With that, he turns and walks into the room on the left, El-Saffani right behind him.
O’Malley huffs. “Like we need his help.”
I hope we don’t, but I’m glad we’ll have it if we do.
Latu, O’Malley and I enter the first room on the right. The layout looks familiar. Above is an arched ceiling decorated with carvings that shift and jitter in the torchlight. There is an aisle down the middle, as there was in our coffin room, and what might be coffins on either side, but they are different from ours. Where we had two rows of detailed, wooden coffins lined up end to end, with space between them, these are plain and white, lined up side to side and packed one against another, the far ends pressed against the wall. At the end of the aisle is another one of those white stone pedestals, this one broken into a dozen pieces.
These coffins aren’t covered. I can’t see into the ones at the far end of the room, but the ones close to us are empty. The ends of these coffins don’t have carvings and jewels, they don’t have nameplates—all they have are two flat metal discs, each the size of my fist. All the discs are scratched and dented, as is the white material around them—like someone with stiff boots kept kicking the discs harder and harder.
Latu walks toward the end of the room, her torch held up high. She looks down and left, down and right, over and over again. She reaches the wall, then jogs back.
“Empty,” she says. “All of them.”
O’Malley kneels, runs his hand over the end of a coffin. He taps it with the point of the knife.
“Latu, put some light on this,” he says.
She tilts the torch close to him. I notice the light is starting to fade: the flame is slowly burning out.
O’Malley puts his finger into a deep gouge.
“Look at this scratch,” he says, then runs his finger along it. The white material is torn and splintered. It’s not wood and it’s not metal. I should know what it is, but—like almost everything else—I can’t place it.
O’Malley stands. Latu holds the torch over the coffin. More scratches on the inside, both where someone would lie and on the walls that separate it from the coffins on either side. On the flat bed, there are metal fasteners of some kind, but nothing fastened to them. The fasteners are scratched and rusted over.
Cracks, breaks, crumbled bits…so much damage.
“Looks like someone got mad at it,” O’Malley says. “Got mad at all of them.”
“No padding,” Latu says. “Ours had padding. Did people lie in there on that hard bottom?”
O’Malley shrugs. “If these are even coffins at all. We don’t know if they are.”
But we do know.
Why are these different from ours? Why are they packed in like this?
Latu sees something. She reaches into the coffin, tugs at one of the fasteners. It rattles in complaint, then she stands. She holds her hand out for us to see.
It’s a tiny bit of dirty white cloth.
O’Malley takes it from her, holds it close to his face, squinting to see it in the fading torchlight.
“Looks like the same lining that was in our coffins,” he says.
He offers it to me. I take it. It’s hard to tell from this small sample, but I think he’s right.
Memories of my coffin flare to life. Waking up in the dark. The white fabric splattered with my own blood. I can remember nothing from before I woke up, but everything after—including some things I’d much rather forget.
Latu leans down, wipes her hand on the coffin’s hard, flat bottom.
“So where’s the rest of the cloth?” she asks. “Where’s the padding? Did someone take it out?”
I don’t have the answers to her questions. Neither does O’Malley.
“Let’s check the other rooms,” I say.
We turn to go, but on the way out Latu sees something else. She reaches into another coffin, picks something up, holds it near the torch for all three of us to examine.
A thin shard, a pale yellow splinter. It’s the wrong color to have been part of the coffin. I know I’ve seen this material before, though, and recently.
I take it from Latu, pinch it between thumb and forefinger. I look closer.
A coldness washes inside my chest as I realize what it is.
“Bone,” I say. “A little piece of bone.”
I look in the coffins again, as if I might have missed seeing bodies, but there is nothing in any of them.
O’Malley takes the splinter from me, stares at it.
“You’re right,” he says. “So where’s the rest of the skeleton this came from?”
One more thing we don’t know.
I take it back from him and toss it into a coffin.
“Next room,” I say. “Come on.”
EIGHTEEN
Bishop and El-Saffani found the same thing we did: two long rows of empty, beat-up coffins.
Latu’s flame flutters out. Bello wraps another strip of flag around the pole as Okereke watches, holding a torch of his own. He uses his to light ours as Bello starts wrapping Bishop’s flagpole with a new strip.