It had to be Mr. Benedict, Reynie thought. If Mr. Benedict couldn’t help him, then he was beyond help.
Reynie climbed down and went to the window. He gazed out into the dark night. Kate was off somewhere risking her neck. Sticky was murmuring in his sleep, having troubled dreams. And Constance’s dreams could be no less troubled — she had more to worry about than anyone.
Reynie would send one message, one message only. He had never been superstitious, but he decided now that if he received no response to help him, he would give up. Just give up and take an easier path. He wouldn’t have to try to be some kind of hero, wouldn’t have to fail — and soon it would be too late to matter. There would be nothing he could do, no point in trying. It would be out of his hands.
Just thinking about it was so enticing Reynie almost didn’t send the message. But then, squeezing his lips tight in determination, he signaled the words before he could change his mind: Whisperer too strong. Please advise. — RM
Reynie waited at the window, his heart hammering. He felt his entire future, indeed his entire character, depended upon the next few moments. Send me something, he thought. Please just send me . . . just send me anything.
He waited. Minutes crawled by. Why must they take so long? Perhaps they had nothing to offer him. Perhaps they were racking their brains for anything to say other than “good luck.” Or perhaps they weren’t even watching — perhaps the Recruiters had found them. Reynie couldn’t know the reason, but the reason hardly mattered. What mattered was the empty night.
“I can’t believe this is it,” Reynie thought, with the strangest mixture of despair and relief.
But this was it. It was all over.
He was just turning from the window when he saw a distant flash, a pinprick of light among the trees on the mainland shore. Someone, at last, was signaling a response. Reynie heard his pulse pounding in his ears. He held his breath until the message was completed.
Remember the white knight.
Reynie let out his breath. A long, slow release. He didn’t have to think very hard to know what Mr. Benedict meant by that. Though it seemed so long ago, he well remembered their conversation about the chess problem. The white knight had made a move, changed his mind, and started over.
“And do you believe this was a good move?” Mr. Benedict had asked.
“No, sir,” Reynie had answered.
“Why, then, do you think he made it?”
And Reynie had replied, “Perhaps because he doubted himself.”
Reynie stared out the window for a long time. Then he put down the flashlight and climbed back into bed. His heartbeat had steadied, his shoulders relaxed. In his mind he took out the letter he had just written to Miss Perumal, crumpled it up, and threw it away.
He would write her another.
The Mouse in the Culvert
As Reynie composed a more optimistic letter to his former tutor — indeed, even as, in his mind, he wrote the words “and now our hopes really do lie with Kate” — Kate was feeling less and less optimistic herself.
Her problem wasn’t finding Mr. Curtain’s secret computer room. Her problem was not getting caught.
At first everything had gone fine. Kate had flitted through the shadows behind the dormitory, and in no time had made her way down to the boulders behind the Institute Control building, kicked open the secret entrance, and darted inside the foyer. It was here that the problems began. The ceilings had no crawl space, and the air vents were too small to accommodate her. She had no choice but to move about in the open. And it was open in the passage, as a quick peek from the foyer proved — open and bright as day. Not to mention it was hardly a “short passage” at all. Lined with doorways, it stretched off into the distance, where it finally turned a corner. Why had Sticky said it was short?
Then Kate remembered the boys had been blindfolded. They must have thought it was short, because they’d only gone a little way before Jackson had led them through a doorway and onto the tower steps. Any one of these near doorways might lead to the steps, then. Should she try them all?
As if in answer, about halfway down the passage a door slid open and Jackson stepped out into the passage. Kate pulled back into the foyer and listened. No footsteps. She peeked out again. Jackson was leaning against the wall by the door, munching absently on a stick of licorice. He seemed relaxed, settled, as if he intended to stay there awhile. Kate smiled. She thought it pretty likely he was guarding the tower steps. Now she just needed to get past him.
Pulling back out of view, Kate eased her slingshot from her bucket, snugged a marble into it, then peeked around the corner again. She waited a long minute, then another. Finally the opportunity came: Jackson looked down to straighten his sash, muttering something to himself. It was now or never. Kate launched the marble down the passage.
The marble shot over Jackson’s head, struck the stone floor in the distance with a satisfying click, bounced off the far wall, and skittered around the corner. Jackson spat out his licorice and barked, “Who’s there?” Not waiting for an answer, he ran down the passage and around the corner, and Kate dashed to the door he’d been guarding. Next to it was a numeric keypad. She hadn’t counted on that, but if Mr. Curtain hadn’t changed the codes again. . . . Her fingers flew across the numbers.
The door opened. Kate leaped inside.
Only then did she realize she was in an elevator. An elevator? Of course! How else would Mr. Curtain get up to the Whispering Gallery in his wheelchair? He must not let his Messengers use it — he did like his secrets, didn’t he? Probably enjoyed the thought of the children laboring up all those steps, too. As the door slid closed, Kate saw the tower steps through an open doorway across the passage. Jackson had been guarding both entrances.
There were only a few buttons inside the elevator. They were unlabeled, but it wasn’t hard to guess that the top button would be for an entrance outside the Whispering Gallery, and the one below it — that would surely be the computer room. Kate stared longingly at the button . . . but of course she couldn’t press it. She couldn’t use the elevator. Jackson was sure to hear it. He was probably already coming back down the passage.
And so Kate improvised. She emptied her bucket, flipped it over, and standing atop it on her tiptoes, unscrewed the maintenance panel above her. She’d never worked so quickly in her life. In no time she’d tied her rope in place, gathered her bucket and things, and disappeared though the panel into the elevator shaft above.
No sooner had Kate replaced the panel below her than the elevator door opened. Kate held perfectly still. She heard Jackson grunt. The door closed again.
Kate flicked on her penlight. The elevator cables stretched high above her, disappearing into blackness. She took off her shoes and socks, slid the socks over her hands to protect them, then put her shoes back on. With her penlight clamped between her teeth, she started up, wasting no time. She had a very long, very difficult climb ahead of her.
It was a very long, very difficult way to go only to be disappointed. Despite the socks, the cable hurt her hands; the climb was exhausting; and when at last Kate came to a set of doors near the top, she found them impossible to pry open or peek through. Above them another set of doors (which must open onto the passageway outside the Whispering Gallery) proved equally immovable. Then, squeezing past the winch and machinery at the top of the elevator shaft (if the elevator had started just then, she’d have been killed), Kate discovered that a vent cover she’d spotted was welded shut. The vent was too tiny to climb through, anyway. She did manage to peer down through it, if only to make the following, discouraging mental notes: