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I looked at Emma. She was staring at the floor, her face unreadable.
“A failed experiment is nothing to be sorry for,” Bentham said. “It’s how scientific progress is made. But what happened to your grandfather is one of the great regrets of my life.”
“That’s why he left,” Emma said, her face tilting upward. “It’s why he went to America.” She turned to me. She didn’t look angry, but wore an expression of dawning relief. “He was ashamed. He said so in a letter once and I never understood why. That he felt ashamed, and unpeculiar.”
“It was taken from him,” I said. Now I had an answer to another question: how a hollowgast could’ve bested my grandfather in his own backyard. He wasn’t senile, or even particularly frail. But his defenses against hollows were mostly gone, and had been for a long time.
“That’s not what you should be sorry for,” said Sharon, standing in the doorway with his arms crossed. “One man wasn’t going to win that war. The real shame is what the wights did with your technology. You created the precursor to ambrosia.”
“I’ve tried to repay my debt,” Bentham said. “Didn’t I help you? And you?” He looked at Sharon and then Mother Dust. Like Sharon, it seemed she, too, had been an ambro addict. “For years I’ve wanted to apologize,” he said, turning to me. “To make it up to your grandfather. That’s why I’ve been looking for him all this time. I hoped he would come back to see me, and I might figure out a way to restore his talent.”
Emma laughed bitterly. “After what you did to him, you thought he’d come back for more?”
“I didn’t consider it likely, but I hoped. Fortunately, redemption comes in many forms. In this case, in the guise of a grandson.”
“I’m not here to redeem you,” I said.
“Nevertheless, I am your servant. If I can do anything, it is yours for the asking.”
“Just help us get our friends back, and your sister.”
“Gladly,” he said, seeming relieved I hadn’t demanded more or stood up and screamed in his face. I still might’ve—my head was spinning, and I hadn’t quite sorted out how to react. “Now,” he said, “as for how to proceed from here …”
“Can we have a moment?” Emma said. “Just Jacob and me?”
We exited into the hall to talk in private—out of sight of the hollow, but only just.
“Let’s make a list of all the terrible things this man is responsible for,” Emma said.
“Okay,” I said. “One: he created hollows. Without meaning to, though.”
“But he did. And he created ambrosia, and he took away Abe’s power, or most of it.”
Without meaning to, I nearly said again. But Bentham’s intentions were beside the point. I knew what she was getting at: after all these revelations, I wasn’t so confident about putting our fates and those of our friends in Bentham’s hands—or his plans. He may have been well-meaning, but he had a dismal track record.
“Can we trust him?” Emma said.
“Do we have a choice?”
“That wasn’t my question.”
I thought for a moment. “I think we can,” I said. “I just hope he’s used up all his bad luck.”
* * *
“COME QUICKLY! IT’S WAKING UP!”
Shouts echoed from the kitchen. Emma and I dashed through the doorway to find everyone cowering in a corner, terrified of a groggy hollowgast that was struggling to sit up but had managed only to droop its upper body over the edge of the sink. Only I could see its open mouth, its tongues lolling limply across the floor.
Close your mouth, I said in Hollow. Making a sound like it was slurping spaghetti, it sucked them back into its jaws.
Sit up.
The hollow couldn’t quite do it, so I took it by the shoulders and guided it into a seated position. It was recovering with remarkable speed, though, and after another few minutes it had regained enough motor skill to be coaxed out of the sink and onto its feet. It no longer limped. All that was left of the gash in its neck was a faint white line, not unlike the ones fast disappearing from my own face. As I relayed this, Bentham couldn’t hide his irritation that Mother Dust had healed the hollow so thoroughly.
“Can I help it if my dust is potent?” Mother Dust said via Reynaldo.
Exhausted, they went off to find beds. Emma and I were tired, too—it was nearing dawn and we hadn’t slept—but the progress we were making was exciting and hope had given us a second wind.
Bentham turned to us, eyes alight. “Moment of truth, friends. Shall we see if we can get the old girl running again?”
By that he meant his machine, and there was no need to ask.
“Let’s not waste another second,” Emma said.
