“Oh, I assure you, officer,” said Somkit. “I always tell the absolute —”
“Knock it off,” snapped Winya. “Manit might be an old softy when it comes to you hoodlums, but I know better. You’re lucky I brought you here and not straight to the jail. If I hear one peep out of you”— he held up the keys and jangled them in Somkit’s face —“I’ll be locking you up where you really belong.”
He stomped back down the aisle, hung the keys on a peg on the wall, and went out. The stable door slid shut behind him.
“Now what are we going to do?” whispered Pong.
“Relax,” said Somkit. “Once Manit gets here, I’ll talk to him and everything will be fine.”
“A senior police officer?” asked Pong. “That doesn’t sound fine to me.”
“Manit’s different. I know him, and he’s a good guy. Trust me, he’ll do the right thing and let us go.”
Pong couldn’t imagine this, but his friend sounded so sure. Somkit began pacing the stall, practicing what he’d say to Manit when he came. “So, as you can see, we didn’t steal the taxi. It’s an old junker, and we were just . . .”
While Somkit paced, Pong looked around the stable. There were no orbs inside, just the dim moonlight shining in through the slatted windows near the ceiling. It felt like a long time since Pong had been in a room with no orb light at all. The shadows seemed richer here, as if they were made of more colors.
As his eyes tracked the room, he realized that the shadows across the aisle held a deeper shadow, one that moved ever so slightly. He held still and watched. The dark shape shifted slowly. Two black eyes glimmered at him unblinking, like an owl’s.
Pong’s breath snagged in his throat. He’d know those eyes anywhere.
Nightmares of Nok had haunted him ever since he had escaped her in Tanaburi. Most days he’d woken up in a sweat, unable to shake the image of her towering over him, dragging him back to prison. And now, finally, here she was. Pong waited for the same wave of panic that had plagued his dreams, but instead he felt a strange numbness. Maybe he’d known all along that she’d catch him eventually.
Slowly, he stepped up to the bars of his stall. Nok must have known he was looking at her, but she kept her head tucked under her arm, like a pigeon using its wing to shelter from the rain. Finally, she lifted her head again and the moonlight hit her face.
Pong took a step back. Had he made a mistake? Was that really Nok? Shadows pooled under her eyes. She stared at him flatly, as though she didn’t know, or care, who he was. She couldn’t look more different from that confident, defiant girl he’d last seen on the cliff’s edge. The girl sitting slumped over a few yards away looked like the most miserable creature he’d ever seen.
That should have been satisfying. Instead, an uncomfortable feeling wormed its way between Pong’s ribs.
And now he realized that Nok wasn’t just watching him from the shadows. His first thought at seeing her was that she was there to gloat over his arrest. Why else would she be there? But curiously, she sat on the floor of a stall just like theirs, also locked behind a door.
Somkit had noticed her, too. He stepped up beside Pong, just as confused. “What’s going on? Do you know that person?”
“That,” whispered Pong, “is Nok Sivapan.”
Somkit gasped. “Sivapan? As in the warden’s kid? As in the one who’s been chasing you? But why the heck is she locked up in here?”
That was Pong’s question exactly. It made no sense. “What are you doing here?” Pong asked her directly. “Don’t these guys know who your father is?”
Nok’s eyes shut and opened again slowly. “They know who I am,” she rasped in a voice that sounded shredded and wobbly from crying. She sat with her left arm cradled gingerly against her stomach. Pong noticed a dark crust of blood stuck to her cheek that trailed from a gash on her temple.
“Hey, who did that to you?”
“Will you knock it off with the small talk?” hissed Somkit, suddenly frantic. He pulled Pong close and whispered, “We’ve got bigger problems! With her in here, we’ll never be able to talk our way out of this. She’ll tell Manit who you are, and then he’ll have no choice but to take you in. We’ve got to get out of here!”
Somkit gripped the bars of the stall door in both fists. His arms trembled as he twisted and pulled. The wooden bars creaked but didn’t budge.
