“But it’s against the Rules,” I cried, shocked not just about the murder but about the subterfuge that accompanied it. “The prefects lied to us. It’s against everything Munsell stands for.”
“Technically speaking, you’re wrong,” she said, shaking her head. “It’s written that the pursuit of Harmony requires sacrifices from all of us. It just doesn’t specify what. Hard work, selflessness, Civil Obligation—and sometimes something else. And I’m not sure the prefects actually know anything about this at all. It’s Head Office.”
I looked around at the spoons and had an idea.
“All these people wouldn’t have had their postcodes reallocated, would they?”
“No,” she agreed. “Now you know why the Collective is so underpopulated.”
“But the Previous numbered eighty million or more! You’re not telling me that they were all sent to places like this?”
She looked across at me.
“I don’t know what happened to the Previous.”
“Does the Apocryphal man know?”
“He might have an idea, but to him it’s not emotive—merely history.”
We stood for a moment in silence. There was so much unknown, and so much to discover. But right now, I had only questions.
“Why didn’t more people attempt to walk out? Why would you just stand here and wait to be absorbed?”
“I wish it were as simple as that. Believe me, Eddie, you don’t know the half of it.”
She looked up at the sun to gauge the time.
“We need to leave. I’m not going to raise any suspicions by bringing you back after dark.”
“You can do that, right?”
“You have no idea how beautiful the night sky is. You can see the stars—bright points of light hanging in a sky of empty blackness.”
“I can imagine.”
“You can’t. No one can. The same can be said of fireflies, glowing in unison on a moonless night.”
“Fireflies?”
“My point entirely. And there’s the moon, too.”
“I can see that,” I said, “if dimly.”
“Not the moon itself,” she replied, “but the lights on the unlit side of the crescent. There are other glowing specks adrift in the night, too—pinpoints of light that criss-cross the sky.”
And she smiled at me. But it was a tired, relieved smile. She hadn’t shared this with anyone.
I walked across to Courtland, who was doing his best to weigh himself down with spoons. He had stuffed both satchels, all his pockets, his boots, and he even had two large handfuls. If he could have stuffed them in his ears, he would have.
“What?”
“We’re leaving.”
“Suits me. I’ll pay either of you twenty merits to carry this satchel for me.”
We told him he could carry his ill-gotten gains himself, and we walked out of the piazza. Despite our refusal to work as pack mules, Courtland was ecstatic and talked ceaselessly about his good fortune and how carefully he was going to introduce the spoons, so the market wasn’t flooded, and how it would take a month to check the engraved postcodes against the register to see if they had clear title.
“Can’t have the prefects asking questions,” he said, “even if Mum is one of them.”
He jangled and clanked when he walked, and in his intoxicating acquisitiveness, he hadn’t once noticed the lost Rebootees beneath his feet.
Courtland
1.1.02.01.159: The Hierarchy shall be respected at all times.
The progress was easy on the Perpetulite, but it slowed when we reached the spalling and the road reverted to thick rhododendron and tussocked lumpiness. Courtland was hampered even more by his load and was soon sweating and blowing like a steam engine. He called a halt as soon as we had reached the place where the road branched.
“I’m going to leave these here,” he said, unloading all the cutlery except the ones he was carrying in the satchels. “We could tell Yewberry that we need to come back for a further expedition.”
“We’re not coming back,” said Jane in a quiet voice. “There’s nothing here for anyone.”
Courtland laughed. “There’s enough spoons here to fund an entire color garden; forget the scrap color, East Carmine is in the spoon business, with me at its head. Are you tired, or is it just me?” He sat down heavily on a moss-covered lump of concrete.
“People aren’t supposed to come here,” said Jane, perching on a fallen tree. “After the wires corroded and the flak towers fell into disuse, the Perpetulite was necrotized to keep visitors away. No one was ever supposed to come back from High Saffron, and no one ever did.”
“Until now,” said Courtland.
“Yes,” repeated Jane, “until now. Tell me, Courtland, when you were pretending to conduct the chair census in the Greyzone yesterday, were you looking for anything in particular?”
“Like what?”
“Unlicensed supernumeraries.”
His surprise was genuine. “There’s one in East Carmine?”
“There are sixteen,” replied Jane cheerfully, “and five of them are blind.”
“B-word?” he asked incredulously. “You mean without-sight b-word?”
“Mrs. Olive has been blind for twenty-two years,” said Jane, looking at me. “Makes a nonsense of the fear of night, doesn’t it?”
“How can someone survive Variant-B Mildew?” asked Courtland, not unreasonably. “I mean, as soon as the sight starts to go, the Rot kicks in, and you’re spared the horror of permanent darkness.”
“It’s not a horror,” said Jane, “far from it. Someone remade the night as a barrier to restrict movement, and sightless people who have no fear of the darkness would give the game away.”
“Night as a barrier?” asked Courtland. “But why?”
I looked at Jane. I wanted to know, too.
“There used to be places called prisons before the Epiphany, where the demerited were restrained against their will.”
“It sounds hideously barbaric,” I said.
“Prisons are still with us,” she said, “only the walls are constructed of fear, taboo and the unknown.”
“But why didn’t the sightless catch the Mildew?” I said. “I still don’t understand.”
“They didn’t catch Variant-B for the simple reason that they were safe and comfortable in their attics,” explained Jane. “In fact, not one single supernumary has ever caught the Mildew. And that’s quite significant, don’t you think?”
I’d heard enough. I wanted it to stay as death on the road at the end of the Night Train, and Head Office quietly feeding the wantonly disruptive to carnivorous trees and an ancient technology. It was enough for today, enough for all week—enough for all time. Enough.
“We’ve got to get moving,” I said in a more forceful tone. “If we’re not at Bleak Point by sundown-minus-one, we’re going to spend a miserable night in the Faraday cage. Courtland, Jane—we’re leaving.”
Jane didn’t budge, and neither did Courtland.
“I feel a bit odd,” he said, “and I can’t feel my elbows.”
I felt my own elbows, and noticed nothing unusual. I looked at Courtland’s fingernails. They had grown a half inch. It could be only one thing.
“The Rot,” he said in a quiet voice, tinged not with dread but with sadness and inevitability, “and not a blasted Green Room in sight. What rotten luck. If there’s one thing good about curling up, you at least get to Chase the Frog.”
“No, no, no,” I said, holding my head in my hands. “Don’t make the Mildew part of this!” I felt tears well up inside me, and a retching sob as everything came crashing down around me. The yateveos and Perpetulite didn’t kill anyone back at High Saffron—they just mopped up the remains.