Hollowpox: The Hunt for Morrigan Crow Read online

  The soprano sighed. “Darlings, De Flimsé is everything. De Flimsé is life.”

  “De Flimsé is a genius,” added Frank, looking somber as he picked up the discarded newspaper and read the news for himself.

  “This is De Flimsé,” Dame Chanda continued, gesturing to her green embroidered silk gown. “At least a third of my wardrobe is by De Flimsé. My favorite perfume is Flimsé by De Flimsé. My second-favorite perfume is Whimsé by De Flimsé, which I am wearing as we speak, and for which I am a brand ambassador and billboard model.” She held a hand to her chest and lowered her head, taking a little bow.

  “What a coincidence,” said Frank, sniffing at his wrists. “I’m wearing Whimsé by De Flimsé for Himsé.”

  Jack caught Morrigan’s eye, and they both had to look away quickly, trying not to grin.

  “Oh, I thought so, darling, you smell delicious.” Dame Chanda beamed at him before returning her attention to Jack and Morrigan. “Juvela De Flimsé is an icon, my dears. A giant of the Free State fashion world. She once called me her muse, you know,” she added as an aside to Frank.

  “She’s been to seven of my parties,” he replied, puffing himself up with pride. “Eight, if you count the one she left in disgust because Countess von Bissing wore a gown made of summer-weight fabric. In autumn.”

  “Oh, but this is just dreadful,” said Dame Chanda, taking the paper back from Frank. “It says here she was found early this morning, lying half-buried in the snow, eyes wide open but completely, catatonically unresponsive. Nobody knows how she got there. She’s in the Royal Lightwing Wunimal Hospital in some sort of… waking coma? They don’t know when or… or if she’ll recover. Oh, poor Juvela. Whatever could have happened to her?”

  Voice breaking, she tossed the paper down and buried her face in her hands. Frank slid off his chair, disappeared underneath the table, and emerged at Dame Chanda’s side, reaching up to pat her comfortingly on the shoulder, while Jupiter, Kedgeree, and the others made noises of quiet sympathy.

  Morrigan leaned over to get a better view of the photograph accompanying the article, and gasped. “Oh! Oh, I’ve seen her.”

  Dame Chanda tutted miserably from behind her hands. “Yes, that’s just what I’m saying, darling, of course you’ve seen her, it’s De Flim—”

  “No, I—I mean I saw her,” Morrigan clarified, snatching up the newspaper. “Last night. On the Wunderground.”

  It was the leopardwun. Juvela De Flimsé was the leopardwun who’d tried to attack Baby Dave. She looked a lot more composed in her photograph, of course. It was a very glamorous shot of her attending Nevermoor Fashion Week, draped in an oversized pink pashmina, but it was unmistakably her. She had the same big, expensive-looking diamond earring studded in the tip of one ear. She was wearing enormous sunglasses in the photo, so Morrigan couldn’t tell whether her eyes were the same startling shade of green, but even so… she was certain it was the same Wunimal.

  Dame Chanda looked up, frowning. “I don’t think so, darling. Juvela doesn’t take public transport. She has a driver.”

  “I heard she has a whole roster of drivers,” said Frank. “And a fleet of motorcars.”

  “I heard she rides a unicorn everywhere she goes,” said Fenestra from her spot on the floor, in a tone of mock reverence. Everyone turned to her in surprise; they’d all thought she was asleep. “And uses it to stab people wearing last season’s shoes.”

  Jack, Kedgeree, Martha, and Charlie put in a heroic effort not to react to this entirely inappropriate joke.

  “It has to be her,” Morrigan insisted, ignoring them. “Look, it says she was found near the Nevermoor University West Campus. That’s where she got off the train, at Scholars’ Crossing! Well, it’s where she was forced off the train, actually.”

  Morrigan recounted for them what had happened on the Wunderground the night before.

  “Oh no,” said Dame Chanda when she’d finished. “No, no, no. That doesn’t sound like Juvela at all. Juvela wouldn’t harm a fly. She’s a vegetarian! Well, a weekday vegetarian, but still—she would never, ever try to hurt a child.”

  “But I’m telling you, she did try,” Morrigan insisted. “I watched her do it. There was a whole train carriage full of eyewitnesses! Hawthorne was there too, you can ask him if you don’t believe me.”

