by Carter Roy
“Maybe it actually was a basketball hoop,” I said.
“Sure,” Greta said. “This head guy hires Sammy’s parents—who are physicists—to make basketball hoops for them. Because he’s going to field a team in the NBA.”
“Put that way, it doesn’t sound so likely,” I said.
“This isn’t good,” Dawkins muttered. “This isn’t good at all.” He bolted down another sandwich, but he didn’t look happy.
“Why?” I asked. “What is it a diagram of?”
“I don’t know,” Dawkins said, “but I have my suspicions. Hearing what Sammy’s parents are working on; hearing about this eye of the needle…” He finished the last sandwich in two big bites. “The situation is far worse than any of us thought.”
“They’ve taken my dad and kidnapped us, and they almost cut off Greta’s hand,” I said. “How much worse can it be?”
“You have no idea.” Dawkins glanced over his shoulder at me, but he seemed to be looking farther—through the hole in the motor home, across the darkness behind us, and back to the building, where Ms. Hand and her team were up to no good. “It appears they’ve solved a puzzle they’ve been struggling with for centuries and now can do what should be impossible.”
“And what is that?” I asked.
“Oh, nothing much, Evelyn Ronan Truelove,” Dawkins said. “But it appears that they’ve found a way to trap the human soul.”
CHAPTER 18:
WAITING FOR THE END OF THE WORLD
Sammy’s eyes bulged as he gaped at Dawkins and then me. “Your name is Evelyn Truelove?”
“It’s a pretty silly name, I know,” I said. “Just call me Ronan.”
“No one cares about your stupid name,” Greta muttered, but Sammy blinked at me like I’d grown horns.
“You okay?” I asked him.
“I think I’m just tired,” he said, covering his face and letting out a giant yawn. “Is it okay if I go to sleep?”
“Absolutely,” Dawkins said. “Though I fear the back bedroom may be a bit windy.”
Sammy stumbled past us to the dining nook, where he curled up on one of the padded benches.
Poor kid, I thought, picturing Izzy and Henry. “I’m beat, too,” I said, sliding into the empty passenger seat.
“I’ll sleep later,” Greta said. “I want to know why these people want to trap souls.”
Dawkins sighed. “I suppose there’s no harm in telling you two everything, seeing as you’re already hip-deep in this. That scientific society Sammy’s foster parents joined? It’s a centuries-old group who are working hard to bring about the end of the world.”
“Why would anybody want to do that?” I asked.
“Because they can?” Dawkins said, shrugging. “Why does anyone do anything? They believe humanity is rotten with sin, and the only way to save the Earth is to scour it clean with a hellfire that rids the planet of everyone but themselves. Like Noah’s ark, only with fire this time.”
“So they want a do-over,” Greta said. “Except this time the survivors will be the bad guys.”
“Not in their eyes,” Dawkins said. “They believe they’re the good guys—the only ones with the courage to do the hard work required to save the world.”
I thought of Ms. Hand lecturing me. “The Bend Sinister,” I said.
Dawkins lifted an eyebrow. “That’s their name. They fancy themselves scholars and scientists, but it’s all just window dressing for run-of-the-mill evil.
“Instead of working to make the world a better place, they’re dedicated to trying to kill the thirty-six Pure. That is the whole reason the Bend Sinister exists: to murder people, and in so doing, bring about the end times.”
“What’s a Pure?” Greta asked.
But Dawkins was on a roll. He ignored her question and just kept talking. “And yet they’ve never succeeded. Why? Because…” He raised his thumb. “One: They don’t know who the thirty-six are. Sometimes they uncover the identity of, at best, a few, but they’ve never managed to murder more than five at once. Which can plunge the world into a whole mess of trouble, but doesn’t quite bring about the end.”
“And reason number two,” I said, thinking of my mom, “is that the Blood Guard are there, protecting the thirty-six.”
“Exactly,” Dawkins said, leaning back in the seat. “We Guards devote ourselves to making sure the Pure one’s life is as regular and boring as can be. Ideally they live lives of unspoiled grace and then die a natural death.
