Hollowpox: The Hunt for Morrigan Crow: Nevermoor 3

by Jessica Townsend

  Jupiter set down his cutlery and leaned his chin in one hand, looking at her seriously from across the table. ‘I did tell her and we are taking it seriously, I promise. But Mog, so far there haven’t been any other witnesses who’ve seen it.’

  ‘But you believe me, don’t you?’

  ‘Yes,’ he said emphatically. ‘I believe you’re telling the truth.’

  His careful phrasing wasn’t lost on her. She scowled. ‘You believe I’m telling the truth … but you don’t believe I saw what I think I saw. Right? You think I just imagined it or something.’

  ‘No. I think it’s entirely possible you did see that, but I’m afraid you’re the only one who has.’ He chased a single pea with his fork, trying to pierce it but never quite gaining purchase. ‘But that’s not why it’s not on the posters, Mog. I discussed it with the task force and the Elders, and we decided that it’s not a good idea to talk about Wunimals having “glowing green eyes”. We’re worried it might send the wrong message.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘People are already frightened,’ he said. ‘They’re already poised to view the infected as attackers, rather than victims of an illness they can’t control. If we describe them as having glowing green eyes, you can be sure some numpty will claim they’ve been possessed by demons or some such nonsense.’

  ‘Who cares what some numpty thinks?’

  ‘The thing about numpties, Mog, is that they can always find plenty of other numpties to believe their numpty nonsense. You know what they say: you’re never more than six feet away from a numpty.’

  ‘I think that’s spiders.’

  ‘Either way,’ he continued, ‘we’re keeping it under wraps for now. If it’s a symptom that only shows up during the culmination period, it won’t matter much anyway. We don’t need glowing green eyes to tell them apart when they’re tearing through town on a rampage.’

  Morrigan supposed that was true enough. She stabbed a bit of roast chicken with her fork, but didn’t eat it. ‘What’s happening with all that, anyway? The task force. Is Dr Bramble any closer to finding a cure?’

  ‘I don’t think so. And the numbers of infected keep ticking upwards.’ He closed his eyes for a few seconds, still leaning his head in his hand. Morrigan almost thought he’d fallen asleep, but then he sat up suddenly and shook it off. He looked miserable and exhausted. ‘The problem is, we’re only finding infected Wunimals at the point of culmination, or after the virus has left them catatonic, so what have we got to study? If we could at least prevent some of the attacks before they happen … but it’s impossible because we don’t know who’s infected or how they get infected. We can’t have eyes on every Wunimal in the city.’

  ‘Why don’t you tell the public?’ Morrigan suggested. ‘Then if they see someone acting weird, you could go and investigate.’

  ‘I think we’ll have to, sooner or later,’ he admitted. ‘But that’s going to come with a whole new set of problems. Imagine! “Hi everyone, please look out for Wunimals who might have a disease that could cause them to violently attack you. Oh, and you won’t be able to tell who it is until they attack you, because we don’t really know what the symptoms are, we’re just guessing that it might be these perfectly normal things that anyone could reasonably feel at any time, whether they’re infected or not. Good luck!”’ He gave a short, humourless laugh. ‘Bet Holliday Wu can’t wait to broadcast that message.’

  Morrigan had never seen her patron so dejected. She didn’t know what to say, so she poured a glass of water and pushed it across the table towards him. He accepted it with a grateful smile.

  ‘Have you seen any of the infected?’ she asked. ‘What do they look like afterwards? To you, I mean, as a … you know. As a Witness.’

  Jupiter took an enormous bite of chicken, and Morrigan knew it was so that he had time to think about how to answer.

  ‘It’s hard to describe, Mog. I’ve never seen anything like it. I’ve heard stories about hollow people – it’s sort of a dark fairy tale among Witnesses. Someone always knows someone who has a friend who once met a stranger who was completely hollow, but … I’ve never believed it was actually possible, until now.’ He shook his head, as if he still didn’t quite believe it.

  Morrigan frowned. ‘What do you mean, “hollow people”?’

