by Yvonne Woon
I put my hand up. “Just—stop—no more. Let’s focus,” I said, eyeing a nurse as she talked on the phone.
Everything was just as I remembered: the drawings on the walls, the crayons and picture books in the waiting room, the hum of machines beeping, nurses chatting, shoes tapping against the floor. A line of bedrooms.
Then room 151. “Someone’s in there,” Anya said, peering through the window. Standing on my toes, I peered over her shoulder. A single bed stood in the middle of the room, and a boy was lying in it, the sheets tucked around his tiny legs.
I knocked. When he didn’t move, I knocked again, louder, and turned the knob.
The room was still, save for the breeze from an air-conditioning vent, which blew up beneath a potted plant, making its leaves quiver. The same boy from my vision was asleep in the bed, his arms riddled with patches and tubes, as if he had been turned inside out.
Anya poked his leg, but he didn’t wake.
“Don’t touch him!” I whispered.
“Why not?”
“Just—watch him while I go under, okay?” I took out a piece of notebook paper and a stick of graphite from my coat. The plastic tiles felt cold and slippery as I knelt on the floor.
Pushing away a knot of wires, I slid underneath the bed, which was nailed to the floor, my body just fitting in the narrow space. I patted the ground with my hand until I felt something rough and cold, like metal. I traced its edges with my fingers: it was in the shape of a circle. And placing the piece of paper over the area, I rubbed the page with graphite to make an impression of the surface, hoping that I was doing it correctly.
I emerged with a sneeze. We both froze, waiting for the boy to wake up, but he didn’t move.
“So what is it?” Anya asked, pulling dust bunnies out of my hair as we looked down at the rubbing I had made. It was an oval plaque of some sort, engraved with the following inscription:
to arrive there
follow the nose of the bear
to the salty waters beneath;
Beneath the words was a crest depicting a small bird. I felt my heart skip. “It can’t be,” I whispered, gripping the paper.
“What?” Anya said.
“It’s a canary,” I said, tracing its wings. “The crest of the Nine Sisters.”
Before I could say anything more, the small boy shifted in his bed, making Anya and me jump. “Let’s talk about this somewhere else,” I whispered, and made for the door.
“So what is it?” she said as we waited for the elevator.
Glancing down the hall to make sure no one was looking, I took out the paper. “Some sort of riddle. A set of directions,” I said, pointing to the first line: to arrive there. Suddenly, I looked up. “Maybe it’s a set of directions to the secret of the Nine Sisters.”
I looked to Anya, expecting her to be excited, but instead she said, “I don’t know. It seems too easy. Why would it be beneath a hospital bed?”
I watched the dial of the elevator tremble as it moved down the floors toward us.
“The last line ends with a semicolon, not a period. Maybe it’s incomplete.”
Anya looked skeptical. “All of that stuff is a legend, though. We don’t even know if any of it is true.”
“It’s a stretch, I know, but this exists, right?” I said, staring down at the page. “What else could explain this?”
“How are you so sure it belongs to the Nine Sisters?”
I pointed to the bird at the bottom of the page. “This is the exact same crest that’s in our history book, under the Nine Sisters. I looked them up last night.”
Anya shook her head. “It can’t be. It has to be a fake, or a crest that looks just like it.”
“Why? Why can’t it be real?”
She gazed at the paper as if she feared it. “How could you have seen that in a vision?”
“Maybe I was meant to find it.”
As she studied me, a smile spread across her face. “That is the most ridiculous thing I’ve ever heard.”
“So what do you propose, then?” I asked, taking offense. “We just ignore it?”
She sucked on a lock of red hair. “Fine,” she said. “Let me see it again.”
The elevator dinged, and a down arrow lit up. Once the doors closed, I took out the rubbing.
“So we have to follow the nose of the bear to the salty waters beneath,” I said, reading the final two lines.
“I don’t know what that means,” Anya said.
