Hollowpox The Hunt for Morrigan Crow - Jessica Townsend Page 0,110
of the fireblossoms, read: GREATEST ECOLOGICAL COMEBACK OF ALL TIME.
‘You think Holliday fixed it so that the protest— Ow!’ She winced as she felt a little itching prickle in one of the fingers on her left hand, like an insect bite. It’d been annoying her all morning. ‘So the protest got forgotten?’
‘That woman has the ear of every desk editor in Nevermoor,’ said Jupiter. ‘She spent hours last night talking to each of them personally, and I don’t know how those conversations went, but whatever stories they’d been planning to publish, in the end they all went with Holliday’s version. You should see Wunsoc this morning – people are lining up to see the trees!’ He shook his head, laughing in disbelief. ‘I bow to the Queen of Spin. Any messages while I was out, Kedge?’
Morrigan grinned at Jack, who raised a discreet eyebrow back at her. This was quite a change from the gloomy, fatigued Jupiter who’d been haunting the Deucalion recently. She knew which one she preferred.
‘Several.’ Kedgeree straightened up, flipping through a stack of handwritten notes. ‘Your accountant has asked for the third time this week how long you intend to keep paying a full staff while three-quarters of them are off on a jolly—’
‘They’re not on a jolly,’ said Jupiter.
‘Her words, not mine.’
‘For goodness’ sake, it’s barely been a week! And it’s not my employees’ fault the Deucalion’s closed. What am I going to do, let them starve?’
‘That’s what I told her you’d say,’ Kedgeree said calmly. ‘And she asked me to remind you that the Hotel Deucalion is not a charity, nor is it currently making money, and to gently suggest that a grand re-opening might—’
‘Not until we’ve contained the Hollowpox,’ Jupiter cut him off. ‘Or cured it.’
Morrigan sat up straight. She’d been waiting all night to tell Jupiter about Squall’s offer, but it wasn’t a conversation she wanted to have with an audience. Jupiter shot her a quizzical look, but she shook her head and mouthed, Later.
He turned back to Kedgeree. ‘Now, do we have a status update on the Grand Sulk?’
The Grand Sulk was what he had taken to calling the Deucalion’s current, rather strange state. Ever since they’d closed the place down, things in the hotel had started going a bit weird. Just little things at first; rooms you’d expect to find in one place would show up somewhere else entirely. Or some ornate wallpaper replaced with bare brick walls.
Then slowly, on the upper floors where the fanciest and most expensive suites lay empty, things started to sort of … go to sleep. The lights went out and wouldn’t come back. The heating turned off, the hearths were all extinguished and it became so cold you could see your breath clouding the air. Eventually the suite doors locked themselves and wouldn’t open for anyone, not even Jupiter.
Kedgeree, Frank and the rest of the staff were worried. They’d tried everything to coax the sleeping parts of the hotel awake again, even going so far as to stage a fake party one night, but the Deucalion was having none of it. It had continued slowly shutting down, room by room, floor by floor.
Jupiter, meanwhile, refused to engage, insisting it was just being childish and ought to grow up, and reminding everyone that he was in charge, and he would decide when they reopened, and he wouldn’t have his hand forced by a building.
But Morrigan didn’t think the Deucalion was being childish. She thought perhaps its feelings were hurt. Maybe it felt at a bit of a loss now that its halls were so empty, and the quiet had thrown it off its game a little. She’d been extra nice to her bedroom since the closure, just in case, complimenting its every transformation – no matter how odd. The recent addition of a terrarium full of large black spiders had been the ultimate test of her generosity, but upon its arrival she’d merely nodded and said in what she hoped was a cheering voice: ‘Very skittery. Lots of legs.’
‘The eleventh, twelfth and thirteenth floors are now in full hibernation,’ said Kedgeree. ‘The conservatory on the fourth floor has frosted over and the Smoking Parlour is showing definite signs of weariness. The second biggest ballroom was, last I checked, a mosquito-infested swampland.’
‘Oh yes,’ said Dame Chanda as she and Martha descended the staircase into the lobby. ‘I was hoping to use it as a rehearsal space yesterday, since the music salon has shrunk to the size