What the Hand Remembers

PREVIOUSLY: Cassian slipped out of the bathroom after overhearing the Chosen speak of a marked boy named Albert Sterling and a person called "the Hand." At the end of the dormitory hall, a tall wrapped thing lifted Albert off the floor by the neck, and Albert screamed Cassian's name. Cassian had four seconds to choose. He moved.

…

He never remembered crossing the hall.

There was the corner, and then there was the cold, and then he was inside it. It hit him like diving into a frozen lake. The breath punched out of his chest. The gray light went black at the edges, and the sound of the crowd breathing was suddenly everywhere, inside his skull, between his ribs, a hundred lungs pulling at the air around him until he felt his own breath being drawn away.

He kept running.

Albert's feet were kicking six inches off the floor. Cassian threw both arms around his legs and hauled, with all his weight and every ounce of butcher's-boy strength he'd earned hauling carcasses on the kill floor since he was nine. Albert shrieked. Something above them gave a long dry creak, like a tree bending, and for one terrible heartbeat Cassian felt the thing's attention swing around and settle on him.

He looked up.

The wrapped head was bent over him, near enough to touch. Close up it was worse. The cloth wasn't gray. It was the color of old teeth. It was knotted and re-knotted, soaked through with some brown stain, layer after layer, and where the eyes should have been the folds sagged inward, into two shallow hollows. It smelled of cold iron and wet earth and, underneath, of something sweetly, dreadfully familiar.

It smelled like the kill floor on a Monday morning, when the drains are still wet.

Let go, Cassian thought, with a cold, clear fury. Let him go.

The long gray hand tightened on Albert's neck. Albert made a gurgling sound.

And Cassian, with his right arm still locked around Albert's knees, did the only thing his body knew how to do. He reached up, caught the wrist of the thing, and pulled.

His fingers closed on cloth and bone.

It was ice. It was colder than anything he'd ever touched; it burned. For one blind instant the pain was so bright that he saw white, and heard a voice screaming in his own throat.

And then something answered.

It came up out of him like heat from a banked fire. He couldn't have said where. Low in his belly, in the heel of his hand, in the long old scar across his palm that had split open weeks ago on a rusty bed frame. A warmth, small and fierce and stubborn, rolling out from the center of him into his fingers, into the wrist of the thing. It wasn't magic. It wasn't a prayer. It was simply his, the way his own pulse was his, the way the shape of his hands was his, and he understood, in the part of him that never needed words, that the warmth had been in him all his life. That it had always been there, in the long nights, in the cold kitchen, waiting to be called.

The wrapped head jerked.

The crowd of breaths broke off, all at once, as if a hundred people had choked on the same word. The long gray fingers around Albert's neck went slack.

Albert fell. He landed in a heap on the stone, wheezing, and Cassian dragged him back by the collar and dropped on top of him and rolled with him toward the wall, and then the two of them lay in a tangle of limbs and bare feet while the thing stood over them.

It did not strike.

It did not move. It had straightened to its full height, stooped under the vault, and its wrapped head was tilted down at Cassian, the cloth rising and falling in slow, rapid, bewildered breaths. A tremor ran through the dark robe, down its length, like a shudder in a dog that has bitten something it thought was meat and found it was a live coal.

Then, very slowly, it bowed.

It was a small gesture, hardly more than a nod. A dip of the long gray head. But it was unmistakable, and the sight of it, that tall hideous thing lowering its face to a fifteen-year-old boy in a torn cloak, was so wrong that Cassian felt his stomach drop through the floor.

From deep in the cloth came a sound. A long, soft exhalation, a sigh from a hundred throats, like a congregation settling into its pews. There was nothing angry in it. Nothing hungry. It sounded almost like relief.

Recognition.

The shape began to withdraw.

It went backward, not turning, step by slow step, gliding into the dark at the foot of the stairs. The gray light thinned. The cold lifted off Cassian's skin like a hand withdrawn from his throat. Within seconds there was only a hallway, and an open door, and the sound of rain, and two boys on the floor.

Albert was sobbing.

He lay curled on his side with his arms over his head, making a thin whistling sound through his teeth. Cassian pushed himself up on one elbow. His hand throbbed. When he turned it over, the old scar across his palm had split open again, a thin red line weeping blood, and the skin around it was white with frost.

