As time passed, the school fell into an uneasy sort of normality. Students went to class, studied, played games… and waited.
When a week had passed without any sign of Nathaniel, Allie began to allow herself to hope that maybe they were safe after all. Perhaps Lucinda had got to the board in time. Maybe they’d stood up to him and he’d been forced to back down.
When she asked Isabelle about it, though, the headmistress just shook her head. ‘He’s letting us get comfortable. Hoping we drop our guard.’
After the Night School instructors returned to the school, the group met less often. Raj and Isabelle had ordered them to stop looking for the spy and, under the circumstances, they had little choice – the teachers watched them like hawks. Now there was nothing for them to do but wait. Jules and Lucas began joining them for meals again and conversations about lessons replaced Nathaniel and spies.
It was a kind of false normality and Allie hated it. It felt like they were all pretending something awful wasn’t about to happen. But what else could they do?
She found she missed the adrenaline rush of meeting in secret out of hours, of sneaking into locked rooms and searching for evidence. She missed the feeling of actually doing something. They were back on the outside of things again. On some level, maybe they always had been but, at least for a while, it had felt like they’d had some control.
Without the daily gatherings, she found it easy to keep her distance from Sylvain. And she wanted to do that. She needed time to think about things.
Every so often, though, she’d look up and find him watching her from across a room, a lost look in his bluer than blue eyes. And her heart would twist inside her.
Each time it happened she remembered what he’d said: ‘I won’t wait for ever… It hurts too much…’
Sometimes, when he made no effort to pursue her, or he didn’t laugh at one of her jokes, she’d worry he’d decided not to wait any more and panic would unfurl in her chest unexpectedly, making her heart stutter.
He just… had to wait. Just until this thing with Nathaniel was finished. After that…
For his part, Carter never returned to the walled garden. Allie had suspected he wouldn’t after their talk, but she still felt bereft that first sunrise when he didn’t appear.
Still, though, at least they were getting along better. He treated her like a normal friend – not a good friend – but a friend, nonetheless.
Baby steps, she told herself.
The weirdest development was she was starting to like gardening. She remembered something Jo had told her once about falling in love with the gardens after she’d been given weeks of detention. At the time Allie hadn’t understood but now she could see what Jo meant. There was something therapeutic about the smell of damp earth; about dropping seeds into it and covering them up. It was calming.
It helped that the cold was less biting now. March had arrived in the midst of all this and green shoots appeared everywhere, all at once, as if someone somewhere had pressed a button marked ‘Grow’. The neat, straight furrows she and Carter had made that morning in the rain were already lined with tiny green plants that would someday be carrots, cabbages and potatoes. Looking at them, she felt a sense of accomplishment – she’d helped to create that.
Mr Ellison had become less fierce once he and Allie were alone again, as if he felt sorry for her. Most days, he brought out a thermos of hot sweet tea and packets of biscuits, and they’d take a break, sitting on a bench, munching the biscuits and watching the birds work. They talked about a lot of things then – about his childhood in London, and how he came to Cimmeria to escape the city. He never told her the story Carter had told, about making a mistake and losing everything, and Allie didn’t ask. But she found herself telling him things she wouldn’t have wanted to tell anyone else. How she and her mum couldn’t talk any more. How she missed her dad. There was something about him – a kind of thoughtfulness and wisdom – that made her feel she could really talk to him. He’d made mistakes in his life, too. And so he, perhaps alone among the adults she knew, was unlikely to judge her.
Lately, Allie had been having long talks with Isabelle, too. After Lucinda’s visit she’d plied her with questions about Orion and Nathaniel and Gabe.
It was Isabelle who told her about the other secret groups like Orion elsewhere in the world. That the one in Europe was called Demeter. The one in America, Prometheus. That Orion was the oldest but no longer the biggest or most powerful.
The headmistress also told her more about Nathaniel’s plan. As they sat in her office one Friday after the day’s classes ended, Allie asked her about Nathaniel.