The Call Page 11

  “Confident,” Ms. Breen had said when she’d asked about Anto. “The doctors are … ” And she hesitated, didn’t she? She hesitated right there! As if to say they’re not bloody confident at all!

  Nessa turns to go back to the refectory, her mind still wrestling with her fears. And then she stops.

  Conor is there. Lounging in an alcove that held the statue of a saint back when this part of the college was a monastery. He’s watching her and must have been the whole time she stood at the window.

  “I think you broke my rib,” he says. He’s like an apparition. He doesn’t belong here when her mind is so focused on other things. “A foolish risk you took there for Megan. It was my duty to teach her a lesson, but I wouldn’t have damaged her. She can take a bit of a beating, can’t she?”

  Nessa never stands next to Conor unless they’re paired off at sparring, and that hasn’t happened in several months. She has forgotten just how large he is, in all ways, and she has a sudden realization that no matter how many weights she pumps or how much of the terrible refectory food she eats, she will never be as strong as he is.

  “What do you want?” she asks him.

  He’s not unintelligent, and yet this simple, obvious question throws Conor into confusion. As though it has come to him as a surprise. He looks once around the empty corridor and then back at her, and his breathing changes.

  “Listen,” he says. His voice becomes a whisper. “Listen. This is your chance. Nobody has to know.”

  “What … what are you talking about?”

  And then his lips are crushing hers. Just like that, and it takes all of her considerable strength to push him away. “What the … ?! Conor!”

  “Don’t be a fool,” he says. “You might as well take it when it’s offered. Obviously I must forbid you to tell anyone. But you’re not like that twit Sherry. I’ve sent her away, and it’s for you.”

  Then he’s kissing her again. Rough and inexpert. Callused hands are pushing under her tracksuit, straight up toward her small breasts, his whole, massive body pressing against her. “You might as well,” he breathes. “All of us who were out there today are going to be Called now. So enjoy it! Enjoy!”

  And then he screams.

  Never once in their sparring has she successfully landed a blow on him, but for some bizarre reason he’s not expecting one now. Certainly not a vicious punch between the legs. Or a second one before his nerves have had time to tell him something terrible is wrong. Or a third. He’s not ready to have his ear yanked, or to have it used as the handle of a battering ram, as she slams him into the wall. And that rib? The one she damaged earlier in the day? Why, yes, yes, it still hurts, especially when she strikes at it with stiffened fingers.

  When she has him down and helpless, she staggers away from him. But Conor has had the same training as herself. He knows that to stay down is to die, regardless of the damage suffered. He leaps to his feet and charges along the corridor after her, half blind with dripping blood. He grabs her before she can get through the door into the back of the refectory and flings her away from it, as though she is no heavier than a paperback. She hits the polished floor and slides along it to end up against the very same alcove where their encounter began.

  She’s not going to catch him by surprise again, she thinks. The Cage, the Cage would have been far better than this! She tries to stand, but suddenly Sergeant Taaft is there and keeps her down with a polished black boot.

  “A lover’s tiff?” she asks.

  Nessa can’t see the sergeant’s face, but genuine eagerness fills Taaft’s voice as she says to Conor, “You want to fight me, child?”

  Conor’s battered face shows no fear at all. But eventually, and with regret, he answers, “You have more training than me.”

  “No kidding.”

  “But I’ll keep getting stronger.”

  And now Taaft sounds like she is spitting. “Not in the Cage you won’t. Picking on the handicapped! You make me sick.”

  But it’s Nessa who feels sick, battling to keep the tears of shame at bay.

  It hasn’t been the best week in Liz Sweeney’s life, and now, now the snow!

  Everybody says the winters are colder than they used to be, that nobody should have to put up with temperatures like these the week before Halloween. But nowadays thermometers always take a dive after September, and the instructors think nothing of dragging the class for a pre-breakfast, barefoot run through the slush.

  “No offense,” says Aoife to Horner. “No offense, sir, but me and Liz Sweeney, we’re just out of the Cage. That biscuit was our first food in days, sir. Sir?”

