What Leo Saw

"You went down," said Leo.

It was the first thing he had said to Cassian in two days. He said it on the stair, on the way up from supper on Friday, in a low flat voice, without turning his head, and the hand on the banister did not move. The other boys went by them in a stream, jostling. Cassian stopped. Leo stopped one step above, and stood very still, looking at nothing.

"Where?"

"The shaft. I heard you go. I watched the bed." A pause. "I counted the minutes. You were gone forty-one."

"Leo—"

"You came back alone."

It was not a question. It was a plain statement, laid out between them like an exhibit. Cassian opened his mouth to answer. He found there was nothing in it. He had thought of a hundred things to say, in the dark, in the night, in the classroom with his eyes on the clock. He was too far gone. I couldn't reach him. The thing was between us. But the words lay in his throat like stones, and when he looked up into the other boy's eyes, he could not say any of them.

Leo's eyes were very steady.

They were dark, and wet, and looked at him with a sort of terrible, patient understanding. It was not anger. He would have known what to do with anger. It was something worse: the expression of someone who has watched a thing happen that he has dreaded for a very long time, and who is not surprised.

"I'd have gone in," said Leo.

"I know."

"I'd have been useless. I'd have been dead in a minute. But I'd have gone." His voice shook. "I think that's the difference between us. I'm not the one who's supposed to be able to."

"Leo, I—"

"Don't."

He went up the stairs. Cassian watched him go.

…

The sixth night was long.

They stood in the circle at the Hearth, the Chosen, in the red light. Karl Brandt stood among them now. He had been given a gray cloak that afternoon, without ceremony, by the Deacon, who had handed it over like a coat at a cloakroom. He wore it with his chin high. He sang in a clear tenor, and gave Cassian a quick glance each time the line turned, bright and sidelong and pleased.

The hymn rose.

Cassian stood at the table with the knife in its cloth before him and his hands folded behind his back. He had trained himself to ignore the words. Don't translate. Don't think. He sang from the diaphragm, loud, without meaning, as he had done for a week, and the floor hummed under his boots and the candle flames bent. It was no different from any other night.

Until the fourth verse.

It was a very small sound. It came from somewhere on his left, a little behind, and for a moment he did not notice, because it was so much a part of the pattern. A thin reedy pipe, a little flat. A treble voice. Not a Chosen's, not a prefect's. It came from the floor, from the walls, from the throat of the Hearth, as if some child were standing in the dark just beyond the candle's reach and singing along.

He knew it.

He had heard it in the dormitory, at all hours of the night, over the scratch of pens and the creak of beds. He had heard it hum through the bathroom door on the first evening in September, nervous and tuneless, making up a song because there was no one to listen. Venite, hospes... A boy with a round face and a nervous laugh who had said, Please don't.

Ad mensam nostram.

Cassian's own voice stuck in his throat.

Mensa parata est.

It was perfectly in time. That was what he could not bear. A few weeks ago, Ronald Fisk had not been able to carry a tune in a bucket. Now he sang the old hymn as if he had been born to it, lightly, easily, and with an expression in the voice, a terrible bright gladness, that made Cassian's skin crawl.

Come in. Come in. Oh, come in.

He clenched his teeth. He sang louder. He drowned it out with the full force of his chest, until the veins stood out on his neck, and the Rector glanced across at him with pleased surprise.

It did not help.

The thin sweet voice went on beneath his own. It did not fade. It threaded through the other voices like a silver wire, steady and clear, and when the hymn ended, and the candles were pinched out, and the Chosen filed away into the night, it was still singing somewhere under the stone, softly, to itself.

…

He lay on his back afterward and did not sleep.

The room was dark. Albert, to the left, slept flat on his back with his mouth open, as he had every night since the roof. Karl had taken a corner by the door. His breathing was smooth. Leo's cot stood against the far wall, and in it Leo lay on his side with his back to the room, awake, as stiff as a plank.

Ronald's bed was empty.

Cassian turned his head and looked at it. In the dark, the bare frame was a pale shape against the wall. Somebody had left a pen on the sill above it. A cheap ballpoint, blue, bitten at the end. He had not seen it before. He stared at it for a long time.

Albert lent him a pen, he thought. In the first week. Ronald never gave it back.

It was a small stupid thing to think about. It seemed to him the worst thing in the world.

He turned his face to the wall and shut his eyes and tried to say the Latin verbs.

Amo. Amas.

Amat.

Beneath the floor, a voice began to hum.