Hollowpox: The Hunt for Morrigan Crow Read online

  Some of these branches went more than a dozen chambers deep; in fact, the farthest Morrigan had traveled was fourteen archways along to a room called Jemmity, named after the Wundersmith Odbuoy Jemmity. Inside Jemmity, instead of another archway there was a locked wooden door like the one she’d seen on her first visit to Sub-Nine, with the words THE LIMINAL HALL carved above it, glowing in the stone. It was the end of the line. (Morrigan tried her imprint on that door too—just in case—but again nothing happened.)

  “Will I have a room named after me here someday, do you think?” Morrigan asked.

  “My understanding is that it happens when a Wundersmith turns one hundred years old. Or… erm, when they die. Whichever comes first,” explained Sofia.

  Morrigan tilted her head to the side. “Fingers crossed for option number one.”

  “Yes, quite,” the foxwun agreed. “Now I’m afraid I must leave you here, Morrigan—I have a class to teach up on Sub-Six. Will you manage?”

  “Of course. I’ve visited ghostly hours on my own before.”

  Sofia looked reassured. “Good. But please pace yourself. Don’t try to do everything at once. All right?”

  “Promise.”

  When Sub-Nine had been occupied and properly cared for, Van Ophoven must have been one of the grandest chambers of all, Morrigan thought. In its current state, it had the spectral air of a cathedral fallen into ruin, all vast crumbling stone arches and staircases jostling with half-broken marble statues.

  She found the tiny sliver of light in the air and nudged it open, slipping into the ghostly hour, and her suspicion was confirmed: the Van Ophoven of the past was strange and beautiful. A sprawling architectural landscape so exquisite it made Morrigan’s heart ache to think it no longer existed.

  The Gossamer-Spun Garden.

  It wasn’t so much a garden as a thousand different gardens. Or a thousand different drawings of a garden, from a thousand different imaginations, rendered in three dimensions by a thousand different artists. There were trees that grew up to the ceiling, bearing fruit of silver and gold, and rainbow vines that moved like snakes. There was a meadow of wonky sunflowers that grew high above Morrigan’s head, and a fairy-sized garden with funny little red toadstools.

  The lesson was led by Brilliance Amadeo, a master Weaver who had already become one of Morrigan’s favorite teachers. (It was probably quite strange, she realized, to have a favorite teacher you’d never met, who didn’t know your name, and with whom you would never speak because they’d been dead for over a hundred years… but she tried not to ponder that too deeply.)

  “The Gossamer-Spun Garden is over seven hundred years old,” Brilliance was saying when Morrigan arrived. She led her students down a path lined with fluffy, misshapen daisies that swayed in an imaginary breeze and gathered buzzing clouds of bright pink bumblebees. Morrigan tried to keep up, but she wanted to stop and look at everything. “Its plants and flowers and unnimals never die, its vines and trees never become overgrown or unmanageable. It’s entirely handmade, woven from the Gossamer threads of the world around us.”

  “Who made it?” asked one of the students, a boy of maybe seven or eight.

  Morrigan hadn’t quite gotten used to seeing children so young inside these ghostly hours. Nowadays you had to have turned eleven to join the Wundrous Society. But Sofia had explained to her that in the old days, whenever a Wundersmith died, an elite Wunsoc team was sent out to scour the whole realm for the child who’d been born to take their place. Sometimes it took days, sometimes months, sometimes years. But whenever they found the child, their family would gladly hand them over to be raised at Proudfoot House and trained by the other Wundersmiths. It was seen as the highest honor.

  When she’d asked Sofia, Rook, and Conall which Wundersmith she might have replaced, and who among the original nine was her predecessor, she was disappointed to find they couldn’t answer her. After Ezra’s generation, Conall said, Wunsoc stopped searching for those children. They weren’t keeping track anymore.

  Morrigan couldn’t help wondering—perhaps a little bitterly—what kind of Wundersmith she’d be by now, if she’d been studying the Wundrous Arts since she was small.