I crossed my arms. The nose of the bear. That couldn’t be referring to a real bear. Maybe it meant an etching on a building, or a rock formation that looked like a bear.…And the salty waters probably referred to the ocean.…
“But Madame Goût said that the Nine Sisters vowed to let their secret die with them so no one would ever find it,” Anya said. “So why would they leave a riddle leading to it?”
I didn’t know, and before I could say anything more, the elevator doors opened to the ground floor.
“Renée?”
My eyes traveled up from the right leg of his pants, cuffed as if he had just come from riding a bicycle, to his collared shirt, unbuttoned at the top, to his auburn mess of hair.
“Noah?” He was carrying a cup of coffee and a book.
He looked at my name tag. Quickly, I ripped it off and crumpled it in my hand, hoping he hadn’t read it.
“What was that?”
“Nothing,” I said, giving Anya a look. She did the same. “Why are you here?”
“Visiting my grandmother,” he said.
I swallowed, staring at his dimples, at the dark red stubble on his cheeks. “I’m so sorry.”
“No, it’s okay. She’s been here for a while. I like to come every so often to say hi, even if she can’t hear me. I was actually on my way here when I ran into you on the street.”
“You were?” I said, inexplicably relieved to realize that the flowers weren’t for Clementine, but for his grandmother.
“Who are you visiting?”
“Oh, um, no one, really.”
“No one, really?” he said, letting out a laugh. “What are you doing here, then?”
As I searched for the right answer, Anya piped in. “Sampling the cafeteria.”
“We were just leaving,” I said, grabbing her arm. “We have to get back to campus for a…”
“Club meeting,” Anya said, finishing my sentence.
He backed into the elevator. “A club? What club?”
“It’s girls only. A private thing,” Anya said, making my face go red with embarrassment.
“I hope your grandmother feels better,” I said, just as the doors closed. Together Anya and I ran back to St. Clément, splashing through the puddles collecting on the flagstones, and into the dormitory.
IT RAINED FOR THE NEXT FEW WEEKS, SEPTEMBER washing into October with little change. I should have been happy about my discovery in the hospital, but I couldn’t feel anything but dull. With Dante gone, time seemed to stand still around me; the mornings just as cloudy and dark as the evenings, as if the sun had never decided to rise. There was no wind, like the world was holding its breath along with me, waiting for him to return.
Anya and I spent the beginning of October huddled in the library, trying to decode the riddle. I looked up the crest of the canary dozens of times, comparing the photographs in the books to the one on my rubbing just to make sure. Despite the imprecision of the graphite, the similarities were unmistakable. The crests were the same. That’s when I got the first tingling sensation that I might be right: the secret of the Nine Sisters wasn’t dead; it was preserved in a riddle.
But what did it mean? I had already searched all of the indexes for anything about oceans, bears, noses, or any combination of them, but the clues were so vague that they rendered nothing. The more I studied the rubbing, the more I was certain of only one thing: the verse was only one part of a larger riddle. And in order to make sense of it, I had to find the other pieces.
“But how?” Anya asked, the bangles on her wrists clinking together as we walked to Strategy and Prediction, which was being held off campus.
“Maybe it will come to me in another vision,” I said. “That’s how it happened before.”
The rest of the students loitered on the sidewalk by the school gates, which were matted with wet leaves. Parked by the guard’s booth was a dark green van, with the St. Clément crest printed discreetly on the back.
Headmaster LaGuerre sauntered down the path in a light brown suit. When he saw us, he smiled and fished the keys out of his pocket.
I sat in the back row, in between Anya and a boy named Harrison, who had a chubby face covered in freckles. The seats were dusty and rough. In front of me sat Noah and Clementine, their heads bobbing together as we rolled over the cobblestone streets of the old port. I watched as she played with a lock of his hair and whispered something in his ear. He laughed, and I looked away, not wanting to admit that some part of me was jealous.
