“Pull back his sleeves! Look at his arms!” Benny crowed.
Jonathan, totally blinded now by his tears, felt his sleeves yanked back to his elbows. The room gasped, then hushed. The hands let him go. He closed his eyes, his body racked by sobs.
“God,” Sebastian said. His voice was hollow, shocked.
“No,” Jonathan tried to say, but he wasn’t sure his voice made it through his choked throat.
He rubbed at his sightless eyes with his arms, forgetting that his sleeves were pulled up. The scarred and hardened tissue of his burns and scars scraped roughly on his face.
“Leave me alone,” he managed to gasp, his voice echoing in the still chamber. “You don’t know how much I loved her. How much I love her.” But he couldn’t tell anymore what he was saying from what he was merely feeling. It could have been that the words he meant to say only echoed, unheard, in the dank dungeon of his harrowed heart.
“I saw,” Benny said, his voice low and stained with a stinking smile. “I saw the psychiatrist’s report about your therapy. About your guilt over the burning death of your sister. I saw the doctor’s report about your burns. And I saw your sentencing papers. For arson.”
Jonathan just shook his head and kept his eyes closed.
“God,” Sebastian said again, his voice dripping with disgust. “You’re a freak. No wonder you want to stay here.”
The windows shivered in their panes. The cold and endless dripping of water filled the edges of the silence.
“You better tell us,” Sebastian said. “I want him back. He’s a rat.”
“I don’t know where he is,” Jonathan sniffed.
“Fine. Whatever. But you’ll find out. He’ll try to talk to you. And then you’ll hand him over.”
Sebastian turned and walked back toward the stairs that led to his room. His feet sloshed slowly from one puddle to the next. The tip of the sword dragged with a jagged scrape along the stone floor. He stopped at the bottom stair.
“You have until tomorrow night. If you don’t give him to us by then, you have to go after him. And you can’t come back without him. You can starve out there with him and the other rats.” Sebastian coughed out a nasty little laugh. “The freak and the rat. Best friends in the nuthouse.”
His steps receded up the staircase.
Everyone else stood in damp quiet.
Then, one by one, they turned and walked away. Walter was the last to go. He took a small step toward Jonathan, his eyes wide, and then stopped. He opened his mouth like he was going to say something. But then he shook his head and turned away, leaving Jonathan sitting alone in the hard chair, tears running unwiped down his face like the rain on the dark windows, his horrible scars exposed.
Jonathan didn’t take the turn that would bring him down past the Hatch and up to the library. He walked right by it, moving slow to protect his candle’s fragile flame. He didn’t have any matches. There hadn’t been a chance to grab a lantern. The thin white candle was the only light he had.
He pressed forward through the darkness, stopping from time to time to listen. All he ever heard, besides his breathing and the ever-present dripping, was the papery scrape of tiny claws on wet stone.
“Colin?” he whisper-shouted. His voice came back to him in damp echoes. There was no answer.
He climbed a short staircase, then descended a longer, spiral one. He passed a narrow window set high in the wall. There was no glass—just a narrow, tombstone-shaped opening in the wall, a couple of feet tall. The wind blew spatters of icy rain into the passageway. Jonathan had to stand on the tips of his toes to peer out at the ocean that surrounded them. Dark clouds were stacked and heaped to the horizon, just as they had been since he arrived. They looked grimmer now, though, more threatening. Like they were coming for him. The waves jostled and crowded one another like an angry mob storming Slabhenge Castle.
He kept going, leaving the gray light of the window behind, returning to the world of claw scrapes and candlelight.
“Colin?”
He turned a sharp corner into a hallway that was narrower, tight. He passed one door, closed and silent. Then another. Then one that hung open, the door dangling from a single broken hinge; the room behind it was small and dark and empty. Inside was only a broken chair and some empty bottles littered on the floor.
The fourth door was closed and Jonathan was just past it when something caught his eye. Something small and white on the floor, barely within the reach of his candle’s wavering light. He stopped and bent down.
It was a paper crane. Tiny. Not much bigger than a marble.
Jonathan smiled and stood up. He pushed the door open with an echoing creak.
Beyond was a steep, skinny staircase that circled up into shadows. Jonathan walked up it, letting the door swing closed behind him.