  ‘When I look at someone,’ he said, pushing his plate aside and leaning in, ‘– really look at them, I mean – I see a whole, complete, unique person. I spoke to Dame Chanda this afternoon, for example, and she had a song stuck in her head; it fluttered around her ears like a moth. She was cross about something; it cast a little black shadow over her face. Beyond the surface, she was cloaked in a deep, melancholy blue, like she was under the ocean. That’s the sadness she feels for her friend Juvela, I think.

  ‘Beyond that, she has this constant, steady kindness – right here around the sternum – like a candle burning in a windowless room. Some people only ever have flashes of kindness, but hers is a permanent fixture.’ He stared into the middle distance for a moment. ‘Beyond that … well, I don’t often look beyond that. The deeper layers are harder to unravel. People lock them down, hold them as close as possible, even if they don’t realise it. That’s a boundary I won’t cross unless invited.

  ‘But those Wunimals in the teaching hospital … there’s nothing there,’ he said softly. ‘Nothing on the surface. Nothing underneath. No past, no present.’

  ‘Well … I mean, they’re asleep, aren’t they?’ Morrigan reasoned. ‘Maybe when people are sleeping—’

  ‘They’re not asleep. They’re not anything. Someone in a coma still has all the things that make them a person. They still have dreams and physical afflictions and the imprints other people have left on them, scars and smudges from loved ones and enemies. They still have a past. But these Wunimals, they’re like … black holes. There’s nothing there.’

  Jupiter’s eyes were wide, his pupils big and black. He was frightened. Morrigan felt the hairs on her arms stand up.

  ‘Honestly, Mog, I’d rather be dead than hollow.’

  In the weeks that followed, it became clear there was no containing the Hollowpox, even if they could distract people from it.

  Their C&D gatherings soon became Hollowpox gatherings for all intents and purposes, with all other matters temporarily shunted aside. There’d been at least one attack every week since Christmas, and the numbers kept rising until it seemed like every second or third day there was some fresh rumour, some new tale of a rhinoceroswun running riot in a grocery store or a catwun slicing someone’s face like a scratching post.

  Holliday Wu warned them that it wouldn’t be long before the public started connecting the dots, and the truth came out.

  Meanwhile, the locked ward in the teaching hospital on Sub-Three was already full, and a second ward on its way to filling up too. The meagre hospital staff worked in rotating twelve-hour shifts to the point of exhaustion, until one day Nurse Tim marched into the Gathering Place threatening to lead his fellow nurses in a strike. In response, the Elders drafted in any Society members with medical expertise who could assist, and they came from all over the Seven Pockets without hesitation.

  Even some of the students were called on to help. Senior scholars with medical experience were promoted to positions of authority on the regular wards, and junior scholars like Anah had chunks of their timetable taken over by hospital duty.

  It worked out well for Unit 919, because Anah became their personal hotline to information about the affected Wunimals – her quiet, unobtrusive nature made her an excellent eavesdropper.

  ‘They won’t let us assistants see them, of course – we’re not allowed on the locked ward – but I heard two of the nurses talking in the tea room,’ she told the unit one morning at Station 919, while they waited for Hometrain. ‘They said yesterday there were three Wunimals brought in the night before, a family of badgerwuns. The youngest was only our age! It’s just awful.’

  Morrigan didn�
��t know why this news felt so shocking; after all, why would the Hollowpox discriminate between young and old? But somehow it made it seem so much worse to think of someone their own age, lying in a hospital bed. She couldn’t stop thinking of how Jupiter had described them. Nothing on the surface. Nothing underneath. No past, no present. Like black holes.

  Hometrain 919 pulled into the station, with Miss Cheery hanging out the side waving at them as usual, and they all piled on board. The copper kettle was already boiling. Mahir dropped teabags into a mismatched assortment of mugs, Lam doled out sugar cubes according to the individual preferences they’d all memorised by now, and Francis offered around the biscuit jar.

  ‘This is really good gingerbread, Miss,’ he said in a tone of approval. He snapped a piece in half. ‘Good snap. Nice and spicy. And is that … nutmeg?’

  ‘I’ve no idea, Francis,’ said Miss Cheery, biting into her gingerbread bear.

  His face fell a little. ‘Did you not bake it yourself?’

  ‘No, Francis, I got it from the shop like a normal person.’

