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Bentham clapped his hands. “That’s the spirit!”
Emma’s gaze lingered on my face. She could tell I was faking.
“You can leave as soon as you’re ready,” Bentham said. “Sharon will be your guide.”
“We shouldn’t wait,” Sharon said. “Once the locals have had their fun with that hollow, I reckon they’ll kill it.”
Emma picked at the front of her poufy dress. “In that case, I think we should change.”
“Naturally,” said Bentham, and he sent Nim to find us clothes more befitting our errand. He returned a minute later with thick-soled boots and modern work pants and jackets: black, waterproof, and with a bit of stretch to them.
We retreated to separate rooms to change and then met in a hallway, just Emma and me dressed in our adventure clothes. Rough and shapeless, they made Emma look slightly mannish (though not in a bad way), but she didn’t grumble—she just tied back her hair, snapped her head to attention, and saluted me. “Sergeant Bloom, reporting for duty.”
“Purdiest soldier I ever did see,” I said, drawling out a terrible John Wayne impression.
There was a direct correlation between how nervous I was and how many dumb jokes I made. And right now I was practically quaking, my stomach a leaky faucet dripping acid all over my insides. “You really think we can do this?” I said.
“I do,” she said.
“You never doubt, ever?”
Emma shook her head. “Doubt is the pinprick in the life raft.”
She stepped close and we hugged. I could feel her trembling ever so slightly. She wasn’t bulletproof. I knew then that my shaky faith in myself was starting to dig a hole in hers, and Emma’s confidence was what held everything together. It was the life raft.
I’d come to regard her faith in me as somewhat reckless. She seemed to think that I should be able to snap my fingers and make hollowgast dance at will. That I was allowing some inner weakness to block my ability. Part of me resented that, and part of me wondered if maybe she was right. The only way to find out for sure was to approach the next hollow with an unshakable belief that I could master it.
“I wish I could see myself the way you do,” I whispered.
She hugged me harder, and I resolved to try.
Sharon and Bentham came into the hall. “Ready?” Sharon asked.
We let go of each other. “Ready,” I said.
Bentham shook my hand, then Emma’s. “I’m so happy you’re here,” he said. “It’s proof, I think, that the stars are beginning to align for us.”
“I hope you’re right,” Emma said.
We were about to go when a question came to me that I’d been meaning to ask the whole time—and it occurred to me that, in a worst-case scenario, this could be my last chance to ask it.
“Mr. Bentham,” I said, “we never did talk about my grandfather. How did you know him? Why were you looking for him?”
Bentham’s eyebrows shot up and then he smiled quickly, as if to cover his moment of surprise. “I missed him, that’s all,” he said. “We were old friends, and I hoped I might see him again one day.”
I knew that wasn’t the whole truth, and I could see in Emma’s narrowed eyes that she knew it, too, but there was no time to dig any further. Right now the future was of much greater concern than the past.
Bentham raised his hand goodbye. “Be careful out there,” he said. “I’ll be here, preparing my Panloopticon for its triumphant return to service.” And then he hobbled back into his library, and we could hear him shouting at his bear. “PT, up! We have work to do!”
Sharon led us down a long hall, his wooden staff swinging and his massive bare feet slapping the stone floor. When we came to the door that led outside, he stopped, bent down to match our height, and laid out his ground rules.
“It’s dangerous where we’re going. There are very few unowned peculiar children left in Devil’s Acre, so people will notice you. Don’t speak unless spoken to. Don’t look anyone in the eye. Follow me at a slight distance, but never lose sight of me. We’ll pretend you’re my slaves.”
“What?” said Emma. “We will not.”
“It’s the safest thing,” said Sharon.
“It’s demeaning!”
“Yes, but it will raise the fewest questions.”
“How do we do it?” I said.
“Just do whatever I say, immediately and without question. And keep a slightly glazed expression.”
“Yesss, master,” I said robotically.
“Not like that,” Emma said. “He means like the kids in that awful place on Louche Lane.”
I let my face slacken and said in a flat voice: “Hello, we’re all very happy here.”
Emma shuddered and turned away.
“Very good,” said Sharon, and then he looked at Emma. “Now you try.”
“If we must do this,” she said, “I’ll pretend to be mute.”
That was good enough for Sharon. He opened the door and swept us out into the dying day.
The air outside was a toxic-looking yellowish soup, such that I couldn’t tell the position of the sun in the sky except to say it must’ve been getting toward evening, the light slowly leaking away. We walked a few paces behind Sharon, struggling to keep up whenever he saw someone he knew on the street and sped up to avoid conversation. People seemed to know him; he had a reputation, and I think he was concerned that we might do something to ruin it.
We made our way down oddly cheerful Oozing Street, with its window-box flowers and brightly painted houses, then turned onto Periwinkle Street, where the pavement gave way to mud and the houses to shabby, sagging flats. Men with hats pulled low over their eyes were congregating around the end of a seedy cul-de-sac. They appeared to be guarding the door to a house with its windows blacked out. Sharon told us to stay put, and we waited while he went to talk with them.
The air smelled faintly of gasoline. In the distance loud, laughing voices swelled and fell away, swelled and fell away. It was the sound of men in a sports bar watching a game—only it couldn’t have been; that was strictly a modern sound, and there were no televisions here.
A man in mud-splashed pants came out of the house. As the door swung open, the voices grew louder and then faded when it slammed shut. He walked across the street carrying a bucket. We turned, watching as he walked toward something I hadn’t noticed: a pair of bear cubs chained to a sawed-off lamppost at the edge of the street. They were terribly sad looking, with only a few feet of slack on their chains, and they sat on the muddy ground watching the man approach with something like dread, their furry ears flattened back. The man dumped some putrid table scraps before them and left without a
word. The whole scene made me unutterably depressed.
“Those there are training grims,” Sharon said, and we turned to find him standing behind us. “Blood sport is big business here, and fighting a grimbear is considered the ultimate challenge. Young fighters have to train somehow, so they start out fighting the cubs.”
“That’s awful,” I said.
“The bears have the day off, though, thanks to your beastie.” Sharon pointed at the little house. “He’s in there, out through the back. But before we go in, I should warn you: this is an ambrosia den, and there’ll be peculiars in there who are lit out of their minds. Don’t talk to them, and whatever you do, don’t look them in the eye. I know people who’ve been blinded that way.”
“What do you mean, blinded?” I said.
“Just what it sounds like. Now follow me and don’t ask any more questions. Slaves don’t question their masters.”
I saw Emma grit her teeth. We fell in behind Sharon as he crossed to the men clustered around the door of the house.
Sharon talked with the men. I struggled to overhear while maintaining a slavelike distance and averting my eyes. One of them told Sharon there was an “admission fee,” and he dug a coin from his cloak and paid it. Another asked about us.
“I haven’t given them names yet,” Sharon said. “Just got ’em yesterday. They’re still so green, I don’t dare let them out of my sight.”
“Is that right?” the man said, approaching us. “Don’t have names?”
I shook my head no, playing mute along with Emma. The man looked us up and down. I wanted to squirm out of my skin. “Haven’t I seen you somewhere?” he said, leaning closer.
I said nothing.
“Maybe in the window at Lorraine’s,” Sharon offered.
“Nah,” the man said, then waved his hand. “Ah, I’m sure it’ll come to me.”
I only risked a direct look at him once he’d turned away. If he was a Ditch pirate, he wasn’t one of those we’d tangled with. He had a bandage over his chin and another over his forehead. Several of the other men were similarly bandaged, and one sported an eyepatch. I wondered if they’d been injured fighting grims.