  “Of course we believe you, Mog,” said Jupiter firmly, casting a pointed look at Dame Chanda, who still looked troubled.

  “Oh! Yes, darling, of course,” she said hurriedly, reaching out to give Morrigan’s hand a gentle squeeze. “Of course I believe that you believe you saw—”

  “But why didn’t you tell me about this last night?” Jupiter interrupted. “It sounds terrifying. Is Hawthorne’s sister all right?”

  “Oh, she’s fine,” Morrigan replied with a shrug. “Baby Dave has the fortitude of an ox. I didn’t tell you because I forgot. It happened so quickly and… well, it wasn’t a big deal, honestly. Just a bit weird.”

  “Very weird,” Jupiter agreed. “And very much the sort of thing Juvela’s doctors might need to know about. Perhaps it could help them understand what happened to her. But otherwise, Mog, I think we should keep this information to ourselves, all right?”

  “Why?”

  Jupiter pressed his mouth into a line, and he and Dame Chanda shared a somber look. “When it comes to Wunimals, some people already have certain… opinions. The tabloids love a story about Wunimals behaving badly, and a famous Wunimal, well… we just don’t want anyone forming a conclusion about what happened before we know what happened, that’s all. It wouldn’t be fair to Juvela.”

  Morrigan agreed to keep it quiet but privately thought that if this De Flimsé person was as famous as they said, the tabloids would know about it soon enough. The train car had been full of people, after all.

  “Right!” Jupiter snatched up his coat. “Come on then, Dame Chanda. To the hospital!”

  The soprano rose gracefully and headed for the parlor door, glancing back over her shoulder at him in a deeply dignified manner. “To the florist, Jove. Then to the hospital. We are not monsters.”

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  ROOK

  It was drizzling outside Morrigan’s bedroom window on the day she was to return to school. She grimaced at the sight of it, rubbing her eyes as she sat up in bed (a thin, too-firm mattress this morning and one uncomfortably lumpy pillow, as if it knew she’d need the extra push to get up). The rain didn’t bode well—drizzle in Nevermoor could mean a torrential downpour inside Wunsoc. Not an ideal start to the new term.

  There was a soft knock on the door, but when she crossed the room to open it, nobody was there. She looked down; on the floor sat a breakfast tray with a pot of tea, a dish covered by a silver cloche, and a handwritten note.

  First day back, Mog! Huzzah!

  Don’t forget your brolly.

  —J.N.

  Jupiter must have written this note days ago, she thought, and left it with Martha before heading off-realm. As a captain in the League of Explorers, he was regularly called away to travel into one of many mysterious other realms outside of their own. Morrigan didn’t know much about his work in the League, but she knew it was both very important and surprisingly dull. A lot of Jupiter’s missions seemed to be tedious diplomatic trips to attend coronations and summits and ceremonies.

  Scowling at both the enthusiasm and the unnecessary advice in the note, she set it aside and carried the tray over to her slablike prison bed. Underneath the cloche was a big bowl of steaming hot porridge swirled with honey, and she ate the whole thing in silence, staring out at the rain.

  Morrigan knew she ought to be excited to go back to Wunsoc, but all she felt was a mild sense of underwhelm.

  She had been practicing Nocturne and Inferno every single night of the holidays without fail, and every morning too. The same thing, over and over: calling Wunder, lighting candles. Calling Wunder, lighting candles.

  She wanted to do more, wanted to learn something new, but
in truth she was too frightened to try it on her own. The act of lighting a candle made her feel formidable and in control. She didn’t want to risk going too far, creating something dangerous that she couldn’t contain. The memory of what had happened the first time she’d breathed fire—the way it had roared up from her lungs and set the canopy of Proudfoot Station ablaze, injuring the awful Heloise and getting Morrigan temporarily kicked out of Wunsoc in the process—was still painfully fresh. Safe to say she was hesitant to overextend herself.

  What she needed was a teacher. Someone to give her lessons in the Wretched Arts, not the Arcane Arts. Murgatroyd the Scholar Mistress had promised her an education in being a Wundersmith, and Morrigan was planning to gather up her courage, march right into her office, and demand that she finally fulfill that promise.

  Something caught her eye—the golden circle on the black station door was pulsating with a soft golden glow, the signal that Hometrain was on its way. With a resigned sigh and a last sip of tea, she snatched up her brolly and pressed the W imprint on her index finger to the circle. It swung open to reveal the small, brightly lit room she knew well.

