Hollowpox: The Hunt for Morrigan Crow: Nevermoor 3

by Jessica Townsend

  ‘How do you figure that?’ said Francis.

  Thaddea looked at him and gave a huge, theatrical shrug. ‘Let’s think. One of them’s got a mesmerist and one’s got Arch, whose knack is literally theft.’

  Morrigan scrunched her nose. ‘Thaddea, I don’t think this is meant to be a comp—’

  ‘EVERYTHING IS A COMPETITION.’

  Francis and Morrigan glanced at each other in a silent understanding that it was probably best to let Thaddea have this one.

  They were supposed to stay within a one-block perimeter, regroup when their heists were complete and report back to Wunsoc as a unit. Thaddea chose their mark carefully: a big, sprawling pawn shop called Secondhand City.

  ‘How impressive does this thing have to be, then?’ Morrigan asked as they made their way up and down the cluttered aisles, eyeing the teetering stacks of furniture, antiques and oddities.

  Francis shrugged. ‘What about a bicycle? Or a suit of armour. Ooh – what about this gramophone? I’ve always wanted a gramophone.’

  Morrigan frowned. ‘You do know we don’t get to keep it afterwards?’

  He cast a longing look at the antique music player. ‘Oh. Right.’

  ‘You two are thinking about this the wrong way,’ said Thaddea. She pulled her long tangle of red hair into a messy ponytail and rolled up her sleeves. ‘We’re not here to do the bare minimum. We’ve got to go big or go home.’

  ‘Oh, good! I vote we go home,’ said Morrigan, and Francis laughed.

  They wasted ten minutes running up and down the aisles, making dozens of suggestions that Thaddea turned down.

  ‘What about that?’ Francis pointed out a mannequin. ‘We could dress it up in clothes and pretend it’s one of us. Just walk right out of here.’

  Thaddea rolled her eyes. ‘That’s the stupidest idea I’ve ever—’

  ‘Shhh,’ said Morrigan, holding an arm out to stop them as they came to the end of an aisle. There were voices coming from the next aisle over. They peeked around the corner and saw two men standing next to a large, spherical, mechanical-looking thing made of metal and rusting in places. It was almost as tall as they were.

  ‘… had five offers come in already and it’s only been here a week. Real collector’s item, this is.’

  The customer looked sceptical. ‘What is it?’

  ‘A railpod, innit,’ replied the other man, who must have been the shop owner.

  ‘Doesn’t look like a railpod to me,’ said the customer.

  The owner lowered his voice. ‘That’s ’cos it’s not a local design, is it? This is rare, genuine, bona fide property of the Wintersea Party—’

  ‘Oh, pull the other one! It’s just some rusty old piece of junk. I’ll give you thirty kred for the scrap metal.’

  ‘Thirty? You’re having a laugh, squire. I won’t sell it for less than a thousand.’

  ‘One thousand kred? You’re out of your mind!’ The potential buyer shook his head and sauntered away, chuckling.

  They watched the shop owner chase him all the way down the aisle until they were out of sight, then Francis ran eagerly to the machine. ‘It looks a bit like a railpod but it’s too small for that. And look – it’s got a propeller and a motor. This is a vessel made for the water.’

  Morrigan walked around it, trailing her hand on the metal sidings. ‘You think it’s a boat?’

  ‘Weird-looking boat,’ said Thaddea, jiggling a rusty handle.

  The door fell open, revealing a small space inside with a single seat and controls for a navigator. They gathered around, peering inside.

  Thaddea and Morrigan withdrew immediately, covering their noses.

  ‘Ugh, it stinks,’ said Thaddea. ‘It smells like seaweed and dead fish.’

  Morrigan nodded in agreement, trying not to retch. It wasn’t just seaweed and dead fish. There was something else familiar but hard to define – a sort of muddy, decaying smell. She didn’t dare take her hand away from her nose and mouth, and instead said in a muffled voice, ‘Shut the door, Francis, it’s disgusting.’

  ‘It’s not a boat, it’s a submarine.’ Francis was apparently too excited to notice the smell. ‘Look, that’s a periscope! And that stuff there is sonar equipment, I’m sure of it. It’s a personal vessel, made to transport one passenger. I think … I think it’s for spies!’

  ‘How do you know all this?’ asked Morrigan.