“As you probably realized from your placement tests, some dead animals are easier to sense than others,” said Headmaster LaGuerre, glancing back at us through the rearview mirror. “The French term that Monitors use to describe this is force majeure, or in English, superior force. Some dead animals have a stronger force than other animals, which makes them easier to detect.
“For example, other than humans, the animal with the heaviest soul, and therefore the greatest force, is the cat, which is why it is our school mascot. The cat is much like a Monitor, because it can detect death just as we can.”
I thought back to Headmistress Von Laark’s Siamese cats, who always pawed at Dante and Gideon.
“The same distinctions of force exist within humans. The sign of a Clairvoyant Monitor is being able to recognize these differences in weight. Death is everywhere. In order to do our jobs, we need to be able to distinguish between dead animals, dead people, and the Undead. After that, we find the Undead who are dangerous, and put them to rest.”
“Who put us in charge?” I asked, thinking of Dante. “Why do we get to decide who lives and who dies?”
As I spoke, I felt a pair of eyes on me, which I assumed were Clementine’s. But when I looked up, I discovered they belonged to Noah.
The headmaster nodded thoughtfully. “Because a world without order would collapse in on itself. We’re the only ones capable of sensing the Undead. It’s not fair, I suppose, but it’s not our task to solve the mysteries of nature.”
The van continued along the St. Lawrence River to the grungy industrial area of Montreal. Headmaster LaGuerre glanced over his shoulder as he maneuvered down the waterfront. “But water,” he said. “Water complicates everything.”
Following the headmaster, we climbed out of the van and walked to the dock. Big windowless factories lined the shore, spewing a continual stream of black smog into the sky. Rusty pipes and corroded beams of metal stuck out of the river like the remnants of a flooded forest. It smelled like a mixture of salt and sewage, and for the first time, I was glad my sense of smell was partially muted.
“It is incredibly difficult to sense a dead creature when it is immersed in water,” the headmaster said, stopping at the end of the dock. Behind him, a slew of rowboats bobbed in the water. “And the deeper it is, the more challenging it is for us to sense its presence. Which is exactly why we’re here. To practice our intuition.”
I shivered as I studied the flotsam drifting along the riverbank: beer cans and wrappers and cigarette butts.
“This is where people dump things that they never want to be found again. Weapons, clothes, the dead…Death often resides in inconvenient locations, and as a Monitor in the world, places like this will be your office. Many of the cases you will encounter are of children who have drowned —and per the Cartesian Oath, you will have to find them and bury them before they float and reanimate.”
A murmur rose over the class.
He gazed out at the murky water. “I have planted one dead animal out there,” he said. “Your job is to locate it, identify it, and if possible, record its depth.”
We paired up. Noah was working with Clementine. I worked with Anya, her platform shoes wobbling as she climbed into a rowboat.
After I settled in, she handed me the oars. “You row,” she said. “I’ll direct you.”
“Why do you get to direct?” I said.
“Because I have weak arms,” she said. “I’m not good at sports.”
“But I’m better at detecting the dead than you are.”
She looked offended at my statement, but shook it off. “All the more reason for me to practice.”
“Fine.”
“Fine.”
As we rowed out, the headmaster climbed into his own boat and continued to shout out tips on sensing the presence of the dead beneath the water. I tried to pay attention, but Anya kept changing our course. “To the left more. No, now to the right. Oh, sorry, never mind, back to the left again.”
Frustrated, I turned around. “Can you just pick a direction and stick with it?” At the periphery of my vision, I could see Noah put one of his oars down.
Anya pointed to the left. “More that way.”
“That’s wrong,” I said. “I can feel it.”
“So can I,” Anya said. “Just because you’re first rank doesn’t mean you’re always right.”
“I’m right this time,” I said, but was distracted by a splash.
Clementine and Noah were a few feet behind us, their boat wobbling as Noah teased her with a net he’d fished out of the river.
“Stop it!” Clementine said, shielding her face as she laughed. “You’re shaking the whole boat!”
She winced as an oar fell in, splashing water into her face. Her voice was shrill as she screamed.
