Of all the buildings, only the gym has escaped damage. In better times, the entire population of the college would squeeze in here to watch a movie on the roll-down screen. Nobody has to squeeze now. Barely fifty chairs hold the survivors from the night before.
Anto intercepts her before she can pass through the double doors. “Nessa!” he cries, torn between outrage and concern. “You’re supposed to be in the medical tent!”
Aoife dragged her there as the Red Cross were still setting it up. Before handing Nessa over to the medics, Aoife said, “Don’t tell anybody about Conor, you hear me?”
“But … Testimony.”
“Yes, your Testimony must be honest, I know that. But it ends when the Three Minutes are up, doesn’t it? It’s about the Grey Land; they don’t need to know what comes after that. Your parents don’t need to know it.”
Maybe Aoife’s right. A survivor’s Testimony is something that follows them around the rest of their lives, and while nobody will sympathize with Conor, Nessa knows how it might look. Wrong. Vicious. Unnecessary. People don’t see women as killers, even now, even after all of this!
Perhaps in time she will feel regret for what she’s done, or shame. But not yet. Not ever!
“Nessa!” Anto says again. She must have been daydreaming, for she finds herself sliding down the wall until he grabs her with his normal-sized right arm.
“Let me take you back.”
“No. I’m staying here.” And by “here,” she means nestled into the warmth of his body, close enough to sense the beating of his heart, forcing him to bring his larger arm into play just to keep her on her bandaged feet.
She lifts her chin, but hesitates, suddenly aware the whole hall can see them together, her weaknesses exposed.
Then she kisses him anyway. By Crom, it hurts! Everything hurts. Even his hair chafes where she’s grabbed it with her torn palms, and the pain makes her laugh suddenly, for she never imagined a heaven like this, where even agony serves as a reminder of life, survival, victory. Every sense is screaming for her attention. The smell of him! Sweaty and sooty at once. The scratch of his unshaved chin. The tenderness of his lips and the care with which he curls his massive strength about her frame.
“Do you like farms?” she whispers.
“Farms? Why … I don’t know. I’ve—”
“Say yes.”
“Yes. Um. I … love farms?”
“Good. And Donegal?”
“It’s, uh, the best place in the world?”
“Take me inside. I don’t think I can walk.”
Alanna Breen hobbles in last of all. Past sleeping bags and bandaged faces. Past hanging heads and slumped shoulders. The dragging of her injured leg is the only sound in the place, and with her glistening burns she knows she looks worse than anybody here.
But she owes it to the students to keep her back straight. Only six months ago, some of these were playing with dolls. Most still await the Call, God help them. These are her children, she thinks, and she shakes with a love for them that is every bit as strong as that of their parents. No wonder her reserve crumbles the moment she turns to face the crowd.
She has prepared words that won’t come. Instead Alanna Breen, who has never so much as hugged a weeping pupil for comfort, is forced to walk from chair to chair, kissing each person solemnly on the forehead.
On she hobbles, from little Bronagh Glynn, to Cormac O’Malley, to Aoife and Liz Sweeney. There is pudgy Mr. Hickey with burnt bits of his own maps caught in his singed hair, a fierce grin on his face. After him, she finds Nabil and Taaft; the veteran Melanie, looking even more afraid than the others for some reason. Next she comes to the five members of Year 3 who tricked a similar number of Sídhe into getting locked in a basement. She kisses them all, as well as crotchety Ms. Flynn and Lorcan Bianconi and Mitch Cohen …
Ms. Breen holds her composure all along the first two rows of chairs. But then she comes to Anto and Nessa. So wrapped up are they in each other that they barely register her presence, or the fact that she has paused before them.
What’s wrong? Ms. Breen asks herself. What’s wrong?
For once the answer is “nothing.” They are happy, that’s all it is. They are like something transported from the world of her youth to remind her of how things used to be sometimes. How they ought to be, even now.
She starts sobbing, all dignity lost, crying for the ones who didn’t make it, for twenty-five years of empty chairs in the refectory. Then everybody is at it, the whole gym filled with their drawn-out despair, until at last the school head recovers herself and shouts, “Enough! Enough!”
At last she can speak, because the truth has finally dawned on her: “We have won a battle,” she cries. “Don’t you understand? We have won! The Nation must survive! We will survive! We are winning! The Nation will survive!”
She has pressed a magic switch that has them all leaping to their feet, yelling the slogan back at her. They’re still weeping as they shout, of course, but it doesn’t stop them fighting through it. The Nation will survive! The Nation will survive! They scream it loud enough for the whole country to hear.
And perhaps, in the Grey Land of their exile—wherever exactly it may lie—the eternal grins of the Sídhe slip, just a little.
Four years ago they believed their daughter to be doomed, and were so afraid of the suffering to come they even considered poison.
Yet here she is, beautiful and strong. She has found love. She is a hero of the Nation, whose Testimony will forever change the way people think of the Sídhe. But all she wants now are her mam and dad, as she did when she was an infant.
They feel her arms, strong as anchors, when she hugs them. Her skin against theirs is strangely smooth, like porcelain baked in a kiln.
“I can’t stay long,” Nessa says. “The doctors want to look at me.”