Pong snapped out of his numb state. Somkit was right. He wouldn’t just sit and wait to be taken away, especially not with Nok there to watch.
He rattled the stall door, testing the strength of the hinges. They’d never break it open. He reached through the bars and felt the lock with his fingers. “Have you got anything we could pick this with?”
Somkit made a sour face and shook his head. “Not even a snip of wire.” He mashed his forehead to the bars, scanning the stable. “Hey!” He pulled Pong close to him. “See that stick? We could use it to try to get the keys!”
Nok’s staff stood propped against the door of the stall next to them. The police must have taken it away from her.
Pong glanced at Nok. He didn’t want her to see what they were doing. But the girl was lying down on her side, one arm tucked under her chest. She wasn’t even looking at him anymore.
“Okay, let’s hurry!” he whispered.
Pong’s neck scraped against the wooden bars as he jammed his shoulder between them, groping for the staff. His finger brushed against bamboo. The staff wobbled back and forth and then fell toward him. Somkit caught it inches before it clattered to the ground.
“Phew!” he whispered. Nok still didn’t stir.
The boys slid the staff under their stall door. Pong picked it up and stuck it out between the bars, angling for the peg on the wall. “Here, you hold the end so I don’t drop it,” he told Somkit.
Together the boys aimed the staff at the ring of keys hanging on the peg. It took a few tries, but finally Pong was able to use the staff to flip the keys off the wall. They landed on the floor with a soft jangle.
“You did it!” whispered Somkit. “Now use the stick to drag them to us.”
But before Pong could do anything, the front door swung open and the light from the porch orb flooded inside.
“All right, boys,” said Officer Winya as he stepped into the stable. “The meeting’s almost over, and —” Winya stopped mid-stride and stared at the boys. His eyes traveled down the length of the staff to the keys on the floor. “Hey, what’s going on here?”
Pong yanked the staff back inside the stall with him. Somkit hid it behind his back, as if Winya wouldn’t notice a five-foot-long bamboo pole sticking up in the air.
Winya snarled and picked up the keys. “I knew it,” he said as he walked toward their stall. “You street rats are coming with me.”
Pong’s pulse throbbed in his jaw as he watched Winya unlock their stall door and step inside.
Somkit held Nok’s staff out in front of him. “Don’t — don’t come any closer!”
Winya narrowed his eyes.
“Oh, crap,” muttered Somkit.
The officer growled and rushed at him.
“Oh, crap!” Somkit swung the staff out with miraculous timing. Winya ran straight into it, groin first.
“Oof!” The officer doubled over, clutching himself.
Somkit whacked the staff over Winya’s back, sending him to the ground. He looked at Pong, his face almost as shocked as Winya’s. “Now what?”
Pong scooped up the keys from where Winya had dropped them. The guard rolled onto his side, moaning.
“Come on!” Pong pulled Somkit by the arm out of the stall and swung the door shut behind them. He quickly fumbled with the keys until he got the right one and twisted it, locking Winya inside.
“Let’s go, let’s go, let’s go!” called Somkit, dropping the staff and running for the stable door.
Pong ran after him a few steps, then looked back over his shoulder. Nok lay on the floor of her stall with her face pressed to the b
ars.
Pong expected to feel a surge of hatred for her. This was his moment to get even. She was locked up, and he was free, and she deserved every bit of it.
Nok looked up at him with flat, resigned eyes. Pong knew that look. It was hopelessness.
The space behind his rib cage flared with that old familiar heat.
Ignore it, he told himself. Ignore it and run!
But even as he thought those words, his feet were turning his body around and taking him back to Nok’s stall.
“Hey!” cried Somkit. “What are you doing?”
Pong stopped in front of Nok’s door. He glanced at Winya, who puffed for breath as he struggled to get his feet under him. Pong’s hands shook as he tried a key in the lock.
Twee! Winya’s whistle trilled. Twee! Twee!
