by Ruth Fox
He vanished through the door, which swung back behind him.
“Why didn’t you say anything?” hissed Ryder.
“Why didn’t you?” Zach returned. “I’m pretty sure those cameras caught something! All Ms. Cutter has to do is show it to them and we’re busted!”
“Not if she doesn’t want to admit stealing from kids,” Ryder returned. “We were only taking something that already belonged to Morton!”
“Shhh!” said Monster-boy. He had slipped out of his seat and stopped the door from swinging back all the way. When the others looked at him, he said softly “They brought me here on the night they found me. If you listen, you can hear everything they’re saying out there.”
He was right. They could all see out into the station from here, and Andy was at the reception desk, saying, “Deb, can you get the phone numbers for the Morgensterns and the Hazelwoods? Call their parents and let them know . . .”
But that wasn’t what Monster-boy was looking at. Zach peered around him, so he could see a police officer coming in through the door. The officer was carrying a plastic case that looked like an oversized lunch box.
“Is this it, Jenson?” Andy asked.
“You betcha,” said Constable Jenson, shaking his head as he put the container on a nearby desk. “It was found outside Jeremy Dawkins’s bedroom.”
He removed the lid, and all three of the officers leaned in.
Behind them, the three boys craned their necks.
“Gloves?” said Jenson, holding out a pair of rubber gloves. Andy took them, but didn’t put them on. He folded them to lift the thing from the container without touching it.
It was a long, curved claw, very much like those on Monster-boy’s fingers.
“Who else knows about this?” Andy asked grimly.
Jenson looked grim. “There were other officers on the scene, but they’re all your men, Andy. But we’re not going to be able to keep this quiet for long. Philip Nielson was sniffing around—once he gets wind of this—”
Andy shook his head, then dropped the claw back into the container. “Seal this and lock it away. Jenson, I want you to set up a task force. Get some of the Silvershine Security people on it—keep them away from the sensitive stuff, but we don’t have enough trained officers for something this big, and we’re going to need everyone we can get on this right away.”
Jenson looked grim. “We can’t cross the Wall, can we? We’ve got no jurisdiction in South Silvershine.”
“Just do it, Jenson. We won’t have much time before this news blows. And when it does . . .” Andy turned around, looking grim.
Zach, Ryder and Monster-boy resumed their seats with expressions of innocence. Their hearts were racing.
“Was that—” said Ryder.
“Yeah,” said Zach. “It was.”
“A monster claw,” breathed Monster-boy, looking down at his own fingers and the long curving claws. “The boy must have fought hard. Most claws don’t break easily.”
They lapsed into silence, listening to the sounds drifting through from outside: phones ringing, murmured conversation, and the ticking of the clock on the wall. Several more minutes passed before they heard the front door slam open. They heard Mrs. Hazelwood yelling.
“Where’s my son? Where’s that rotten, good-for-nothing scoundrel?”
That was only the beginning of the tirade.
Zach and Morton weren’t spared when Mr. Morgenstern picked them up. He couldn’t seem to make up his mind whether to be silent and fuming or spewing mad. “. . . What were you thinking? I want you to tell me exactly what you did. And right after we get that pamphlet about safety?”
“I—uh—we—” Zach began, not sure which question to answer first.
Mr. Morgenstern held up a hand and tightened his grip on the steering wheel. “Don’t give me your excuses! I don’t want to hear another word about it.”
So Zach fell silent, but a moment later, Mr. Morgenstern slapped the steering wheel. “I mean—a phone call—from the police—in the middle of the night—do you know what you’ve put your mother through? What were you doing?”
“We were just—” Zach started again.
“Quiet!” snapped Mr. Morgenstern. “If you can’t say anything sensible, don’t say anything at all.”
This went on for the whole ride home. Zach was relieved to get out of the new car and into the house, which looked bright and warm and welcoming after their ventures that night. Mrs. Morgenstern rushed at them and hugged them both.
“My boys,” she said. “Oh, I’m so glad you’re safe.”
She wrapped them both up in hugs so tight they could hardly breathe.
“Now, we’re going to have a talk about this,” began Mr. Morgenstern, but Mrs. Morgenstern wasn’t having a bit of it. She glared at Mr. Morgenstern. “It can wait,” she said. “Joseph, it can wait.”
Mr. Morgenstern subsided, but he wasn’t happy about it. Zach wondered what it was they weren’t telling them—but not for long. He was too tired, and all too ready to submit to his mother’s ministrations. Mrs. Morgenstern settled them on the couch with mugs of cocoa and extra blankets. She sat in an armchair herself. Zach wondered if she’d ever let them out of her sight again.
❖ ❖ ❖
Zach woke in the morning wondering if he’d dreamed last night. But then he felt something jabbing into his stomach and remembered the file he’d stolen. He looked across at Monster-boy, who was sprawled at the other end of the couch, and saw he was clutching the silver wristband in his claws, and had to accept that it had all been very real.
He leaned across the couch and took the wristband. He held it up in the dim morning light filtering through the curtains, and gasped.
Monster-boy had woken. “Thank you for helping me,” he said quietly, so as not to wake Mrs. Morgenstern in her armchair. “No one’s ever done something like this for me before.”