“But nonetheless, the unexpected sometimes happens. The Bend uncovers a Pure’s identity, defeats the Guard, and kills the person we swore to protect. The world becomes a darker place, but only until the preordained time for that soul to be reincarnated. Eventually it returns to the world in a new vessel, a new person whose birth tips the scales back into balance.”
“But if the soul doesn’t reincarnate?” I asked, thinking about this Eye of the Needle device. “If it gets trapped?”
“That, my friend, is the crux of the problem.” Dawkins shook his fist. “Souls are not supposed to be something you can trap, not something you can pluck out of a body with a pair of magical tweezers. Souls return,” Dawkins said, and for the first time in our short acquaintance, his voice sounded full of heartache. “They always return. That’s the final safeguard.”
“Until now?” I asked.
“So it appears.” He steered the motor home into the southbound lane of a broad freeway, four lanes in each direction, light traffic on both sides. Through the windshield, the lights of a city glowed on the horizon. The clock on the dashboard said it was well past two in the morning.
“If the Bend can stop the souls of the Pure from reincarnating, they need only trap a soul and hold on to it. Eventually, they will have stopped enough of the Pure from coming back into the world. And then…”
“And then…?” Greta asked so softly that I could barely hear her.
“And then the world will end,” Dawkins said, tightening his hands on the steering wheel.
There was nothing to say to that, so we just looked out at the road and the darkness that seemed to swallow up the world around us. Our silence lasted long enough that I started getting antsy. I needed to hear something—anything—even if it was only my own voice.
“Hey!” I said, my voice louder than I’d intended. “I never told you about the purple monocle my Mom gave me—”
“She gave the Verity Glass to you?” Dawkins said, shaking his head. “Awfully trusting.”
“Maybe not so much,” I said, thinking of what my mom had written on the envelope. “I was supposed to give it to whoever I met on the train. You, I guess.”
“Please do not tell me that the Bend Sinister found it and took it from you,” Dawkins said, his eyes glancing off Greta before meeting my own.
“No,” I said, patting my jeans. “I’ve got it right here. You want it?”
“Just keep it in your pocket for now,” he said with a shake of his head.
“It was strange,” I went on. “When I used it to look at Izzy and Henry, those people from the motor home, they were just kind of shimmery outlines.”
“That’s because they’re not there in a way the Verity Glass can see. They’ve signed over their life force to further the cause. Many Bend Sinister acolytes donate their animating spark, that spiritual essence that carries a person through his or her life.
“All that sacrificed life force adds up to a mighty raw power. It’s channeled by the Hands.”
“Like Ms. Hand?” Greta asked.
Dawkins scowled. “That’s her title, not her name. A Hand can use the power herself or funnel it through her minions, that bunch of soulless brutes who tag along in her wake.”
“Back at the safe house,” I said, “when Greta trapped Mr. Four, Ms. Hand said—”
“‘The flesh is all he has left,’” Greta said.
“Your Mr. Four barely exists now except as an extension of the so-called Ms. Hand. But through him and others
like him, she can perform wondrous feats.”
“We saw some of that,” I said, and told him about Mr. Four at the river.
“But worse even than the Hands,” Dawkins continued, “are the Heads. No one knows their identities. Who are they when they’re not bent on evil? We have no idea. They pretend to be ordinary people, holding down ordinary jobs. The Blood Guard’s work would be tons simpler if the Heads would just, I don’t know, wear some kind of universally recognized sign of wickedness.”
“What about that tattoo,” I said. “The open eye with the wavy lines coming off of it. Couldn’t you look for that?”
“The symbol of the Perceptor,” Dawkins said. “An all-seeing eye before which nothing can be hidden. That girl’s diary Sammy mentioned? She’d been examined by the Perceptor. It is sort of like a Verity Glass, except it’s a sickly green and glows, and the Bend Sinister mount it in this horrifying mask.”
“You drew a picture of it!” Greta said. “In your notebook.”