  ‘Where were you yesterday?’ Hawthorne asked Morrigan as they settled into their usual spots, rucksacks abandoned on the floor. ‘Were you sick?’

  ‘What? No, I was at school.’

  ‘But you weren’t on Hometrain in the morning.’

  ‘Or the afternoon! We didn’t see you all day,’ Cadence added with a slight note of accusation in her voice. ‘We were wor— I mean, Hawthorne was worried. Wouldn’t shut up about it. So boring.’

  ‘Oh. No, um, I took the Brolly Rail in early yesterday morning,’ said Morrigan, stifling a yawn. ‘I had a ghostly hour scheduled for five o’clock. And then I had to stay late.’

  ‘Five o’clock!’ said Hawthorne. ‘There’s one of those in the morning, too?’

  Morrigan rolled her eyes. ‘Ha very ha.’

  It wasn’t entirely true. She had come in early and stayed late, but neither of those events had been mandated by the Scholar Mistress or anyone else. The day before yesterday it had occurred to Morrigan that just because Rook carefully designed her timetable each week and she still had to attend the various Arcane and Mundane classes she’d been allocated … technically there was nothing stopping her from visiting extra ghostly hours.

  So that afternoon, when school had ended and Sub-Nine was empty of basement nerds, she’d searched through The Book of Ghostly Hours and spent ninety glorious, unscheduled minutes in the company of Li Zhang, one of the first Wundersmiths. He’d demonstrated an element of the art of Veil, cloaking himself in the precise colours and texture of his surroundings, like a human-chameleon hybrid. Morrigan was swept away by the magic of it, and it was nearly dinner time when she’d finally taken a railpod home.

  She’d only watched Li Zhang, of course. She was pacing herself and exercising caution and all that, just as she’d been warned to do. Rook couldn’t have complained, and Morrigan didn’t think she’d be in trouble, exactly, but even so … she wanted to keep her extracurricular plans to herself. For now.

  ‘And what are they teaching you in Wundersmith school?’ Hawthorne continued. ‘Have you learned how to kill fifty grown men with a single glare yet?’

  ‘A hundred grown men,’ Morrigan corrected him. ‘And all their mates.’

  ‘Please don’t start this again,’ groaned Anah. She was trying to sound annoyed, but in truth she looked a little scared.

  ‘Have you made any monsters yet, Morrigan?’ Thaddea piped up. ‘Something with lots of teeth I hope.’

  ‘And lethal breath,’ added Cadence. ‘And poisonous B.O.’

  Morrigan grinned. ‘All good ideas. I’ll make a note.’

  ‘And have you set a date to conquer Nevermoor?’ Mahir asked her in a serious, business-like tone. ‘I think a Monday would be best. Everyone’ll still be tired from the weekend, so they won’t be up to much fighting back.’

  ‘Excellent point.’ Morrigan shifted a bit on her floor cushion, getting comfortable. ‘I’ll put it in the conquering calendar.’

  ‘Will you be conquering all of Nevermoor at once, do you think?’ Arch asked, holding out an imaginary microphone to catch her answer. ‘Or taking it borough by borough?’

  ‘Borough by borough, I’d have thought,’ said Morrigan. ‘Seems more manageable. Pass the biscuits, please.’

  ‘Miss Cheery, make them stop!’ Anah whined. After several weeks of this repetitious joke (started, of course, by Hawthorne), she was still the only member of Unit 919 who didn’t find it funny.

  Morrigan, on the other hand, was delighted that her unit had decided to tease her about being a Wundersmith. It was much better than being afraid of her. She was holding on to the hope that one of these days, prim, panicky Anah might forget to be frightened and join in instead.

  Morrigan stayed after school again that day. At the end of her final lesson she asked Hawthorne to tell Miss Cheery she’d get herself home, then raced back down to Sub-Nine, clutching a scrap of paper on which she’d copied down the details of a promising ghostly hour.

  LʘCATIʘN

  PARTICIPANTS & EVENTS

  DATE & TIME

  School of Wundrous Arts, Sub-Nine of Proudfoot House, Kingston

  Griselda Polaris, Decima Kokoro, Rastaban Tarazed, Mathilde Lachance, Brilliance Amadeo, ʘwain Binks, Elodie Bauer

  Griselda Polaris demonstrates the Wundrous Art of Ruination

  Age of Endings, Ninth Thursday, Spring of Nine

  15:25–16:42

  It was a glorious lesson, one of the best Morrigan had had so far, featuring a Wundrous Art she’d not yet heard of let alone witnessed and a Wundersmith – Griselda Polaris – more gifted than any of the others she’d seen.

