The dream jerked her awake in the darkness, the hair wet on her neck and her breathing hard and jagged, but she couldn't remember. Not until she lay with pounding heart and bits of it returned to her, a gunshot and a strangled scream, and a body, and her own legs trying to run but feeling like lead, and when she looked down at her hands, they were covered in blood.

By the time she fell back asleep, it was time to get up. Lark, who Ren swore would never learn to sleep in, was already awake. Ren dug in the cupboard for a metal box of flour, mixed it into a paste with water to make thin biscuits. The kids got up one by one, noisy, the boys grumpy in an early-morning way, and Hollis left without a word, his jacket pulled on despite the heat.

At school Ren's head was a fog. She supervised a test in Hollis's class, where he finished half an hour before anyone else; she carried sheets to the laundromat and fed rhines into the noisy machines, broke up a fight on the playground, stocked the pantries when the local aid workers brought groceries in the bed of a truck. Shakiness jolted through her body for no reason. She avoided talking to the other teachers, because that made it worse. Breathe in slowly, hold it, let it out through her mouth. Something the doctor taught her when she educated the whole town on trauma last year. Keep your eyes down. Do your work. Somehow she survived.

The dream repeated itself that night, and in school there were painful rings around her eyes, the lost sleep making her head throb. The following night was dark and dreamless, but Ren awoke not from the crashing thunder but from Lark burrowing into her bed, and Pepper shaking and whining. In the morning the world was a soppy mess again, the burnt trees dripping, the eaves of the house slick, and Clover and Lark stomped to school in their rubber boots, flinging mud. The air was cool and smelled sick.

"Can you do a favor for me on Saturday?" asked Evelyn Abbot as Ren clocked in at the desk.

She froze with her fingers on her numbers. Favors rarely involved money. "Yes," she said.

"The cables I ordered last week came in. Trying to stop the lights from flickering. I have someone picking them up, but they're heavy and he'll need help."

Ren tried to feign disinterest. "Who?"

"Flanders."

Of course it was Topper. It was always Topper.

When he came to the house to get her, the little one was with him, the one with half her face burned far beyond normalcy. Her blond hair was cut short, sticking out as if it rarely saw a brush. Topper held her hand as Lark sprang out to meet him, then stopped at the sight of the little girl.

"Hi, song-lark," said Topper. "Tell my little sister hello."

"Hi," said Lark, curious enough to stare.

The little girl looked at her shoes and Ren nudged Lark away. "You stay here. Your mom made salt dough. Ask..." She did not know Topper's sister's name. "Ask her if she wants to play."

The little girl tugged on Topper's sleeve, cupping her hand to whisper, and he smiled. "She wants to come with us. She loves a trip to town. If you don't mind," he added in haste, and Ren shrugged.

The walk was slow, for every five steps Topper and Ren made, the little girl made ten in a different direction, picking up sticks, pointing out birds, wanting to investigate a rustle in the bushes. She was about Clover's age. "What's her name?" Ren asked.

"Kit," said Topper, looking Ren in the eye, and she looked away.

In the next town over, Kit dropped her playfulness, walked with the hood of her sweater drawn and her face to the sidewalk. Ren's blood quickened as she saw the looks, the eyes land on Kit's face and widen before darting away. She found herself walking beside the little girl, wedging her between herself and Topper, without realizing it.

"Here," said Topper, holding open the door to the loose parts store when Ren breezed past it.

Inside was a junkyard, and Kit dug through a trunk while Topper and Ren stood at the front desk, watching the two men in back coil thick, black lines onto a giant spool. It would break their backs carrying it all the way home, but Topper said his uncle lived here and owned a truck. They rolled the spool out together.

This town had its own Saturday market, noisy and crowded with stalls and booths, sellers stepping into their pathway and offering a smell of a candle, a taste of a spice. Topper smiled with one side of his mouth but hurried on, following Ren, who kept watching for the little girl out of instinct, or maybe just lifelong habit. Topper stopped before a booth of wheat kernels.

"I promised Mom I'd buy some," he said to Kit without turning around, though Kit had wandered to the next sale table. "She grinds it at home," he added to Ren. "Cheaper."

He was looking into her eyes again but she didn't know what to say so she said nothing. She watched as the woman at the stall, her hair in a rainbow scarf, scooped the kernels into a white paper bag, weighing it on a hanging scale, and Topper added half a loaf of crusty brown bread speckled with seeds to his purchase.

"To Saturdays," he said, lifting the bread high before breaking it into three pieces, holding one to Ren.

Her hands stayed at her side. "I didn't bring my money." Her eyes found little Kit again, holding something dark and round in her hands.

Topper opened his mouth and Ren's stomach twisted with not knowing what he was going to say, with wanting to be anywhere but here, and it was Kit who saved her, butting into Topper's legs. "Top, look." She hoisted the thing in her arms and Ren saw it was a military helmet, dented from use, with a visor that flipped down over the eyes. "It's for sale."

