No

He thought about it for three days.

He thought about it on his knees in Mr. Calloway's classroom, while the old man read aloud about the grace of the valley. He thought about it at the long table in the dining hall, eating roast pork he could not taste. He thought about it lying on his back at night with the hymn coming up through the floor, counting the cracks in the stone ceiling, the way he'd counted the water stains over his bed in Ottley when the shouting started downstairs.

Your hands. On certain nights.

He did not need anyone to tell him what that meant. He had known the instant the Rector said it. He'd known the way you know the smell of rain before the first drop. And still he sat on the edge of that knowledge for three days, not looking over it, not looking down.

Because the offer was good.

That was the trap of it. It was good. His mother, safe. Her bills, paid. A house with a white fence. Daniel's hand on hers. Edward, gone from her life like a bad tooth. All of it laid in front of him on a clean white cloth, with a hot meal and a telephone, and a kindly old man saying I do not wish to buy you.

He had never in his life been offered anything that wasn't a leash.

On Tuesday night, he lay awake and watched the window turn from black to blue. He watched Albert's chest rise and fall in the corner, the gray scarf still wound around his neck. He watched Ronald grind his teeth. Karl, stiff as a plank. And Leo, by the window, awake as always, with the lantern light on his face.

Their eyes met.

Leo did not look away. For a long, quiet moment he simply looked, his dark face unreadable. Then, very slowly, he lifted one hand from beneath the blanket and held it out flat in the air between them, palm up.

He closed it.

He opened it again, empty.

It might have meant anything. They'll take it from you. You'll hold nothing. Don't. Cassian lay with his heart pounding, trying to read it, and when he looked again, Leo had turned to the wall.

Nobody gives you anything, he thought. Not for free. Not ever.

And that was when he knew.

…

On Wednesday evening, he walked to the cloister door alone.

It was raining again. The gallery was black as a throat. He passed the chapel on his left, a vast shape against the clouds, and he did not look at it, and he did not slow. At the door, a tall figure in a black dress was waiting with a lantern and a ring of keys.

"Mr. Hale," said Deacon Thorne.

"I want to see the Rector."

"He is expecting you."

She opened the door without another word. The study was as it had been, the fire, the books, the rain on the high window. Rector Kell sat in his leather chair with a cup of tea going cold on his knee, and when Cassian stepped inside, he looked up with a smile of such open gladness that Cassian almost faltered.

"My dear boy. Come in. Come in."

"No, sir." His voice cracked. He steadied it. "I'll stand."

The smile stayed on the old man's face. But the warmth went out of it, slowly, like a lamp being turned down.

"I see."

"I've thought about it. About all of it. I know what you're offering." He put his hands behind his back to hide the shaking. "I appreciate the call. And the boots. And what you've done for my mother."

"You are very welcome."

"But my answer's no."

The fire crackled. Outside, the rain ran in streams down the glass.

Kell did not move. He sat with his cup balanced on his knee and gazed at Cassian with an expression of such mild and attentive sorrow that for a moment Cassian felt sorry for him. He was an old man in a cardigan. He had made tea.

"May I ask why?"

"Because I asked what it costs."

"And I told you."

"You told me hands." Cassian's throat was tight. "You told me my silence, and my obedience, and my hands. And you wouldn't say what for. You said you'd tell me after I said yes." He swallowed. "My dad did that. He'd say, 'Just come with me, boy, I'll show you.' And it was always something I couldn't take back."

Kell's lips parted.

"I've been given away once already," Cassian said. "He signed a paper and I got on a bus. I don't want to sign another one. Not for a hot meal and a house. Not even for her."

He had not known he was going to say the last part. It came out raw, and it hung in the air between them, and he felt his face burn.

The Rector set his cup down, carefully, on the small table.

He stood. He crossed the rug in his slippers, and stopped a pace from Cassian, and looked up into his face. His round pink face was perfectly calm. His eyes behind the spectacles were not.

"I am sorry," Kell said, "to hear it."

"I'm sorry too."

"Are you?" A thin smile. "I rather think you aren't. I think you have never been so pleased with yourself in your life. That's fine. That is how it should be, at your age." He lifted his hand and, very gently, brushed a speck of lint from Cassian's shoulder. The touch was warm. It sent a shiver down his spine. "I only wish I could say it will be as easy as you imagine."

