In any case, the die was cast—always assuming Jiminy Cricket brought my note back to Claudia. When the second round came, the last heirs of the Gallien might show up at the gate of the haunted city with a posse of grayfolk. If we could get out of here and join them, there was a chance of freedom, maybe even overthrow of the creature who had taken power and cursed the once pleasant land of Empis.
I thought I’d settle for freedom. I didn’t want to die in this damp cell, or on the killing field for the pleasure of Elden and his sycophants, and I didn’t want any more of my fellow prisoners to die, either. There were only fifteen of us left. Gully passed the night of the banquet—while the banquet was still going on, for all I knew. Two gray men carried him off after breakfast the next morning, supervised by a night soldier whose name might have been Lemmil, or Lammel, or maybe even Lemuel. It made no difference to me. I wanted to kill him.
I wanted to kill them all.
“If there’s a way to deal with the night soldiers, you better figure it out quick, Princey,” Ammit said after Gully was taken away. “I don’t know about Flight Killer, but that bitch who’s with him, that Petra, won’t want to wait long for some more killing. She was getting off on it.”
Getting off on it wasn’t exactly what he said, but it wasn’t wrong.
Dinner the night after the banquet was chunks of half-raw pork. Just looking at mine made my stomach turn over, and I almost tossed it down the waste hole. It was good that I didn’t, because there was another note from Pursey tucked inside it, written in that same educated script: Move tall cabinet. Door. May be locked. Destroy this. Yours in service, Percival.
I could have used more, but that was what I had to settle for, and it would only matter if we could get to the Officials’ Room in the first place. We could deal with the limber sticks, but only if we could do something about the high voltage that surrounded our captors. But say we did.
Could we kill them when they were dead already?
4
I dreaded breakfast the next day, knowing if Pursey brought sausages, the second round was going to happen before I had any idea of what to do with the blue boys. But it was big flapjacks coated with some kind of berry syrup. I caught mine, ate it, then used the cup with the hole in the bottom to wash the syrup off my hands. Iota was looking at me through the bars of his cell and licking his fingers, waiting for Pursey to be gone.
When he was, he said, “We’ve got another day for the hurt ones to heal up a little, but if it isn’t tomorrow it’ll probably be the next day. Three at most.”
He was right, and they were all depending on me. Absurd for them to put their trust in a high school kid, but they needed a rainmaker, and I was elected.
In my head I heard Coach Harkness say, Drop down and give me twenty, you waste of space.
Because I had no better idea, and felt like a waste of space, I did. Hands wide apart. Down slow, chin touching the stone floor, then up slow.
“Why you do that?” Stooks asked, hanging over the bars and watching me.
“It’s soothing.”
After you get past the initial stiffness （and the body’s predictable protest at being asked to do actual work）， it always is. While I went down and up, I thought about the dream: Leah holding my mother’s purple hairdryer. Believing the answer to my problem—our problem—lay in a dream was undoubtedly magical thinking, but I had come to a magical place, so why not?
Here’s a little side-note that isn’t a side-note at all—just wait for it. I read Dracula in the summer before seventh grade. This was also at the urging of Jenny Schuster, not long before she and her family moved to Iowa. I was going to read Frankenstein—I had it from the library—but she said it was boring, a shit-ton of bad writing combined with a lot of bullshit philosophy. Dracula, she said, was a hundred times better, the coolest vampire story ever written.
I don’t know if she was right about that—it’s hard to take the literary judgments of a twelve-year-old too seriously, even if she is a horror maven—but Drac was good. Yet long after all the bloodsucking, the stakes pounded into hearts, and the dead mouths stuffed with garlic had pretty much left my mind, I remembered something Van Helsing said about laughter, which he called King Laugh. He said that King Laugh didn’t knock but only barged in. You know that’s true if you ever saw something funny and couldn’t help laughing, not just in the moment but every time you remembered it. I think true inspiration is like that. There’s no link you can put your finger on, saying oh sure, I was thinking about this and it led me to that. Inspiration doesn’t knock.