The Last Night Before

The corridor window had a stone seat.

He had never noticed it before. In six weeks of obeying the Law, he had never stood anywhere near the end of the hall after dark, and when he first stepped out of Room 104 on Saturday night, with the silver clasp cold at his throat and the hymn pulsing in the floor, he had meant only to walk. To breathe. To put a wall between himself and four sleeping boys.

But the window was there, tall and narrow, with its leaded panes beaded with rain. Under it a slab of stone, worn smooth, big enough for two people to sit. Someone had left a folded blanket on it. He sat down. He pulled the blanket over his knees.

Below, the courtyard lay black and shining. Beyond the roofs, the chapel crouched on its hill, a darker shape against the dark, and from its narrow slits, the faintest red glow showed. Candles. The Chosen were already gathering. The Rector would be laying out the knives.

He was supposed to be there in an hour.

Forty-nine.

He took the folded sheets from inside his shirt and spread them on his knee. The translation lay before him in pencil: the invitation, the table, the blood, the hand. He had read it a dozen times. It did not change.

We give a hand, that you may be filled.

He thought about what he knew.

He knew that something lived beneath the chapel. He knew that it was old, and strong, and patient. He knew that the school had been built to feed it and keep it, that the staff were afraid of it, that the children were its livestock. He knew that a man named Dobbs had gone shopping for a boy with the right kind of hands, and found one in a kitchen in Iowa, and that Edward Hale had signed him over for a debt he could never name.

He knew that in eight days there would be forty-nine offerings.

He knew, because Silas had said it, that the first Hand had been a butcher's apprentice.

He did not know what would happen to Albert Sterling.

When they carry out what's left.

He closed his eyes.

…

There were two ways it could go.

He laid them side by side in his mind, with the care he had learned from the kill floor, where a mistake with a blade means more than a mistake. He looked at each one in turn.

One. He kept quiet.

He walked into the chapel tonight, and the next night, and the next. He did what he was told. He stood in the ring in his silver collar and sang the invitation, and the thing in the dark was fed, and the valley slept. His mother, in her room with the view of the river, grew stronger every day. She laughed at crosswords. She went home to Daniel's white house in Illinois. She never had to wonder where her son was, or why the bills had stopped coming. Edward never touched her again.

It would cost him only his silence. His hands. A few bad nights.

He would be good at it. That was the horror. He could feel how good he would be.

Two. He spoke.

He walked into Room 104 and woke the others. Ronald and Karl and Albert and Leo, four boys who had put their heads under blankets every night since September. He told them what he'd learned. The translation, the vault, the rite. He told them the thing under the chapel was not a ghost or a curse but a creature, kept in the dark and sung to every night. That the teachers knew. That the Rector knew. That the school was a farm and they were the crop.

And then what?

He saw it quite clearly. He saw Ronald's mouth fall open. He saw Karl's eyes narrow, bright with the first real information he'd ever had. He saw Albert, already half-gone, begin to shake. He saw the news go out through the dormitory like a drop of dye in water. Whispers. Notes. A hundred frightened boys. By Monday, Silas would know. By Tuesday, the Rector.

And his mother would be moved out of her room with the river view. Moved onto a van. Moved back to Cedar Hollow.

He opened his eyes.

The rain ran down the glass. The candles burned in the chapel.

I can't decide this, he thought. It's too big.

I'm fifteen.

…

"You read it."

The voice came out of the shadows beside him, so soft that for a moment he took it for the wind.

He jerked upright.

Leo stood three feet from the window seat. He wore only his nightshirt and a pair of thin socks, and his bare ankles showed white against the stone. His arms hung at his sides. His face was in shadow, but the dark eyes caught the glow from the window, and they shone.

Cassian had not heard him come. Nor had he ever seen him, in six weeks, out of bed after the bell. A boy who was not Chosen, in the corridor, at night.

"Leo. You shouldn't be here."

"I know."

"If they find you—"

"They won't." The words were quiet, flat, unemphatic. "They don't look for me. I've never given them a reason to."

He said it as a statement of fact, as though it were nothing at all. Cassian stared at him. Six weeks in the same room, and he could count on his fingers the words this boy had spoken to him.

"Why do you stay out of it?"

"Don't." Leo flinched, a quick, hard shudder, and then stood perfectly straight. "Not tonight."

He took a step closer. For a moment the lantern in the courtyard below flared, and Cassian saw his face clearly: the sharp cheekbones, the shadows under the eyes. A face too old for fifteen. A face that had been looking at something terrible for a very long time and had never once been allowed to look away.

"You can read it now, can't you?" Leo whispered.

Cassian's mouth went dry.

"You left a note."

"Yes."

"You told me not to say the meaning aloud."

"Yes."

"Why?"

Leo's jaw worked. He opened his mouth, and shut it. A muscle jumped in his cheek. The silence stretched between them like a wire, and in it, Cassian could see him fighting something. Not a person. Something else, deeper. A thing built into him from the first, a fear so old it had grown roots.

"Because when you say it," Leo said at last, "it hears."

"It hears everything."

"It hears meaning. Anything else, it ignores. A song is just a song. A noise." His voice was almost inaudible. "But when someone understands, when they speak it back in their own tongue, it knows they've seen it. It turns its head. I saw it turn once. I was seven."

The cold closed around Cassian's chest.

"You've known," he said. "All along. Since the first day."

"Since I was seven."

"Then why didn't you—"

"Because I am a coward."

It was said with such precision, such finality, that Cassian had no answer. Leo stood in the half-light with his hands clenched at his sides and his chin high, and under the dark eyes there was a shimmer of wetness he refused to acknowledge.

"I'm sorry," he whispered. "I wanted to say more. I can't. I've tried a thousand times. Every time I open my mouth, it feels like a hand over it. I can only do little things." A short, savage laugh. "A handkerchief. A note. It's all I've ever been able to do."

"Leo, what—"

"Choose well," Leo said.

And turned, and walked into the dark.

Cassian was on his feet in an instant, his blanket falling. "Wait!" He ran to the corner. He looked left and right. The corridor stretched away black and empty in both directions. A single door stood ajar at the far end, a thread of gray showing in the gap. It was Room 104.

There was no sound. No footstep. No breath.

It was as though the boy had never been there at all.

…

He went back inside.

He did not light a candle. He stood in the doorway for a long time, with his hand on the frame and the cold running over his ankles, and let his eyes adjust to the dark.

Four beds. Four shapes beneath four blankets.

Ronald lay on his back with his mouth open and one pudgy hand flung out over the edge of the mattress, palm up, fingers curled. He was snoring, faintly. In sleep his face was the face of a much younger child. A plump, wet, hopeful face. A boy who still believed that everything would be all right if he was nice enough.

Karl lay stiff as a board, hands folded on his chest. His glasses were on the nightstand. Without them, his face looked unfinished. Thin, ambitious, tired. There was a line between his brows that did not smooth in sleep.

Albert had curled into the corner, knees to chin, the gray scarf still wound around his throat. His breath came shallow and fast. Now and then his lips moved, shaping a word without sound. The same word, over and over. Cassian did not need to hear it.

And by the window, Leo lay on his side with his face to the stone. His shoulders rose and fell evenly. He might have been asleep for hours.

Cassian stood among them.

A few miles away, a woman in a bed by a river was sleeping soundly for the first time in months. In an hour, a ring of cloaked children would gather in the red light. Within the week, a knife would be put into his hand.

He was about to choose for all of them.

He stood, and listened to the hymn, and felt the scar throb in his palm like a second pulse.