  “We all made it,” Brilliance told the little boy. “Everyone who ever trained in the School of Wundrous Arts. You might think of it as a collaborative canvas, shared through the Ages. Wundersmiths have long practiced the Wundrous Art of Weaving here in the glorious, cocoonlike safety of everyone else’s past mistakes,” she said, her eyes twinkling. “Look over here—see this… I suppose one might call it a flower?”

  The students laughed, and Morrigan could see why. The “flower” resembled the floppy, misshapen ear of an elephant, all gray and leathery and tough-looking. It was like a very young child’s impression of a flower, if all they had to draw with was a gray crayon held between their toes.

  “Would you believe me if I told you that this flower here is the earliest known work of Alfirk Antares?” Brilliance asked, smiling fondly at it.

  Morrigan had no idea who Alfirk Antares was, but obviously these children did. They all three gasped, absolute glee written on their faces, as if they’d been told their favorite celebrity was in the room.

  “He was only nine years old,” she said, nodding at the older boy. “Same age as you are now, Owain. Not bad for his first act of Weaving, don’t you agree?”

  Brilliance led them farther along the winding path, reaching out now and then to touch the velvety petals of a rose, or to run her hand lightly through a pond, leaving a rippling bioluminescent trail in its wake. The children followed, openmouthed, eyes darting in every direction. Morrigan tagged along, feeling equally overcome.

  “We’re going to start with the same task assigned to every Wundersmith who has ever entered this garden,” explained Brilliance. “You will find it incredibly simple to do, yet monstrously difficult to do well… and just about impossible to do perfectly. But that’s what the Gossamer-Spun Garden is for. Mistakes. Failures. Practice. So let’s get started. Please begin by calling Wunder.”

  Morrigan followed along with Brilliance Amadeo’s instructions and, to her delight, found she could do everything the other children could. Brilliance was a wonderful teacher—patient and precise, always willing to slow down or repeat herself if needed.

  “Weaving is about expanding and contracting one’s imagination, weaving together thought, creativity, and physical matter to manipulate and create our own reality and bring our vision to life. When we weave, we pull threads from the Gossamer and rearrange them, either to influence the world as it is”—she paused for a demonstration and sent an enormous vine swinging back and forth in the distance with a casual flick of her wrist—“or to make the world anew.”

  When Morrigan narrowed her eyes, she could just make out the near-invisible, golden-white threads of Wunder working in the background, darting to and fro to obey their unspoken orders. She soon discovered that she needn’t properly sing to call Wunder—it was paying closer attention to her, like a dog alert to its owner’s every command. In this kind of constant communication, she only had to hum a few notes to feel it gathering to her fingertips.

  Just like Ezra Squall, she thought. The realization came with a strange mix of alarm and satisfaction.

  By the end of the lesson, the students—Morrigan included—had each created their own clumsy sort of pseudo-flower, wonky and imprecise as they were. In her little patch of garden bed, Morrigan had tried to make a red rose and instead ended up with something more closely resembling a vomit-green pillbox hat on a stick.

  Nevertheless, it was her vomit-green pillbox hat on a stick. Morrigan felt elated. I made that, she kept thinking while she sat on the ground, staring at it. She felt powerful and brilliant and artistic, just like Brilliance Amadeo herself.

  As the ghostly hour ended, her ghostly teacher and classmates and the beautiful Gossamer-Spun Garden began to cut in and out, turning staticky, and then simply melted away. Morrigan preferred to
watch the ghostly hours she visited fade, rather than step back through the curtain. It took longer, but there was something calming about remaining still while the world around her gently transformed.

  Once Morrigan was alone again in Van Ophoven she noticed how tired she felt. No, exhausted.

  She should leave. She should get up and go back to the study chamber, or… what time was it? Maybe she ought to be going back to Hometrain by now.

  Get up, she told herself silently. But nothing happened.

  She was so tired. Her body simply wouldn’t do what she was telling it.

  It made her think of Golders Night, when she’d sat on the ground in that alleyway, soaked to the bone and shivering, her leg bleeding and throbbing. But at least she’d known what was wrong with her then, known specifically what the obstacles were to her getting up and moving: the cold, the blood loss, the pain.

