He took one last glance at the inside of the cave, shining his flashlight just over the spot where Theo and Anya had emerged minutes before. I hoisted my bag to my shoulders, mouthing them a silent good-bye as I followed my grandfather out into the daylight.
S
OURCE:
J
EREMY
B. A
GE: THIRTEEN.
Undead for five years.
I stole glimpses at the most recent entry in my grandfather’s notebook while we hiked across the alpine ridge toward the floating peak we’d seen from the third point.
Enrolled in Gottfried Academy: September
2011
.
My grandfather led the way with a newfound vigor, using the pull of the Undead to guide us. Without the chest, Pruneaux, or Dante to help lead them, the Undead were slowing; I could feel the gap between them and us shrinking.
But if Dante wasn’t with them, then where was he? Every few steps I searched the white expanse of mountains below us for a dark speck moving over the snow, waiting for his vacancy to reach out to me through the wind. Theo and Anya couldn’t have been right. They must have misheard him. After all, their hearing had dulled, too...
I slid my grandfather’s notebook out of my pocket and continued reading.
Recruited on November the
24
th,
2011
. Sent as source on
December the
12
th,
2011
. Questioned on December the
22
nd,
2011
.
Recruited, and sent as a source? That could only mean one thing. I squinted at my grandfather’s handwriting, making sure I had read his notes correctly. But before I could turn the page, Mr. Harbes glanced over his shoulder at me. “What are you doing back there?”
“Nothing,” I said. “Just looking for a tissue.”
He frowned, and dug through his pocket until he pulled out a crumpled bit of napkin. “Here. Now hurry up. The sooner we catch up to the Liberum, the sooner we can go home.”
It wasn’t until after we camped and finished a meager dinner of rice and canned beans that I was able to sneak back to my tent. But when I flipped to the second page of the notebook, someone ripped open the flap of my tent.
I slammed the cover shut and thrust it beneath my sleeping bag just as a dark, heart-shaped face appeared in the entrance. Clementine. I relaxed my grip on my shovel. “Was that really necessary?” I whispered.
She rolled her eyes. “You scare too easily,” she said, and after glancing over her shoulder, she climbed inside.
“Turn off your flashlight,” she said to me. “We can’t have two lights on in here or they might suspect there are two people.”
“You turn off yours,” I said. “This is my tent.”
Clementine shook her head as if she were doing me a favor. “Fine.” She inspected the blue nylon of the tent. “This is where you’ve been sleeping this whole time?” she said with a grimace.
“It’s a tent,” I said. “Is yours really that different?”
“It’s bigger,” she said, and wiped away a bit of dirt beneath her legs. “And a lot cleaner.”
I clenched my jaw, trying to hold my tongue. “So what do you want?”
“I’ve been watching you,” she said, her eyes sharp. “You’ve been acting weird all day. You know something.”
I slid the notepad out from under the sleeping bag, lowered my voice, and told her about Theo and Anya, about how they had visited me in the cavern and given me this. I left out what they had said about Dante. Although she had aligned herself with me now, Clementine was still a Monitor, and a fierce one at that. I didn’t want to give her any reason to change her mind.
She leaned over my shoulder and together, we flipped through my grandfather’s notepad.
Stephen L. Age: fourteen. Undead for eight years. Enrolled
in Gottfried Academy: September
2011
. Recruited on November
the
7
th,
2011
. Sent as a source on November the
14
th,
2011
.
Questioned on December the
1
st,
2011
.
Notes on the questioning:
Source confirmed that the Liberum were searching for the clues
left behind by the Nine Sisters, which they believe will lead them to
the Cartesian Map. Source also confirmed that the Liberum have a
potential lead on the first clue, which they obtained through force,
and are now moving on foot to Montreal to find it.
Source was put to rest December the
5
th,
2011
.
Clementine furrowed her brow. “Does this mean what I think it does?”
“I think so,” I whispered, a knot forming in my stomach. I flipped through the pages. Atop each entry was the name of an Undead boy, followed by a slew of similar notes.
