Hollowpox The Hunt for Morrigan Crow - Jessica Townsend Page 0,6

The light from the projection illuminated her face. ‘Why didn’t you tell us?’

Lam’s chin trembled a little. ‘I … it just … seemed kinder not to.’

The nine children marched eagerly into the grounds of Wunsoc, all but Lam oblivious to the danger behind them.

Morrigan exhaled in relief, looking at Hawthorne and Cadence in the dim classroom, and they stared back at her in mute bewilderment. At last, with the gates shut behind them and the monsters no longer visible, it felt like some air had returned to the room. Then an amplified voice spoke over the footage, and they all jumped in shock.

‘I suspect you are all wondering why you’re here.’

Morrigan knew those brittle tones. It was Elder Quinn.

Gregoria Quinn was one of the High Council of Elders, the three most revered people in the Wundrous Society. The High Council was elected by all members of Wunsoc at the beginning of each Age, to lead and govern them until the next. Morrigan could see why Elder Quinn had been chosen for this honour; she may have been small and frail and very, very old, but she was a formidable woman. Her fellow Elders – Helix Wong and Alioth Saga – were nearly as impressive, Morrigan thought. (But not quite.)

‘For many years,’ Elder Quinn’s voice echoed around them, ‘the Wundrous Society has had one mission. One unified, secret purpose, expressed in two discrete yet equally important tasks. We call this purpose, for want of a grander title, Containment and Distraction.’

‘So … not Chips and Dip,’ whispered Hawthorne and, absurdly, Morrigan had to clap a hand to her mouth to suppress a hysterical giggle.

‘Shhh,’ said Cadence, elbowing her in the ribs. ‘Look.’

Elder Quinn spoke while the footage continued – of an inauguration night that was entirely different from the one they had experienced. And yet it was the same night.

Morrigan remembered marching up the drive to Proudfoot House feeling a little nervous, perhaps, but not afraid. She remembered seeing the cloaked Wundrous Society members holding candles, perched high in the dead fireblossom trees that lined the drive, and feeling strangely comforted by their presence. She remembered thinking that the hard part was over. That she’d got through the trials and into the Society and everything was going to be easier from then onwards.

She’d been wrong, of course. But it wasn’t until now that she knew precisely how wrong she’d been.

Behind the nine new scholars, jumping down from the trees, the figures were not members of the Wundrous Society. They weren’t even human … just doing a good imitation of it.

‘What in the Seven Pockets are we watching?’ breathed Arch.

The figures seemed to unfold from their vaguely human facsimile, shifting into what must have been their true form: enormous vulture-like creatures, hunched and haunted-looking, with yellow eyes and great, hook-like talons.

Morrigan couldn’t believe she and the rest of the unit could have been so oblivious.

‘Run, for goodness’ sake,’ Arch whispered to the projected Unit 919, quite pointlessly. Morrigan understood the impulse. She wanted to shake her past self, to force that other Morrigan to turn around and see the danger.

Because it wasn’t just the things slithering out of the shadows and perching in the trees. There was more, so much more.

She’d believed – they had all believed – that the splendour and spectacle of their inauguration was meant to be a celebration of their success.

It wasn’t a celebration, she realised now. It was a distraction. A series of precise, choreographed distractions designed to direct their line of sight to exactly the right place so they missed everything else happening around them.

The marching musicians accompanying them up the path to Proudfoot House had distracted them from the human-sized vulture things crowding in behind them.

The sparkling, iridescent rainbow archway had blinded them to the fact that every window in Proudfoot House had begun to bleed – thick, oozing rivulets of red dripped down the brick walls like something out of a horror story.

The trumpeting elephant caught their attention at the bottom of the marble steps just as a team of Wunsoc members conducted a thousand-strong army of spiders to skitter across the shoes of Unit 919.

None of them had noticed a thing.

And when they’d looked up in awe to watch their nine names burning across the sky in dragon fire, they’d missed perhaps the most extraordinary sight of all: a platoon of trees at the edge of the Whinging Woods had drawn up their roots from the ground and were marching – slowly, very slowly