  This felt different. Not as if something had happened to her body, but as if something had been removed from it. Drained out of her. Just… gone.

  How long had she been sitting there, she wondered? Her muscles were aching all over, and she was so cold, and so hungry. Had she ever been fed in her entire life?

  “Didn’t pace yourself, did you?”

  She very slowly turned to see Rook towering above her.

  “Sofia said she warned you. Better listen next time.”

  Rook didn’t seem to expect a response, which was good because Morrigan was too tired to give one. Instead, the Scholar Mistress put a bowl of chicken soup in her hands, dropped a blanket clumsily around her shoulders, and sat down beside her.

  They sat in reasonably comfortable silence, broken only by the scraping of spoon against bowl. Rook seemed quite content to stare around the empty room, lost in her own thoughts. It took quite some time, and almost all the soup, but eventually Morrigan had recovered enough energy to speak.

  “Where do the others go?” she asked.

  “Hmm?” Rook snapped out of her dreamy state, turning to Morrigan with a suddenly sharp gaze. “Where do what others go?”

  “You know,” mumbled Morrigan. It was uncomfortable, having the Scholar Mistress’s full attention, without anyone else in the room to buffer it. Like standing under a spotlight. “The others. Ms. Dearborn and Mrs. Murgatroyd.” She hastily shoved another spoonful of soup into her mouth, wondering if she’d overstepped a boundary.

  But Rook didn’t seem offended. “Oh… we’re all in here,” she said vaguely.

  Morrigan swallowed. “All the time?”

  She nodded. “All the time. Only… some of us are more here than others. I don’t come out much.”

  “Why not?”

  “I don’t have a reason to. Or at least, I haven’t until recently.”

  Morrigan paused before asking her next question, but finally decided if there was ever a moment to ask, this was probably it. “How many of you are in there?”

  A tiny muscle twitched at the corner of Rook’s mouth. “Nobody’s ever asked us that before.”

  “Are there more than three?” Morrigan pressed.

  “Oh… I should imagine so.”

  “How can you not know?”

  Rook tilted her head to one side, then the other, looking pensive. “Have you ever seen a set of nesting dolls, Wundersmith? You open up one, and there’s another inside her, and another inside her, and another…” Rook trailed off, and Morrigan nodded. “Could one of those dolls know how many others she carried within her? Could she know how deeply they’d nested inside her brain?”

  Morrigan couldn’t have explained why, but those words made her skin crawl.

  “The answer is no, of course she couldn’t,” continued Rook. “Not for sure. But perhaps sometimes, if she paid close attention, she might feel them… rattling around in there.” She gave her head a tiny shake from side to side. “Who knows? Maybe we go on forever.”

  Morrigan thought about that for a moment. She was picturing not dolls, but the chambers of Sub-Nine, following on one after the other like branches on a tree. If you wanted to get to the last chamber, you had to go through all the others first. There weren’t any shortcuts.

  “Does that mean Dearborn doesn’t know about you?”

  Rook frowned. “I’m not sure. Certainly, she and I have never met. Not in transition, I mean, the way you could say I’ve ‘met’ Murgatroyd. We’ve never had a reason to.” She glanced at Morrigan. “I hear she’s awful.”

  Morrigan nearly spat out her soup. “She’s, um… not great.”

  “Yes, that’s the rumor.”

  On the train ride home, all Unit 919 wanted to talk about was the Hollowpox—rumors they’d heard, theories they’d come up with. There’d been mounting speculation all over Wunsoc about exactly who was under quarantine in the teaching hospital, how dangerous they were, and whether any other famous Wunimals like De Flimsé might have been infected.

  “I heard they’ve got an elephantwun in there,” said Mahir. “Apparently, some boy from Unit 916 helped bring him down. He saved a whole platoon of the Stealth from being trampled.”

  “Ugh, that’s just Will Gaudy,” Thaddea groaned. “There’s no elephantwun, he’s been trying to get people to believe that stupid story all day. I heard there’s a giant snakewun in there that went on a killing spree and ate a family of five and they all had to be cut out of its stomach.”