“Where’s Anto?” Agnes asks. “Don’t we get to meet him?”
They’ve had a letter from her already, that she sent before she came home, so they know a little of what’s gone on, but no details. And, to be honest, the details don’t matter. She has returned to them, while around the country other parents are not so lucky, for even after all that has happened in Boyle, children are still being snatched away by the Call.
Nessa spends all of Christmas with them, staying in her old room, insisting on the presence of the worn-out teddies of her childhood.
But she has changed. Fergal gasps to see her rearrange the embers in the hearth with her bare hands. And he gasps again as she shows him how she can spit the fire out of her fingers after, or even her lips.
Early in the new year, she tells her parents that she has to leave again.
“The Nation must survive,” she says. “I can help with that.”
She sits alone on the bus, her suitcase propped up on the seat beside her so she can pretend it’s Megan sitting there instead. And off she goes through the snowy roads, Agnes and Ferg waving her away, hugging each other, their pride so fierce it burns.
This is a grim book, but it wasn’t grim in the making, what with people from all over the world adding in energy and encouragement. My family were brilliant. Then, there was Julie Crisp, who was wiser and more generous than she had to be.
And what about the beta readers like Carol Connolly, Iain Cupples, and Doug of the McEachern clan? They gave up lots of time, didn’t they? And not just for The Call, but for the manuscripts that came before it too! And I don’t want to forget Carole Fleres, of course, who helped with earlier works. Thanks, guys, seriously.
I’m also grateful to the Ficklings—all Ficklings. Everywhere. But in particular to Rosie (aka “The First”), who pushed my work on the rest of the office; to David, who loves to phone with good news; to Caro, who gave me the run of her home and pretended not to be traumatized by my strange ways.
One day in July, I was introduced to the incredible DFB team in Oxford, and that’s when I knew everything was going to be okay. Professionals every one of them, an
d if I were a drinker, I’d raise a glass in honor of Carolyn, Bron, Anthony, Phil, and Simon, and all the rest.
I’d need lots of glasses for the editing side, since so many people chipped in. But the steady hand on the helm belonged to Bella Pearson, who gathered everything together and fired brilliant suggestions into my inbox.
Others may be completely unaware of their contributions to The Call. They include the dead poets, Amergin, Eibhlín, and Anonymous—my apologies to you all, and my sincere respect. There’s also the boarding school I attended when I was Nessa’s age, Clongowes Wood College, and the ones I attended in spirit in the company of Enid Blyton. Art helped too—the swirly heroic stuff of Jim Fitzpatrick. The first Book of Conquests I ever picked up was the one he illustrated.
Plenty donated courage to the cause when they came to readings of early versions of this book at Boskone, LuxCon, and TitanCon. The Brotherhood Without Banners showed up every time and they have no idea how much it helped to hear them say what worked or didn’t work for them.
And let’s not forget the organizers of the above cons, who work so hard every year to provide people like me with such opportunities!
To all of you, my thanks for this book.
PEADAR O’GUILIN grew up in beautiful Donegal in the far northwest of Ireland. These days, he lives in Dublin, where he toils day and night for a giant corporation. You can find him on Twitter by following @TheCallYA.
Copyright © 2016 by Peadar O’Guilin
All rights reserved. Published by Scholastic Inc., Publishers since 1920, by arrangement with David Fickling Books, Oxford, England. SCHOLASTIC and associated logos are trademarks and/or registered trademarks of Scholastic Inc. DAVID FICKLING BOOKS and associated logos are trademarks and/or registered trademarks of David Fickling Books.
First published in the United Kingdom in 2016 by David Fickling Books, 31 Beaumont Street, Oxford OX1 2NP.
www.davidficklingbooks.com
The publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Ô Guilin, Peadar, author.
Title: The Call / Peadar Ô Guilin.
Description: First [American] edition. | New York : David Fickling Books/Scholastic Inc., 2016. | “First published in the United Kingdom in 2016 by David Fickling Books.” | Summary: For the last twenty-five years every teenager in Ireland has been subject to “the Call,” which takes them away to the land of the Sídhe, where they are hunted for twenty-four hours (though only three minutes pass in this world)—handicapped by her twisted legs, Nessa Doherty knows that very few return alive, but she is determined to be one of them.
Identifiers: LCCN 2016012970 | ISBN 9781338045611 (hardcover : alk. paper)
Subjects: LCSH: Fairies—Juvenile fiction. | Mythology, Celtic—Juvenile fiction. | Survival—Juvenile fiction. | Good and evil—Juvenile fiction. | Ireland—Juvenile fiction. | CYAC: Fairies—Fiction. | Mythology, Celtic—Fiction. | Survival—Fiction. | Good and evil—Fiction. | People with disabilities—Fiction. | Ireland—Fiction.
Classification: LCC PZ7.O363 Cal 2016 | DDC 823.92 [Fic] —dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016012970
First edition, September 2016
Jacket design & art by Christopher Stengel
e-ISBN 978-1-338-04806-3
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. No part of this publication may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher. For information regarding permission, write to Scholastic Inc., Attention: Permissions Department, 557 Broadway, New York, NY 10012.
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