“We’re not in trouble, Jason,” he said, his voice cold and angry. “You are.” He held the letter out so that its bottom corner dangled in the slowly dancing flame. It caught fire and the flames licked quickly up the letter, curling it and crackling. The light in the room grew brighter. Sebastian’s face was washed in brighter shades of red and flickering orange. He held the letter as long as he could, until the hungry flames were right up to his hand, and then let it drop to the damp stone floor at his feet. He sucked on his fingers and looked at Jason.
“Mommy and Daddy can’t help you.” He picked up the sword and tilted his head back and looked down his nose at Jason. “We don’t need their help. They’re the ones who sent us here, man! Screw them! And you want to, what, go running back? So they can blame us for what happened and send us to some other craphole? And you wanna do that to all of us?”
“No. I just wanna go home. I’m sorry, Sebastian.”
Sebastian shook his head. “Home? Home?” His face twisted, then darkened. “No,” he snorted. “You’re not sorry. But you’re gonna be.” He pointed with the sword to the shadows where Colin and Jonathan had just been. “Sinner’s Sorrow. Twenty minutes.”
The watching boys gasped. Jason’s face went pale.
Jonathan’s knees were still burning. And he’d spent only a couple of minutes on the Sinner’s Sorrow.
“You can’t do that! That’th too long,” Colin protested.
“Damn it, Colin. I’ve warned you to shut up.” Sebastian turned to face Colin squarely. His face was etched in hard lines of anger. His eyes bore black holes into Colin’s. He pointed the sword at Jason. “He gets twenty.” The sword swung until its point was inches from Colin’s nose. “You get ten.”
“You can’t make me.”
“The hell I can’t.”
“I won’t.”
“Really?” Sebastian’s eyes roved wildly through the room. They found Jonathan, and his jaw clenched. His sword swung to point at Jonathan. “Then your little buddy Johnny gets twenty. Is that what you want?”
Colin looked back and forth between Sebastian and Jonathan. Jonathan’s mouth went dry and he tried to shake his head, but his neck wouldn’t move. Colin sniffed and pinched at his neck.
“Okay. I’ll do the ten minuth.”
Sebastian smiled. “I know you will. I’ll be running the watch.”
“No.” Jonathan’s voice finally croaked free of his throat. Sebastian’s gaze swung to him. “I’ll do it. I’ll take the twenty.”
Sebastian narrowed his eyes and shook his head.
“No. Not you. This is Colin’s. And then he gets tonight’s coal duty. And no dinner. Come on. Jason’s first.”
Jonathan took one look at Benny’s hungry leer and swallowed his protests.
The windows showed pure night blackness when Colin and Jason limped up from the coal room. Sebastian and his favorites had already gone up to their rooms, and the only light in the dining room came from the three candles set on the floor in the middle of the circle of mattresses. Jonathan and the other boys were already in bed, lying awake and waiting.
Colin crawled into his bed with a little grunt. His face was smudged with black coal dust. Jason fell onto his own mattress and pulled the blanket over his face.
“Are you okay, Colin?” Walter asked in a hoarse whisper.
Colin was lying on his back with one arm thrown across his eyes.
“It wath bad,” he answered. “But not ath bad ath it’th gonna get around here.”
The other boys looked at one another through the wavering candlelight.
“Well,” Colin said, “are you going to read the thtory, Jonathan?”
Jonathan bit his lip.
“Sure,” he said, and opened the book to the page he’d bent down to mark his spot. “It’s a new chapter, called ‘I Travel Quite Across the Island.’ ” He took a breath and cleared his throat. The other boys rolled over onto their elbows to listen. The warmth of the candlelight caught their ready faces.
“I mentioned before that I had a great mind to see the whole island,” he began to read, and if there was the drizzle of rain or the skittering of rats, the sounds were lost in the words of the story.
The next morning, a supply boat was scheduled to arrive, with mail and food and anything else the Admiral had ordered. Sebastian had them all drilled and practiced and ready to go, waiting by the gates nearly an hour before the boat was supposed to get there.
Gerald was standing ready in the dead Mr. Vander’s uniform.
“Remember,” Sebastian was saying to them. “This ain’t no big deal. It was always us that unloaded all the stuff anyway. Mr. Vander’s gonna just be standing a little farther back this time, is all. I’ll do all the talking, if we have to do any. We do it quick, we do it quiet, and we get them out of here.”
The boys all nodded, Jonathan included. He looked back over his shoulder. Across the courtyard, Benny stood by the closed doors that led to the dining room. Jason and Colin were locked inside. The key was in Sebastian’s pocket.