I think fast. “What do I get in return?”
“Celestine,” she almost shrieks, “I’m trying to help you here.”
“You’re trying to help yourself.”
She sighs. “What do you want?”
“I want information on a person.”
“Who?”
“Carrick.” I don’t even know his surname. “He was in the cell beside me in Highland Castle.”
“The Flawed boy? Why?”
“No questions. It’s my own business.”
“Does he know something?”
“No!” I lie. “I just want to find him. Let’s just say I’m running low on friends right now. I need someone who can understand what I’m going through.”
“Fine. I’ll get whatever details I can, but I never interviewed him. It wasn’t a story we wanted.”
This maddens me.
“I’ll find out something and get back to you. Now you think for me, Celestine. I need something. I need more. Was Mr. Berry in the Branding Chamber? Did he see the sixth brand? The reports say he wasn’t there after the fifth, that he was removed with your family. Are they wrong?”
A long pause.
“Yes, Mr. Berry saw the sixth brand,” I finally reveal. She’s right, I need her help.
I picture that day again, in the Branding Chamber. I have tried so hard to block it out, but I can’t. It comes to me in my nightmares, at certain times of the day when I’m least expecting it, the pain, the smell, the horror of it, and I want to escape it. It happens when my dad comfortingly puts his hand on my shoulder and squeezes. He doesn’t know it, but I tense up, immediately taken back to the chair, feeling Tina’s touch before each branding. To willingly put myself back in that chamber, while in the comfort of my own bed, is against everything I have been trying so hard to do, especially after the events of tonight, when I’m scared and sore and want to forget it all. But I go there. The smells, the sound, the fear, my banging heart, the ache in my wrists and ankles. Crevan shouting at me in his bloodred cape, the angry spittle flying from his mouth.
“He wasn’t thrown out with your parents?” she asks.
“He somehow made his way back in. He had a phone in his hand. He was recording.”
No need to mention Carrick being in there, too. I need to keep something further for myself.
“Recording? There’s video? Oh my God. Okay, thank you, Celestine. Thank you.” She hangs up.
My heart is racing, anxious from reliving the moment, for revealing Mr. Berry’s possible video, also for asking about Carrick. I don’t want her to think that he has anything to do with this, and I don’t want to get him into trouble, but I have no other way of finding him.
Now that I’m awake and have the Branding Chamber scenario firmly in my head, I can’t go back to sleep. My head is pounding from hitting it earlier on the car, and I feel a large bump on my head. My mouth is dry, and I’m parched. I get out of bed, feeling shaky, and throw an oversized cardigan around my T-shirt.
I go downstairs to the kitchen, going straight to the fridge for water. As I open it, I sense a presence and turn around to see Mary May sitting in the corner of the room, in darkness, watching me. The overhead light of the oven fan is all she has to see by. She has a book, which she covers with her hands, the first time I’ve seen her flesh without the leather gloves. She smiles at my obvious fright, though she seems tired.
“What are you … I mean, why are you … you’re staying the night?” I ask.
She takes me in, looks me up and down slowly, and it makes me wrap the cardigan around me tighter. This woman gives me the creeps.
“Bearing in mind the events of tonight, I thought it best I stay here. That’s a fine bump on your head,” she observes.
My hand goes to it, and I wince. It’s pounding. I need water and headache pills. I help myself as she watches.
“You’re worried I’ll have a concussion?”
“No.” She laughs, but it’s not a joyous sound. It’s cruel, like she’s laughing at me, as though I’m the most stupid person she’s ever met. “I wanted to make sure you stay where you should be. No rule breaking. I know about events like these, what they do to a person.”
“What do you mean?” I down the pills and water.
“Revenge,” she says, and I see the coldness and the darkness in her eyes, and I think back to what she did to her sister, reporting her to the Guild, and then to her entire family when it turned its back on her.
“Is that why you did what you did to your family?” I ask. “Out of revenge?”
“No,” she says, not blinking, not seeming bothered that I’ve asked a personal question. “I caught my sister with my boyfriend. Reporting her to the Guild was out of revenge.”
The story is too close to home for me right now, and I wonder if she’s testing me. Does she know about Art and Juniper? She couldn’t. If she did, the Whistleblowers would have found him by now.