  In Morrigan’s Wunsoc wardrobe her usual uniform hung on the back of the door, but alongside it was a second pullover, a heavy coat, a pair of leather boots with thicker-than-normal woolen socks, leather gloves, and a scarf—all in black. Morrigan’s lip curled at the sight of it; clearly, the Wunsoc weather phenomenon had something unpleasant in store.

  She sighed again, wondering whether she might just get away with climbing back into bed. Unfortunately, the door was one step ahead and had locked itself behind her.

  “Rude,” Morrigan said under her breath, and reluctantly got dressed.

  Miss Cheery welcomed Unit 919 back to school with a rousing cheer she’d written herself that went for a full seven minutes. (She’d even made her own pom-poms from leftover Christmas tinsel.) She handed out their new timetables, stuffed their coat pockets full of biscuits for the walk to class, and then waved them off at Proudfoot Station like a proud mother hen.

  On the chilly walk through the Whingeing Woods, Hawthorne wasted no time in regaling Morrigan and Cadence with dramatic holiday tales from the Swift family. Their house had been invaded by a swarm of aunts, uncles, and cousins from the Highlands on Boxing Day, and Morrigan hadn’t heard from him since Christmas Eve.

  “I’ve been trapped in a hell made of toddlers,” he moaned, “with no news of the outside world. My cousin Jordy did a wee in my left dragonriding boot! I am so glad school’s back.”

  “That makes one of you,” sighed Cadence. “I had a brilliant holiday. My gran treated Mum and me to a volcanic spa break in Moonrise Bay. Ten days steaming in a hot lagoon and watching molten lava pour down the side of a mountain. It was lush.” She tugged her collar up against the wind, looking highly resentful.

  Morrigan recapped all that had happened at the Deucalion in the week since Christmas. “Oh—and we lost Frank for three days!” she finished. “Turned out Fenestra had buried him under six feet of snow in the lobby and forgotten about him. I mean, he’s a vampire, so it’s not like he was any more dead than usual when we dug him up, but I’ve never seen him so cross. He still isn’t talking to Fen.”

  They said goodbye to Cadence outside in the grounds—her first lesson was in identifying poisonous fungi in the Whingeing Woods, something she could not have been less excited about.

  “Does anything normal ever happen at your place?” Hawthorne asked Morrigan sincerely as they climbed the marble steps of Proudfoot House and headed inside to the bank of brass railpods. Even at this early hour, a massive queue was already forming.

  She snorted. “No. If I had my own dragon, it’d be called Lives with Lunatics. Oh—I almost forgot! Remember that leopardwun from Christmas Eve?”

  “I was trying to forget it, to be honest,” he said, cringing. “Still haven’t told Mum and Dad about that.”

  “They’ll probably hear about it anyway,” said Morrigan, “because she’s famous!”

  She proceeded to tell Hawthorne all about Juvela De Flimsé (he’d never heard of her either) and about Dame Chanda’s visit to the hospital with Jupiter.

  “But they were turned away,” she said. “Even with their W pins. Then the next day they tried again but she’d been taken somewhere else, and they weren’t even allowed to know where. Isn’t that weird?”

  “Bit weird,” agreed Hawthorne, sounding only vaguely interested. He craned his neck, counting the people queueing in front of them. Railpods whooshed in and out of the platform. “We’re gonna be late.”

  The large brass spheres were part of the Society’s internal-external travel network and could take you anywhere inside Wunsoc (if you had permission to be there), and to most of the Wunderground stations in Nevermoor. They hung suspended from a cable in a long line, and as each pod disappeared into the narrow, tunnel-like shaft at one end of the platform, another would arrive at the other end to replace it. Like gigantic beads being threaded on a wire.

  “Where’s your first class? Should we take a pod together?” Hawthorne asked her.

  “Oh, no. I’m just going down the hall.” She glanced toward the Scholar Mistresses’ office, and a feeling of dread swelled up inside her. “Free period this morning, so I’m… I’m going to go see Murgatroyd.”

  Morrigan swallowed, picturing the Arcane Scholar Mistress warping into her ice-cold Mundane counterpart, Ms. Dearborn. The transformations were unscheduled and unpredictable—like a roll of the dice. If you sought out one, you were just as likely to get the other.

