Hollowpox The Hunt for Morrigan Crow - Jessica Townsend Page 0,160

here nor there.’

Morrigan frowned. She’d assumed wrongly. When they’d joined hands earlier … that had nothing to do with beginning the apprenticeship. It wasn’t some ritualistic seal that bound them together, it had only granted Squall the necessary access to cure the Wunimals. Which meant (one thought came tumbling after the other) – which meant that he’d fulfilled his part of the bargain without any binding agreement in place. This was the agreement.

The full picture resolved in Morrigan’s head, giddy disbelief rising inside her.

She needn’t sign this contract at all! Squall had already cured the Wunimals, and it wasn’t as if he could undo it without her cooperation. She could simply walk away, having got exactly what she wanted and given him nothing in return.

In the silence, he reached out through the Gossamer, touched his Inferno imprint to the contract and swiped it across the page. The scorched trail he left behind curled itself into a signature – small, black and calligraphic.

‘I’ve no interest in teaching a disinterested student, Miss Crow. Nor one who is merely fulfilling an obligation. I don’t want a dead weight. I want an heir.

‘You’ve witnessed the possibilities now. You’ve met the Wundersmith you could become. Opened a window into a future that could be yours. But if you are not enthusiastically, fanatically eager to climb through the window and seize that future for yourself, then … close it.’ Squall’s voice was barely a whisper. He gave a shrug that was almost practised in its nonchalance, but the black intensity of his gaze betrayed him; he didn’t look away, and neither did she. ‘I won’t hold you to our agreement.’

Morrigan could almost have believed he was bluffing, except beneath the veneer of resolute calm he looked so … frightened. As if he’d fully accepted that she might do exactly as he suggested. Close the window. Walk away.

But of course, she wouldn’t. She couldn’t.

Someday far in the future, Morrigan would think back to this moment and tell herself she’d acted according to some unwritten code of honour, obeyed some chivalrous little voice in her head that sang, you promised. She’d given her word, after all, and decency demanded that she keep it.

But in that moment – in the stretch of her hand to the paper, and the burning of her name upon it – Morrigan wasn’t thinking of honour. She was thinking of how it had felt to have a universe inside her. The universe was gone now, but the space it had occupied was still there. Cavernous and wanting, filled with a hunger like nothing she’d known.

And her hunger said, ‘More.’

Back on the ward, the snoring and the wheezing continued in peaceful oblivion.

Morrigan stood alone beside her bed. She picked up Emmett and hugged him to her chest. That simple action alone took so much will and effort. She wanted desperately to sleep in her own bed, to be cocooned in the safety and warmth of the Deucalion. She wanted to go home.

Morrigan didn’t know how long it took her to get out of the hospital, up three floors of Proudfoot House and all the way down to the train station in her slippers, pyjamas and cloak. Hours, almost certainly. She felt as if she were dragging herself there, and she didn’t know if it was her exhausted body pulling her exhausted brain behind it, or vice versa. She simply knew she had to keep going – one shuffling, tiny step and then another. It was dark on the path through the Whinging Woods, and the trees muttered low and deep, and somewhere in the forest something howled and she knew, distantly, that she ought to be frightened. That on any other day, walking the path through the Whinging Woods in the pitch-dark night, on her own, would have terrified her.

But Morrigan was too tired to be frightened.

And even back inside her own frail self, without the scaffolding of Ezra Squall’s borrowed power, she could still remember what it felt like to truly be a Wundersmith, and she carried the memory with her like a talisman. Like the worn old rabbit held tight in the crook of her elbow. She would cling to that memory by the skin of her fingertips, for as long as she possibly could.

It would get her to the station, and then into a brass railpod, and then all the way to Station 919. It would see her through the black door, through the wardrobe, into the gently rocking waterbed her room