“Leave it here,” Bello says. “That’s for them. That’s for the grownups. We don’t need it.”
I want to drop it. Not because of her words, but because the knife frightens me. I don’t even want it touching my skin. This knife was used to kill. It was used to turn people—people like us—into nothing but piles of bones and puffs of dust.
The grownups killed each other. If any of them are still alive, will they try to kill us, too?
“We might have to defend ourselves,” I say to Bello. “We need it.”
She shakes her head. “We don’t need it. It’s a bad thing, please don’t bring it.”
Yong comes closer to me. His eyes are suddenly alive, burning with eagerness. He holds out his hand.
“Give the knife to me,” he says. “I’ll take it. You carry the tool.”
There is a hunger to his words, something…disturbing about his need. Just like I know it’s a bad idea if he leads, I know he shouldn’t have the knife.
“I’ll hold on to it for now,” I say.
He is standing in front of me, his back to the others. They can’t see his face, but I can. His upper lip twitches, twists into a sneer. His eagerness shifts, transforms. His heavy black hair hangs down almost over his eyes, eyes that blaze with hate.
“You’ll change your mind,” he says quietly. Then, in the faintest whisper: “Or I’ll change it for you.”
Before I can respond, he smiles, turns and walks back to the others, leaving me alone with the skeleton.
I briefly wonder if I should tell everyone what he said, but I decide against it. We don’t need another argument right now. We need to follow Bello’s advice and get away from this place.
I look at the doors lining the hallway. Gouged, chipped, scratched. Were people desperate to get inside?
I see one set of doors that is slightly open. If we had come out of our room and turned left instead of right, this archway would have been a few feet down on the right-hand side. The space between the stone doors is barely wide enough for me to slide through if I turn sideways. Coming from inside that room, I see a dim, flickering light.
Does that room have more coffins? I walk toward it, past Bello and the others.
A strong hand lands on my shoulder.
It’s O’Malley.
“Em, don’t go in there,” he says.
He sees me looking at his hand, then pulls it away. His face flushes. He didn’t act like that when he put his arm around Bello.
“I have to,” I say. “There could be more of us inside.”
O’Malley closes his blue eyes for a second, swallows, nods once, opens them.
“Then I’m going in with you.”
Those words make my heart hammer so loud I wonder if he hears it.
I’m holding the knife and the tool. I thought the tool was a weapon at first—it’s not, but it will still work fine for that purpose.
I hold it out to O’Malley. “Take it,” I say. “In case there’s danger.”
Spingate gasps; she points at the tool.
“It’s called a scepter,” she says. “That word just popped into my head. The tool, that’s what it’s called.”
Scepter, tool, weapon…all I care about right now is that it is heavy and O’Malley can use it to smash things.
He takes it.
“I’m with you, Em,” he says.
His eyes…so blue…
I can’t look at him any longer, so I face the door. I walk to it and slide my body through the narrow opening.
O’Malley follows.
NINE
The room is dim, illuminated by a single flickering light high up in the arched ceiling.
I point the knife out in front of me. O’Malley holds the bottom of the scepter with both hands, the prongs up near his ear.
Like our room, there are twelve dusty coffins arranged in two end-to-end rows of six. All the coffins are open. The lid-halves aren’t folded neatly to the sides—they stick up at different angles, broken; did the occupants fight their way out like I did?
I walk up to the first coffin. O’Malley is right next to me. I brush off the nameplate before looking inside.
Orange stones surround the name L. Morgan.
Inside the coffin, dust-covered clothes—a little white shirt, a short red tie, little black pants—covering a tiny, withered corpse.
A corpse far smaller than Brewer.
A corpse so small I could cradle it in both arms.
The skull, the tiny skull, is smashed to bits at the center of the forehead. I can’t tell what symbol is in that dried, cracked skin, if there was any symbol at all.
O’Malley’s shaking hand slowly reaches toward L. Morgan’s head. His fingertip gently touches the ridge of bone below the little skull’s right eye.
“A child,” O’Malley says. “Barely more than a baby. How could anyone do this?”
A baby. Even if L. Morgan had been awake when the attack came, he couldn’t have defended himself. The grownup bodies in the hallway…maybe those people died in a battle, but that’s not what happened here.