“Okay!” she said, smiling while she wiped her cheeks, “we have to get back to work.”
“You work too much,” Noah said, teasing her as he shook the water from his arms.
“Everyone else is already looking for the animal; we’re behind.”
“Oh, come on,” Noah said. “It’s just a class. Besides, how hard could it be?”
Clementine adjusted her barrette. “Everything worth doing is hard,” she said, and picked up an oar.
Letting out a sigh, Noah’s eyes wandered across the river as she rowed backward. I felt his gaze linger on me.
Clementine must have seen him staring, because her lips tightened. Quickly, I averted my eyes, and, under Anya’s directions, we zigzagged away from them until we were close enough to hear the headmaster speaking to one of the boats ahead of us.
“Stop,” Anya said. “I think it’s right below us.”
I couldn’t feel anything and knew she was wrong. But I humored her. Putting down the oars, I leaned over the edge of the boat and stared into the water, where I could see the headmaster’s reflection as he rowed alongside a pair of girls.
I watched his lips move as he spoke. “It’s customary to bury Monitors at sea—a place where their bodies can never be detected, even by fellow Monitors. Very few Monitors ask to be buried in the ground. The few that do are buried in the Monitors’ section of the Mont Royal Cemetery.”
Mont Royal Cemetery. I watched the reflection of the headmaster’s face in the water. Suddenly I felt exhausted and miserable, as if I’d been searching for something but had failed.
Mont Royal Cemetery. I felt dizzy. I hated myself. I hated that I had failed.
My chest heaved, and I coughed. Slowly, I felt myself falling forward. There was a splash. And then everything went cold.
When I surfaced, I was dry and standing in a thicket of trees on the side of the mountain. In one hand I held a flashlight. Below me, the city was reduced to strings of tiny lights, and beyond that, I could see the St. Lawrence River, its waves glimmering in the moonlight.
I began to walk. Just a few yards away, there was a joggers’ path illuminated by streetlamps, which wound up the mountain. I stayed away from it. Instea
d, I chose to travel unseen, weaving through the trees until I reached the other side of Mont Royal.
Two teenagers were standing by a drinking fountain, holding hands. Unable to help myself, I stopped for a moment and watched them whisper to each other and laugh. They seemed so carefree, as if time didn’t matter. The boy played with the girl’s hair, touching her neck, and I leaned against the trunk of a tree near them, my eyes so dry that they stung. When the girl leaned in to give the boy a delicate kiss, I looked away.
A tree branch behind me gave out, filling the silence with a loud crack. The couple froze and looked in my direction. Not wanting to be discovered, I crouched down and closed my eyes. I didn’t want to be reminded of myself, to be reminded that I was there, invading their intimacy. Slowly, I receded into the trees behind me, and when I knew I was out of sight, I ran down the other side of the mountain, knowing that no matter how much I wished otherwise, I would always be that person peering from the woods, because I could never have what they had.
When I descended on the opposite side of Mont Royal, I found myself at the tall black gates of a cemetery. The mere sight of their iron tendrils made me relax. As I slipped inside, the air seemed to settle into a quiet stillness, the sound of the cars on the street fading into nothing.
I turned on my flashlight. The cemetery was overwhelmingly vast, with rows of headstones as far as I could see. Daunted, I walked toward a map—an intricate thing, as complex as a nervous system. After skimming the index, I found the section I was looking for and put my finger on it, tracing the path from where I stood to a tiny circle of land near the back of the grounds.
I set off. The sky was so wide that it felt like I was at sea. I knew I’d found what I needed when I spotted a grassy area enclosed by a chain. The headstones here were smaller than most of the others I had passed, and far less ornate—many just rectangular stones overgrown with weeds.
Hopping over the chain, I shone my flashlight on each headstone, reading the inscriptions. There weren’t more than two dozen of them, and they were all brief—just names and dates spanning the last two hundred years. I didn’t recognize any of the names, and felt myself growing impatient.