“Is this some sort of prank or something?”
She stared at me. It was clear that it wasn’t.
“What secret do you have here that you’d kill for?”
“Stop the search, Red. You can save the lives of four people you don’t much like, and who cause us untold misery. Sort of a weird ethical dilemma, isn’t it?”
“Will you come with me to High Saffron?”
“Red, you have to do this one for yourself.”
At that moment Sally Gamboge returned and barked out her chair tally. Before I could even think about Jane’s request, Sally Gamboge had moved next door and demanded entry. The Grey homeowner was older and less abrasive than Jane, and he started to panic. I caught Jane’s eye and she looked upward, toward the attic.
“I’ll do the top floor,” I announced. “It’s time I did some chair counting myself.”
The Yellows looked at one another but could raise no realistic objections, and I mounted the steep, narrow stairs to the third floor while Penelope and Bunty searched the second. The stair twisted back on itself, and by the time I got to the top landing and paused in the dim light from the skylight, my heart was beating fiercely. I grasped the handle and carefully opened the door.
The only light came from a thin, mullioned window at the far end, which afforded the room only meager light. I could just make out a small bed, a table, a bureau and a pitch-pine chest. There was a single chair in the middle of the room, and it was occupied by an old woman. She was dressed in a simple linen smock, had no spot or any merit badges and was knitting a long scarf that lay in an untidy cascade at her feet. Her hands were twisted and gnarled like old roots, and although I could see no detail in her face, her cheekbones were prominent and her slack skin hung in soft folds that jangled when she spoke. If she had not moved, I would have considered her to be sundried Nightloss, such that we find from time to time.
She stopped what she was doing when I walked in but didn’t look up—she simply listened in a peculiar manner.
“Jane?”
“No—Edward Russett.”
“The new swatchman’s son?”
“Yes, ma’am. What are you doing up here?”
“Not much,” she replied, “but I have my knitting—and Renfrew at bedtimes.”
She reached for the glass of water that was next to her, but she didn’t look—she just moved her fingertips across the tabletop until they encountered the glass, then grasped it. The hair on the back of my neck stood on end, and I felt myself tremble. This was something I had never before encountered, nor ever thought I would.
“You’re . . . blind!”
She gave out a short laugh.
“We are all blind, Master Edward—just some more than others.”
“But you can’t be,” I blurted out. “As soon as poor sight becomes apparent, then Variant-B kicks in and, and, well—look here, you should be studied, not kept in an attic!”
“Hmm,” she said, “Jane told me you were a bit foolish. I have to stay hidden for I dispel fear, and fear is a commodity much needed by the Collective.”
“Fear of the night?”
“Yes; a couple of sightless people kicking around would really finish off that particular nonsense, now wouldn’t it?”
“I don’t understand.”
“Then you have fulfilled all that is expected of you. What’s going on downstairs?”
“A merit sweep by the Gamboges.”
“Jane also told me you showed potential,” said the old lady. “I suggest you show it. It’s time you left.”
I closed the attic door and ran downstairs, where I met Jane on the doorstep. A larger crowd of Greys had turned up from the fields, glasshouse and factory. Some even carried tools. The mood had grown darker.
“How did you get along with Mrs. Olive?” asked Jane.
I looked around nervously, and the crowd stared back at me silently.
“How many do you have hidden?” I asked.
“Sixteen in the Greyzone and one living above you. Mostly damaged Nightloss, a few Rebootees. Five are blind and one of them can’t move anything from the waist down. To the prefects they’re ‘unlicensed supernumeraries’and harboring them carries a twenty thousand demerit—applicable to anyone who lives in the house or ‘could not have reasonably failed to know.’ ”
“Unlicensed supernumeraries?” I echoed, having never heard the term.
“I agree it’s somewhat dispassionate. We just call them ‘the Extras.’ ”
“Tommo’s Ulrika of the Flak,” I said, recalling the sandwiches he had left for an imaginary friend in the flak tower. “Does he know about them?”
“Thankfully not. But feeding imaginary friends has a long tradition, and the sandwiches are always welcome. Do you know how hard it is to smuggle food out of the dining room?”
I answered that I did, because the lunch monitors had the power of Stop and Search—eating between meals was strictly forbidden.
“So try doing it for sixteen people—even with Apocrypha on your side.”
“Perkins Muffleberry back home,” I murmured. “I left food for him in the hollow beech. It was always gone by the morning.”
She laid a hand on my shoulder.
“Don’t sweat it, Red,” she said, doubtless reading the despondency in my face. “Few people see anything at all. Everything might look fine and dandy on the outside, but behind the closed door there’s a fire raging. Now, will you stop this from getting any worse?”
“Yes,” I said quietly, as the full scale of what was going on suddenly became apparent, “I think you’re right.”
“What did you find up there?” asked Sally Gamboge, stepping out of the house.
“A three-person bench and an armchair,” I replied, voice cracking.
“Very well,” said the prefect, and she made a move toward the next house.
“Wait!”
She stopped.
“I have decided,” I said slowly, “to conduct my chair census in a less . . . intrusive manner.”
I started to sweat and swallowed down my nervousness as the Yellows all glared at me.
“No, you haven’t,” said Little Penelope Gamboge in a belligerent screech. “You’ll do this census the Yellow prefect’s way, or you won’t do it at all!”
“Then I won’t do it at all.”
“You will,” said Sally Gamboge, “and that’s a Direct Order.”
“I’ll be dead on the road to High Saffron in under twenty-four hours,” I replied, the apprehension in my voice readily apparent. “I can certainly afford to defy you on this occasion, ma’am.”
“Your almost certain death is precisely why we need to hurry this along,” remarked Bunty with a singular lack of empathy. “If Head Office has entrusted you to conduct this important work, it behooves you to complete it as soon as you can. The Collective expects all residents to act with the highest level of integrity.”
“The answer is NO.”
They stared at me for a moment in astonishment.
“We’ll magnanimously let you reconsider that last response, Russett,” observed Courtland. “Refusing a Direct Order from a prefect carries a maximum five hundred demerit. Haven’t you lost enough merits today already?”
I had—and a loss of five hundred more would put me teetering on the edge of Reboot. It was all so hopelessly unfair. I was refusing not just in order to keep the Extras hidden but to save the Yellows. The Greys who were standing close by were not just idle onlookers but there to defend the secrets in the attics and their potential twenty thousand demerit for complicity. I looked at Jane, the Greys—and then the Yellows, who were completely oblivious to just how close they were to becoming compost.