“What’s that you got, then?” Ribs said at his shoulder. He tried to pull away but it was too late. “Owydd?” she muttered. “What, like … Ovid?”
“It’s my father,” he said quietly.
He felt her lift the file out of his hands and she turned the papers steadily and then she grunted. “It don’t make sense, Charlie, him bein a talent an all. That ain’t how it works. Talents don’t descend through bloodlines, they’re random, like. Our parents is what usually throws us out, when they see what all we can do.”
Charlie swallowed the lump in his throat.
“Huh. He were down in London?”
It was disconcerting, not being able to see Ribs as she talked. He looked at the file, floating in the gloom. “Does it mean something?” he whispered. “You ever hear of any talent ever leaving this place? You think he ran away?”
“All the way to London? Naw,” she said. “But London’s where they send the exiles.”
“What are they?”
“Them what lose their talents, when they come of age. It don’t happen to most, but to some. No one knows why.” Her voice went very quiet. “It’s just a awful sad thing. It ain’t easy for them goin back out among ordinary folk, an not able to do what they used to do. It be like losing a part of yourself, I guess. Your poor pa.”
Charlie rubbed at his nose with a knuckle. He tried to imagine it. “He was just a kid, like us.”
Ribs closed the file, returned it to the drawer. Her voice was very close to his ear when she spoke next. “You ever want to talk about it, I’m a good listener,” she said softly. “You ain’t even got to know I’m there. We all got stories, Charlie. We all know how it is.”
Charlie felt the heat rise to his face.
And then, mercifully, she was trying the desk drawers. All were locked. Charlie had turned away, confused, thinking about his father, when his eye glimpsed something on the carpet. It must have fallen out of the papers when Bailey was there.
Ribs picked it up. It was Berghast’s notebook. They still didn’t light the candle but went back to the window and in the weak glow from outside she turned the pages, struggling to decipher Berghast’s scrawl. There were lists of dates, and numbers, and annotated letters that maybe meant something to him but not to Ribs or Charlie. Over the page: diagrams and what were perhaps maps, they couldn’t say. Charlie’s bleeding had stopped in his arms and he drifted around the study peering at the strange objects and trying the doors quietly. But when Ribs made a sudden surprised gasp he came back over, stood near.
“What’d you get?” he whispered. “What is it?”
The journal, floating in midair, closed.
“Ribs?”
“I think I just found who we got to talk to,” her voice muttered. “An it ain’t bloody Berghast.”
* * *
“The Spider?” said Komako, later, in disbelief. She stared at Ribs. It was late; they were gathered in the classroom, keeping their voices down. She glanced at Charlie. “Is she serious?”
Charlie blinked in the candlelight. “I think so.”
He seemed deflated. Maybe he was just tired. His shirt was torn, bloodied. He’d have to get rid of it, she knew. Seeing him fall had been awful, the plunging weight of his body in the darkness, the hollow crack as he struck the ground.
“I am serious,” Ribs whispered. She was visible, wearing her gray smock, red hair standing up in thick tufts. “Cross me heart an hope to—”
“Okay, okay. I get it.”
“I don’t,” Oskar said nervously. Beside him, Lymenion gave a low puzzled growl in his throat, as if in agreement. “What would the Spider want with, with, with the missing talents?”
Ribs winked. “Maybe he eats them.”
Komako glared.
“Well the bloody journal never said, did it,” Ribs protested. “There was just them names in the one column an the Spider’s in the other. Course the next page had a list for a order of candles, an dates an times of delivery, so you tell me. I just reckon we got to just go on over an ask him.”
Oskar gulped. He was winding and unwinding the string around his finger. “Ask … the Spider?”
Komako grimaced. Obviously Ribs was right, they’d need to see what they could learn from the glyphic. It might be as simple as him looking for the talents in that way he had, by sensing them. Maybe that was all Dr. Berghast meant, maybe he was searching for the disappeared kids too. She looked up. “Where’s the journal?”