Latu, O’Malley and I enter the second room on the right.
This one isn’t any different. We find a few tiny scraps of fabric, a few broken bits of bone. We count the coffins this time: twenty-four on each side. If all six rooms are like this, that’s space for almost three hundred people.
So where are they? At the very least, where are their bodies?
I stand in the middle of the room, holding the spear, as O’Malley and Latu move down the aisle. He checks the coffins on the right, she the left. This room also once had a pedestal, but it’s been smashed into a hundred white pieces. Only the flat top remains intact. Mostly, anyway.
“Hey, Latu,” O’Malley says. “That bruise on your cheek, that come from Bishop?”
She nods, keeps looking in the coffins, one after another.
“Yes, but I hit him first.”
O’Malley stops checking. “What? How did that happen?”
“I woke up in a room with Johnson and Cabral,” she says. “The other cradles had dead little kids inside.”
Even in the torchlight, I can see the hard muscles in her arms.
“I bet you broke out of your cradle first,” I say, using her word for the coffins. “Then you broke out the other two. Am I right?”
Latu looks back at me.
“When I woke up, my cradle was already open,” she says. “Same for Johnson and Cabral. Our room door was open, too.”
Why did their coffins open and not ours? And how could their room door be open, when we had to use the scepter to get out?
“We wandered the hall for a little bit,” Latu continues. “Then Bishop found us.” Her eyes narrow at the memory. “He had the others with him. He rushed at us, like he did with you. Johnson and Cabral ran. I didn’t.”
I wonder if she stood her ground because she was so terrified she couldn’t move, like me, or because she is actually brave.
“He rushed you,” O’Malley says, amazed at the story. “That’s why you hit him? To keep him from tackling you?”
Latu shakes her head. “No, he stopped before he got to me, like he did with Em. He told me I had to join his tribe. I didn’t like the way he talked and I didn’t want to join his stupid tribe, so I punched him.”
She’s not brave, she’s out of her mind.
O’Malley starts to laugh. “That bruise on his jaw? That’s from you?”
Latu nods. “I shouldn’t have done it. I didn’t think. I hit him, and he hit me back so hard I fell down. I…I don’t remember ever being hurt like that before. He asked if I was done fighting. I said yes, and he helped me up.”
O’Malley goes back to looking inside the coffins, sometimes reaching his hand in and swishing it around, feeling for whatever might be in there.
“Then what happened?” he asks.
Latu also returns to searching the coffins.
“Then nothing,” she says. “We got into a fight, I guess, and he won. So Johnson, Cabral and I joined his tribe and we wandered all over this stupid place for I don’t know how long.”
I see the torchlight play off her tongue as she licks her dry lips, which reminds me of how thirsty I am. It’s so humid in here my shirt clings to my body—there has to be water somewhere.
Bishop hit her, true, but she hit him first. He didn’t hit me. Or O’Malley. Does Bishop have more control over himself than Yong had? For that matter, Latu hit Bishop—does she have less control? I already feel connected to her, like we were close friends before the coffins and we just can’t remember it, but if she’s that unpredictable, is it smart to trust her?
O’Malley finishes with his side of the room and walks back to me. Latu does the same. O’Malley grins at her.
“Your bruise looks like it hurts,” he says. “But I bet it was worth it to punch that jerk.”
She smiles back at him. “Yeah, it was.”
We go back into the hall in time to see Bishop and El-Saffani enter the last room on the left. Latu’s torch is already fading a bit, but enough burning cloth remains to see what’s in the last room on the right before we have to tie on another greased strip.
I look back down the dark hall. Farrar still blocks the way, flickering torches lighting up the scared faces and white shirts behind him.
O’Malley, Latu and I enter the last room. It stinks in here like it stinks in the hall, and in the rooms we searched. Without a word, Latu moves to the left, O’Malley to the right, each checking the coffins on their sides. Maybe this is the room with water, or maybe there are more weapons to be found.
I hear something.
O’Malley and Latu hear it, too. They stop. Our ears seek out the sound…a scraping, a snorting…the rattle of a coffin wall as a body bumps against it.
It’s coming from the last coffin on the left.
Is it a kid like us? Or is it something else?
I don’t know what to do. I’m frozen once again. So is O’Malley, the torchlight sparkling against the whites of his wide eyes.
Latu slowly creeps forward, toward the sound.