She was drowned out by the sudden blare of sirens, the roar of an engine. Morrigan turned in the direction of the sound, and felt her heart bounce up and down in her chest like an ecstatic frog.
A truck made of green rippled riverglass was reversing down the road towards them at top speed, scattering the swarm, splattering some and sending the rest flying for the shelves. The back doors flew open and a crew of a dozen people jumped out wearing full-body jumpsuits, heavy black boots and great metal tanks on their backs, with spraying attachments they wielded like weapons, one in each hand. One of them carried a second tank out of the truck and tossed it lightly to Roshni.
Incredibly, the brigade of bookfighters was led by an enormous ostrichwun in a tweed vest, twice as tall as the rest of them, with great big feathery wings. He had the longest legs Morrigan had ever seen, ending in clawed feet that looked like three-pronged daggers.
‘About time, Colin!’ Roshni shouted, but she was grinning as she turned back to Miss Cheery and the scholars. Colin didn’t answer her but made straight for the mess instead, wings flapping wildly. ‘Right, you lot – we’ll take it from here. Into the truck and STAY INSIDE. Jagdish will come back and drive you to the loans desk once we’ve got a handle on this.’
She turned back to join the bookfighters and other librarians and they ran into the oncoming swarm, spraying thick rivers of bright pink foam and bellowing like warriors.
Unit 919 scrambled up into the riverglass truck and Miss Cheery shut the thick glass doors, sliding a huge metal bolt into place.
Everyone looked miserable and exhausted, but relieved to be out of the chaos … except for Thaddea, who gazed out through the rippled glass, watching Roshni and the bookfighters in awe. Yellow-green guts went flying as the brigade of bookfighters danced around each other, battling the infestation in what could almost pass as choreography. Morrigan thought the scene had a sort of … nauseating beauty about it.
Though she was very glad to be on this side of the riverglass.
‘I’m going to be a librarian,’ Thaddea declared rapturously, as a trail of putrid pus-coloured slime dripped down the side of her head.
‘Is … everyone … okay?’ Miss Cheery panted, pressing one hand to her chest.
Francis had his hand over his mouth, looking green and grim, and Mahir was slumped on the floor, having slipped over on a slime-puddle and not bothered to pull himself up. Arch was trying to wipe bug guts off his clothes, but so far had only managed to spread them farther. Cadence was shaking her head in disbelief – whether at the general situation or specifically at Miss Cheery’s question, it wasn’t clear.
‘Didn’t see that one coming, then?’ she asked Lam pointedly.
Lam gave a small, apologetic shrug. ‘I don’t see everything.’
She was the only one who had managed to escape any degree of sliming, thanks to Arch and Mahir. She pressed herself against the wall to avoid contact with the rest of them.
‘What are those things?’ asked Anah in a trembling voice from the corner of the truck.
‘Book bugs,’ said Miss Cheery, still catching her breath. ‘From the entomology section. There was this book – The Big Book of Bad Bugs. It was all about the world’s biggest and gnarliest insects, and it got checked out by loads of people because it had such good pictures. It was opened and shut constantly, which is bad news around here. People got a bit careless, and about a year ago some of the bugs got out. They started breeding before the bookfighters could round them all up. The bookfighters keep fumigating, but Rosh says they get another outbreak every couple of months. They don’t even try to get them back in the book any more, that’s how bad it is. They just kill them.’
Hawthorne came over to Morrigan and pressed his face against the door, peering miserably out at the action and shivering. ‘Wish we c-could go back out there and h-help.’
Morrigan glanced at her friend and noticed his clothes were drenched through. She cupped her hands, exhaled a little puff of fire and let it dance warmly, hovering just above her palms; a trick she’d learned last week from Rastaban Tarazed.
‘Thanks.’ Hawthorne rubbed his hands together over the flames and then looked up, nodding at the bookfighters with a little grunt of laughter. ‘What’s he playing at?’
He meant Colin. The ostrichwun was the only one who didn’t have a weapon, but he didn’t need one. Those clawed feet of his were weapons, and he used them to great effect. His legs bent the opposite way to human legs, and as he flapped his immense black and white wings, he kicked up and outwards with a terrifying ferocity.