  ‘My Great-Aunt Iyawa was an officer in the Sea Force before she retired – Admiral Iyawa Akinfenwa, you can look her up, she was really famous in her day. She has a whole library of books about seafaring vessels.’ In his enthusiasm, he reached out to open the door wider, but Thaddea slammed it shut.

  It was the Juro, Morrigan realised. The River Juro that snaked through the middle of Nevermoor, dark and deep and meandering – that was the familiar smell.

  ‘Sometimes people travel from the Highlands all the way to Nevermoor via the river,’ Thaddea told them. ‘Doesn’t mean they’re spies.’ She walked around the vessel in a circle, knocking on random parts of the outer shell.

  But Francis was convinced. ‘All that technology – it’s much too expensive to be for ordinary people. Anyway, nobody else would be desperate enough to travel underwater in the Juro when there are venomous river serpents and Great Spiny Demonfish and Bonesmen and Waterwolves and all sorts.’

  Thaddea stood between Francis and Morrigan, placing a hand on each of their shoulders. Her eyes were suddenly shining. ‘Guys, this is it. This is what we’re stealing.’

  Morrigan stared at her. ‘Thaddea … you cannot be serious. That thing is huge. How are we going to carry it out of here?’

  ‘There are three of us! And I’ve easily got the strength of three people, so technically there are five of us.’

  ‘Technically still three,’ Francis disagreed.

  Thaddea’s face had turned bright pink with excitement. ‘Come on, can you imagine everyone’s faces when we show up back at Wunsoc with this thing?’

  ‘Back at Wunsoc?’ Morrigan gave a short, incredulous laugh. ‘You think we’re going to get that thing all the way back to Wunsoc? Thaddea, how? That’ll take us all day, and I’ve got to be back on Sub-Nine by—’

  ‘Ugh, not Sub-Nine again,’ Thaddea groaned.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Shut up about Sub-Nine, will you? It’s all you ever talk about lately.’ She kicked at an old table-leg in frustration. ‘Sub-Nine this, Wundrous Arts that. Whiny Binky this—’

  ‘It’s Owain Binks actually—’

  ‘I’m sick of hearing about it!’ said Thaddea, her eyes flashing. ‘How you’d rather be down in your secret school on your private floor while we’re all trying to get better at this stuff – you know, the stuff that the Wundrous Society actually exists for? It’s like you don’t even care.’

  Morrigan gave an indignant sputter and looked around at Francis for support, but he had suddenly become very interested in the floor. ‘I’m so sorry that crawling around in the sewers isn’t my idea of a good time. We can’t all be Thaddea No-Retreat of Clan Macleod.’

  ‘It’s not supposed to be about having a good time, though, is it? We have a job to do. We’re supposed to be working hard and making ourselves useful and doing some good in the realm!’

  ‘We’re THIRTEEN.’

  ‘I asked Gavin Squires if I could join the Beastly Division and you know what he told me?’ Thaddea barrelled on. ‘He said we had to start proving ourselves if we want to join the big kids. All of us. We have to prove ourselves as a unit.’

  ‘I don’t care what Gavin Squires said!’

  ‘Well, maybe you should,’ she spat. ‘Since out of all of us, you’re the one who’s got the most to prove. Wundersmith.’

  She said the word with so much venom that Morrigan flinched.

  Francis looked nervously from her to Thaddea and back again. ‘Maybe … maybe we should go back and find that mannequin—’

  ‘Oi! You three – get out here, quick!’ Hawthorne stood a
t the entrance of the shop, face red and chest heaving from running, and waved them urgently out into the street. ‘Come on, hurry. You’ve got to hear this.’

  The rest of Unit 919 was already waiting for them in the sunshine on Grand Boulevard, a little knot of black cloaks gathered at the outer edge of a crowd.

  ‘What’s going on?’ Morrigan asked a glowering Cadence as they approached.

  Cadence shook her head. ‘Listen to this fool.’

  The fool in question was a smartly dressed man standing on a crate and shouting into a megaphone at the assembled audience. It was an angry, booming, unpleasant sound, and the things he was saying were even more unpleasant.

  ‘This is simply a matter of nature righting itself! These so-called Wunimals are UNNATURAL. They are an AFFRONT TO HUMANITY. They were never meant to walk among humans as our equals!’

  Morrigan scowled. It seemed to her that the crowd’s response to this was an even split of cheering and booing, but everything was so loud it was hard to tell.

