CHAPTER 1

Try harder, Lucy.

Lucy stared down at Madame Temnikova's face.

Which seemed incredibly gray.

Try.

Harder.

Lucy.

She put her hands over Temnikova's sternum again, and again hesitated.

Stage fright: an opportunity to prove herself or a chance to fail. Which wasnothing new for her. It just hadn't been a life-or-death issue until now.

This isn't a performance. Do something.

But an actual dying person in the living room wasn't the same as a Red Crossdummy in the school gym. Lucy tried not to think about Temnikova's skin underher hands. Or the way, from the looks of things, that skin now encased only abody, no longer a soul.

Except the moment wasn't definite. More like Temnikova was not there and thenthere and then not there. Mostly not.

Gus, Lucy's ten-year-old brother, started to ask the question she didn't want toanswer. "Is she ..."

Dead?

"Call nine-one-one, Gus," she told him for the second time. He'd beenmotionless, mesmerized. Lucy kept her voice unwavering, though she felt likescreaming. She didn't want to freak him out. Channeling her mother's dispassionand authority, she said, "Go do it right now."

Gus hurried across the room to the phone, and Lucy looked at the ceiling, tryingto remember the steps in the Cardiac Chain of Survival—what went where andfor how long. Where were her mother and grandfather, anyway? They were usuallyand annoyingly there, running the house and everything,everyone, in it like a Fortune 500 company.

The metronome on top of the piano ticked steadily; Lucy fought off the urge tothrow a pillow at it. Instead she used it to time the chest compressions.

Still ...

That sound.

Tick tick tick tick.

A slow adagio. A death march.

She didn't know how Gus could stand it. Spending day after day after day afterlonely day in this room, with this old woman.

Everything good (tick) is passing you by (tick) as you sithere (tick) and practice your life away (tick).

Except she did know, because she'd done it herself for more than eleven years.Not with Temnikova, but in this room. This house. These parents. This familyhistory.

"My sister is doing that," Gus said into the phone. Then to Lucy, "They want youto try mouth-to-mouth."

When Lucy and Reyna signed up for the CPR workshop at school last spring, they'dassumed their future patients would be sexy, male, and under forty, an ideawhich now seemed obviously idiotic. Lucy swept her hair back over one shoulderand braced herself.

Their lips met. Lucy's breath filled Temnikova's lungs. They inflated anddeflated, inflated and deflated. Nothing. She went back to the chestcompressions.

Gus was speaking, but his voice seemed far away. The order of Lucy's actionsfelt wrong; the backs of her thighs cramped. She looked up at Gus, finally, andtried to read his face. Maybe her inadequacy was engraving permanent trauma ontohis psyche. Twenty years from now, in therapy, he'd confide to some beardedmiddle-aged man that his problems all began when his sister let his pianoteacher die right in front of him. Maybe she should have sent him out of theroom.

Too late now.

"Tell them I think ... I'm pretty sure she's dead."

Gus held the phone out to Lucy. "You tell them." She stood and took it, wincingat the needles that shot through her sleeping left foot while Gus walked to thepiano, stopped the metronome, and slid its metal pendulum into place.

The house seemed to exhale. Lucy gave the bad news to "them." After going overthe details they needed, she hung up, and Gus asked, "Do we just leave her bodyhere?"

Temnikova had dropped to the Persian rug, behind the piano bench, where she'dbeen standing and listening to Gus. Right in the middle of a Chopin nocturne.

"Yeah. They'll be here soon. Let's go ... somewhere else."

"I don't want her to be alone," he said, and sat in Grandpa Beck's armchair, afew feet away from Temnikova's head. She'd been coloring her short hair anunnatural dark red as long as Lucy's family had known her.

Lucy went to Gus and rested her hip against the chair. She should try her mom'scell, or her grandfather's, and her dad's office. Only she didn't want to. Andthe situation was no longer urgent, clearly.

"Sorry, Gus."

Fail.

One of the EMTs said it looked like a stroke, not a heart attack, and there was"probably" nothing Lucy could have done. He typed into his phone or radio orwhatever it was while he talked.

Probably. It wasn't exactly a word of comfort.

While the other EMTs loaded Temnikova's body onto a gurney they'd parked in thefoyer, the "probably" guy clipped his radio back onto his belt and checked offthings on a form. Lucy gave her name and parents' names and the house phonenumber. He paused halfway down the page and rested his finger over one of thecheck boxes.

"You're over eighteen, right?"

"Sixteen."

"Really." He—small and wiry, maybe two inches shorter than Lucy—gaveher a once-over. Their eyes didn't quite meet. "You look older."

She never knew what to say to that. Was it supposed to be a compliment? Maybeshe didn't want to look older. Maybe she didn't even want to be sixteen. Twelve.Twelve had been a good age: going to the symphony with Grandma Beck inexcessively fancy dresses, unembarrassed to hold her hand. Being light enoughthat her dad could carry her from the car to the front door on late nights.Shopping with her mother and not winding up in a fight every time.

"So I've been told," she said. He smiled. There should be some kind of ruleagainst smiling in his job. She said, "Just another day for you, I guess."

"I wouldn't put it that way." He handed her a card. "I'll need to have one ofyour parents call this number as soon as they can. You said she's not arelative?"

His look turned into a stare that lingered somewhere between Lucy's neck andwaist. She stood straighter, and he returned his attention to the clipboard."She's my brother's piano teacher."

Lucy gestured to Gus, who'd been sitting on the stairs, his chin in his hands.He didn't appear traumatized. Bored, possibly. Or, knowing him, simply thinking.Maybe thinking about how if he'd been allowed to go to his school sleepover atthe Academy of Sciences, like he wanted, this wouldn't even be happening. But,as usual, their parents and Temnikova had said no, reluctant to take any timeaway from his scheduled practice.

The EMT blew a breath through his thin lips. "That's rough. It happening righthere, during a lesson."

Where else would it happen? Temnikova practically lived there, in the pianoroom. Gus wasn't your average ten-year-old, fumbling through "Clair de lune" and"London Bridge" while everyone who was forced to listen held back the eye rolls.He had a career. A following. Like Lucy used to have. And Zoya Temnikova hadbeen working with him since he turned four, when Lucy's grandfather flew her tothe States from Volgograd, set her up in an apartment down the street, andhelped her become a legalized citizen.

Her dying at the piano made perfect sense.

Still, it was sad. She'd given her life to their family, and now it was over.

After the EMTs rolled the body out, Gus got up off the stairs and stood next toLucy in the starkly hushed foyer. If he was upset about Temnikova, he didn'tshow it. When Lucy asked, "You okay, Gustav?"...