Her muscles were aching all over, and she was so cold, and so hungry. Had she ever been fed in her entire life?
‘Didn’t pace yourself, did you?’
She very slowly turned to see Rook towering above her.
‘Sofia said she warned you. Better listen next time.’
Rook didn’t seem to expect a response, which was good because Morrigan was too tired to give one. Instead, the Scholar Mistress put a bowl of chicken soup in her hands, dropped a blanket clumsily around her shoulders, and sat down beside her.
They sat in reasonably comfortable silence, broken only by the scraping of spoon against bowl. Rook seemed quite content to stare around the empty room, lost in her own thoughts. It took quite some time, and almost all the soup, but eventually Morrigan had recovered enough energy to speak.
‘Where do the others go?’ she asked.
‘Hmm?’ Rook snapped out of her dreamy state, turning to Morrigan with a suddenly sharp gaze. ‘Where do what others go?’
‘You know,’ mumbled Morrigan. It was uncomfortable, having the Scholar Mistress’s full attention, without anyone else in the room to buffer it. Like standing under a spotlight. ‘The others. Ms Dearborn and Mrs Murgatroyd.’ She hastily shoved another spoonful of soup into her mouth, wondering if she’d overstepped a boundary.
But Rook didn’t seem offended. ‘Oh … we’re all in here,’ she said vaguely.
Morrigan swallowed. ‘All the time?’
She nodded. ‘All the time. Only … some of us are more here than others. I don’t come out much.’
‘Why not?’
‘I don’t have a reason to. Or at least, I haven’t until recently.’
Morrigan paused before asking her next question, but finally decided if there was ever a moment to ask, this was probably it. ‘How many of you are in there?’
A tiny muscle twitched at the corner of Rook’s mouth. ‘Nobody’s ever asked us that before.’
‘Are there more than three?’ Morrigan pressed.
‘Oh … I should imagine so.’
‘How can you not know?’
Rook tilted her head to one side, then the other, looking pensive. ‘Have you ever seen a set of nesting dolls, Wundersmith? You open up one, and there’s another inside her, and another inside her, and another …’ Rook trailed off, and Morrigan nodded. ‘Could one of those dolls know how many others she carried within her? Could she know how deeply they’d nested inside her brain?’
Morrigan couldn’t have explained why, but those words made her skin crawl.
‘The answer is no, of course she couldn’t,’ continued Rook. ‘Not for sure. But perhaps sometimes, if she paid close attention, she might feel them … rattling around in there.’ She gave her head a tiny shake from side to side. ‘Who knows? Maybe we go on forever.’
Morrigan thought about that for a moment. She was picturing not dolls, but the chambers of Sub-Nine, following on one after the other like branches on a tree. If you wanted to get to the last chamber, you had to go through all the others first. There weren’t any shortcuts.
‘Does that mean Dearborn doesn’t know about you?’
Rook frowned. ‘I’m not sure. Certainly, she and I have never met. Not in transition, I mean, the way you could say I’ve “met” Murgatroyd. We’ve never had a reason to.’ She glanced at Morrigan. ‘I hear she’s awful.’
Morrigan nearly spat out her soup. ‘She’s, um … not great.’
‘Yes, that’s the rumour.’
On the train ride home, all Unit 919 wanted to talk about was the Hollowpox – rumours they’d heard, theories they’d come up with. There’d been mounting speculation all over Wunsoc about exactly who was under quarantine in the teaching hospital, how dangerous they were, and whether any other famous Wunimals like De Flimsé might have been infected.
‘I heard they’ve got an elephantwun in there,’ said Mahir. ‘Apparently, some boy from Unit 916 helped bring him down. He saved a whole platoon of the Stealth from being trampled.’
‘Ugh, that’s just Will Gaudy,’ Thaddea groaned. ‘There’s no elephantwun, he’s been trying to get people to believe that stupid story all day. I heard there’s a giant snakewun in there that went on a killing spree and ate a family of five and they all had to be cut out of its stomach.’
‘Thaddea!’ said Miss Cheery. ‘That’s horrible, and very much not true.’
‘It’s only what I heard, Miss.’
The conversation went around in circles, and Morrigan found it hard to focus. She truly was worried about the Hollowpox, but … she couldn’t stop thinking about the afternoon she’d just had. About Brilliance Amadeo. About the Gossamer-Spun Garden and her tiny contribution to it.
She was really becoming a