But … he wasn’t very precise in his attacks. Not carefully targeting the bugs like Roshni and the others, but rather going a bit … berserk. His eyes were wild and frightened. He was out of control.
It was hard to tell through the green riverglass, but Morrigan was certain that if she could have seen them properly, his eyes would have been glowing emerald.
‘Miss Cheery?’ she called back to their conductor, who was in the corner helping Francis. ‘I think you should come and see—’
‘PUT THAT OUT,’ cried Lam, looking at Morrigan’s hands in panic.
But the warning came too late.
Three things happened in extremely quick succession.
First, outside the truck, Roshni screamed as Colin viciously lashed out at her chest with his clawed foot.
‘ROSH!’ cried Miss Cheery.
Morrigan felt a sudden jolt of terror. The tiny flame cupped in her hand roared in response to her fear, growing brighter and bigger. It singed Hawthorne’s eyebrows and engulfed Morrigan’s hands up to the wrists so that it looked like she was wearing gloves of fire. She gasped, shaking them out to extinguish them.
And lastly – the sudden flash of fire having caught his attention – Colin halted and turned to face the truck, lifting his beak into the air and sniffing like a wolf scenting its prey. He locked eyes on Unit 919 and, in an instant, was running towards the truck faster than Morrigan would have imagined possible.
The riverglass door lived up to Roshni’s promises; it was strong enough to withstand the sudden fierce assault. Colin leapt into the air with great flying kicks and threw his head against it repeatedly, hard enough to do some damage to himself if not the glass. But it didn’t stop him. He couldn’t stop. He had descended into madness.
‘Get back from the door!’ Miss Cheery shouted at Unit 919, rushing to stand between her scholars and the glass.
The bookfighters were clearly well trained to respond in an emergency. After a moment’s confusion they divided themselves into three groups: one still fighting the bugs, one trying to control Colin, and one helping Roshni, who had collapsed on the ground. The half a dozen who swarmed the ostrichwun managed to pull him away from the truck, pinning him to the ground. It took the strength of all six to hold him down, and Colin fought them even still.
‘Everyone get down on the floor,’ ordered Miss Cheery. She ran towards the front cabin and climbed through a little latched door into the driver’s seat. ‘I’m getting you out of here.’
‘But what about Roshni and the others?’ asked Morrigan. ‘We can’t just leave them!’
Thaddea reached out to slide back the metal bolt. ‘We have to get out there and help!’
‘Do not touch that door, Thaddea Macleod!’ shouted Miss Cheery as the engine roared into life. ‘Everyone get down NOW.’
Those who didn’t were instantly thrown to the floor as the truck lurched away from the scene. Miss Cheery careened down the aisle the way they’d come, swerving dangerously close to the towering bookshelves and almost crashing several times on their short journey back to the loans desk. Unit 919 was silent; they heard the crackle of the truck radio and, for the first time, a slight note of fear in the conductor’s voice as she called for an ambulance. In her head Morrigan could still see poor Roshni lying on the ground wounded, confused by her friend’s attack. She hoped the librarian would be okay.
‘Right. Everyone out,’ or
dered Miss Cheery as they pulled up near the Mayhew Street entrance. ‘And I don’t just mean out of the truck, I mean out of the library. I’m going back for Roshni.’
Half the unit ran obediently to open the door and clamber out, while the other half shouted in protest.
‘Miss, we’re not leaving you!’
‘You can’t go back alone!’
‘We have to help—’
‘QUIET.’ They fell silent immediately. Morrigan had never heard her speak so fiercely. ‘You are to walk through that revolving door, and you are not to come back inside. I need you to stand guard outside the library. Don’t let anyone in. Wait for me on Mayhew Street, but do not come back inside, understood?’
‘But—’ began Hawthorne.
‘UNDERSTOOD?’
Mumbling their reluctant agreement, Unit 919 turned to head for the exit as instructed.
‘Morrigan, wait.’
She felt Miss Cheery’s hand grip her arm and turned back.
‘Take the Brolly Rail home, quick as you can, and tell Captain North what’s happened. Tell him about Colin. Tell him to …’ she paused, swallowing and breathing through her nose as if to steel herself. ‘Tell him to bring the Stealth.’