  But none of that, it turned out, was what would make this ghostly hour her most memorable yet.

  Morrigan stood among the other Wundersmiths watching Griselda as she demonstrated an act of exquisite destruction. She was so ancient she could have been mistaken for Elder Quinn’s great-grandmother, but she moved with surprising grace and agility.

  Ruination was the opposite of Weaving and, unexpectedly, it seemed to take nearly as much precision and care to properly Ruin something as it did to Weave it in the first place. Griselda began the lesson with the extraordinary feat of Weaving a building from scratch – a small, perfect conservatory made of hundreds of glass panels so that it resembled a little crystal palace, reflecting and refracting light all around the enormous chamber. She was much faster and more precise than Brilliance Amadeo, who until now had been Morrigan’s gold standard in the Wundrous Art of Weaving.

  ‘Anyone can throw a rock at a window,’ Griselda told the group, and then she did exactly that: lobbed a fist-sized stone at one of the panes of glass, shattering it into pieces.

  ‘But the art of Ruination is not about using external brute force. It’s about unravelling a thing from the inside, separating all its constituent parts, then breaking down those parts, and on and on, until you have transformed the thing, made it unrecognisable to itself. The truest, purest act of Ruination is an act of transformation.’

  By the end of the lesson, Griselda and her students had broken down the glass structure again and again, until it was transformed into a pile of fine white sand.

  Like Brilliance, she was an excellent teacher – watchful and patient, generous with praise but quick to correct. Morrigan got so caught up in the hour that she was utterly unprepared for its sucker-punch ending, and when the teenage boy standing next to her put his hand up to ask a question, she barely even registered his words.

  She was instead watching Griselda, who turned to the boy with a warm smile and said, ‘Excellent question, Mr Squall.’

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  Ezra, the Boy

  He wasn’t listed in any of the hours. Not one.

  Morrigan felt unbelievably stupid for not thinking of it herself, for not even imagining that as she dived into the well of Wundersmith history on Sub-Nine, she might one day meet a past incarnatio
n of the Wundersmith they called the evillest man who ever lived. The man who had tried to lead his fellow Wundersmiths in a rebellion. Who had built an army of monsters and committed a massacre in Courage Square. Who had sent his Hunt of Smoke and Shadow to kill all cursed children in the Wintersea Republic but had decided to spare Morrigan’s life for his own mysterious, deranged reasons.

  The man who had once looked her in the eye and said, ‘I see you, Morrigan Crow. There is black ice at the heart of you.’

  But his name wasn’t anywhere in The Book of Ghostly Hours.

  It had been deliberately left out.

  Morrigan stayed on Sub-Nine until it was so late she thought Martha or Kedgeree might send out a search party. She skimmed as much of the ledger as she could. She looked for listings during the Ages she knew he lived in Nevermoor, just over a hundred years ago – the Age of Endings, and the Age of the East Winds. She looked for the names of Wundersmiths who must have been around at the same time as Squall, the likes of Brilliance, Owain and Decima. She flipped to the listing for her first ever lesson in the Gossamer-Spun Garden and ran her finger down the page until she found the names in the ‘Particpants & Events’ column: Brilliance Amadeo, Owain Binks, Elodie Bauer.

  But there had been one girl and two boys in that lesson, Morrigan was sure of it.

  How had she paid so little attention? She’d already seen him! Probably dozens of times by now, as a boy and perhaps a teenager. She’d skipped merrily across his history without even noticing he was there.

  Morrigan took out a notebook and meticulously copied down details of ghostly hours where she was sure Squall would be. Once she’d filled half a dozen pages, Morrigan tucked it away in a hidden pocket of her rucksack.

  She was going on a Squall hunt.

  LʘCATIʘN

  PARTICIPANTS & EVENTS

  DATE & TIME

  School of Wundrous Arts, Sub-Nine of Proudfoot House, Williams