Hollowpox The Hunt for Morrigan Crow - Jessica Townsend Page 0,70
the High Council of Elders in that time had been thinking, how they’d possibly justified to themselves their decision to vilify eight innocent people and erase Wundersmith history?
‘I suppose it should have been obvious,’ she said finally, and felt her breath catch in her throat. An image came to her of Elodie and Ezra giggling beneath the oldest tree in the woods. ‘Who would ever try to stop a Wundersmith except another Wundersmith?’
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
Daylight Robbery
Summer of Three
Armed with Sofia’s explicit permission, Morrigan continued to feast on The Book of Ghostly Hours, adding more and more listings to her notebook until it seemed she was spending more time in the past than the present.
Her once-treasured mornings on Hometrain drinking tea with Miss Cheery and the rest of Unit 919 were becoming almost an inconvenience, a thing she had to get through before she could rush down to Sub-Nine. Soon she was skipping Hometrain altogether, coming in early every morning and staying late every afternoon.
She supposed some might have found it strange, spending so much time with people you couldn’t talk to, people who didn’t even know you were there. But far from feeling lonely, Morrigan had come to relish the gentle, undemanding company of Brilliance Amadeo and Li Zhang and Griselda Polaris. Of Elodie and Owain and Odbuoy. It was as though they were becoming her … friends.
Even – and it made her itchy with guilt to realise it – Ezra.
That was the weirdest thing of all. Ever since she’d learned the truth about the Courage Square Massacre, about how he’d turned on his friends so viciously, she’d expected to find herself seething with hatred every time she saw him in the ghostly hours. But instead she was finding it increasingly hard to believe that Ezra the boy and Squall the murderer were even the same person.
Ezra was just so … normal. Every time he teased Owain or Elodie, or called the venerable Griselda Polaris ‘ma’am’, or laughed at one of his own jokes, or made a mistake in class and got frustrated with himself, it just made him seem more normal. More human. He could have been anyone in her unit. He could have been her.
When she told Hawthorne and Cadence about Squall’s regular presence in her school day, they reacted just as she expected them to – Hawthorne with alarm and curiosity, Cadence with a feigned indifference that didn’t altogether mask her alarm and curiosity.
‘What was he doing? What’d he look like? Did he see you? He can’t see you in those ghostly hours, can he? He can’t get out of them, can he? He can’t travel through them?’ Hawthorne finally stopped to breathe.
‘It’s not a time machine, Hawthorne, you idiot.’ Cadence rolled her eyes. ‘It’s just, like, an historical record or something, right? Morrigan? That’s right, isn’t it?’
She looked from Hawthorne’s wide eyes to Cadence’s furrowed brow, and instantly felt bad for telling them. Perhaps now wasn’t the time to be troubling her friends with the idea of Ezra Squall’s presence in Nevermoor, historical record or not. Between Unit 919’s inclusion in C&D and the ongoing Hollowpox problem there was already so much to worry about.
The virus had begun to infect every part of their lives. Hawthorne’s mum had had to pull Baby Dave out of nursery after her teacher, a usually very lovely llamawun, attacked a group of parents at pick-up time. Cadence’s next-door neighbour, a frogwun Minor, had disappeared for three days and been found floating, comatose but thankfully still alive, in the duck pond of their local park. The llamawun and frogwun were now both in the Wunsoc Teaching Hospital.
‘That’s right,’ Morrigan agreed, smiling at her friends in what she hoped was a reassuring way. ‘It’s not the real Squall. Just an historical record.’
‘Like watching a film?’ Hawthorne asked optimistically.
Morrigan wanted to tell him how very unlike watching a film it had been that morning, when she’d seen seven-year-old Ezra cry because he couldn’t breathe fire as well as Owain. He was so upset she’d almost wanted to reach out and hug him.
‘Yeah,’ she said instead. ‘Something like that.’
Unit 919’s next workshop in distraction, What’s That Behind You?, was a practical lesson out in the city. Their teacher split them into groups of three and left them on Grand Boulevard with simple instructions:
1. Cause a distraction.
2. Steal something.
3. Don’t get caught.
Anah – who’d been raised by an order of nuns called the Sisters of Serenity – immediately panicked and started asking forgiveness from the Divine