“Pong!” called Somkit, stomping his feet like a toddler. “We have to go!”
Nok sat up and held on to the stall bars. “What are you doing?” she whispered.
“Getting you out,” said Pong, trying another key and failing.
Nok blinked. “Why?”
Twee! Twee! Winya blew the whistle over and over. Outside, Pong could hear men’s voices shouting and boots pounding.
Click! The last key on the chain opened the lock, and Nok swung out of the cell, tumbling onto the ground at Pong’s feet.
Somkit hurried back to Pong and grabbed his arm. “We are going now!”
It was too late. Four men in uniforms of the Governor’s guard filed in through the stable door.
“Grab them!” gasped Winya, pointing to Pong and Somkit.
Pong still clutched the keys in his hand, searching frantically for some way to escape. No good. There was only one door.
“You kids!” shouted a guard. “Hands on your heads! You’re under arrest.”
Pong dropped the keys. He’d ruined their only chance to get away.
Nok swiped her staff from the ground and stepped forward, standing between Pong and the guards. She stared at Pong strangely, as though she couldn’t get her eyes to focus on him.
“Hold on to something,” she said quietly.
Pong and Somkit both grabbed onto each other before realizing that wasn’t what she meant. They let go and gripped the stall bars on either side of them.
One of the guards pointed to Nok. “You there! Put the staff down! You’re coming with us.”
Nok stood with her feet planted wide, holding her staff in front of her with both hands. The posture was the same as that day she faced Pong at the cliff’s edge, but this was a very different girl. Her hair stuck out in all directions. Her breath came fast and irregular. She looked wild and dangerous, like a wounded creature. The armed guards exchanged wary looks.
The first guard took a cautious step forward.
Nok twisted her shoulders, as though winding her body up.
She took one deep inhale through her mouth and held the staff up high.
“HA!” She brought the end of it down hard onto the stable floor.
Pong shut his eyes. Silence smothered the room. A hard pulse of air blasted over him, rippling through his clothes. The ground shook like an earthquake. He heard men’s voices crying out, their words muffled by the intense pressure in his head.
His ears popped and he opened his eyes.
Somkit still clutched the stall bars. “What . . . the . . . heck?”
All four guards lay on their backs on the floor, twitching like fish in the bottom of a boat.
Somkit suddenly leaped to life and grabbed Pong and Nok by their wrists. “If we stay in this barn one more minute, I’m gonna kill both of you! Let’s go!”
Nok gripped the bench in the back of the speedboat as it rocketed across the water. She felt hollowed out and dizzy.
She must be in a state of shock. How else could she explain sitting silently on the seat of a stolen police boat while other police boats chased right behind?
It was just before sunrise, that rare time when there was hardly any traffic on the river. Nok watched the boy named Somkit as he expertly shifted gears, weaving around the choppy sections of current as if he knew exactly where to expect them.
He was the one who had stolen the boat. Somehow he’d known a secret way to jump-start it without any keys. He seemed completely at ease behind the controls, as if he’d driven this boat a dozen times.
Pong sat beside her on the other bench. She had barely looked at him since they’d run away from the stable, and she couldn’t bring herself to look at him now.
Search orbs reached across the dark water toward them.
“They’re coming up behind us!” Pong shouted to his friend.
“You guys hold on!”
Somkit gunned the motor as he made a sharp turn upriver. The sky had lightened just enough now that he could cut the boat’s headlights, but they still had the Jade glow of the orb motor to worry about. Unless they could cut that off, they’d be easily found.
Somkit headed for the thick pillars of the Giant’s Bridge. It was the only bridge that spanned the entire river, one of the last remaining structures from Chattana’s wondrous past. According to Nok’s history books, it was named for the giants who helped build it.
She had never given the bridge much thought before, but now that she was looking at it from underneath, she marveled that anyone could have lifted those colossal stones. Only a giant would have had the strength to sink the massive pillars there, in the deepest, swiftest section of the river.
