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foot off completely—so hard a blow the ax rang as it bit into the stone at the edge of the pond. Then he batted the foot away with the ax, like it was a ball and the ax was a hockey stick. It splopped into the lily pond.
    Saskia had passed out on the first chop; she didn’t see fish nibbling at her sneakered foot. I did. I couldn’t look anywhere else: not at Saskia and the bleeding; not at the Court of King Xar, who’d all gone “Urrrr!” like they were watching something awful on YouTube and not something awful that was happening for real, right in front of them.
    â€œHelp her, someone help her, someone help her,” I heard my own voice saying…because there was nothing—nothing I could do, nothing I knew to do. That chapter in the SAS book about first aid? It had scared me just thinking about it, so I’d skipped it—and in any case, even if I had known what to do, would I have done it? What if Saskia’s blood was infected?
    People started to drift away, back to their hangovers and a lazy day.
    â€œWe can’t help her,” muttered Grace, crying and hugging the baby inside her. “Come away, Ruby. Just come away.”
    I shook my head at her; unable to stand it, she turned and waddled back into the house, sobbing. That just left me and Xar.
    He was staring at Saskia—observing, I guess…to see if it was true, what she had said, that the only way to save her was to cut off her foot.
    â€œShe’ll bleed to death,” I whined at him. “She’ll die anyway.”
    â€œYes,” he said.
    And then I got it; no one was coming to the rescue here. There was only me.

CHAPTER SEVEN
    At this point in time, there are a number of things I don’t really get. But these are only the things I know I don’t get, and not the things I don’t know I don’t get, which are, unfortunately, to be revealed.
    I dragged Saskia into that ice-cream van myself. No one helped. No one tried to stop me. Crying, dog tired (don’t think about dogs)—no, dead tired (don’t think about death)— very (that’s OK) tired, very hungover, very ill, and very aching-all-over, I drove that stupidice-cream van toward the army base. It was the only place I could think of where there would be medical help, and I took the only route I knew to get to it: highway, turn right at Swindon.
    I was on the same highway I’d once driven along with the Spratt, when we sang and played silly games—as you do when you’re trying to take your mind off an apocalypse-type situation. And I realized a dreadful thing. That journey? It was the last time I’d laughed. I had smiled since. I had smiled pretty hard last night. Grinned witchy grins. But that journey? It was the last time I had laughed.
    In an attempt to block out thoughts about the disappearance of my own laugh, I tried to find other things to think about—but I didn’t much want to think about a single thing. Except…why had Saskia even turned up looking for me in the first place? Why would she—why would anyone?—leave the Camp of the Useful: the army camp where you’d be protected and taken care of? Where everything was surely… tickety-boo , as my grandma would have said.
    It was the one thing I probably should have asked her about, and now I couldn’t ask her about it, and no explanation I could come up with seemed remotely plausible:
    EXPLANATION #1: Saskia is a kindhearted girl who really likes me and was so worried about whether I was OK she left the army camp.
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    EXPLANATION #2: Saskia had ditched the Spratt, and she had come to beg my forgiveness.
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    EXPLANATION #3: The Spratt had ditched Saskia, and she had nowhere else to go.
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    EXPLANATION #4: Ruby, she kept trying to tell you something and maybe you wouldn’t have to be dreaming up explanations if you’d listened.
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