The Hatch

"I was cleaning," Cassian said.

It was the stupidest thing he could have said. He knew it as the words left his mouth. He was kneeling in the dark on the floor of the vestry with a cold candle in one fist and his cheek burning from the iron, and Wade Harlan stood in the doorway with a lantern, looking down at him with the mild, bleary politeness of a man who has been woken from a nap.

"In the dark?"

"The candle went out."

"Ah." Wade considered this. He was a tall boy with a long, pale, serious face, and when he frowned, the seam of his mouth deepened. "You heard it, then."

Cassian's throat closed. "Heard what?"

"The breathing." Wade lifted the lantern and let its light roll over the slab, the scratches, the black ring. "Everyone does, the first time. Usually it's an accident. A boy comes in alone for the vestments, or the oil, and he happens to lean on the iron. They always come out the same color you're now. Gray." He said it gently. "You'll get used to it."

"Will I?"

"I did. In about a year." A small, dry quirk of the lips. "Mostly."

He crossed the floor and took the candle from Cassian's hand. He lit it from his lantern, his long fingers steady, and set it back on the stone. The flame shivered, then burned straight.

"I'm supposed to report you," he said. "To the Deacon. For entering the vestry without leave."

"I know."

"I'm not going to." He glanced down. "I left you alone. That's a breach too. If I say you were touching the hatch, someone asks me why I was gone." A pause. "I'd prefer not to have that conversation. So we'll say you scrubbed the floor and I read my book, and nothing else happened. Agreed?"

Cassian looked up at him.

"Why?"

Wade seemed to think about it. He lowered himself onto the edge of the cabinet, his lantern between his knees, and for a minute he said nothing at all.

"My brother was a Hand's assistant," he said at last. "Years ago. Before Silas's time. He used to talk in his sleep." His eyes were on the slab. "I'd like you not to end up like him. That's all."

"Where is he now?"

"Home," said Wade. "Sitting in a chair. He doesn't talk anymore."

He picked up his book and left.

…

"The tally," Cassian said.

It was Friday evening, an hour after the vestry. They stood in the Student Council office, a long paneled room on the ground floor of the main hall, with a map of the valley pinned above a fireplace and a rack of ledgers by the window. Silas Ward sat behind the desk writing something in a red notebook. He didn't look up.

"What tally?"

"On the vestry floor. Forty-nine marks. Cut into the stone beside the hatch."

The pen stopped.

"Seven clusters of seven," Cassian went on. "Old. And a second set next to it. Newer. With two letters scratched under, E.M."

Silas set the pen down.

For a moment he sat quite still, with his long white hands flat on the blotter. His face had gone smooth and empty. Then he rose, and crossed the room, and closed the door, and turned the key.

"Who else have you told?"

"No one."

"Good." He stood with his back to the wood. "I need you to understand something, Cassian. You are going to hear things in the next few days that are not for repeating. I am going to say a few of them now, because I'd rather you hear them from me than from the Rector's mouth in front of a crowd. But if you repeat them, I will deny I spoke. And I will be believed."

"I understand."

"I wonder." He looked at him. "Very well."

He crossed to the window and stood looking out over the courtyard. His pale reflection hung in the glass, superimposed on the gray quad.

"That is the vault," Silas said. "Below the chapel, under the vestry, a stone chamber the size of this room. It was built in 1893. The Guest rests there. It has rested there, with intervals, for one hundred and thirty-three years." His voice was careful, flat. "The tally is a count. The first Hand cut it, a man named Josiah's apprentice, a boy of fifteen who had a butcher's shop in Hollis Creek. He kept it so that the Vigil would not be forgotten. Forty-nine is the number of offerings on the first night."

Cassian's mouth was dry. "Offerings."

"Every seven years there is a Great Vigil. Seven nights. It begins on the twenty-fifth of October, in the year the seven comes round." Silas turned. "That is nine days from now. The Guest wakes and it is fed, and the valley is spared another seven years. That is the covenant. That is all of it, in its barest form."

"And what do I do?"

Silas was quiet.

"You are the Hand," he said.

He said it without inflection. Without ceremony. Just the two words, set down in the quiet room like a pair of stones.

"I've heard that. In the bathroom. The night Albert—" Cassian broke off. "What is it?"

"It is a title, and a duty." Silas drew a breath. "The Rector will explain it. Not me. I am sorry, but that is the rule. I can tell you only this. The Hand is the person the Guest will accept. There is one every generation. The Society searches for him, sometimes for years. You were found."

"By who?"

"By a man called Dobbs, among others."