“What did your mum say about this wristband?” Zach said urgently. “Did she say anything about where it came from?”
“Just what I told you,” said Monster-boy with a frown. “That it belonged to my grandfather, and that it was important.”
“This symbol,” said Zach, running his fingers over the etched surface. “It’s exactly like another one I’ve seen. In a place we call the Factory . . . What does it mean?” asked Zach.
Monster-boy shrugged. “Maybe nothing.”
“I don’t think—” Zach began. He had been about to say I don’t think it means nothing, but Morton took the wristband back and slipped it on his wrist, hiding it under his sleeve.
“Morton,” he whispered a moment later. “Why didn’t you say you were going to take the knife?”
Morton cocked his head to one side. “I should have asked. I’m sorry.”
“It’s just . . .” Zach said. “If Chief Andy had searched us and found that knife on you, we would have been in even more trouble.”
Morton’s puzzled expression morphed into understanding. He reached into his shoe and pulled out the knife, unwrapping it. “Where I come from, everyone carries knives, if they don’t have a gun that’s got silver coating. The silver keeps the smog from eating the mechanical parts.”
“I didn’t know that. How does that work?” Zach asked.
Morton shrugged. “Silver has a very high electrical and thermal conductivity. I’m not sure exactly why, but the silver plating counteracts the effects of the smog—for a while, at least. It tarnishes after a while because it reacts to the Sulphur compounds in the air . . .”
“Um, what?” Zach asked, blinking. “How do you know all that?”
His brother looked slightly embarrassed. “Anyway, a knife is cheaper and it will always work. I didn’t think about it. I just knew it would be useful.”
He slipped off the couch and padded through to the kitchen. Zach heard the tap running as Morton washed the knife, the opening and closing of a drawer as he put it back where it belonged, and a rustle as he put the tea-towel in the washing basket in the laundry. He returned to the couch. A few moments later, Mr. Morgenstern came downstairs and flicked on the TV, and they all watched Philip Nielson tell them about the latest Vanishing.
“I want you to watch this and think, boys,” Mr. Morgenstern said. “Think that could have been you.”
“But, Dad,” Zach said. “That kid was taken from his bedroom. So being out in the streets isn’t really any more dangerous.”
“Maybe it’s safer,” suggested Monster-boy. “You know, if you’re out and about and they can’t find you . . .”
Zach grinned, and punched him lightly in the arm.
“You’ve been spending too much time with Zach, Morton,” Mr. Morgenstern growled. “Now, what were you boys doing out there, anyway?”
“We were playing,” Zach said, hating the fact that he was lying to his parents. He hadn’t done a lot of that, and he didn’t like the way it felt. “Monster-tag. That’s all.”
Mr. Morgenstern shook his head. “In my day—”
“Did you play Monster-tag?” Zach asked.
“That’s not the point,” he said.
“We did,” Mrs. Morgenstern interjected. Mr. Morgenstern looked at her sharply, and she shrugged. “Well, we did. Before the Wall came down, we played tag all the time. We didn’t know anything about monsters, though, because we didn’t know what was on the Other Side of the Wall. We just called the tagger ‘it’, and we all ran away as fast as we could . . .”
“I was good at it,” said Mr. Morgenstern with a chuckle. “Everyone hated when I was ‘it’.”
Zach liked it when his parents talked about their past. He liked trying to imagine them being young and irresponsible. But he couldn’t keep them distracted for long, and soon they were talking about the “new Rules.”
The new Rules were these:
Zach and Monster-boy would no longer catch the bus to or from school. They’d be picked up and dropped off at the front entrance by Mr. Morgenstern.
They wouldn’t go to friends’ houses without asking. They wouldn’t go to the mall without asking. They wouldn’t walk around the block without asking.
They could go and play in the backyard during the day, but not after dark.
They would have their mobile phones on them at all times. (Mr. Morgenstern, following Zach’s advice, went out that morning and bought Morton a phone, which Zach was envious of, as it was newer and flashier and had bonus credit for downloadable games).
And lastly, and most importantly, they would obey all Rules at all times.
❖ ❖ ❖
Later, Zach crept upstairs and hid the file folder he’d stolen under his pillow. He told no one about it—not even Monster-boy. He wanted, desperately, to open it and take a look inside, but Monster-boy was waiting for him to show him how to play SnatchAttach on his new phone and Zach didn’t want him coming into the room while he was going through what might be personal information. His curiosity would have to wait.
Chapter Fourteen
As it happened, it waited a while. Zach couldn’t seem to get a moment to himself to look through it. Even when Morton wasn’t in the room, Zach could feel his parents watching him. They hovered in the hallways, poking their head through the door at random intervals to “check on them.”
He thought he might be able to read the file at night, using his LED watch. But Monster-boy always seemed to be awake, his yellow eyes glowing as he read through comic books and school textbooks. Zach always drifted off to sleep before Morton did, and the file remained unread.
