to Harrow and back to the bars of the House of the Ninth. They stared at each other with shared panic.
Harrow said finally, “In what way can I earn your trust?”
“Let us sleep for eight bloody hours and never talk like this again,” said Gideon, and her necromancer relaxed, very minutely. Her eyes were so lightlessly black that it was hard to see the pupil; her mouth was thin and waspish and unsure. She remembered when Harrow was nine, when she had walked in at just the wrong moment. She remembered that nine-year-old Harrow’s mouth falling slightly slack. There was something curious about Harrow’s face when it was not fixed into the bland church mask of the Reverend Daughter: something thin and desperate and quite young about it, something not totally removed from Jeannemary’s desperation.
“Eight and a half,” Harrow said, “if we start again immediately in the morning.”
“Done.”
“Done.”
Several hours later, Gideon turned over in her bed, chilled by the realisation that Harrow had not promised to never talk like that again. Too much of this shit, and they’d end up friends.
As they walked back, the halls were as lonely as they ever had been—emptier, somehow, as though with the Fifth’s untimely end Canaan House had managed to expunge what little self it had. There was only one exception. A quiet pattering of steps drew both of them pressed flat into an alcove, staring out at the thin grey pre-morning light: on very nearly silent feet, the Fourth teens passed before them, rapidly crossing an empty and dilapidated hall on some mission. Jeannemary led with her rapier drawn, and her necromancer stumbled behind, head bent, blue hood over his hair, looking like a penitent. Another second and they were gone. Gideon found herself thinking: poor little buggers.
* * *
In her nest of blankets, the light comingb in yellow and unwelcome from the cracks around the curtains, Gideon was too tired to take off her clothes and almost too tired to sleep. She kept rustling when she turned over, trying to find a comfortable spot, and then she remembered the crinkled note in her pocket. In the dim light she smoothed it open and stared at it, blearily, pillow still sticky with bits of the cold cream she used to take off her paint.
ut we all know the sad + trying realit
is that this will remain incomplete t
the last. He can’t fix my deficiencies her
ease give Gideon my congratulations, howev
20
AN INAUSPICIOUS NINE HOURS later Gideon and Harrow were making their way down the long, cold staples of the facility ladder, the air thick with last night’s blood. Having been woken up just thirty-five minutes previous (Harrow always lied), Gideon climbed down into the dark with the distinct sensation that she was still asleep: somewhere in a dream, a dream she’d had a long time ago and suddenly remembered. She had mechanically downed the mug of cooling tea and the bowl of congealing porridge that Harrow had brought her that morning—Harrow arranging her breakfast was a concept so disagreeable there was no space left in her head for it—and now it sat leadenly in her stomach. The crumpled note lay hastily interred at the very bottom of Gideon’s pocket.
Everything felt dark and strange and incorrect, right down to the still-drying paint her adept had applied to her face. Gideon had not even murmured dissent at this incursion, just got on with spooning porridge into her mouth. It was testament to Harrow being Harrow that none of Gideon’s wooden submission had even perturbed her, seemingly.
“What the hell are we meant to be doing down there?” she’d asked plaintively, as Harrow led the way back to the dim lobby and the stairs to the hatch. Her voice sounded odd in her mouth. “More bone men?”
“I doubt it,” Harrow had said briskly, without looking around. “That was one challenge. There’d be no point doing the same thing for the next one.”
“The next one?”
“For God’s sake pay attention, Griddle. The hatch key is the first step—the warm-up challenge, if you like.”
“That wasn’t a challenge,” Gideon had objected, stepping over a taut strand of yellow tape. “You just asked Teacher for it.”
“Yes, and as we discovered, some of our so-called rivals hadn’t even cleared that pitiable hurdle. The hatch key grants access to the facility complex, which contains a number of testing rooms set up to replicate particular necromantic experiments. Anyone who can accurately carry out an experiment to its intended conclusion—as we did by dismantling that construct—gets