got to his feet and tried to look menacing, even though he was the smallest of them. “You beat us for not following the plan.”
Geb got to his feet, from which position he towered over Nott’s head. He pushed Nott back onto the cold stones of the fortress floor.
“We will!” he said angrily. “But you’ve lost your helm, haven’t you? And that girl has our master’s athame. And you’ve already wasted weeks. Even if we obey our master’s orders, even if we find him—when we find him—he’ll be angry.”
Balil was nodding. “It’s your fault, Nott, but…he might see it as our fault too. The lost helm, the delay. We’re the oldest. He’ll be angriest at us.”
Geb gestured at the new, still frozen boys. “These Watchers will help us find the girl. And when we find her, we’ll get our master’s athame back—and your helm. Then we’ll wake the others, then we’ll search every inch of the darkness and find our master. He will have no reason to send any of us to our caves. Especially not me. All will be well.”
Nott looked from Geb to Balil to Wilkin. All three seemed satisfied with this plan.
“But…”
“Sit down,” Geb ordered, not meeting Nott’s eyes. “That’s enough from you.”
Nott sat and stared at his feet. Every Watcher was so terrified of being disciplined he was determined to prove he was better than all the others. Their master had been so arbitrary and secretive about his punishment that no Watcher was certain what would draw his anger or what penalty he would exact. The Watchers themselves were one of their master’s biggest secrets, but he was full of so many other secrets that Nott sometimes wondered if the man was built of them. If you removed his cloak and his clothing and boots, would there be anything inside? Or is he filled with the smoke of his own hidden plans? If you pierced him, would those secrets leak out into the world?
“These are new ones,” Balil explained, pointing at the frozen Watchers, “from just a few years ago.” He chucked a stone at the frozen boys, and it bounced off one of their faces. Ever so subtly, their bodies were beginning to soften—arms slowly relaxing, legs straightening out against the floor.
“They’ll know how to use computers!” Wilkin said in a burst of understanding. “They’ll use them to lead us to Quin?”
“Aye,” said Geb. “They’ll know the modern ways.” He gave one of the boys a swift, hard kick. “Hurry up and come awake, will you?”
“And those?” Nott asked.
Behind Balil were two disruptors Geb had retrieved when he’d run off into the darkness There. The metal weapons gleamed with faint iridescence in the night’s glow.
“When we find her, we’ve got to scare her, haven’t we?” Geb asked. “I don’t know about you, Nott, but I don’t fancy being cut by her whipsword again if I can avoid it. We’ll scare her into giving up the athame and the helm.”
“Look!” Wilkin said excitedly.
One of the frozen boys had blinked, very slowly.
The hospital basement smelled of death and disinfectant. Dark shapes of gurneys and old medical machinery loomed up around Shinobu. The anomaly he’d created had already fallen shut, but its residual tremor was alive in the room, and equipment vibrated around him. It was well past midnight, the heart of the graveyard shift, and except for rattling pipes and the buzz of fluorescent lighting fixtures, the hospital was quiet as he crept into the hallway.
He’d woken in the middle of the night, curled up next to Quin, but all he’d been able to think about was the focal. No, all he’d been able to think about were the secrets the focal had whispered to him while he was wearing it—the boys who’d attacked them, the athame of the Dreads, Catherine’s journal. But more than all these things was the Middle Dread himself. It was as if the focal knew the Middle Dread, and the voice Shinobu kept hearing, just out of earshot, belonged to him.
When he’d woken, he remembered that Quin hadn’t hidden the helmet yet. She’d only tossed it into the closet before they fell asleep. He’d shaken her shoulder and whispered, “Quin, wake up, please! I’m going to put it on, and I don’t want to put it on.”
Quin was so deeply asleep she didn’t feel or hear him. He shook her harder, and said, more loudly, “Please, Quin. Wake up! Stop me!”
She came half-awake and turned toward him in the bed. In the