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“Maybe, but if he has a role, it’s a minor one. There’s no doubting the failure with the Archers. Your failure.”

“Not mine!” my old French teacher protested. “Not just mine. It wasn’t my team. I was called in later. The headmaster—”

“Careful, Lefevre, careful.” A pause. “Come on then. Take me to her.”

They left without another word to Lucy Penrose. I was clambering out from under the bed, stifling another sneeze as the door shut behind them.

I was in front of Mrs. Penrose in four beats of my pounding heart, thrusting the slightly crumpled picture of Rose toward her face.

“How do you know this girl?”

The woman stiffened. Her gaze flitted to my face, then away. She reached for the image.

“Not until you tell me how you know Rose.”

The effect of my words was so dramatic that I would have taken them back in the next instant if I’d been able to. I’ve never seen someone stabbed in the heart, but I have to imagine it would look like this did. The hurt in that woman’s face…it was something I hadn’t ever imagined could be communicated by mere expression. I felt it too, some echo of it, like someone had taken every dream I had ever had in one hand and crushed them all in one swift contraction of fingers to fist. And the cry that escaped her…Tears sprang into my eyes without me even knowing why. “I’m sorry! I’m so sorry!” I was babbling, pushing the drawing onto her.

“You’ve…seen her?” Lucy Penrose’s voice creaked with disuse.

“In a book…a bookshop…I—” I didn’t know how to say it. I glanced at the door. They’d been talking about the Archers. I should be following them. “Yes, I’ve seen her…” I concluded lamely.

“In a book,” Mrs. Penrose breathed.

“My mother, Caroline Archer,” I said, aware my chance was slipping away. “Do you know her? Is she close? They’re going to her, I think. The Smith man…”

Mrs. Penrose nodded. “Directly below this room. Don’t let them catch you.” Tears flooded down her face now, though she spoke without choking on the words.

“I have to go…” And with that I was out of the door, hoping I could reach my mother’s room without getting found out.

An old woman saw me through the open door of her room as I passed. I reached the stairwell without challenge, glanced back the way I’d come, then went on down. Another woman, this one younger, shuffled by me on the stairs, going up as I went down. She looked more like a staff member than a patient, but she moved as though she was drugged and paid me no attention, so who knows?

At the back of my mind, along with the “don’t get caught” and all the normal worries attendant on trespassing in a secure facility, were the picture of Rose, and the tears of the woman who must have drawn it. Most craziness I could pass off as the craziness you might find in a psychiatric hospital…BUT IT WAS ROSE…How did that happen?

The director and Mademoiselle Lefevre must have been delayed on the short journey, because as I left the stairwell and peeked along the corridor lined with patients’ rooms, I could see that they were only now reaching the one I judged to lie below Mrs. Penrose’s.

I drew back as soon as I saw them. Lefevre’s voice reached me faintly:

“…but then she always was a haughty bitch. So poor, no husband, and still she thought so very much of herself and those children of hers.”

Anger flared, and I looked back around the corner in time to see Lefevre open the door, presenting me with the symbol of a butterfly, drawn in black. The same butterfly had been fixed to Mrs. Penrose’s door—I was sure I’d seen one, though I’d only glimpsed it.

Mademoiselle Lefevre led the way in, holding her clipboard in both hands as if it might double as a shield. Smith followed, a bulky man in an ill-fitting suit, balding, not tall.

I hurried up behind them. If the director had looked around as he went in, he would have seen me. I was angry enough to almost want him to do just that.

I reached the door a second after it clicked shut and pressed my ear to it, not caring who might come along and object.

“—need you to pay attention, Mrs. Archer.” The director was talking, and I liked his tone even less now it was aimed at my mum. “Can she even hear me? How much are we giving her?” This seemed aimed at Lefevre. Quite how she’d moved from French teacher to dispenser of drugs in a handful of years, I didn’t know.

Lefevre answered, but I couldn’t catch the words. The director hummed and hah-ed then continued as if deciding some of what he had to say might penetrate whatever fog they’d wrapped her in.

“I don’t want to be here, Caroline. We Smiths don’t like to get our hands dirty. Did we not evolve as a species to use tools? Blacksmiths with their hammers. Wordsmiths with their quills, pens, keyboards. Worldsmiths with their plans, agents, viruses. A Smith uses tools. A hospital director uses a doctor, a headmaster uses a teacher, a judge uses a prosecutor. And yet here I am, wasting my valuable time with debitage…”

“Debitage” might have washed over most eavesdroppers without registering, but I am, as I told you, a collector of ten-dollar words. When our ancestors first picked up rocks in the Stone Age, they chose flint for its ability to create both sparks and the sharpest of edges. Flint’s the devil’s own business to work with though. You might think lacemaking is complicated and requires a deft touch. Knapping an arrowhead out of flint using just stone and bone and horn—that’s real artistry.

When the archaeologists dig up Neolithic settlements and find the quarry where spearheads and hand axes were made, they excavate heaps of failures. These waste flakes and bifacial rejects, all the mistakes, the failed creations…that’s debitage. The balding bastard in his ugly suit had just called my mother a reject, something he had worked on, seeking to make a tool. Something that had failed and had been discarded.

Rage had filled my ears with fury’s white noise, and for an unknown time the words spoken beyond the door had failed to register while I clenched my hands into bone-achingly tight fists. Only the sound of cracking brought me back to the moment. Fractures had spread across the walls, reaching for the ceiling, a cage of them surrounding me…as if I were…the center. Dust sifted down from overhead. The director’s voice paused, then carried on.