The Giant's Almanac by Andrew Zurcher (black female authors .txt) 📕

‘But I would like you to see my room here,’ he said. ‘It is the room I have always wanted.’

Just at that moment, lights simultaneously appeared in the three archways that joined the Master’s court to the courts of the Registrar, the Commissar and the Heresiarch. Sharp footsteps, jumbled and echoing, tramped in the stillness.

Fitz took Clare by the hand and pulled her into the stairway. He began to run up the stairs, and she ran behind him. They took the steps two, sometimes three at a time, circling so fast that he grew dizzy. By the time they reached his room, they were both gasping for breath. In his chest Fitz’s lungs burned as if they had been set on fire, or as if he were being smothered. Clare shut the door behind her, and dragged the desk in front of it.

‘That won’t hold the door against them,’ Fitz said. ‘They can get through anything. They are with me even in my dreams. They can make tomorrow come before today.’

‘There isn’t much time, then, dearest,’ said Clare. ‘I want you to understand something. Mr Ahmadi is not the man we think he is. He is using you. They are using you. They are using all the children. Come with me. We can get out of this place. There is somewhere safe we can go. We can go to the Mountain.’

The footsteps had reached the stairs, below. There was a sound of many people climbing. Whoever they were, they weren’t speaking to one another, only climbing.

Above their heads, the trapdoor in the ceiling suddenly opened.

Ned More’s head dropped into the room.

‘Clare,’ he said, ‘we have to leave.’ The urgency in his voice made Fitz very anxious to wake up. He tried to push himself from the dream, through the surface of it as one might push through the surface of a lake, up through the tangled water into the clear and untroubled air – but he wasn’t able to remember how. Suddenly he wasn’t sure he was in a dream at all. The steps on the stairs grew louder.

The people chasing him were getting very near.

Clare dragged the mattress off Fitz’s bed, and with sudden and surprising strength upended the whole bed against the wall. Beneath the mattress, the bed’s frame was fixed with wooden slats. She climbed them as if they were a ladder, so that she could almost reach the trapdoor in the ceiling above. She looked back down at Fitz.

‘Now, Jaybird,’ she said.

Fitz reached out his hand. Somehow he had managed to take off his necklace, and the silver jay was twined round his fingers. Instead of taking Clare’s hand, he dropped the necklace into her outstretched palm.

‘Clare,’ said Ned.

From above, there were voices.

From below, there were voices.

Everything is in my head. The mind is its own place.

‘Jaybird,’ said Clare. But Fitz didn’t climb.

Clare took Ned’s hand, and he pulled her into the ceiling. The trapdoor fell shut behind her.

The steps had become very close, now, to the top of the stairs. Fitz could now make out what the voices were saying. They were saying, ‘He is bound to wake up.’

He pulled the bed back down from the wall. It hit the floor with a crash. In his terrified state, he found it easy, somehow, to drag the mattress back into place. Its blankets were still on it. He pushed the desk away from the door and sat on the bed.

Through the window, a light flared in the sky. It took him a moment to make sense of it. It was a hot air balloon; he had seen the burner firing, and above it the looming darkness of the envelope. It fired again, and in the sudden illumination, he saw faces – Clare’s, Ned’s, and a third face – long, shadowed, beneath the hood of a cloak. Now the balloon, which was drifting in the sky, seemed to rise, and rising, to catch the wind.

The footsteps on the stairs stopped. In his dream there was whispering, but he couldn’t understand it. He lay down on the bed, his body damp with sweat against the hot blankets. Then the footsteps died away again.

He fell back into a deep sleep, and didn’t wake up until the next morning.

When he saw Dina at breakfast, he reached into his shirt for his silver jay, and found that it was missing.

10

The Sensorium

Fitz took his place behind Payne as the others began to file through the low door into the hall. The bronze gong had sounded and the hundreds of feeders, already working their way through their first course, fell silent along the long benches that crowded the lower end of the hall. Fitz felt them staring up at the Prents as they walked in single file to their places at the table, fanning out to either side in the familiar motion that left him standing opposite Dina. For a few seconds they stood behind their chairs, and in the lofty cavity of the Lantern Hall not a muscle twitched within the skin. This was Fitz’s favourite time of the day: an emptiness, almost like a moment forgotten between two others, between the arrival and the settling, the hunger and the satisfying.

‘Don’t eat too much tonight,’ said Navy, from the other end of the table. Her eyes, merry, sat in her broad and freckled face like diamonds. Fitz had already started to reach for the bread, but the intensity of her expression brought him up short.

At this a few of the others turned their heads sharply – Dolly, above all Dina. Payne, the closest, reached out and took a piece of bread, then turned and offered the basket to Fitz.

‘No, thanks,’ he said. It’s some joke I don’t get.

Dina regarded him with settled power.

Fitz felt a tap on his shoulder. He looked up and was startled to find the Riddler standing