"Hey," he said. His voice cracked. "Hey. Albert. It's gone."

Albert didn't answer. His nightshirt was soaked. On his neck, just below the jaw, a ring of white marks was rising: four long stripes on one side, a thumb-print on the other, each as pale and sharp as a burn.

Cassian started to say something else, and the cloister door slammed open.

Lantern light poured down the hall.

They came in a rush, a half dozen of them in gray cloaks, boots ringing on the stone, a tall man's silhouette in the lead holding a ring of iron keys. Behind him came Silas Ward, platinum hair gone gold in the lantern's light. Tessa Quill, her face stark and furious. The boy with the seam of a mouth. They were early. Hours early. And they pulled up short in a line like a row of fence posts when they saw the hall.

Nobody said anything.

The man in front was not a man. Cassian saw that when the lantern swung. A woman, tall and gaunt, in a black dress buttoned to her throat, her iron-gray hair scraped into a knot so severe it pulled the skin back from her temples. She wore a heavy silver chain across her chest. The key ring in her hand held a single black key, long as a finger, and she held it before her like a priest holds a cross.

She looked at Albert, curled and shuddering on the floor. She looked at the white handprint on his neck.

She looked at Cassian.

He had never been looked at like that. Not by his father, not by the nurses, not by Silas Ward in the cafeteria. Her eyes went over him carefully, from his bare, bleeding feet to his torn cloak to the white-rimed fist clenched against his chest. Her mouth did not move. But something behind her gaze did, a kind of terrible, controlled astonishment, like a woman who has watched a clock tick for forty years and heard it strike thirteen.

"Deacon," Silas said, very softly. "It let go."

"I see that."

"It bowed."

"I see that, Mr. Ward."

She crossed the hall in four strides and dropped to one knee in front of Cassian. He flinched back against the wall, but she caught his wrist, quick and cold and absolutely certain, and turned his hand over in the light.

She stared at the scar. At the line of fresh blood, and the frost, and the pale curved shape of the old wound across his palm. Behind her, he heard someone draw in a breath through their teeth.

"Did it touch you?" the Deacon said.

"Yes," Cassian whispered.

"Where?"

"My hand. I grabbed it. I..." He shook his head, dizzy. "I don't know what I did."

"Did it speak to you?"

"No." A pause. "It... bowed."

The Deacon closed her eyes.

For a moment she stayed motionless, kneeling there on the cold stone with his bleeding hand in hers, and Cassian had the horrible sense of being weighed. Then she let go of him and rose. When she turned to the others, the expression was gone from her face. It was a closed door.

"Mr. Ward. Take the Sterling boy to the infirmary. Gently. Miss Quill, go with him. No one speaks of this in the dormitory. No one leaves this hall until I say so."

"Deacon, the Rector—"

"Will be told in the morning. By me." She turned back to Cassian. "Get up, Mr. Hale."

She knows my name.

He stumbled to his feet. His knees wouldn't hold. A hand caught his elbow, thin and steady, and he looked up and found Silas Ward standing beside him, holding him upright, pale eyes level with his own.

Silas's mouth curved. It wasn't the razor-blade smile from the cafeteria. It was smaller. Almost shy.

"I told you to stay warm," he murmured.

Cassian's blood went to ice.

"It was you. In the bathroom."

"I thought so." Silas let go of his arm, and for a moment his pale eyes dropped to Cassian's cut hand with an expression Cassian couldn't read. Hunger, maybe. Or awe. Or something sadder than either. "I wasn't sure. Now I am."

The Deacon lifted the lantern. Its light shivered over the frost on the walls, and over the ring of faces, every one of them turned toward him, every one wearing the same stunned and measuring look.

"You will come with me, Mr. Hale," she said. "You are not in trouble. Not tonight."

"What was that?" His voice came out cracked, raw. "What is it? Why did it..."

"Not tonight."

"Albert said my name. It looked at me. It knew me—"

"I said not tonight." The Deacon's voice never rose. It didn't have to. She stood with the black key in one hand and the lantern in the other, a stern straight figure framed by the dark hall, and when she spoke again there was no kindness in it, but there was something that sounded strangely like respect.

"But you will have questions, Mr. Hale. And in this place, there is only one person who can answer them." She turned. "Follow me."