Dawkins nodded. “I’ve never seen one myself, but that’s what I’m told it looks like. It allows the user to actually perceive souls, but it is supposed to have other abilities as well. The tattoo of the Perceptor, however, is not for anyone who must move unrecognized in the world. So a Head wouldn’t be marked.”
“Are you one of those Pures you mentioned?” Greta asked, resting her hand on Dawkins’ shoulder. “Were you reincarnated? After the truck stop?”
Dawkins laughed. “Afraid not! That was just plain old healing. An Overseer’s body repairs itself no matter what befalls it. That’s why I eat so much—I have a metabolism like a furnace.”
“You healed?” I asked. “An eighteen-wheeler comes to a stop on top of you and you just…get better?”
“Yes, Ronan. I heal. Very quickly, perhaps, but just like your body does when you have a cut or a broken bone. Overseers cannot be killed. Nunquam mori, it’s called by the Guard, which is just a fussy way of saying ‘Never die’ in Latin. I’ve hidden my death, and as a result, the world is stuck with me until I decide to shuffle off.”
“I wish I could do that,” I said, and thought of my mom. “Are all Blood Guards immortal?”
“No, only the Overseers,” Dawkins said. “And trust me, you do not wish it for yourself or anyone you love. It hurts. Though I may not be able to be killed, I still feel every almost-death.” His whole body shivered. “Nausea and pain so overwhelming that a real death would be a mercy. But then…” He caught my eye. “As you say, I get better.”
“So does this mean you’ve been alive a long time?” Greta asked.
“A couple hundred years, though I am relatively young in the ranks of the Blood Guard’s Overseers.”
“You’re two hundred years old?”
“Not quite,” Dawkins said, “but another ten years or so and…”
“That means you were born in…1824?” Greta said.
“1821, actually. It was about ten years later that I got involved with the Blood Guard, though I didn’t understand that. At first all I understood was that I’d picked the wrong pocket.”
“So you’ve been a thief all your life,” Greta said.
“Pickpocket,” he corrected her. “There’s a difference. Picking pockets takes…art. Prestidigitation. Finesse. Thieving is just smash and grab.”
“Stealing is stealing.” Greta folded her legs against her chest and wrapped her arms around them, then closed her eyes. “Where was this, again?” she asked with a yawn.
“England,” Dawkins said. “I was born the month Napoleon Bonaparte died, May of 1821. I came into the world in a dark little hole of a town called Northampton, within an even darker, smaller hole called a workhouse.
“My mum had gone there when no other place would have her: she was poor, pregnant, without a husband or a job. A few years later, she finally got out, sewn into a burlap sack and tossed in a potter’s field with a shovelful of lime, lost among all the others who’d died in the workhouses.
“Not being the trusting sort, I ran away the first chance I got, just after I turned eight. My feet carried me south to London and into the company of two similarly homeless children named Agatha and Spinks. We were scavengers and thieves and always hungry. One winter when I was ten or so, we spotted the perfect mark.…”
CHAPTER 19:
JACK DAWKINS, FISHER OF WALLETS
We pegged her the moment she glided into the new market square at Covent Garden. She was large and soft and pale and wrapped up in a bloodred silk brocade day dress that whispered money.
“Pretty,” Agatha whispered, clutching her ragged coat.
“Pretty easy mark, you mean,” Spinks said. Staying back a few yards, we followed her down the aisle between the stalls, snaking through the crooked tumble of carts and booths and not stopping long enough to catch anyone’s ire.
The vendors sold everything you could ever want and a lot more besides. There were bakers, butchers, and fishmongers; men selling chicken, pigeon, and duck; produce sellers with barrels of cabbages, onions, and potatoes heaped higher than our heads, and bins full of unshelled peas, watercress, and other vegetables we couldn’t name, never having eaten them before.
We eventually wound up in a corner favored by metalsmiths. And that is where we saw the woman in the bloodred dress, a matching purse dangling from her wrist, picking her way through the stalls.
Nothing in that corner should have been of interest to a plump, well-dressed society lady. If we’d been paying mind, we might have wondered what she was doing there at all and been more careful.