Somkit expertly steered the boat to the north side of the bridge, trimming the motor to match the speed of the current. The orb behind the boat still glowed, but not as much as before, and the pillar would help hide them. The only thing to do now was wait.
Nok’s eyes traveled up the pillar. Elephants had been carved into the base. Above them danced celestial maidens whose lovely faces had been worn away by a hundred years of rain. Nok felt like them, faded beyond recognition. Without looking, she ran her fingers over her left wrist.
Who was she?
She was not Nok Sivapan — that was certain. Nok Sivapan was perfect.
The girl sitting in the stolen police boat was the daughter of a criminal. She’d been born in a jail.
Trees drop their fruit straight down.
That was true, wasn’t it? After all, she had attacked the police. Run from arrest. Assisted a fugitive. In the past few hours, she had entered a backward world, where nothing was the way it should be. And there was one thing that was wrong most of all: the boy she’d been hunting had found her first. He had had her locked behind bars. That was his moment for victory, his chance for revenge, and he had let her go.
This, more than anything else, shook Nok to her core.
He let her go.
Why?
The police boats drew closer, their motors buzzing like a cloud of hornets. Pong and Somkit exchanged nervous glances.
Nok could call out right now. She could turn the boys in. It might redeem her enough in the eyes of the law that she’d be forgiven for the other bad things she’d done that night. Nok parted her lips. She took a deep breath.
He let me go, she thought. He let me go.
The search orbs pivoted away. The buzz of the motors faded. The police had turned to search elsewhere. Somkit and Pong both let out heavy, relieved breaths.
Nok shivered and shut her eyes. The person she once was had truly and completely vanished.
After the sound of the police boats faded entirely, Somkit pressed the throttle forward again. “I’ll take us a little farther upriver, someplace where we can hide this boat. I’ll figure out how to send Manit a message so he can come get it.”
“And you really think he’ll forgive you for taking it?” asked Pong. “Somkit, you’re going to be in so much trouble. I don’t think you’ll be able to talk yourself out of it this time.”
“Maybe,” said Somkit, chewing his lip. “But if anyone will understand, it’ll be Manit. The thing I’m more worried about is what’ll happen
to —”
He turned and scowled at Nok. He motioned for Pong to come closer. The two boys whispered together, glancing over their shoulders at her. Nok knew what they were arguing about.
“You don’t have to worry about me,” she said.
Somkit glared at her. “Oh, sure. Like you won’t run home and tell your daddy everything the first chance you get.”
Nok looked behind them, at the Gold lights of the western shore winking off with the rising sun. She tried to imagine walking in the door of her house and joining her parents and siblings at breakfast. Would they look her in the eyes or turn their heads in shame? Nok didn’t want to find out. Now she understood what her mother had meant about gossip cutting like a knife. If anyone learned the truth about her — where she’d been born, who her real mother was — her family would never recover. No amount of spire-fighting trophies could overshadow that. They had been right to want to send her away.
Away.
That’s where Nok wanted to go now. But where to? She couldn’t picture herself at a cheerful country school in the mountains any more than she could imagine going back to her parents. For some reason, the image of the library in Lannaburi came to her — the one with all the old books. It was quiet there. A person could get lost among the shelves for a long time.
“I won’t be running home,” she said finally.
The boys exchanged a look. Nok didn’t know or care what it was about.
Somkit gripped the wheel and turned them north. He sliced the boat through the dark-green water, maneuvering into a quiet canal on the East Side. Somkit and Pong hopped out and began tying up the boat.
“Where are you going to go now?” Pong asked her.
But Nok had already slipped away, melting into the shadows without a sound.
Pong and Somkit hurried for the Mud House, using the rising sun to guide them east.
Pong kept sneaking looks at his friend, who wore a deep scowl. “I know you’re mad at me.”
Somkit snorted and scowled deeper. “Why would I be mad at you?”
“Because I let Nok Sivapan out of that stable.”
A Wish in the Dark Page 17