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
Concerned Citizens of Nevermoor
The fallout from their Gobleian Library escapade was swifter and further-reaching than Morrigan could have anticipated. She didn’t see Miss Cheery again before the summer holidays began the following day, but she heard from Jupiter that the Elders and the Scholar Mistresses had hauled their conductor over the coals for taking them on such a dangerous excursion.
‘It’s not her fault,’ Morrigan told him on Saturday morning, stabbing at her toast with the butter knife. It was early, and she and Jupiter were the only ones in the staff dining room. The table was laid with all their favourites – crumpets and toast and waffles and sausages and eggs and blueberry syrup – but neither of them had eaten a bite. ‘Miss Cheery shouldn’t be in trouble, it was Mahir and me who wanted to go to the Gobleian Library. Hawthorne was right, we should have gone to the pool.’
And I didn’t even get to steal the book, she thought glumly.
Somewhere in the fight against the book bugs and the scramble to get into the truck, she had dropped Volume Three Hundred and Seven of An Unabridged History of the Wundrous Act Spectrum. It had probably been destroyed by bug guts and pesticide foam. All that history had been at her fingertips, and now it was gone, maybe forever.
‘Miss Cheery has taken full responsibility, quite rightly,’ said Jupiter. ‘She’s the grown-up, Mog, she should have known better than to take a bunch of thirteen-year-olds into a pocket realm. Bad things can happen in liminal spaces.’
Morrigan looked up from her badly butchered toast. ‘What’s a liminal space?’
‘A sort of … inbetween. A threshold between one place and another. Tricksy Lanes are a good example – they can be unstable, unpredictable places where normal rules of the universe don’t seem to apply.’
She told him about the locked doors at the end of every branch of chambers on Sub-Nine, each labelled The Liminal Hall. ‘What do you think they could be?’
He frowned, considering it. ‘I honestly don’t know, but I strongly suggest you stay away. Like I said – liminal spaces can be dangerous. And the Gob is one of the most dangerous I’ve ever come across. I wasn’t planning to take you anywhere near the place until you’re at least fifteen. You certainly won’t be going back any time soon. Not least because it’s been closed to the public until further notice, by order of the Nevermoor Council.’
Morrigan deflated even further. She’d been hoping he might take her back there once all of this blew over. Even if Volume Three Hundred and Seven had been destroyed, there were still three hundred and six other volumes tucked away behind Devilish Court.
‘Is Roshni all right?’ She’d been feeling awfully guilty about deceiving her, even more so since she’d watched the poor woman get attacked by a raging ostrichwun.
‘The librarian?’ Jupiter winced a little. ‘It … wasn’t a pretty injury, but she’s in the teaching hospital and Miss Cheery hasn’t left her side. She’s going to be all right. Not sure I can say the same for her ostrichwun friend. He seems to have hurt himself more than anyone else. He’s in the teaching hospital too, of course.’
He stared broodingly into his cup of coffee, which had long gone cold. ‘Another attack we could have prevented and Wunimal we could have helped, if only we’d known he was infected, if we’d had the slightest clue, some warning, just a scrap of information.’
Morrigan studied her patron’s exhausted face. He’d been up all night for the opening of the Nevermoor Bazaar.
The Stealth had been out in force at the summer market festival, on the lookout for any strange Wunimal behaviour. Jupiter patrolled with them all night, scouring the crowds for any ‘black holes’ as he’d started calling them – the area surrounding those Wunimals who were nearly depleted of Wundrous energy, having had it all eaten up by the Hollowpox. In the past few weeks he’d managed to thwart three separate attacks this way. The Stealth had taken the infected Wunimals into protective custody so they’d be safely isolated when the pox reached culmination, preventing them from hurting anyone – including themselves – and finally Dr Bramble and Dr Lutwyche were able to study the virus in its host before culmination. They’d taken blood samples and talked to the three infected Wunimals about where they’d been, who they’d come in contact with, what other symptoms they’d been experiencing.
