Hollowpox The Hunt for Morrigan Crow - Jessica Townsend Page 0,85
and tell Captain North what’s happened. Tell him about Colin. Tell him to …’ she paused, swallowing and breathing through her nose as if to steel herself. ‘Tell him to bring the Stealth.’
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
Concerned Citizens of Nevermoor
The fallout from their Gobleian Library escapade was swifter and further-reaching than Morrigan could have anticipated. She didn’t see Miss Cheery again before the summer holidays began the following day, but she heard from Jupiter that the Elders and the Scholar Mistresses had hauled their conductor over the coals for taking them on such a dangerous excursion.
‘It’s not her fault,’ Morrigan told him on Saturday morning, stabbing at her toast with the butter knife. It was early, and she and Jupiter were the only ones in the staff dining room. The table was laid with all their favourites – crumpets and toast and waffles and sausages and eggs and blueberry syrup – but neither of them had eaten a bite. ‘Miss Cheery shouldn’t be in trouble, it was Mahir and me who wanted to go to the Gobleian Library. Hawthorne was right, we should have gone to the pool.’
And I didn’t even get to steal the book, she thought glumly.
Somewhere in the fight against the book bugs and the scramble to get into the truck, she had dropped Volume Three Hundred and Seven of An Unabridged History of the Wundrous Act Spectrum. It had probably been destroyed by bug guts and pesticide foam. All that history had been at her fingertips, and now it was gone, maybe forever.
‘Miss Cheery has taken full responsibility, quite rightly,’ said Jupiter. ‘She’s the grown-up, Mog, she should have known better than to take a bunch of thirteen-year-olds into a pocket realm. Bad things can happen in liminal spaces.’
Morrigan looked up from her badly butchered toast. ‘What’s a liminal space?’
‘A sort of … inbetween. A threshold between one place and another. Tricksy Lanes are a good example – they can be unstable, unpredictable places where normal rules of the universe don’t seem to apply.’
She told him about the locked doors at the end of every branch of chambers on Sub-Nine, each labelled The Liminal Hall. ‘What do you think they could be?’
He frowned, considering it. ‘I honestly don’t know, but I strongly suggest you stay away. Like I said – liminal spaces can be dangerous. And the Gob is one of the most dangerous I’ve ever come across. I wasn’t planning to take you anywhere near the place until you’re at least fifteen. You certainly won’t be going back any time soon. Not least because it’s been closed to the public until further notice, by order of the Nevermoor Council.’
Morrigan deflated even further. She’d been hoping he might take her back there once all of this blew over. Even if Volume Three Hundred and Seven had been destroyed, there were still three hundred and six other volumes tucked away behind Devilish Court.
‘Is Roshni all right?’ She’d been feeling awfully guilty about deceiving her, even more so since she’d watched the poor woman get attacked by a raging ostrichwun.
‘The librarian?’ Jupiter winced a little. ‘It … wasn’t a pretty injury, but she’s in the teaching hospital and Miss Cheery hasn’t left her side. She’s going to be all right. Not sure I can say the same for her ostrichwun friend. He seems to have hurt himself more than anyone else. He’s in the teaching hospital too, of course.’
He stared broodingly into his cup of coffee, which had long gone cold. ‘Another attack we could have prevented and Wunimal we could have helped, if only we’d known he was infected, if we’d had the slightest clue, some warning, just a scrap of information.’
Morrigan studied her patron’s exhausted face. He’d been up all night for the opening of the Nevermoor Bazaar.
The Stealth had been out in force at the summer market festival, on the lookout for any strange Wunimal behaviour. Jupiter patrolled with them all night, scouring the crowds for any ‘black holes’ as he’d started calling them – the area surrounding those Wunimals who were nearly depleted of Wundrous energy, having had it all eaten up by the Hollowpox. In the past few weeks he’d managed to thwart three separate attacks this way. The Stealth had taken the infected Wunimals into protective custody so they’d be safely isolated when the pox reached culmination, preventing them from hurting anyone – including themselves – and finally Dr Bramble and Dr Lutwyche were able to study the virus in its host before culmination. They’d