“Yeah. I’m fine.”
“When I first came here, I got sad all the time. It wasn’t just the place. I mean, it was a little bit the place.”
“I’m not sad.”
“Well. I was.” Her mouth was open just a bit, as if with anticipation, as if she knew how closely he was watching her lips. “I’d just lost my sister, Teshi. She was my little sister, she’d been sick for a long time. And then she just wasn’t sick anymore. It was Mr. Coulton and Jacob who found me, who purchased passage for me here. Ribs was there, too. She’d just sort of … attached herself.”
Charlie raised his face. “Jacob—？”
“Marber. Yes. He was different then. I don’t know what he is now. He disappeared while we were sailing south from Tokyo. He was just … gone, one night. The sailors all believed he’d jumped overboard. But for years after, he’d be seen near Cairndale, off in the valleys, just walking. Head down, like he was looking for something.”
Charlie suppressed a shudder. He imagined that monster of smoke and darkness, stalking the walls of Cairndale, trying to find a way in.
Komako’s face was suddenly serious. “I know what it looks like here. Dr. Berghast and Miss Davenshaw and the like all act like this is a refuge for us, for our kind. And they want it to be, they do. But nowhere’s safe, not really. You be careful, Charlie One-of-Us-Now.”
“You don’t know where I’ve been,” he said. “I can take care of myself.”
“You’re not the only one who’s had it hard, Charlie.”
There was something about the way she said it. He looked at her then, really looked at her. Wondering suddenly and for the first time just what she’d lived through. How her sister had died, or her parents, or how she’d had to leave her entire life behind to come here. He scraped at the sill with a fingernail, feeling ashamed.
“What you saw the other night, the carriage in the courtyard,” she said. “You weren’t supposed to see it. It makes deliveries sometimes. Crates. And sometimes it takes things away, too.”
“I’m not afraid.”
“Only because you don’t know. You don’t know what’s happening here.”
He lifted the candle from its dish where it was guttering and poured out the wax and set it back upright. “So tell me.”
But he could see she was deciding some argument in herself. She got up and listened at the door. She was looking at him darkly as she did so and her eyes were shining in the candlelight. Then she came back and sat very close to him.
“Kids have been going missing,” she whispered.
He blinked. “From Cairndale?”
She nodded gravely. “Maybe even being killed. We don’t know. Last semester I saw Brendan O’Malley going out to that same carriage in the middle of the night. No one ever heard from him again. When I asked, I was told he’d come of age and gone back to his family. But he didn’t have any family, none worth going back to, at least.”
“Wait. What do you mean, what’re you saying?”
“I don’t know, not yet. But I’m going to find out. All of us are, me and Ribs and Oskar.”
“How?”
Komako leaned in close. He could feel her breath on his cheek. “Well, that’s what I wanted to talk to you about,” she said softly. “We need your help, Charlie.”
* * *
It’d been Ribs’s idea, to approach Charlie, to ask for his help. Oskar and Lymenion hadn’t liked it, true, but Komako could see the sense in it. He had a wary sidelong way of looking at you, the way of a kid who’d lived rough, that had made Komako think he just might agree. And he was, after all, a haelan.
It was that, his talent, which had finally convinced her. Because if they wanted to know more—if they wanted to get closer to whatever was going on—then they’d need a haelan.
The disappearances had started two years ago. Not many, not enough that anyone seemed alarmed; and always there was an explanation—gone down to London, or returned to their families, or sent on a journey to Romania, to Peking, to Australia. But no one ever said goodbye. And they left all they cared about behind. When Brendan was smuggled out to the carriage, in the dead of night, he’d been building a replica of Cairndale out of matchsticks in his dormitory; he left it unfinished. This other girl who disappeared six months before him, Wislawa, had just captured a rabbit and was raising it in a cage behind the toolshed; she left it unfed. Admittedly, Komako didn’t know any of the disappeared well: Cairndale kept its kids apart, as much as it could; but she’d heard the talk and knew they weren’t the sort to want to go.