But it seemed the more data they collected, the more baffled they were as to how the Hollowpox was spreading so quickly. One of the three, a roosterwun, had just returned from a silent meditation retreat and hadn’t been in contact with anyone at all – let alone any other Wunimals – for a whole month. How, then, had he caught it?
Sofia had joined the Hollowpox task force as a Wunimal community liaison, and had been reaching out to Wunimals outside the Society to help them be safe and avoid catching the pox. Her main suggestion was to stay home until the task force knew more … but what good would that do, if isolation didn’t keep the Hollowpox at bay?
The best tool in their kit, truly, was Jupiter’s sight as a Witness. But he couldn’t be everywhere all at once, he couldn’t possibly stop every attack before it happened, and he seemed to consider each one he missed a deep personal failing. For the three attacks he’d prevented, there were nearly a dozen he hadn’t. Morrigan could see it was taking its toll.
‘Well, I suppose we’ll have plenty of information now,’ he said with an uncharacteristic sneer. ‘We’ll be swamped with it. Real information, false information, who cares? Not the Concerned Citizens of Nevermoor.’
Morrigan glanced down at the poster Jupiter had ripped off a lamppost in Courage Square and brought home to show her. She’d read it a dozen times at least, and each time it chilled her to the bone.
BEWARE!
YOU ARE IN DANGER
from the
HOLLOWPOX
The Wundrous Society doesn’t want you to know that RIGHT NOW in Nevermoor, potentially THOUSANDS of RABID WUNIMALS are infected with this dangerous virus, putting YOU and YOUR FAMILY at risk of SAVAGE ATTACKS!
The Wundrous Society has admitted that early symptoms of the Hollowpox are almost IMPOSSIBLE TO SPOT!
Could somebody YOU KNOW be
SECRETLY INFECTED?
Watch out for FORGETFULNESS, INCREASED APPETITE, FIDGETING and AGGRESSION.
If you suspect a friend, neighbour, colleague or family member may be infected, you have a DUTY to report them IMMEDIATELY to the Nevermoor City Police Force.
BE ALERT
WATCH YOUR NEIGHBOURS
DON’T HESITATE
ACT ON YOUR SUSPICIONS
Paid for by Laurent St James of the Concerned Citizens of Nevermoor Party
The symptoms listed on the poster were the same as on the Wundrous Society’s posters, but not really. Th
ey’d been edited, abbreviated, shortened to make them even more ridiculously broad.
Forgetfulness, increased appetite, fidgeting, aggression? That described half of Unit 919 on a good day. How many Wunimals would be wrongly accused of having the pox, Morrigan wondered, when these were the symptoms people were watching for?
It was that last bit of the poster that really spooked her. Watch Your Neighbours. Don’t Hesitate. Act On Your Suspicions. It was like these ‘Concerned Citizens’ were just trying to turn everyone against Wunimals.
Any Wunimals. All of them.
‘Who is this Laurent St James?’ asked Morrigan.
‘Some rich idiot,’ muttered Jupiter. ‘One of the landed gentry, a Lord or a Viscount or something. Now he’s formed his own political party, the Concerned Citizens of Nevermoor. They mostly seem to be concerned with nosing into business that doesn’t concern them. Here, eat something, will you.’ He nudged the plate of crumpets towards her, and she nudged it back.
‘You eat something. How does he know so much about the Hollowpox? I thought the Public Distraction Department was keeping it under wraps.’
‘There’s no keeping anything under wraps now, Mog. Not after what happened at the Gobleian.’ He sighed and took a bite of dry toast, made a face and swallowed it reluctantly. ‘It was already out there, anyway, really. Bits and pieces have been leaking for weeks now, it was only a matter of time.’
Morrigan suddenly remembered something. ‘We saw a man with a megaphone shouting about it on Grand Boulevard on Thursday! He called Wunimals abominations. He said they were … what was it? An “affront to humanity”. What a pig.’
Jupiter scowled. ‘Posh bloke in a fancy suit?’
‘Yes.’
‘That’ll be him. Laurent St James. Loves nothing more than getting up on his soapbox. He’s trying to stir trouble.’
One of the kitchen staff came to clear their plates, and Jupiter sent away all of the untouched food with a sigh.
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