  Horner rarely speaks, English or Sídhe or anything else. He doesn’t even like to shrug, but he manages one now, dragging it out of the black hole of war that ate his personality thirty years before. He has a tiny smooth face, with greying curly hair and great big eyes that any Sídhe would be proud of. Liz Sweeney has to drag her gaze away from his before it sucks her into nothingness. Just looking at him is enough to make her shiver, regardless of the weather.

  That Aoife’s a lazy shit, Liz Sweeney thinks, but for once she’ll keep that opinion to herself. The girl cried every day in the Cage and it wasn’t about food, although all of them were bent double over cramped bellies. And looking at her tears, Liz Sweeney didn’t think of weakness, as Conor did. No, she wanted to weep too. For herself. For Chuckwu. For the sister she lost. For her brother Kieron, in Year 6 up in another college and not yet Called.

  She’ll hear news of him very soon. Yes, because farther north, near Bangor, Kieron Sweeney has also been ordered to go for a run in the snow. It’s heavier there, practically a storm, and half an hour from now his abandoned tracksuit will spend three minutes and four seconds getting wet.

  Liz Sweeney can’t know any of that. As part of the Round Table, she constantly tells herself how strong she is. How little she feels—other than scorn—for the Aoifes of this world, and admiration for the Conors.

  Her life is about to be turned upside down.

  Kieron has survived the Call. Now he is back and everything is different. He stands naked on top of his soaking tracksuit with snow falling around him. He shivers violently and then falls to his knees, his mouth open, braying like an animal. He has seen things no human should ever witness.

  Parallel welts run down his chest where a “dog” of the Sídhe raked his skin, but the wounds don’t bleed: They have an ancient, gnarled look about them, and he cries out, “I wish you’d killed me! Why didn’t you kill me?”

  But this is just shock. Disbelief. And while the dreams will haunt him the rest of his life, he will fight them, fight to live, fight to be happy.

  He has been trained for this, and in spite of what he has just experienced, he is one of the lucky ones.

  His teeth chatter. Don’t freeze to death. The idea makes him laugh like a madman. He spent all his energy in the Grey Land, but he grabs up his soaking clothing and staggers, tripping through the ankle-deep snow. Nearly there, nearly there. There’s nobody around of course. Everyone else gets to enjoy a lazy breakfast, but he was foolish enough to mock one of the instructors, Sicari, where she could hear him.

  “Out, Sweeney! Out!” she cried. “A whole circuit of the park.”

  “How will you know I’ve done it?” he couldn’t help asking, and her eyes narrowed so that the combat scar across her forehead turned white under his gaze.

  “You think I couldn’t track you in that?” She jerked her head toward the freezing blanket that had settled onto Bangor overnight. “You’re lucky it’s not the Cage, you little shit. Year Sixes act out sometimes. Everybody knows it. You’re like little children. Now go, puppy, go. A full circuit or, by God, you’ll not eat for a week.”

  That conversation seems like so, so long ago. Another life, which, of course, it is. An innocent one, in which he hadn’t seen the … the fruit trees of the Grey Land. Oh, Danú! Oh, Lugh! The thought of them drives him to his knees to retch from an empty stomach. />
  It was just bad luck that he was called halfway round his circuit of the park. He knows this place like the back of his hand, but now the snow is falling thicker than ever, disguising familiar landmarks—the statue, the yew trees, and so on. He can’t feel his fingers. He can’t think straight. But right beside him there are footprints, as bare as his own. Perhaps a boy in another year has been punished in the same way as he was. Most likely a boy, because the prints are too large, certainly, to belong to any of the girls. And where could this other lad be headed but to the college?

  “Thank you, Lugh,” he says, a meaningless prayer to the enemy’s god.

  He manages to stand. If the footprints are to save him, he will need to follow them before the snow hides them completely.

  Off he goes. They lead him away from the track and through the silent trees. Now, he thinks, here’s somebody who doesn’t fear Sicari will be checking up on him!

