His symbol is the same as Spingate’s: a jagged circle.
“I’m not laughing at you, Bishop,” Gaston says. “I remembered a joke, that’s all. It’s really funny. It goes like this. Once upon a time there was this really big, really stupid kid that liked to hit people. He kept making all of these turns without knowing where he was going, and—”
Bishop takes a step toward Gaston. Gaston moves fast, melts away behind the bigger kids in his group and is instantly out of sight.
“That’s what I thought,” Bishop says.
He glances back to the intersection. When he and his friends were marching, he was so self-assured, like he was carved from confidence. A little bit of teasing, and now he seems full of doubt.
“Maybe we should go back,” Bishop says quietly. “There were a couple of turns where we…maybe we should try that way again.”
Latu shakes her head, shakes it hard.
“I’m not going back,” she says. “I’m not.”
Her wide eyes burn with fierce determination born from true terror.
I see nods of agreement among Bishop’s group, faces filled with fear. Even El-Saffani’s cold expressions shift into something normal—they are children again, little kids terrified by something they want to forget.
“What did you see?” I ask, even though I suspect they saw the same things we did.
Bishop licks his dry lips. He stares absently at the wall.
“Rooms,” he says. “Rooms filled with skeletons. Some of the bones looked like they’d been cut into pieces.”
I nod. “That’s what we saw, too.”
He continues talking as if I said nothing at all.
“There was one strange room. We got to it through a door in the floor. Went down a ladder. Gaston was the only one who could get it open. That room and some of the others had these…uh…Gaston, what did you call them?”
Gaston slides out of the crowd again, but keeps his distance from Bishop.
“Pedestals,” he says. He holds his hand at his sternum, palm down, showing how tall they were. “Made of white stone. The way they were placed in the rooms, they seemed…important. Like a really important statue is supposed to rest on them, you know? But all the pedestals were cracked or broken—except for three that were in the room with the ladder. But that place…”
His voice trails off. He looks afraid, more afraid even than Latu.
“Something in the room scared you,” I say. “What was it?”
Gaston starts to talk, then stops. He looks at Bishop, who won’t meet his eyes. Maybe these two don’t like each other, but something happened down there that unsettled them both.
“A body,” Gaston says quietly. “All shriveled up, just bones and skin. It was facedown, sprawled out. It had clothes on that I think were white, but the…”
He pauses, rubs his face, then continues.
“The juices stained the clothes, made the cloth different colors. The body had some kind of metal shackle on one arm, with a thin point sticking out of it, but the shackle wasn’t chained to anything.” He nods toward Bishop’s spear. “That was in the dead guy’s back, shoved through so hard it stuck in the floor.”
Bishop got his weapon the same way I got mine—out of a person that died from it.
For some reason, I want to make this smaller boy feel better. Maybe he’s embarrassed he was afraid, but there is nothing to be embarrassed about.
“We saw dead bodies, too,” I say. “Bodies are frightening.”
Gaston glances upward, thinking, then shakes his head.
“No,” he says. “Well, yes, the body was all shriveled up and disgusting and scary, but it wasn’t that. It was the room itself. Just Bishop and I went down. It was really dark, and round, and…well, there was something wrong with it, is all.”
“Haunted,” Bishop says quietly. “It’s haunted.”
Gaston rolls his eyes. “Bishop, there’s no such thing as ghosts. What are you, ten years old?”
Bishop snarls at him. “Oh yeah? If there’s no such thing as ghosts, then why did you scramble up that ladder so fast, huh? You almost peed your pants.”
Gaston says nothing. I can tell he wants to give an explanation, tell everyone what exactly was wrong with the room, but he can’t. I get the feeling Gaston thinks he knows everything. When there is something he doesn’t know, something that he feels instead of sees, it bothers him. I will have to remember that.
Latu crosses her arms. “Enough talk. I’m not going back. I don’t want to see any more bones.”
Bishop shakes off his memories of the strange room. He forces a smile. Once again he is the big-chested, broad-shouldered, brave king of the playground.