Ralph’s voice, sharp as a knife’s edge, floats back and forth, now near, now far. Battling the wind. There really is wind. It rings in Blind’s ears, touches his hair. Something strange is happening to him. It’s not supposed to be like that here. He hears the Forest in the stuffy office.
It’s right outside.
It creeps closer.
It scratches at the door and groans with its roots.
It waits. It calls.
“What’s going on? Did you hear me?”
“Yes.” Blind tries to blot out all sounds except the voice. “Yes, I hear.”
“You are going to leave them alone. Understand? We already got Red, and that’s enough. Yes, I know the Law. Three against one and all that. But I don’t care. This time the Law will have to be set aside. By you.”
Blind listens. To this strange person who lives in the House and doesn’t know what the House is. Doesn’t know about the night and its own laws.
“The night brought them to me,” Blind says. He feels like he’s talking to a child too small to understand. “The night woke me up and made me hear. Hear the three hunting the one. Why? I don’t know. No one knows.”
“You are not to touch them. I forbid it. If anything happens to them you are going to be sorry.”
Blind listens patiently. It’s the only thing that’s left. Listen when you can’t explain. Thorns are springing up on the road to the Forest. The internal clock had chimed morning long ago. But the night doesn’t end. Because it is the Longest Night, the one happening but once a year. And this conversation doesn’t end. They both have their own truths, him and three-fingered Ralph.
“Do you hear?”
He does. He hears streams disappearing underground. Birds and frogs vanishing in the air. Trees walking away. The sadness of it.
“Not a single hair on their heads. Or you’ll be out of the House before you can count to one. Got it? I’ll make it my personal business.”
Blind smiles. Ralph doesn’t understand that there is nothing except the House. How is it possible to be out of it, then?
“I know you killed Pompey. The principal could find out, too.”
So that must be what’s on the paper that R One is clutching in his hand. The crumpled whisper of a snitch?
“Stop smirking!”
Ralph’s hands jostle him unexpectedly roughly. There must have been some words he was supposed to say. But he doesn’t have them.
“I don’t have the words you want, R One,” Blind says. “Not tonight.”
The breath of danger becomes closer. He can’t explain anything. He follows the Law. He lives the way the House wants him to, divining its wishes. He hears what others can’t. The way it was with Pompey.
“You’re barking up the wrong tree, Ralph,” he says. “It will be exactly the way it must be.”
“You little brat!”
The air suddenly grows solid, becomes blobs of cotton wool. Blind’s stomach fills up with glass. The glass breaks with a crash and stings him from inside.
“Shhh,” Sphinx hisses at himself when he stumbles over a loose floorboard.
Humpback hurriedly aims the flashlight down. They are looking for Tubby, even though Blind actually promised to find him. That’s according to Tabaqui, who woke them all up to relate the saga of his adventures. Sphinx is reasonably sure he knows where Tubby might be located, and pities him.
It’s time for the morning to arrive, but the House doesn’t know that, or doesn’t care to know. The floorboards squeak disgustingly. A dog howls somewhere in the Outsides. It’s noisy behind the doors of the dorms, and the pipes sing in the bathrooms.
“Not many are asleep,” Humpback notes. “Practically no one.”
“It’s not every night that Leaders are being deposed,” Sphinx says. “Each pack probably had its own prodigal Jackal.”
They pass the teachers’ bathroom. It stares at them menacingly, as befits a crime scene. They spook two shadows who shrink from the light, whispering.
“First tourists,” Humpback sighs. “By morning it’s going to get crowded here.”
Sphinx is silent.
“Could it be that Blind has found him already?”
Humpback would like to keep the conversation going. It’s soothing to him. He doesn’t like being out at night.
“If he had, he’d have brought him. Half an hour is enough for him to find anyone, wherever they might be. More than enough,” Sphinx says.
“Why isn’t he back, then?”
“Ask another. I’m here with you, not there with him.”
It stinks of cigarette smoke on the stairs. On the landing below them, someone sneezes sleepily. Someone who’s listening to a portable radio.
“Going up?” Humpback says, surprised.
“There’s one thing I want to check,” Sphinx says. “I have a hunch.”