Bentham summoned his bear and I rallied my hollowgast. PT appeared in the doorway, scooped his master into his arms, and together they led us through the house. What a strange sight we would’ve made, had anyone been watching: a dapper gentleman cradled in the arms of a bear, Sharon in his billowing black cloak, Emma stifling yawns with a hand that kept smoking, and plain old me muttering at my white-daubed hollowgast, who even in perfect health shuffled as he walked, as if his bones didn’t quite fit his body.
Through the halls and down the stairs we went, into the bowels of the house: rooms crowded with clanking machinery, each smaller than the last, until finally we came to a door that the bear couldn’t fit through. We stopped. PT set his master down.
“Here it is,” Bentham said, beaming like a proud father. “The heart of my Panloopticon.”
Bentham opened the door. PT waited outside while the rest of us followed him in.
The small room was dominated by a fearsome machine made of iron and steel. Its guts stretched from wall to wall, a baffling array of flywheels and pistons and valves glistening with oil. It looked like a machine capable of making unholy noise, but for now it sat cold and silent. A greasy man stood between two giant gears, tightening something with a wrench.
“This is my assistant, Kim,” said Bentham.
I recognized him: he was the man who’d chased us out of the Siberia Room.
“I’m Jacob,” I said. “We surprised you in the snow yesterday.”
“What were you doing out there?” Emma asked him.
“Freezing half to death,” the man said bitterly, and he went on wrenching.
“Kim’s been helping me search for a way into my brother’s Panloopticon,” said Bentham. “If such a door exists in the Siberia Room, it’s likely at the bottom of a deep crevasse. I’m certain Kim will be grateful if your hollowgast succeeds in bringing some of our other rooms online, where there are sure to be doors in more accessible places.”
Kim grunted, his face skeptical as he looked us up and down. I wondered how many years he’d spent battling frostbite and combing the crevasses.
Bentham got down to business. He issued clipped orders to his assistant, who twisted a few dials and pulled a long lever. The gears of the machine gave a hiss and sputter, then turned a degree.
“Bring in the creature,” Bentham said in a low voice.
The hollow had been waiting outside, and I called him in. He shuffled through the doorway and let out a low gravelly growl, as if he knew something unpleasant was about to happen to him.
The assistant dropped his wrench but quickly retrieved it.
“Here is the battery chamber,” Bentham said, drawing our attention to a large box in the corner. “You must guide the creature inside, where he’ll be restrained.”
The chamber resembled a windowless phone booth made of cast iron. A nest of tubes sprouted from its top and connected to pipes that ran along the ceiling. Bentham grasped the heavy door’s handle and pulled it open with a grating rasp. I peered inside. The walls were smooth gray metal perforated with small holes, like the interior of an oven. Along the back hung a collection of thick leather straps.
“Will it hurt him?” I asked.
I surprised myself with the question, and Bentham, too.
?
?Does that matter?” he replied.
“I’d rather it didn’t. If we have a choice.”
“We don’t,” Bentham said, “but it won’t feel any pain. The chamber fills with anesthetic sleeping gas before anything else happens.”
“And then what?” I said.
He smiled and patted my arm. “It’s very technical. Suffice to say, your creature will leave the chamber alive, in more or less the condition he entered it. Now, if you would kindly have it step inside.”
I wasn’t sure I believed him, nor why it mattered to me. The hollows had put us through hell and seemed so lacking in feeling that inflicting pain on them should have been a pleasure. But it wasn’t. I didn’t want to kill the hollow any more than I wanted to kill a strange animal. In the course of leading this creature around by the nose, I had gotten close enough to understand that there was more than just void inside it. There was a tiny spark, a little marble of soul at the bottom of a deep pool. It wasn’t hollow—not really.
Come, I said to it, and the hollow, which had been lurking shyly in the corner, stepped around Bentham to stand before the booth.
Inside.
I felt it waver. It was healed now, and strong, and if my hold on it faltered for even a moment, I knew what it might do. But I was stronger, and a battle of wills between us would’ve been no contest. It wavered, I think, because I had.
I’m sorry, I said to it.
The hollow didn’t move; sorry was input it didn’t know what to do with. I just needed to say it.
Inside, I said again, and this time the hollow complied and stepped into the chamber. Since no one else would touch it, from that point Bentham told me what to do. Per his instructions, I pushed the hollow against the back wall and crossed the leather straps over its legs, arms, and chest, buckling them tight. They were clearly designed to restrain a human being, which raised questions to which I didn’t want the answers right now. All that mattered was moving forward with the plan.