  ‘This was inevitable!’ he bellowed. ‘We have strayed too far from the natural order with our tolerance of these abominations, and now the true nature of the beast is exposing itself. We must protect ourselves and our families, and we must have the RIGHT TO DO SO. But those in power would DENY US that right!’

  The man slammed his fist repeatedly in the air with every sentence, as if striking an imaginary gavel. His face was such a deep shade of red it was nearly purple. If he wasn’t so obnoxious, Morrigan might have been mildly concerned he was about to keel over.

  ‘Mark my words, there is a cover-up afoot! You read the newspapers, you’ve seen the violent outbursts and mysterious attacks. And that’s just the ones we know about! I believe the Wundrous Society is concealing important information that the public has a RIGHT TO KNOW. I have it on good authority that right now inside the lavish, private, taxpayer-funded and unscrutinised Wundrous Society campus, they are sheltering not just one or two, but scores of KNOWN WUNIMAL ATTACKERS!’

  Morrigan shared a nervous glance with Cadence and Hawthorne. Their W badges gleamed golden in the sunlight. She resisted a sudden urge to reach over and tuck their collars inside their shirts.

  Could there be a leak at Wunsoc? All it would take was someone with a big mouth, and the Society didn’t exactly have a shortage of those. Or perhaps someone outside Wunsoc had simply figured it out. She supposed the truth was bound to come to light sooner or later.

  Morrigan felt someone grab her upper arm so hard it was sure to leave a bruise.

  ‘OW! What are you – Lam?’

  ‘Let’s go.’ Lam’s face was stricken. She began to round up the others, ushering them away from the crowd. ‘All of you, let’s go. Brollies out.’

  Morrigan and the rest of Unit 919 followed Lam around the corner at a pace. Nobody questioned her, and nobody was surprised when they made it to the nearest Brolly Rail platform with perfect timing. They hooked their umbrellas on to nine empty loops in a row, just as the rail came whizzing past.

  On their return journey to Wunsoc, they soared above the crowd gathered in Grand Boulevard to find that the rally had devolved into an all-out street brawl and the Stink were arriving to break it up. Lam the oracle had – of course – got them out of there just in time.

  Things were still tense between Morrigan and Thaddea when they got to Hometrain later that afternoon. Morrigan couldn’t forget the way Thaddea had hissed Wundersmith at her, and Thaddea was positively seething over the other teams’ successful thefts. (Cadence’s group had swiped a diamond necklace from a heavily guarded jewellery shop, and Arch’s group came back with their pockets full of pilfered items and a long list of where to return them.)

  But if the others picked up on the friction, they didn’t say anything. All their chatter since jumping off the Brolly Rail had been about the man with the megaphone and the spontaneous riot. Arch thought he’d spotted a lynxwun in the crowd, and Hawthorne swore up and down that he’d seen a furious-looking goatwun head-butting someone.

  ‘Do you think they were infected?’ he said. ‘Or just—’

  ‘Angry?’ Morrigan finished. ‘Don’t know.’

  ‘I’d be angry if someone called me an abomination,’ said Mahir. ‘Very shoddy.’

  Miss Cheery arrived then, bang on time as always, and leapt breathlessly from the carriage.

  ‘Did you hear?’ she asked them. ‘Tomorrow’s lessons are cancelled! The Elders have called a senior summit and announced that junior scholars get the last day of term off as a treat, to do something fun with their units.’

  ‘What’s a senior summit?’ asked Cadence.

  ‘Oh, just a slightly more urgent C&D meeting. About all this Hollowpox business, you know,’ Miss Cheery said, in what sounded to Morrigan like a practised breezy tone, with a carefully careless wave of her hand. Morrigan glanced at Cadence, who raised an eyebrow back at her. She knew they were both wondering if this had something to do with the rally on Grand Boulevard. ‘Society members will be returning from all over the Seven Pockets, and the Gathering Place won’t be big enough to fit all those extra people, so it’s a day off for us. We can go anywhere we like!’

  The announcement was met with cheers from most of Unit 919, but Morrigan was less than excited. She dropped into a beanbag and peeked inside her notebook of ghostly hours; there was a promising one tomorrow that she was dying to see – a lesson in the art of Masquerade. The last thing she wanted was the day off school, when she was about to go a whole summer without any ghostly hours.

  Thaddea gasped as if she’d just had the most important revelation of her life. ‘Miss! This is destiny. There’s a fight on at the Trollosseum tomorrow between Grimsgorgenblarg the Mighty and Fladnak the Fit. Can we go, Miss? Please?’