“The elders weren’t just spying on the Liberum by following them, and turning a few of their boys to their side,” Clementine said. “Your grandfather was using his time as the headmaster of Gottfried Academy to recruit Undead boys to spy on the Liberum for him. He was using
students
to help get more information on the Netherworld.”
I swallowed. “Then he put them to rest so they couldn’t tell anyone.”
Clementine flipped back in time to the earlier entries. There were dozens and dozens of them, some dating back over thirty years. “Wait,” she said. “But your grandfather has only been the headmaster of Gottfried since September. So what are these from?”
“Actually, my grandfather was the headmaster of Gottfried twice,” I said. “First in the 1970s.”
“It couldn’t possibly be 1972,” Clementine said, pointing to the date of the first entry.
“That sounds about right,” I said. “He was the headmaster for seventeen years. There was some sort of scandal there. A fire. He resigned and went back to the High Court. Then last year, he returned to Gottfried Academy to resume his job as headmaster, limiting the school to Undead students only.”
“Seventeen years?” Clementine said, as if that number meant something to her. When I nodded, her eyes widened in awe. “That means that your grandfather left Gottfried in 1989.”
“That sounds about right.”
“Nineteen eighty-nine?” she said, as if it should have rung a bell. “That’s the year of the bombing in the High Court.”
She searched the notebook until she found the last entries in 1989. The last four subjects were each sent as sources on the same day.
“The bombing of the courthouse took place one month after these four Undead were sent to spy on the Liberum
.
” Clementine traced their names.
Kurt M
.,
Henry L
.,
Paul N
., and
Michael P.
“Four entries,” Clementine said. “For each of the four Undead that were on trial.”
However, unlike the previous subjects, these Undead had only one note for the four of them, which read:
Notes:
We were not able to question the sources. They were unexpect
edly captured by a group of Monitors while traveling with the
Liberum. The Monitors have brought the sources to the High Court,
where they are awaiting trial for conspiring with the Liberum.
They have already tried to tell the Monitors of our mission, but
no one believes them. I will not come to their rescue. In a few days
time, the High Court will find them guilty. They will be put to rest.
“The four Undead on trial that day were being accused of a crime that they didn’t commit,” I said. “That’s why Monsieur blew up the courthouse. He must have known what the High Court was doing.”
Clementine’s eyes glimmered. “He wanted to punish them.”
I nodded, the realization complicating my feelings about Monsieur even more. “And to free the innocent Undead in the process.”
“But what happened to the four Undead after that?” Clementine asked.
My mind raced to put the pieces together. I thought of my grandfather, of how he’d resigned from his position as the headmaster of Gottfried not long after the trial, when a mysterious fire ravaged the school, burning half of the campus and the forest around the Academy to ash. The Second Autumn Fire, the locals had called it, for the way it had made the trees look orange.
“Those four Undead were the ones who started the fire,” I realized. “They were seeking revenge on the man who almost put them to rest.”
“That’s why your grandfather resigned,” Clementine said. “He went on to become the head of the High Court.” She turned the page, but the next entry was from last September, over twenty years later. “That’s why there’s a twenty-year gap in these notes. Your grandfather and the elders were lying low. Without a contact at Gottfried, there was no way they could recruit new Undead boys. Until now.”
That night I woke to a pair of cold fingers pressed to my lips. I opened my eyes. Anya was crouched in my tent. “Shh,” she cooed.
She led me outside and away from the camp, tiptoeing through the snow like a deer. I followed her, groggy, my mind still thick with dreams.
“I can’t remember him,” I whispered to her. “I know I love him, but I can’t feel it anymore. I can’t feel anything.”
“Who?”
“Dante,” I said. “What does his voice sound like? I’ll never hear it again.”
Anya slowed, her hair blowing in front of her face. For a moment, I could almost believe that we were standing in the snowy streets of Montreal, walking back to our dormitory at St. Clément. I wanted to go back so badly, to rewind the past weeks, and erase all of the doubt I had been harboring. “Help me remember him.”
“I can’t,” Anya said. “There is no pill for that. But you’re lucky. He isn’t gone yet; you still have him. Love is like any other superstition—you can’t prove it, you just have to believe in it.”