Cassian felt the floor tilt beneath him.

"Hank Dobbs."

"The name means something to you."

"He gave my father the flyer." His voice was a stranger's. "He brought it to the house. He sat at our table."

"Then you understand more than most do, on the day they arrive." Silas's face was grave. "I am sorry. I would spare you that if I could. It is not a kindness to learn it from me. But you'd have it out of the Deacon eventually, and she would make it crueler."

The window rattled in a gust. A gull cried somewhere. In the courtyard, a line of freshmen was marching toward the dining hall, and Cassian watched them through the glass, small gray figures in a gray world, and thought, with the clear, cold detachment of the very stunned: Edward didn't just give me away. He sold me.

He knew.

"And E.M.?" he said, hoarsely.

Silas's eyes flickered.

"I do not know whose initials those are," he said. "I swear. They were there when I came."

It was the first lie he had ever told Cassian. Cassian knew it, as one knows a bad tooth. And he let it pass.

…

Tessa Quill caught him in the corridor outside the library.

She came out of a side door like a thrown knife. One moment he was alone, walking with his head down, and the next his back was against the wall and a hand was at his throat, a small, hard, furious hand, and her face was inches from his own.

"Don't," she said.

"I wasn't going to."

"You were going to say something. I could see it. You've got that look. The look of a boy who thinks he's the first one to be hurt in this place."

"Let go of me."

"No."

He could have thrown her. She weighed perhaps a hundred and ten pounds. But there was something in her eyes, red-rimmed and glittering, that held him as surely as a hand. He kept very still.

"I watched you," she said, low. "On Monday night. In the circle. You stood there with your hands behind your back and your chin up and you didn't look afraid. You looked interested." She spat the word. "He took one look at you and the Rector went soft as butter. Did you see his face? I've never seen him like that. Not for Silas. Not for anyone."

"I didn't ask—"

"You stole my person." Her voice cracked. "That's what you did. I brought Albert in. I trained him. I sat up with him four years. And the second you arrive, he's nothing. He's a stain they're waiting to wipe off."

"He's alive."

"For now."

She leaned in closer. He could smell the soap on her skin, and underneath it, faintly, the same resin and cold wax as the chapel.

"Here is what's going to happen," Tessa breathed. "On the twenty-fifth you'll be in the chapel. I'll be standing across the table. And when it's done, when they carry out what's left, I'll look at you and I'll remember that you could have said no. You could have walked out. And you didn't." She released him. Her fingers left four hot marks. "Watch your back, Hale."

She turned. She walked away, not fast, her cloak snapping behind her, and did not look back.

He stood against the wall with his heart pounding.

What's left.

When they carry out what's left.

…

Albert spoke to him that night.

It was after the bell, when the hymn had begun, when the lamps were dark and the room lay in its usual gray silence. Cassian had been out. He had come back late, from the first of the practice sessions, with the cloth of the cloak still cold on his shoulders, and now he lay on the straw staring at the ceiling.

"I touched it."

The voice was so soft he nearly didn't hear it.

"What?"

"The thing in the rehearsal." Albert's whisper came out of the corner, thick and raw. He'd been crying again, Cassian could tell; the words came wet. "You want to know what I did. Everyone does. I could see you wondering at the table. I could see it on your face."

"You don't have to—"

"I know I don't." A hitch of breath. "I touched one thing. That's all. One small thing, in a practice session, in September. They were going through the Invocation with the dummy circle, and the Deacon told me to step up to the table, and I did. And there was a, a mark, carved in the wood. A word. I put my thumb on it."

"What word?"

"It wasn't a word. It was a name." Albert's voice dropped to nothing. "I don't know how I knew. It was just letters, scratches. But when my thumb touched it, I knew, and something went through me, from the thumb to the spine, like I'd stuck my hand in a socket. And I heard it. In my head. Saying my own name back to me."

Cassian lay perfectly still.

"That's all," said Albert. "I just touched a name. It's not fair. It's not fair. They never told me not to. They never said I couldn't. I only wanted to see—"

He stopped.

He stopped so abruptly that the silence rang. Cassian heard him draw a breath, and hold it, and the faint creak of the bed as the boy sat up, rigid.

"I shouldn't have said that," Albert whispered. "I shouldn't have said any of it. Forget it. Go to sleep."

"Albert—"

"Forget it!"

He turned over, and was silent.

Cassian lay with his eyes open. In the dark, under the sound of the hymn, a single word turned slowly in his mind like a key in a lock.

A name.

He understood, at last, why Albert had been marked.