“I want an orange,” Agatha said. “A big juicy orange.”
“Shh, duck,” Spinks said. “You’ll get one soon enough. But first, you swoon.”
Agatha was the tiniest of us and the best actor, and it was she who would faint dramatically, as if overcome by hunger. She was skinny enough that only those with the hardest of hearts failed to believe her.
Spinks, who still looked wholesome despite his ratty clothes, was the one who would notice Agatha and shout for help.
And then I would nick the lady’s coin purse and run away before she’d noticed.
As the woman fell into a heated discussion with a glazier, we got into position. Spinks and Agatha rounded the man’s stall and I wandered up behind the lady, my hands tucked behind my back, pretending to be looking at the wares for sale.
The woman held up a purple glass disk. “I need to grind a set of lenses that can amplify the effects of this one,” she said.
“What does this lens do, exactly?” the man asked, holding it up and peering at the sky. “This glass ain’t like anything I seen before.”
“It’s…special,” the woman said. “It perceives a rare spectrum that—”
That was when Agatha put the back of her wrist against her forehead, rolled her eyes up, and with a sad “Oh!” collapsed at our feet.
“My sister!” Spinks cried, kneeling beside her.
The woman turned and said, “The poor dear! Give her some water.” She uncinched the cloth bag on her arm, fetched out a silver flask, and held it out to Spinks.
He said, “Oh, thank you, ma’am!” Uncapping it, he tipped it and poured a clear stream onto Agatha’s face.
Agatha sputtered dramatically and said, “Is that you, Spinks?”
And that was my cue. Sidling up behind the woman, I slid my right hand into the open mouth of her bag. My fingers came into contact with a latched coin purse, small but heavy, a perfect fit for my fist.
“Oh no, you don’t,” the woman said, and she cinched the bag tight around my hand, knotting the drawstring.
I yanked but wasn’t able to pull free—not while clutching the coin purse. If I’d let go, I might have been able to slide my hand out, but the purse was fat with money, and I wanted it.
“Think you’re going to rob me, do you?” the woman said, looming over me. I could see now that this was no high-society lady; this was someone who worked hard for a living. It showed in her call
oused hands and in the strength of her arms as she lifted me high above the ground by the wrist she’d knotted tight in her purse.
I dangled, my toes kicking at nothing.
“I seem to have caught myself a tiny filthy rat,” the lady announced. The vendors at the stalls bellowed with laughter.
“Please, ma’am,” I gasped. “I’m sorry!”
“Not so sorry that you let go of my purse. Had you done that, foolish boy, I might have turned you loose. But now…”
Behind her, Agatha and Spinks melted away into the crowd. They’d go to our hidey-hole off Petticoat Lane, I knew, and wait for me.
The woman lowered me so that my feet touched the ground again. I planted my heels and pulled, and she yanked back so hard that I fell to the pavement, my right arm raised above my head.
“You’re coming home with me, rat,” she said. “Either on your own bare feet, which would be easier for the both of us, or dragged through the streets. Your choice.”
She strutted off through the crowd with me in tow, my knees and shins knocking against every bump and stone on the way.
“Let me go, you fat old cow!”
She stopped in her tracks and dangled me in the air once more.
“I’d intended to only bathe you, but it’s clear now that I’ll have to scrub your insides as well.” She set off again, dropping me once more. This time I landed on my feet, and stumbled in her wake.
Our destination was fifteen minutes away: a three-story inn called the Star-Crossed Arms. By the time we got there, I was crying loudly.
“Stop your sobbing, rat,” the woman said. “You want to make a good first impression.” And then she pushed open the door.
Inside was a wide hall that split the building in two. To the left was a warm noisy pub, packed with customers. The smell of meat and potatoes drifting out made my mouth water. To the right were a clerk’s station and an office. “’Allo, Jenks!” called out a bald man behind the counter. “What you got there?”
“A rat I caught in the market,” she said, raising my arm again and looking me over. “Thought I might could clean it up and find a use for it.”