  “Thaddea!” said Miss Cheery. “That’s horrible, and very much not true.”

  “It’s only what I heard, Miss.”

  The conversation went around in circles, and Morrigan found it hard to focus. She truly was worried about the Hollowpox, but… she couldn’t stop thinking about the afternoon she’d just had. About Brilliance Amadeo. About the Gossamer-Spun Garden and her tiny contribution to it.

  She was really becoming a Wundersmith. It was a thought she kept having to squash down, because it was making her grin like a fool while everyone else was discussing the awful matter of the outbreak.

  “What did you do today, Morrigan?” Lam asked her quietly as Hometrain pulled into Station 919.

  Morrigan jumped at the sound of her name.

  “Oh! Um… I made a flower.”

  “That’s nice.”

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  EXTRACURRICULAR ACTIVITY

  The warning signs showed up one morning later that week. Walls and bulletin boards of Proudfoot Station, normally filled with club sign-up sheets and lost property notices, were suddenly plastered with black-and-white posters. Cadence yanked one down and read it out loud to the rest of 919.

  HOLLOWPOX

  ARE YOU AT RISK?

  WHAT IS THE HOLLOWPOX?

  A potentially deadly disease caused

  by a virus which spreads quickly from

  Wunimal to Wunimal.

  COULD YOU BE INFECTED?

  If you are a Wunimal and are experiencing

  extreme distraction or forgetfulness,

  dramatically increased appetite, an inability to

  sleep or sit still, or episodes of aggression that

  seem out of character, you may be infected.

  If you have experienced any of the above

  symptoms, see Dr. Bramble, Dr. Lutwyche, or

  a member of staff at the Wundrous Society

  Teaching Hospital

  IMMEDIATELY.

  BE MINDFUL

  DON’T DELAY

  ASK FOR HELP

  “Was this your patron’s idea?” Mahir asked Morrigan. “Is he still leading that task force?”

  Morrigan took the poster from Cadence. “He is, but… this doesn’t really seem like his style. No color. Not enough exclamation marks.”

  She reread the notice in her head. Distraction. Forgetfulness. Increased appetite. Inability to sleep. Aggression. Nothing about the eyes. Had Jupiter forgotten? She made a mental note to remind him.

  Their first lesson that morning was a workshop called What’s That on Your Face?, a follow-up to their previous master class in minor distr
actions—What’s That Smell?—from weeks earlier. As their resident sleight-of-hand master, Arch had of course achieved top marks in What’s That Smell?, and nobody was surprised when Hawthorne also proved adept at creating small-scale mayhem. Mahir turned out to be good at throwing his voice like a ventriloquist, Lam was brilliant at asking for complicated directions and talking people around in circles, and even Francis had a decent go at jumping out of a birthday cake.

  But the real revelation had been Anah, whose ability to cry on cue was unsurpassed (an absolute must-have skill, the teacher had told them, when enlisting the aid of kindly strangers and getting out of trouble with the Stink). She didn’t even need to fake it; she was just really good at thinking of sad things that made her cry.

  The rest of Unit 919 was quite looking forward to today’s workshop, and the opportunity to practice the skills they’d learned so far. But Morrigan couldn’t help feeling a little frustrated. It all seemed like a colossal waste of time.

  Why bother learning to shout “FIRE” in a crowded building when she could be down on Sub-Nine, making actual fire? Or tending to her slowly growing patch of the Gossamer-Spun Garden? And what could their minor distractions teacher possibly show her that would compare with learning how to Weave still water into waves from Decima Kokoro herself? Surely, building her skills as a Wundersmith was more important than anything else?

  But when she’d spoken to Miss Cheery about it, the conductor had told her that Mundane and Arcane skills were still useful, and it was important to be an all-rounder.

  And when she’d spoken to Rook about it, the Scholar Mistress told her it was important to remember this was a marathon, and not a sprint.

  And when she’d spoken to Sofia about it, the foxwun told her it was important to go gently, to pace herself, to use caution.

  But inside her head, drowning all of them out, she heard the words Ezra Squall had spoken the last time they’d met.