O’Malley walks to another coffin. One lid-half remains closed, the other has been torn away, tossed to the floor long ago to become a landing place for dust.
“Same thing here, Em,” he says. His voice is ragged, more breath than words. “They ripped the lid off, then they caved in this little girl’s face.”
I see a pile of bumps in the dusty aisle between the coffin rows. Then another, and another. It wasn’t just children that died in here.
There are ten more coffins in this room. They are all open. I don’t have to look inside them to know what lies within.
All these little kids, slaughtered where they lay…I can’t bear this for one second more. I have to get out of here.
“O’Malley, come on.”
“But don’t you want to—”
“Come on!”
I hurry back to the stone doors. I squeeze through the crack and into the hallway. Spingate, Bello, Yong and Aramovsky are waiting, their eyes wide, their faces carrying an expression I now recognize—the look of someone desperately hoping for good news.
“Well?” Spingate says. “Are there more of us?”
“They were…younger,” I say. “And they’re all dead.”
“Younger,” Spingate says. “Like Brewer?”
I shake my head. I hold my free hand at my hip, palm parallel to the floor, showing them how tall L. Morgan would have been.
Everyone looks down, as if they expect a child to suddenly appear at my side, my hand on his head.
They are shocked. Even Yong. Despair pulls at his features, makes me forget his constant smirk.
Behind me, O’Malley slides out of the narrow opening. His chest barely fits through the gap; the stone door’s edges rip off another button, drag a long, white scratch across his smooth skin.
Bello stares at him hopefully, like she wants him to tell a story different from mine.
“Is it true?” she asks. “Little kids?”
O’Malley nods. “Little kids. Dressed like us. They were murdered.”
Murdered.
The word enrages me. We could have died the same way, murdered while we slept. I want to know who bashed in those tiny skulls. I want to find the people who did it, and I want to make them pay.
“It was the Grownups,” I say. I hear the hate in my voice. “It had to be. They want to kill us”—I spread out my arms, gesturing to the bones in the hall—“just like they killed each other.”
I don’t want to look in any of the other rooms. We need to get away from all this death. I stare up the right side of the hall, then the left.
To the left is our coffin room, and where we found the knife.
The right seems to have fewer bones, so that’s where we’ll go.
“This way,” I say, and I start walking.
O’Malley falls in on my right side. The other four follow.
We leave the skeletons behind.
TEN
We are walking uphill.
The angle is so slight I didn’t notice it at first, but the hallway slopes gently upward.
We’ve been walking for hours. At least we think it’s hours; we have no way of tracking time. The endless incline is subtle, but it exhausts us, leeches away what little strength we have.
I hold the knife. O’Malley carries the scepter. I tried carrying both for a little while, but the scepter was too heavy.
If we had walked in the other direction, we’d have been going down. Spingate said there’s no limit on how far down we could go, how deep into the ground, but up can’t go on forever.
Can it?
Our coffin room must be far below the surface. This hallway doesn’t seem to have an end. The softly glowing ceiling gently curves upward in parallel with the floor. Far ahead of us, the floor and ceiling seem to meet, but no matter how much we walk, that connection always appears to be exactly the same distance away.
No one speaks. The memory of the bone pile and the dead kids stays with us? silences us. We’ve left that behind, though, for which we’re grateful.
Bones aren’t the only thing we’ve left behind: we haven’t seen a door in maybe an hour, near as we can tell. We walk through an empty, blank, untouched corridor of dust.
My stomach hurts. It pinches. It grumbles, loudly. I hear similar noises coming from the others. We need to eat.
Hungry, tired, confused, afraid—it’s wearing on us. Our feet drag across the hard floor, leaving long footprints in the dust.
O’Malley finally breaks the silence.
“There have to be people who are still alive,” he says. “We can contact someone, get rescued.”
Rescue. Another word of power. Someone to save us. I hope my parents are alive, hope their bones weren’t among those hidden beneath the gray powder. I don’t remember my mother’s face, or her name, but I know I love her. And my father…if he loves me, why hasn’t he come for me? I feel like he was brave, like he was strong, but I don’t know if that’s true or if I’m being a little girl, hoping her daddy was the best daddy there could be.
Bello scoots out in front of us, turns to face us and walks backward. For the first time, she seems excited.