If you went out into the tree line near Eltisley Hall at a certain time in the late afternoon or after lights-out in the Eltisley dorm, you might have seen a teenage girl with dark brown hair and big wondering eyes looking up at the trees and saying, “Are you here? What’s your deal? Is Parliament in session?” And chattering to the birds, which just glanced at her and flew away.
You could never tell how long you would spend at either Eltisley Hall or The Maze—it could be days, weeks, or longer. At one point, Patricia spent seven months in The Maze, until she managed to hide from the teachers and the other students and they all spent a week looking for her. But instead of going back to Eltisley Hall, she was led out into a yellow-grass field, where Kanot himself ushered Patricia and some other students into a great wooden airship, which was whale-shaped except it had more fins, with an interior that was covered with rococo nuts and berries.
Today, Kanot was a heavyset bespectacled African-American man with a Tennessee accent and a bomber jacket. “Here’s the idea,” he said when they were already over the Alps somewhere. “We drop each one of you guys in a small town, someplace where you don’t speak the language. No money, no supplies. And you find a person who needs healing, someone hurting real bad, and you heal ’em. Without them knowing you were ever there. Then we come get you.” Kanot offered to let the students out of this assignment in exchange for letting him hide some stuff in their bones, but nobody went for it. So instead, he started shoving kids one by one out of the airship’s hatch, which looked like the doorway of a French chateau, a few hundred feet up. No parachute.
Patricia managed to slow her descent so the impact just knocked the wind out of her. She staggered to her feet, in a field miles from anywhere. Then she wandered until nightfall, when she saw the lights of the town, behind her. The first few people she found seemed healthy enough, but then she noticed an old woman hunched over a bowl of soup in a small restaurant or bistro. The woman was coughing and her skin looked gray, and Patricia could glimpse an ochre scar poking out of the neck out of her yellow blouse. Perfect. Patricia crept toward the woman, only to get a faceful of soup and what sounded like accusations of thievery in some Slavic language. She ran.
A week later, Patricia was starving and running out of places to hide in this town, with its dingy white plaster walls and muddy roads. She could no longer talk to animals, and she had failed to master the skill of understanding human languages other than English. Plus, she could only heal a sick person with whom she’d built a certain rapport.
“I am so not going to sleep in these same clothes again tonight,” Patricia said aloud, in English. The shopkeeper in the tiny grocery saw her and chased her out, shouting guttural syllables. Patricia ran down the narrow twisting streets, sharp inclines paved with cobblestones, until she had lost the shopkeeper. She squatted behind a stone wall and looked at the only thing she’d been able to steal: a dusty bottle of Chiang Mai brand chili oil.
“This better work.” Patricia tilted the bottle so the words “WARNING RED-HOT” were upside down. The thick liquid singed her throat. She started to gag, but she made herself drink the whole thing. Once the bottle was empty she pulled herself into a shivering ball. Her head ached. She wanted to weep, for everything she’d lost and all she’d failed to gain.
An hour later, she raised her head and threw up. Once she started, she could not stop. Her eyes burned and her nose ran, and the oil was twice as horrible coming up as going down. Her stomach spasmed, not amused by her idea of a meal after days of starvation. She coughed acid.
The good news: Patricia had an idea how to heal the angry old woman now.
Patricia crept across the slate rooftops of the town until she reached the sloping roof of the cantina, where she could see the woman through a small skylight. The skylight was open, and she slipped inside, tiptoeing across a loft where bags of flour and cans of supplies were stored. She hesitated before taking some bread and stuffing it in her mouth. Then she reached the edge of the loft, still on the other side of the glorified barn from where the woman sat at her rickety table. Patricia shinnied up a support pillar, and then onto a ceiling beam. She inched her way across the beam, until she was hanging by her arms and legs over the old woman, and leaned as far as she could without losing her grip.