When they got back to school on Monday, there were cars out front with blue signs on the sides saying Silvershine Security—Your Safety is Our Concern. Officers with blue uniforms strode around the corridors and stood outside the classrooms. They got in everyone’s way, but they also looked very stern and official, so no one was going to complain. Everyone was pretty sure they had guns hidden under their jackets.
Lex wasn’t intimidated, though. She was constantly badgering them for information. She had filled up pages and pages of her notebook with scribblings about the Vanishings, but as yet hadn’t made any headway in unravelling the mystery. Her latest theory —a time vortex, through which only children could travel—wasn’t yielding any promising leads. She’d turned her investigation on other sources instead, hoping for an interesting story. “Can you tell me what it’s like to be a security guard? Have you ever had to guard kids like this before? Do you know anything about the other Vanishings?”
The security guards started to avoid her. They even refused to guard the hallway where her locker was, because she’d ambush them with her notebook.
Teachers were having a terrible time trying to get students to concentrate. Everyone wanted to talk about the Vanishings, not focus on schoolwork.
“What’s the point of quadratic equations?” Zoe Hancock asked. “How are they going to help if someone snatches us out of our bedroom one night?”
But all this was a drop in the ocean compared to the uproar that befell North Silvershine when Philip Nielson broke the story on the monster’s involvement.
“So far, the single claw that has been found indicates the involvement of only one monster,” he said. “But it seems unlikely that the Vanishings are being carried out by a lone operator. Police are speculating on the participation of other monsters—the abduction of this many children would necessitate the coordinated movements of several individuals at the least. Citizens are angry that the police haven’t arrived at this conclusion earlier.”
Philip Nielson interviewed several people. Some said that they knew it all along; it had only been a matter of time before something like this happened. “Opening the Wall was a bad idea from the start. Leaving it open . . . it was an invitation for trouble.”
“How can we trust monsters?” others said. “They don’t think like us. They don’t have any morals. They don’t have any discipline. That’s probably why the Wall was put up in the first place.”
And still others were shocked. The mayor was one of these, and understandably so, given that the Opening had been his idea all along. “We have opened the Wall for them. Even though they weren’t quite . . . what we were expecting, we’ve welcomed them with open arms. We have offered them all the opportunities they could want! And what do they do? They throw it back in our faces! They refuse to speak with us. They refuse our offers to cross the Wall legally. And now, now, they decide to break our laws and steal our children! This is unforgiveable!”
Mr. Majewski, of course, seized upon this validation of his views on monsters as evidence for more attacks on the mayor. “Should not have been done, this Opening of the Wall. Exposing us all to danger! These undesirables roaming our streets at night. Creeping round houses, stealing children! Evil! Nefarious! Despicable!”
Mr. Morgenstern turned the TV off, his lips white. “This is rubbish,” he said.
“People are afraid,” said Mrs. Morgenstern. “And that so-called journalist isn’t helping things by stirring up the sensationalism of it all. He just wants a great story. He doesn’t care about what this is going to do to relations . . .”
“Relations!” said Mr. Morgenstern. “What relations? They’ve never related anything between the North and South sides.”
Zach went upstairs to his room. Monster-boy was in his Cave, poring over his science textbook. Zach sat next to him. “Does it bother you?”
“I don’t know,” said Monster-boy. He turned, and Zach saw that he was holding his wristband in one hand. “They’re my people, but I don’t know the monsters who are doing this.”
Monster-boy looked up, his eyes glowing. He hel
d up a hand so that one of his long curving claws glinted in their light. Zach knew he was thinking about how similar it was to the one they’d seen in the police station on Saturday night.
“I ran away from there because I was scared. I was . . . something happened and I had to get away. I don’t ever want to go back.”
“I don’t want you to go back either,” said Zach.
“The claw they found,” said Monster-boy. “It was just like mine. In South Silvershine—on the Other Side—things like kidnappings are . . . not common . . . but not shocking, because worse things happen all the time. Murders. Killings. Mobs and gangs fighting one another. Breaking into houses. Stealing things. It’s a bad place. And I just feel like—I should do something. I have to.”
Zach nodded. He knew exactly what Monster-boy was talking about, because this was precisely what had been weighing on his mind for the past few days. That they couldn’t just let these monsters get away with this.
“But what can we do?”
Neither of them had an answer.
Chapter Fifteen
Zach texted Ryder three times: call me, we need to talk.
He got no reply. Monster-boy tried from his phone, with the same result. Then Zach called him, but again, there was no answer.
It wasn’t like Ryder to ignore his phone, so Zach wondered if he’d lost it, or left it behind at school. Ryder was often getting grounded, but Zach didn’t think his mum would take away his mobile phone, not with the Vanishings happening. He waited impatiently in the morning, but Ryder wasn’t in his usual spot by the gate; nor did he come into class late and spouting excuses. Zach spent a lonely morning worrying about what could possibly have happened.
The worst of those worries was that Ryder had been kidnapped.
Everyone was suddenly giving Monster-boy sideways looks and whispering about the claw that had been found. Monster-boy ignored it all, but even though he didn’t show it, Zach thought it must have been horrible to endure. To their credit, Ida, Fiona, Lex, and their group ignored the gossip as well. They surrounded Morton like bodyguards, glaring at those who murmured and stared.