"You have plenty of hats to play with," Topper said, but Kit already had the helmet over her head, almost wobbling with its weight. It was a man's helmet. She jutted her chin out, unsteady. Her yellow dress stuck out at the bottom. It looked so wrong. A helmet of war on her head. A man squeezed past them and noticed Kit, and he smiled, the way strangers smiled at Clover or Lark or any child in the world with a normal face.

Topper stood with the halves of the bread in his hands, his jacket slipping off his shoulder. "Let's move. It's too crowded here."

"But look," said Kit, her voice echoing.

It was Ren who looked. She looked at the helmet. She looked at its marks from war. She looked at the child with her marked face hidden, and at the others around them who had stopped staring, who didn't even see her, who suspected nothing. Kit straightened her shoulders.

"Come on, Kit the Bit," Topper said, steady as ever.

"Do you want it?" Ren burst out.

Both Flanders stared at her.

"Here." She pressed all her money into Kit's hand. "Tell the man you want it. Bring back whatever's left."

"You said..." Topper's eyes followed the money. "Ren, she doesn't need that thing."

Kit pushed the helmet back. Her good eye was blue, and it narrowed at Ren quizzically.

"Go, Kit. I'm giving it to you," she said, and the little girl darted off, fist full of money.

She wore it as they rolled the spool down a path out of town, all three munching the brown bread. Topper was quiet for once. Kit chatted to herself inside her helmet, her voice muffled and ringing at the same time.

"What happened?" Ren asked, assured that Kit was distracted.

"To Kit?" Topper looked at her over his shoulder. "The same thing that happened to all of us. She just got the worst luck of anyone." His eyes briefly hardened behind his glasses.

Not the worst luck, because she was alive. She would deal with the stares and whispers and judgment her entire life, but she got to live it. Her family got to keep her. Ren swallowed.

"I saw the dragons," she said, not sure why she was telling anyone this, especially Topper Flanders, of all people. "Before they burned everything. I saw them."

Topper nodded. "Me, too."

They passed a pond of honking geese and Kit mimicked their noise, chasing them from the other side of the fence.

"We lost my dad," said Topper, and added, as though Ren could not possibly understand what he meant, "Lost him, like—"

"I get it."

"During the war. He wasn't even a solider, didn't leave the country. A bomb just hit him." Topper's jaw tightened. "It was my mom and me, and all the kids, when the dragons came. I saw them. I tried to get us out. Our baby brother, I hid him in the snow. But I wasn't fast enough, Ren." He looked straight ahead and breathed hard through his nose. "Those monsters got Kit. They got her."

Ren's heart beat hard. "You don't have to tell me this."

"I want to tell you." He swiveled his head her way. "I brought Kit today on purpose. I saw you looking at her last week."

Something in Ren went hot. "Not...I wasn't..." She couldn't explain. Not without telling him everything.

"It's okay. Everyone looks. No one can help it." The spool rolled into a rut and he stopped, dislodging it before Ren could. They watched Lark bang a stick into the fence. "I hate this for her, Ren. I'm scared she'll grow up and hide herself. And then you go and buy her that stupid helmet."

Ren walked and pushed the spool, afraid her face would betray her, or her voice.

"All kids love that stuff," she said. "My nieces do."

"How long till she figures out she can hide beneath it?"

"Topper, stop," said Ren, loud enough that Kit pushed up the helmet and focused on them. She stood in the middle of the road. "You don't know everything. Stop."

Topper looked at her through his glasses. He licked his lips and opened his mouth and then walked on.

At the farm, a heavyset black and white dog trotted over to greet them, and a red truck waited in the barn. It took Ren and skinny Topper three tries to fling the coil into the truck bed. "I'll see you on Monday," Ren said, her back sweating, before Topper could offer her a ride.

He didn't budge. "I can't get it into the school by myself." He wasn't even embarrassed about this.

Kit grabbed Ren's hand. "You get to ride with us!"

The morning was over before Ren got home, the chickens loud in the yard, Pepper stalking the corner of the yard and whining with wanting to chase them. Clover and Lark spun themselves on a tire swing. "How was your boyfriend?" Hollis yelled from the porch.

Ren didn't bother answering. She passed Darius smiling at her in the doorway, the house sharp with the smell of beans boiling, Patch making a mess of the charcoal crayons he borrowed from school. Home. The shrugcat leapt onto the table and Ren stroked its purple head.

"Did you have a good time? Nice this weather has cooled off," Darius said as he stirred the beans sticking to the pot, and Ren nodded, but though her fingers moved through shrugcat fur she was somewhere else.

That night in the peace of her attic room she lay with Pepper snug at her side and thought of the little girl's fair hair sticking out, of how bright blue and happy her eye was, and she thought of her own scar, so faded now no one looked twice at her. And of the nighthag helmet she wore in Bellica. She loved that helmet. Once she was hidden, she felt the freedom to be herself for the first time.

She didn't need it anymore. And though she mostly ignored it, she hadn't forgotten the hands that pulled it from her head.

But this little girl. Kit. She had no chance. No one was drawing lonely souls into the light in a land so busy healing from war and scared of the next. Kit wouldn't hide away in her helmet; the helmet would help her live. Ren told herself this as she drifted to sleep with her boots still on, the voices of four wide-awake kids rumbling and giggling beneath her.