  This is a direct route, and soon the back of the kitchens emerges from the white curtain.

  Entry through that entrance is forbidden to pupils, but nobody will refuse a survivor anything! With a hundred yards to go, he wastes precious seconds deciding whether to put his wet clothes on to hide his nakedness from the cooks, but he realizes that he must be in an even worse condition than he imagined, because his useless fingers have dropped the tracksuit somewhere along the way.

  It doesn’t matter. Nothing matters except getting inside to those warm lights. Kieron finds he is crying. He doesn’t need the footprints anymore. But when he looks at them again, he sees that they might belong to one of the girls after all, for they are smaller than he thought. No, you idiot. It’s the snow that’s filling them, that’s all. And on he goes.

  At the entrance he fears he will have to scream to be let in, or to beat on the steamed-up windows with nerveless hands. But no, the door lies ajar. It’s still bloody warm though! He cries out in joy. Pushing it shut behind him and sliding to his bare bottom, babbling half-remembered prayers from his childhood.

  It is some time before he realizes he has heard no voices. His whole body aches as the numbness wears off, and it is now that Kieron notices something strange: There are footprints on the linoleum floor, an obvious continuation of those seen in the snow. He has to squint to make them out properly, because they have dried in the heat, leaving behind an outline in dirt.

  And whoever owns these feet can’t be any larger, surely, than an eight-year-old.

  Did he really see man-sized footprints out in the snow? He was exhausted. He was shaking with horror and slowly freezing to death. He must have imagined their larger size.

  “Who cares?” he says aloud. There are coats belonging to the cooks hanging just above his head. He pulls himself up, heedless of any damage he might cause in the process, and borrows the largest of them to cover his nakedness. The effort is almost too much, and he wants to fall down again and sleep under a blanket of old jackets. But he’s come this far.

  “Kieron,” he mutters. “Kieron the Survivor.” He’s going to be a hero. He’s going to get married. He can do anything, anything he wants. “Kieron the Survivor. Kieron Sweeney.”

  And then he steps into the kitchen, where everybody, everybody is asleep. With their eyes open.

  It is such a strange sight he walks right past it, as though in a dream, and on into the refectory. Unlike his sister’s school, Bangor SC has been set up in what used to be called a “Great House.” Eighteenth-century stable buildings have been knocked together with a series of mismatched extensions to make a long, confused series of rooms, stuffed with tables of all shapes and sizes.

  The students are all here to greet him, Kieron the hero. They lie about the place, mouths open, eyes staring, their limbs like a rag doll’s. His mind refuses to switch on and tell him what’s happening.

  He remembers something about another college, but what? What was it?

  And then, from behind him, he hears the faintest of noises. He follows it back into the kitchen.

  A little man, no larger than his hand, sits beside a great vat of porridge. Kieron approaches to within a few paces and notices that the creature is laughing and laughing. “I didn’t do this,” it squeaks. “But a promise allowed me to come and I wanted to see!” It is as naked as he, but has the features of a Sídhe, the glittering skin, the big eyes.

  Kieron lets out a bellow and grabs for the man, but an intense pain causes him to let go at once—an indent has appeared in his palm that he will carry the rest of his life. The tiny man springs away. Furious, Kieron chases him across the counters while the man seems to shrink and shrink.

  The tiny Sídhe skips across the top of the gas cooker, but now it is no larger than Kieron’s thumb, and this proves the creature’s undoing, for it falls into one of the rings on the top of the cooker and the boy can trap it by simply placing a pot over it.

  And then, with animal pleasure—for his palm still aches—Kieron, lights the stove and removes the pot.

  An ever tinier human torch stumbles around for a moment. Then, as though choreographed, both killer and victim fall. One as ash, and one asleep.

  Apart from Conor, Megan is last out of the Cage. Already condemned to lie there a day longer than the others, she couldn’t help herself and found a way to extend her sentence even further by antagonizing Tompkins when he arrived to release Aoife.

  She shuffles from her cell, half bent over like an old man.