"What do you mean?"

"Nothing, my boy. Nothing at all."

He stepped back.

"You will remember today," he said softly. "I want you to. When the time comes, and you are tired, and frightened, I want you to remember that you were given a door, and you closed it yourself." His tone never rose. "Miriam. Show him out."

The Deacon stood at the threshold. She did not look at Cassian. Her face was a mask, her eyes fixed on a point in the middle of the air, and the key ring in her hand trembled just slightly.

She opened the door to the gallery. The rain blew in.

Cassian walked out.

…

By morning it was all over the school.

He couldn't have said how. No one had been in the study but the three of them. But when he came into the dining hall the next day, the whole room fell silent like a plucked string. He walked the length of it under three hundred sets of eyes. At the table by the east window, Silas Ward did not look up from his plate, and his hand, on the handle of his knife, was very, very still.

In Room 104, the reaction was exactly what he'd expected, and worse.

Albert had the strangest look. He stared at Cassian when he came in, mouth half open, his glasses, returned from the infirmary, slightly crooked on his nose. His face went through a series of expressions so rapidly that Cassian could hardly follow them: shock, disbelief, a flash of savage joy.

"You said no?"

"Keep your voice down."

"You said no to Kell." Albert let out a breathless, cracked laugh. His eyes were bright, feverish. "You actually said no. To his face. In his own study. You idiot." Another laugh, higher. "Oh, that's rich. That's perfect. You come in here and you wreck my life and you get to walk out the door like you're better than all of us—"

"Albert."

"No, it's fine. It's fine. I'm just saying." He pressed the back of his hand to his mouth. The laughter had turned to something else. His shoulders were shaking. "I'm glad. I'm glad, Hale, because now we're the same again. Now you're just like me. You're nothing."

He turned away. Cassian did not answer.

Ronald sat on his bed with his hands twisting together. "Hale, are you sure? Are you sure? I mean, the food. And the boots. Hale, you could have called your mom whenever you—" He stopped, and swallowed, and said in a small voice: "I'd have said yes."

"I know you would."

"I'm not saying you're wrong."

"I know."

Karl said nothing for a long time. He sat very upright with a book open on his knee. When he finally looked up, Cassian expected scorn. Instead there was only a blank, cold, almost scholarly confusion, as though Karl were studying a problem in algebra that refused to come out.

"Do you know what I would have given?" he asked at last, softly. "For one invitation. One. To sit in that room. To be told what you were told." His voice trembled with something that was not quite anger. "And you just... threw it back."

"Yeah."

"Why?"

Cassian looked at him. At the neat parted hair, the polished glasses, the face of a boy who had given up two years of his life to scrub a floor for the privilege of being noticed.

"Because I didn't want to know what it was for," he said.

Karl made a small sound. It might have been a laugh. He turned back to his book, and Cassian saw him begin to read, and saw that he was not reading at all.

And Leo, by the window, simply watched.

…

That night, the cold came into the room.

It came without a sound. Cassian had been lying on his back, listening to the hymn, drifting at the edge of sleep, when he realized his hands were numb. He lifted them. His breath came out in a white cloud.

The room was dark. Not the soft dark of other nights, with the gray glimmer of the lantern through the window. A thicker dark, that pooled in the corners of the ceiling and the far wall like water in a basin. In the corner opposite his bed, where the stone angles met, there was a patch of blackness that seemed darker than the rest, so black that the eye slid off it.

It seemed to him that the patch was larger than it had been a minute ago.

He lay very still.

Nobody else in the room stirred. Karl's breath was shallow and quick. Ronald's snores had stopped. Albert, in the corner, was pulled up into a ball with the blanket over his head. Only Leo lay with his face toward the room, his eyes open, shining in the dark.

It's nothing, Cassian told himself. It's a draft. It's the stone.

The patch of darkness shifted.

And then, from somewhere beneath him, from the space under his own bed, between the straw mattress and the cold stone floor, there came a sound. It was so soft that at first he thought he had imagined it. A small, dry, patient noise, like a mouse in a wall.

Scritch.

A pause.

Scritch. Scritch.

Something was scratching, very slowly, at the underside of his bed.