everything else. When the rope suddenly ripped apart, he was completely surprised.
“Look, hands,” he said, bringing them in front of him and wiggling his fingers. They felt twice their normal size.
“I’d love some hands,” the rat told him. “All I’ve got is feet.”
“But you’ve got four of them,” Nott pointed out. Then upon reflection he added, “Though maybe not for long.”
He rubbed his hands together until they began to prickle and then burn as blood flowed into them. It felt like Wilkin and the others were poking hot needles into his flesh over and over and over.
“He probably would stick you with needles, if he thought of it,” the rat mused.
“I poked him with a needle once while he was sleeping,” Nott admitted. “All over his leg. I told him in the morning that a spider had bitten him.”
“Did he believe that?” The creature sounded amused.
“He did. That and lots of other stories. He’ll believe anything, Wilkin will.”
When his fingers finally felt close to normal, Nott got stiffly to his feet. He turned back the way he’d come—and nearly jumped out of his skin.
Someone was lying on the tunnel floor up against the opposite wall, only a few yards away.
“Look,” he whispered to the rat.
It was a dead someone, he saw on closer inspection, a teenaged boy, maybe Wilkin’s age. He was dressed in warm clothing and a thick cloak, but he was frozen solid. He had probably been lying there for a very long while. By his clothes and by his cleanliness and by the sparkling white teeth Nott discovered when he pried up the boy’s lip, Nott concluded he was not a Watcher.
A flash of metal caught Nott’s eyes, and he drew a silver necklace out from beneath the boy’s shirt. In the fading light he could make out the shape of a small silver boar.
There was blood on the necklace, and Nott soon found a fatal wound near the boy’s heart. Blood had soaked through his clothing and then frozen, leaving a stain of dark ice on his shirt. There were stains on the boy’s hands as well. In fact, it looked as if he’d dipped his right finger into his own life’s blood and, with it, written something in the palm of his left hand:
EMILE
“Em-i-ly. Emily?” Nott sounded out. The boy seemed to have written a name.
“That’s a girl’s name,” said the rat.
“So it is,” said Nott. He’d had a cousin named Emily, long ago. She’d known how to write her name. That was why Nott could read it. “What’s that?”
Something had been carved into a flat area on the cave wall, just above where the body lay. In the dimness, Nott could make out a series of numbers, so smoothly etched they seemed to have been melted into the rock. There were letters also.
He knew his numbers, mostly, but only some of his letters. He concentrated on the numbers, which he determined, after some scrutiny, to be 63, 48, 89.
“What do they add up to?” he asked the rat. “And why are they on the wall?”
The creature squirmed in his pocket but didn’t answer.
“Course you don’t know,” Nott said. “You don’t have to be embarrassed. Must be hard to learn to count if you haven’t got hands. I think I might be able to sum them, though.”
He stared at the numbers and tried to add them together. After several minutes he was forced to admit that the task was beyond him.
Soon it grew so dark that he couldn’t see the ground properly and the carvings had all blurred into shadow. He’d been standing so long his legs felt like blocks of ice, but he couldn’t walk anymore to get the blood flowing—he wasn’t going to wander in pitch blackness.
He lowered himself to his knees. With a great deal of effort, he stripped the cloak and clothes from the stiff body of the boy named Emily. He pulled the clothes over his own, then wrapped himself in his cloak and the boy’s. Huddled on the cave floor, he tugged his hood over his head as far as it would go, and compressed his body into a tight little ball to trap his own warmth around him. It helped a bit.
Suddenly he had a thought.
“I bet it sums to two hundreds!” Nott whispered.
“I think you’re right,” the rat whispered back.
“So…this is a different two hundred than the one we Watchers use. But why is it here in my cave?” Nott ran his tongue across his teeth, feeling