By the light of the moon we walked down the ridge, zigzagging through the snow until I couldn’t tell which direction we had come from. A fire flickered in the distance. Theo huddled over it, a tent perched behind him.
“Did you read it?” he said.
“Yes,” I said. I thought back to that afternoon in the German countryside, when I had crouched behind the line of cars and eavesdropped on my grandfather as he threatened Theo. “You already knew my grandfather was doing this, didn’t you?”
“I only had an idea,” Theo said. His Spade rested on the ground beside him, its varnished handle propped up on his bag.
“This has to do with your being disbarred, doesn’t it?” I said.
He glanced at Anya, who gave him an encouraging nod. “Yes,” he said.
“What did you do?”
Theo took a breath, as though he’d been preparing for this moment for years. “I killed my father.”
“It was my first big mission,” Theo said. “I had earned my Spade a year before, and was one of the youngest Monitors ever to get one. And I earned it the real way. I’ve never studied so hard for anything in my life. I had to show them that I was more than just a dropout and a thief. I had to prove that I was one of them.” He clenched his jaw. “This is all to say that I wanted to be a Monitor, more than I’ve ever wanted to be anything. Do you understand?”
I nodded.
“Good,” he said. “Remember that later.”
Anya settled in beside me, her eyes scanning the horizon to make sure no one had followed us. She had already heard this story.
“Prior to that, I had only gone on smaller missions in Paris and Lyon, where I, along with other newly minted Monitors, scouted for fresh Undead. We rounded up non-violent Undead and brought them to the Court to be documented and sent to an Undead school. So when the High Court told me they thought they could trust me with a confidential, high-level mission, I was ecstatic. I went before the High Court, where I received my assignment: to travel to the mountains in upstate New York, where I was to capture an Undead who had supposedly worked with the Liberum. I expected to hear the normal directions: to only bury the Undead if he threatened my life or the lives of those around me, and to otherwise secure the Undead and bring him back to Montreal, where he would appear before the High Court for trial. But those directions never came. The High Court only gave me one directive: keep all details of this mission to myself. If I ran into any other Monitors on my way, I should tell them I was on a trip to see my family.
“That was the first sign that something was wrong, but I didn’t see it. I assumed that the rules were different on covert missions. They only gave me a few details: I was hunting an Undead boy, eleven years old. I remember being surprised when the Monitors told me that the Undead had only died two years before. Most Undead don’t become violent until they’ve been dead for much longer. But the Monitors had told me he was my target, which meant that he must have done something very bad.
“The Court told me that the Undead was somewhere in the wilds of upstate New York. This Undead was particularly vicious, they said, which was why I wasn’t bringing him back to the main courthouse. We couldn’t risk it. Instead, I was supposed to track him down and bury him.”
Theo leaned on his knees, the reflection of the fire making his eyes flicker. “I wandered through the wilderness for days, following his presence. When I finally found him, he was hiding by an old barn. I had expected him to be dangerous, but instead, he looked frightened and confused, and very, very young. I shouted at him to raise his hands where I could see them. He did as I said without arguing. I thought he might cry, that’s how scared he looked. My voice sounded so gruff in those woods. I remember feeling ashamed, standing there yelling at a child.
“Even though he didn’t seem dangerous, I tied his arms together and led him outside, where I planned on doing what I had gone there to do. Sure, he looked like a normal kid, but with every step I remembered the words of the High Court: this Undead was particularly vicious. He must have realized what I was there for, because he started to whimper. He kept repeating the same thing.
They already
questioned me. I don’t know anything.
“I didn’t know what he meant. Who questioned him? And about what? But I forced my thoughts into silence. The Monitors hadn’t sent me there to talk to him. I told him to stand still and face the trees. I pulled the gauze from my pack and was about to put him to rest, when I noticed that his knees were trembling. Then I saw his sneakers, which were the same ones I’d had when I was his age. The laces were untied. I reached toward them, my arm brushing his ankle, and he began to cry. That’s when I knew that I couldn’t do it. I called my contact at the High Court, and told him that I didn’t think the Undead was too dangerous to transport to the High Court, and that I couldn’t put him to rest.