  “What if they Called you now?” Nessa asks. “Why do you do this to me?”

  “To you?” Megan grins. Her red hair is already too long, and now there’s a good handful of it, clumping all to one side. And of course she still speaks in mostly English. “Anyway, Ness, why’re you here? I thought you’d be over in the library writing a wee poem—oh! Scrape that face off yourself, there’s nobody listening. You think I’d say anything if there was?”

  Nessa knows she would not. Megan is a terror, but she’s Nessa’s terror.

  “Come on,” she tells Megan. “They said I could take you to the refectory. You can have broth for now. And you need a haircut.”

  Megan rolls her eyes, but follows along, her pace even slower than that of her lame friend as they make their way down the stairs. But she’s not so far gone she doesn’t detect that something is wrong. “Spill it,” she says. And Nessa does, in a whisper.

  “Another college is dead.”

  “What? Like … like the one in Mallow?”

  “Yeah, just like that. And listen … ” She takes a deep breath, shocked even now by the magnitude of it. “Liz Sweeney’s brother was up there and he was the only survivor. He was … he was Called at the same time it happened. Exactly the same time. Or so the rumors say. And he’s supposed to have seen one of them, a Sídhe. In our world.”

  “No way!” Megan pauses, swaying at the bottom of the stairs. “All those stupid stories of spies are real?”

  “Well, sort of. The stories say the Sídhe wander around disguised as people, or even wearing a person’s flesh over their own. But this one … it … it kept shrinking, the longer it was here.”

  Both of them think of the girl in the rock, although only the bottom half of her shrank, as far as they can tell.

  “Wow,” says Megan. “I can’t believe it. Wow.”

  The Cage—really a series of locked little rooms—sits directly above the staff quarters, aka the barracks, to the north of the refectory. They have to go outside to reach the main complex of buildings, with Megan shivering every step of the way. But already they can catch the fading smells of breakfast and hear Ms. Fortune’s husky voice calling out orders over the sound of chopping.

  “Shouldn’t you be at class, Nessa? Or is it sparring today?”

  “The teachers are all having a meeting. And … and wait till you see this.” With a flourish, Nessa opens the door into the refectory, and Tompkins is right there, standing guard. Three or four other instructors, all of them armed, lounge around to keep an eye on the food supply. And for the first t
ime ever dogs are in here, sniffing at the corners and wagging in delight.

  “Taaft is in town to … to make sure nothing gets poisoned before it reaches us. Everything is to be tasted first by the pigs.”

  “Well”—Megan manages a wink—“that explains why they let me out. I’m to try the broth for them. Not that I’m even hungry, if you can believe that.”

  They talk as Megan slurps down her food. Nessa tricks a grumpy but handsome Doberman into allowing his ears to be scratched. “What about Anto?” Megan asks. “No word yet?”

  “No.”

  “That’s it? All you have to say on the subject?”

  Or any subject. Nessa really wants to explain what happened between herself and Conor, but isn’t sure of where or how to start.

  She damaged him, she really did, but it was only through surprise. The one time he’d caught hold of her, his strength had been terrifying. Nessa used to sleep so easily, but now she relives that moment again and again: dangling from his arm like a weed pulled from the garden, then flung onto the compost. And during it all, that terrible, terrible feeling that she was helpless. That she was nothing. Doomed. All her training and determination, all her clever workarounds and tricks, counted for nothing and would count for nothing the next time he got hold of her.

  “You all right, Ness?”

  She nods. She smiles. “It’s good to see you, Megan.”

  “Damn right.”

  “You’re my bodyguard.”

  “The very best.”

  The high five is spontaneous and perfectly coordinated, so that the smack of their palms makes the Doberman jump and start growling again. But they only laugh.

  Lunch occurs at the usual time, but now the refectory is more crowded than it has ever been, for all of the teachers and veterans are present. Extra chairs are brought in and some of the Year 6s and the last two 7s, a boy and a girl, are moved out of their usual places so that the top table can be lengthened.