Night School: Legacy

‘It’s a minotaur!’ Zoe insisted. ‘Look. Two horns there, and a freakishly muscled torso there. And a kind of tail thing. It’s a minotaur.’


‘Minotaur,’ Allie mumbled to herself. ‘Well, I see a duck.’

‘Really?’ Zoe looked where Allie pointed. ‘I don’t think that looks like a duck. Looks more like a rabbit.’

‘Fine,’ Allie sighed. ‘Then it’s a rabbit-duck. A dabbit. Or a ruck.’

A bird fluttered from the trees to the ground nearby, cocking its head at them before changing its mind and flapping away. Allie barely noticed it out of the corner of her eye as she looked for a more interesting cloud to challenge Zoe’s minotaur.

‘Oh no,’ Zoe whispered to herself. ‘Just one.’

Allie was still staring at the clouds. ‘Yes. Just one dabbit, Zoe.’

But Zoe wasn’t talking about dabbits any more. She leapt to her feet and stared up at the trees, panic-stricken. Allie squinted to see her against the bright sky.

‘One for sorrow; there can’t be just one. There must be two. One for sorrow, Allie.’ Zoe’s voice was urgent as she turned back to look at her. ‘Help me find another!’

‘Find another what?’ Startled, Allie scrambled to follow her but the younger girl had already run into the woods. When she found her a few seconds later, Zoe stood in a clearing, her eyes roaming from tree to tree. ‘Find another what, Zoe?’

The younger girl pointed up, to where the fat, glossy magpie balanced on the branch above her head, its tuxedo colouring strangely out of place. It darted a look down at them before something else caught its eye.

‘There can’t be just one,’ Zoe was muttering to herself. ‘There can’t be just one.’

Still confused about where all this had come from, Allie scanned the surrounding woods for a bird – any bird. ‘There.’ She pointed across the treetops to a tall horse chestnut tree far away where one could just be seen on the highest branches, swaying in the light breeze. From here there was no way to tell what kind of bird it was but she hoped it would look like a magpie to Zoe. ‘Isn’t that a magpie?’

Doubtful, Zoe stood on her toes, peering into the distance. Then she gave a squeal of happiness and clapped her hands.

‘Yes! Two for joy!’

Startled, the first magpie flew away.

Without another word, Zoe ran back to where they’d been playing Cloud Animals earlier and lay down again, looking up at the sky as if nothing had happened.

After a second, Allie sat beside her, a puzzled frown creasing her forehead. ‘So,’ she said carefully, ‘magpies?’

Frowning, Zoe scanned the clouds. ‘There can’t be just one, Allie. Ever.’

‘Because of the poem?’

Zoe nodded.

Allie remembered it vaguely. Her mother had sometimes recited it if a single magpie crossed their path. One for sorrow, two for joy, three for a girl, four for a boy …

She knew some people were superstitious about the birds, or considered them to be bad luck, but she’d never seen anyone react like Zoe. As she considered this, Allie glanced absently towards the football players – but the lawn was empty. They’d gone.

‘Oh balls, Zoe, we’ve lost sodding Philip.’

But it didn’t matter that they lost him and got marked down for it, or that Jerry looked at them with disappointment. Because somehow that afternoon changed everything.

From that day on Zoe accepted Allie completely.


The spate of warm weather didn’t last and the sound of rain lashing against the windows accompanied Allie a few days later as she walked with Carter down the stone stairs to the basement training room talking about what had happened the night before. The weather had been fierce then, too. So instead of going for a run they’d been given a word problem to work out. Written in Eloise’s neat, square handwriting on a white board, it had confounded them all.


A runaway train, packed with passengers is about to crash. You can save all the passengers by switching the train to another track, but if you do that, one innocent person will die. Is it right to sacrifice one to save the lives of many?



As usual, all they’d been told was that this was the sort of decision they might have to make some day, and that there was no right answer and no wrong answer. Instead, they were to make their own decisions.

It drove Allie crazy.

‘It’s horrible. I mean, what kind of question is that?’ she said now, as they walked under the flickering fluorescent lights of the basement hallway. The air smelled musty; it felt cool and damp against her skin. ‘And how can they not tell us what right is?’ She shook her fist at the ceiling. ‘I need to know what right is!’

‘You’ll get used to it,’ Carter said. ‘They’re always asking us things like that.’

‘What are they trying to teach us?’ Allie asked. ‘How to be evil?’

‘Maybe.’