at the docks.
‘We are deeply sorry for your loss,’ said Elder Quinn. ‘We share your distress, and extend our condolences to you and your family—’
‘THEY EXTEND THEIR CONDOLENCES,’ shouted St James, to jeers from the protestors. ‘THEY’RE OH SO VERY SORRY. BUT NOT SORRY ENOUGH TO STOP PROTECTING MURDERERS.’
‘He came prepared, didn’t he?’ muttered a voice in Morrigan’s ear. She turned to see Hawthorne arriving with Mahir. ‘D’you reckon he carries that megaphone around with him everywhere, just in case he gets the chance to loudly bore someone?’
The noise from St James was joined by the clanging of the iron gates as the crowd took hold and shook them back and forth. Elder Quinn tried again to address them, holding her hands up in an appeasing gesture, but her words were drowned out.
‘They’re going nuts!’ said Mahir. ‘Look at them, they’re trying to break down the gates!’
He was right. The protest had become a mob – an actual, proper mob. The kind Morrigan had only ever read about in storybooks about long-lost villages with a witch living in the woods.
‘Did you just see that bloke with a pitchfork?’ Hawthorne’s voice had jumped up half an octave, his eyes grown wide. ‘Who even owns a pitchfork? I don’t even know what a pitchfork is for!’
‘That’s it,’ said Thaddea. ‘I’m going down there to help. The Elders won’t stand a chance holding that lot back on their own.’
Morrigan thought again of what Sofia had said to her that morning. We don’t use our knacks to tyrannise people. It’s not what the Wundrous Society is about. Was this different, though? This wasn’t storming parliament, after all, it was defending Wunsoc from being stormed.
‘Is it for … pitching or forking—’
‘Shut up, Swift. Who’s with me?’ Thaddea glared.
‘No.’ Lam dropped her basket, spilling its contents down the steps, and grasped Thaddea’s forearm with both hands. ‘No, Thaddea. Bad idea.’
‘Are you saying that as an oracle, or a scaredy-cat?’
Lam thought about it for half a second. ‘Both.’
But even the Elders seemed to have noticed the dangerous shift in mood. They’d finally given up their misguided mission of peace, left the mob behind at the gate, and were making their way quickly up the driveway towards Proudfoot House.
The crowd of scholars suddenly split down the middle as a group of teachers and conductors streamed out of Proudfoot House. They encircled the scholars and began pushing them backwards.
‘All of you inside, this instant!’ snapped Dearborn. ‘This is not a traffic accident for you to gawk at. Conductors, marshal your units!’
‘Oh no,’ whispered Lam, watching the Elders intently. ‘They’re moving too slowly.’ She cupped her hands around her mouth and shouted to the Elders in a voice louder than any of them had ever heard her use. ‘Hurry up! Faster.’
Morrigan shivered; she was feeling a very particular kind of chill, one that she only seemed to get when Lam was having one of her moments. She looked at Cadence, and without needing to discuss it, both girls joined Lam in shouting at the Elders.
‘FASTER! RUN, HURRY UP!’
‘Girls! That’s quite enough of that,’ said Miss Cheery, gathering them all together. ‘Right, Unit 919, let’s go. Inside the house. Now.’
‘But Miss, look—’
‘I said now, Thaddea.’
‘No, Miss Cheery, LOOK!’
People were climbing over the walls. Somebody repeatedly smashed something against the lock on the gates – a stone or a brick or something – and there was a great deafening CLANG as they breached it. They poured into the grounds, shouting furiously as they began to march towards Proudfoot House. The Elders stopped halfway up the drive and turned back to face them, Elder Wong holding up his hands as if he might miraculously command them to stop.
Dearborn had given up herding the scholars inside. Everyone standing on the marble steps, young and old, gaped in horror at what was unfolding. More Society members emerged from Proudfoot House and from other corners of the campus, seeming to appear out of nowhere, as if some silent emergency alarm had gone off. They surged forward, marching down the drive to defend the Elders and the campus, even while the conductors still tried to hold back their junior scholars.
With a sickening pop-pop-pop-crrrunch, Dearborn warped into a snarling Murgatroyd, her face and hands frosting over, ready for a fight. Thaddea cracked her knuckles and made to duck under Miss Cheery’s arm, eager to join the adults.
In that moment, Morrigan’s uncertainty evaporated and she realised exactly where she stood. She agreed with Sofia. She trusted Lam.
‘Thaddea, stop,’ she