  ‘Nah, let’s go to the pool!’ said Hawthorne. ‘It’s meant to be scorching tomorrow.’

  ‘The pool?’ Thaddea looked as if he’d just suggested setting fire to an orphanage.

  ‘Oh!’ Mahir sat up ramrod straight. ‘Can we go to the Gobleian Library? Apparently they have the only existing copy of Fitherendian’s Compendium.’ He looked around for a reaction but was met with blank stares. ‘Fitherendian’s Compendium? The illustrated collection of all seventy-seven syllabaries and alphabets of the known elvish languages? Handwritten three thousand years ago by a silent order of monks—’

  ‘CAN WE GO TO THE POOL PLEASE, MISS?!’ Hawthorne interrupted loudly.

  But Miss Cheery was looking thoughtful. ‘Actually, the Gobleian’s not a bad idea at all, Mahir. An old girlfriend of mine works at the Gob. She just got promoted from bookfighter to librarian.’

  ‘Really, Miss, a library?’ said Cadence, making a face. ‘I thought this was supposed to be a treat, not the opening ceremony of the Boring Festival of Things That Are Boring.’

  Mahir frowned. ‘The Gobleian’s not boring, Cadence.’

  ‘Said the Boring Master of Ceremonies.’

  ‘Master of Boremonies,’ Hawthorne amended.

  Cadence reluctantly granted Hawthorne a high-five.

  ‘It was founded by the Wundrous Society itself,’ Mahir went on, undaunted, ‘and there’s a whole private section dedicated to the history of Wunsoc. Members only,’ he finished, holding up his index finger and wiggling the tiny gold W tattoo.

  Morrigan perked up. If there was a section about Wundrous Society history, surely that included Wundersmith history? Maybe even real Wundersmith history, instead of the propaganda they were peddling at Proudfoot House.

  She put her hand up. ‘I vote for the Gobleian.’

  Cadence and Hawthorne looked at her as if she’d gone mad. Thaddea scowled.

  ‘Hmm.’ The conductor had a coy, slightly dreamy expression when they pulled into Station 919. ‘Be great to see Roshni again. I bet she’d give us a tour if I asked nicely.’

  ‘Miss, I don’t think you understand,’ said Thaddea as they all disembarked. ‘Grimsgorgenblarg and Fladnak—’

  She was interru
pted by the short, sharp shriek of the Hometrain whistle and a whoosh of white steam.

  ‘See you bright and early!’ Miss Cheery called over the noise, waving them off as Hometrain disappeared into the tunnel.

  Thaddea gave Mahir a swift, hard punch in the arm.

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  The Gobleian Library

  ‘Miss, please,’ whinged Hawthorne, for the fifth time that morning. He’d been dragging his heels the whole walk from Wunsoc, in the North Quarter of Old Town, to the Gobleian Library in the West Quarter. ‘Can’t we go to the pool instead? Unit 918 went to the pool. It’s scorching.’

  ‘But we’re going somewhere better than the pool, Hawthorne,’ Miss Cheery called back to him, also for the fifth time, from her spot at the front of the group. ‘We’re going to the Gob. Come on, keep up.’

  ‘She can give it a cool name all she wants,’ Hawthorne muttered to Morrigan. ‘Doesn’t make it any less of a library.’

  The walk through Old Town (Miss Cheery insisted on walking) was long and sweaty. On the way, they saw several ice-cream wagons swamped with customers, a group of nursery-aged children squealing and running under a fountain, and packs of picnickers in the Garden Belt, looking cool and content as they sipped lemonade beneath the shade of enormous fig trees. With every scene of summertime bliss they passed, Hawthorne let out a doleful whimper, and Morrigan had to haul him along by his arm to keep him moving. Thaddea was even worse, walking at a snail’s pace in silent protest. (She still hadn’t spoken to Mahir or Morrigan. ‘Macleods Don’t Forgive,’ apparently.)

  At last, they arrived at an imposing sandstone building on Mayhew Street that Morrigan had passed many times but never visited. They went in groups of three through the enormous revolving door. She entered last with Hawthorne and Mahir, pushing through together and filing out the other side into … Mayhew Street.

  At first Morrigan thought they’d done a full circle and come back out the way they’d gone in, but … no, that wasn’t it. They were outside again, they were standing in front of the Gobleian Library façade on Mayhew Street … but it was different this time.