He looked at her again. “Are you not a poetry fan, then?”
“No, I like poetry. Are you kidding? I was the weird, hidden child, remember? I read a lot. A lot.” She nodded toward the book in his hands. “But I’d never heard of him. William Blake. His stuff was hard at first, but he’s good.” She’d keep the details of her snarky internal debate with Alex’s margin notes to herself. “Is he your favorite?”
“He is good. But no, Stephen Crane is my favorite.” A ghost of a smile came and went. “My father put a book of Crane’s poems into my bag when I was sent to school. It had an inscription from his father to him. Then he’d inscribed it for me.”
Lena shivered. He so casually referred to being shipped to the Ward School, the school for strongly gifted children. They were sent there to be trained and never returned home. Once they reached the age of majority, they were given an assignment in another zone, and that was that. Taken from home at five, they would never see their families again. After what he’d told her earlier, he clearly had lingering pain from the separation. How hard would it have been, if instead of hiding her, her parents had given her to the Council?
Reyes’s eyes were distant. He came back to himself with a self-conscious grimace. “It took me a while to appreciate the book, of course. I was a pretty damn precocious child, but I wasn’t reading Crane at five. Don’t think I did more than read the inscription before I turned fifteen.”
She nodded. “But I bet you had the inscription memorized by then.”
His flicked a look at her then glanced away. He made a little shrugging, nodding motion, acknowledging the truth of her words but discounting their importance.
“Have you ever asked yourself why he wanted you to have the book? Other than, you know, his father had given it to him?”
Reyes barked a laugh. He pulled the bag back around and shook crumbs out of the bag and onto the table before stowing the Blake book inside. “I know exactly why he wanted me to have it. He’d marked certain poems, underlined passages, made notes to me, or maybe himself. It was all there, as if he were with me. The things he thought were important to know or to think about.” He pushed the bag back around to his back and looked down at his hands. When he looked up again, he quietly recited a verse:
“In the desert
I saw a creature, naked, bestial,
Who, squatting upon the ground,
Held his heart in his hands,
And ate of it.
I said, “Is it good, friend?”
“It is bitter – bitter,” he answered;
“But I like it
Because it is bitter,
And because it is my heart.”
Lena sat, wordless, for a long moment after he’d fallen silent. Finally she ventured, “So, presumably he…explained…that grotesque poem to you in a helpful note?”
Reyes laughed, a burst of sound after the quiet of his voice reciting words written hundreds of years before. “Not that one,” he told her with a grin. “But he did put a star next to it so I’d know to read it with extra attention. It was a very helpful star.” He laughed again and then stood, telling her to rise with a cock of his head. “C’mon. Let’s go.”
She stood and turned to the door. Reyes went instead to the corner. He knelt in front of the bucket. Was he…? She averted her eyes.
His soft chuckle had her turning back again. “I’m not using it. I’m moving it. The passage to the store is through the basement, and it’s under the bucket.”
She tilted her head to look past his shoulder. Sure enough, he had popped a section of the floor up and slid it to the side.
“Well, I’ll be damned,” Lena murmured. “A bolt hole.”
Reyes propped his wrists on his knees. His brows knit. She wasn’t sure if his scorn was playful or real.
“Did you think there wasn’t one?”
“Well, I didn’t think to look under the piss bucket.”
“Isn’t that the idea?” His voice was droll. He gestured gallantly. “After you.”
She wiped damp hands down the sides of her skirt. Was she really going to do this? Blindly follow Reyes and hope he led her where she wanted to go?
She stepped around him to tread down the narrow stairs winding down into darkness.
Yes. She really was.
Chapter 11