  “Really?” asked Hawthorne, grimacing. “You sure you don’t want to come down to the arena and watch me train instead?”

  It was tempting.

  “I’m moving up a weight class today,” he went on. “Fingers Magee wants to try me on a Low Country Luminescent—their scales glow in the dark!”

  Luminescent dragons were beautiful to watch. Morrigan supposed she didn’t have to see Murgatroyd first thing. She could wait until lunchtime, perhaps. Or tomorrow…

  She opened her mouth to say so but shrieked instead as she felt a hand grasp her white collar, yanking her backward.

  “You,” said a harsh voice. “Come with me.”

  Morrigan turned to see the Scholar Mistress herself, as if summoned there by telepathic thought. “Mrs. Murgatroyd! I was… I was just coming to—”

  “Yes, I’m sure you were. Do shut up,” grumbled Murgatroyd. She grabbed Morrigan’s arm and pulled her to the front of the queue.

  Morrigan looked back at Hawthorne. He winced in sympathy but stayed very still, like a small woodland unnimal hiding in the grass while a hungry bear went on a rampage.

  At the front of the queue, Murgatroyd kicked a bespectacled older gentleman out of his pod and propelled Morrigan inside, following close behind.

  “I say! How very dare—oh, pardon me, Mrs. Murgatroyd,” he said, cringing away from the Scholar Mistress and bowing his head in capitulation. “Please, take my pod, you’re very welcome, do take it.”

  “Just did, dummy,” Murgatroyd snarled, and then shut the door in his face.

  She pressed her imprint to a small golden circle on the wall, then instantly began operating the chains, buttons, and levers in a pattern Morrigan would never remember. The pod rocked forward at great speed, then felt suddenly as if it were free-falling from a height. Morrigan grasped at a loop hanging from the ceiling, trying to steady herself.

  “Um… Mrs. Murgatroyd… what are we—”

  “It’s time.” Murgatroyd’s cracked lips retreated from her brownish teeth in a terrifying leer. “Now you’ve had your first C&D gathering, it’s time for you to learn what you need to learn to become a productive Society member… before you explode like a human volcano and take us all down with you.”

  Morrigan felt a little flip of excitement somewhere in the realm of her diaphragm (although it might have been nausea; the pod was traveling in a violently erratic manner). This was it.
She was finally going to learn the Wretched Arts. Properly. Not on her own in her bedroom, with barely a clue what she was doing.

  No. She was going to learn them where she should have been all along: in a classroom. With an actual teacher! With books and desks and exams and definitely no imminent danger.

  Ever since Murgatroyd had promised her a chance to learn the Wretched Arts, Morrigan had wondered who there could possibly be to teach her. Supposedly the only people who could use them were Wundersmiths. Ezra Squall was the only other living Wundersmith, and she would have bet her favorite boots, her beloved umbrella, and the Hotel Deucalion itself that Squall had not been hired as her teacher.

  She’d finally worked up the courage to ask, when the pod came to a sudden, aggressive halt, and the door swung open onto…

  Nothing.

  They’d arrived at a tiny platform surrounded by darkness, at the end of which was a set of stairs that led down to… who knew?

  “Well,” said Murgatroyd, cracking her neck to the side as they stepped out onto the platform. She nodded at the stairs. “’S down there.”

  “What’s down there?”

  “Sub-Nine.” Murgatroyd sniffed, as if she’d just said something of no real importance. As if she hadn’t just brought Morrigan to the one place in Proudfoot House that was off-limits to all scholars. “Good luck.”

  Morrigan felt her stomach lurch. “Aren’t you coming with me?”

  The Scholar Mistress chuckled, then instantly winced. “Me? Not likely.”

  Morrigan heard a series of tiny little pops, then a familiar crack-crack-CRUNCH that made her skin crawl.

  “You can’t just leave me here by myself!” she insisted.

  “You won’t be by yourself.” Crack-pop-pop-pop-CRRRRUNCH.

  Morrigan cringed. “No—please, please don’t change into Ms. Dearborn now!” A wave of panic rose in her chest.

  The change took mere moments, but Morrigan felt as if time had stopped. Murgatroyd’s cracked and purpling lips, sunken gray eyes, and stooped posture warped and re-formed until the person who stood before her was no longer Murgatroyd.