“You gave yourselves a name?” asked Constance.
Now it was Kate’s turn to be baffled. “You didn’t? How can you have a team without a name?”
Reynie sneaked an amused glance at Sticky, who only shrugged. No need to point out whose idea this naming business had been.
“Anyway,” said Kate, leveling a stern gaze at Constance, “we can all win, you know. You simply have to choose Option A, and so will we.”
“Okay, okay,” said Constance, heaving a dramatic sigh. “Go on back to your room and let’s get this over with.”
Sticky narrowed his eyes. “And you’ll choose Option A?”
Constance pretended to notice something outside the window.
“That’s what I thought,” said Sticky. “Honestly, Constance, what’s the point? If you insist on doing it this way, we’ll have no choice but to choose Option B ourselves. Then we’ll all have more work to do.”
“It doesn’t make any difference to Constance,” Reynie pointed out. “She spends most of her kitchen duty coming up with irritating poems, anyway. She never actually cleans much.”
Constance huffed indignantly at this, not least because Reynie was right.
Kate gazed longingly at the window. “I wish we really were prisoners. Then we could just skip the negotiations and try to escape.”
“We are really prisoners,” said Sticky in a weary tone, and there was a general murmur of agreement.
Everyone knew Sticky was referring not to the exercise but to their overall situation. For months now, they and their families had been the guests of Mr. Benedict, the man who had first brought them together and to whom this house belonged. Though perhaps a bit odd, Mr. Benedict was a brilliant, good-natured, and profoundly kind man, and staying with him would have been a pleasant arrangement if only his guests had been able to choose the circumstances. But in fact they had been given no choice.
Mr. Benedict was the guardian of an enormously powerful invention known as the Whisperer—a dangerous machine coveted by its equally dangerous inventor, Ledroptha Curtain, who happened to be Mr. Benedict’s brother—and because of their close connection to Mr. Benedict, the children were thought to be at risk. The government authorities, therefore, had ordered that the children and their families be kept under close guard. (Actually, the original order had called for them to be separated and whisked away to secret locations—much to the children’s dismay—but Mr. Benedict had not allowed this. His home was already well-guarded, he’d insisted, and room could be made for everyone there. In the end, the authorities had grudgingly relented; Mr. Benedict could be very persuasive.)
The children understood there was good reason for such precautions. Mr. Curtain was cunning and ruthless, with several vicious men in his employ, and the children and their families were obvious targets. No one doubted that they would be snatched up and used as bargaining chips if left unprotected, for Mr. Curtain would do anything to regain possession of his Whisperer. (And just the thought of such a reunion inspired dread in everyone, not least the children.) Still, after months of being forbidden to play outside alone, or ever to go anywhere in town, the young members of the Society were feeling more than a little oppressed.
“If we were really really prisoners, though,” said Kate, “I could have us out of here in a heartbeat.”
“Through the window?” Reynie asked, following her gaze. “Is your rope long enough?”
“Well, there’d be a bit of a drop at the bottom,” she admitted, and her friends exchanged doubtful glances. Kate might be a perfect judge of distance, but her definition of “a bit of a drop” was much different from their own.
“Seeing as how I might break if we tried that,” said Sticky, “how about this instead?” He gestured toward the door, which was locked from the outside with a dead bolt—but whose hinges were on the inside. “You could remove the hinges, right? With proper leverage we could pull that side open enough to squeeze through.”
“Wait a minute,” said Constance, aghast. “You mean the Executives could have broken out of here that easily? Just by taking the hinges off?”
She was referring to Jackson, Jillson, and Martina Crowe, three nasty individuals who had mistreated the children in the past (they were all former Executives of Mr. Curtain), and who had certainly not grown any more trustworthy since their capture. As part of the investigation surrounding Mr. Curtain, they had on a few occasions been brought to the house to be questioned. By themselves they presented no real threat—they were nothing like Mr. Curtain’s wicked Ten Men—but the authorities, ever cautious, had insisted that dead bolts be installed on two rooms, and that anything that might be used for escape be removed from them.
“Those guys aren’t like Kate, remember,” said Sticky. “They don’t carry tools around with them—they wouldn’t be allowed, you know, even if they wanted to. Besides, even if they got the hinges off, they’d never get past the guards.”
“Well, I hope they’ve stopped coming,” Constance said. “I’m sick of seeing their stupid mean faces.”
Kate snorted. “You wouldn’t see them if you stayed away like you’re supposed to. But you always manage to cross paths, don’t you? So you can stick your tongue out at them.”
“If they weren’t in the house,” Constance replied haughtily, “I wouldn’t be tempted to do that.”
“Anyway,” said Kate, rolling her eyes, “back to Sticky’s question, we could get through the door, but not very quietly—Rhonda would surely hear us.” She drummed her fingers thoughtfully on her bucket. “She didn’t say whether or not she was armed, did she? When she was explaining the exercise?”
“No, but she did say she was the only guard,” said Sticky. “Remember? Constance demanded to speak to a different guard—someone who would give us better options—and Rhonda sighed and said for the purposes of this exercise we should assume she’s the only one.”
“It was a perfectly reasonable demand,” Constance protested as the others tittered, remembering Rhonda’s look of exasperation.
“I don’t think she meant for the number of guards to matter,” said Reynie, still chuckling. “After all, we can’t really escape. I mean, it’s not as if we’re going to attack Rhonda, right? And we can’t even set foot outside the house without permission.”
Just then Constance stiffened and looked over her shoulder at the wall. “Uh-oh!” she hissed. “Here she comes!”
They all held their breath. When Constance made pronouncements of this kind, she was always right. Sure enough, a moment later footsteps sounded outside the door, followed by a knock. “Constance? Reynie? Everything all right in there? Have you decided yet?”
“We need more time!” Reynie called.
“Are you sure?” There was a note of concern in Rhonda’s muted voice. They heard the dead bolt turning. “Do you need a drink of water or anything?”
“We’re fine!” Reynie cried quickly. “Just a few more minutes, please!”
“Very well, but please hurry,” Rhonda replied, and she locked the door again without entering. “We have more lessons to get through, you know.”
“That was close,” Kate whispered when Rhonda’s footsteps had receded. “I thought about hiding behind the door, but my magnet would have given us away regardless.”
“Not to mention me,” Sticky pointed out. “I couldn’t even have stood up in time, much less hidden behind the door.”
“Sure you could have,” said Kate. “I was going to help you.”
Sticky stared at her, appalled. He had a vivid mental image of his arm being yanked out of its socket.
“And I was going to use the twine to jerk the magnet over to me,” Kate said casually (as if accomplishing all this in the space of a second was the sort of thing anyone might do), “but then, of course, the window would slam shut, which is not exactly something Rhonda would fail to notice. So it was pointless to try.”
“It’s all pointless, anyway,” Sticky said, thrusting his chin into his hands
. “We’re never going to change Constance’s mind. I think we’ll just have to betray each other and get on with it.”
“I suppose you’re right,” said Kate. “Oh well, I don’t mind washing if you boys will dry…” She trailed off, having noticed Reynie staring at the window with his brow furrowed. “Reynie, what’s the matter?”
Constance’s brow was furrowed, too. But she was staring at Reynie. “He’s getting an idea!” she said, her face lighting up.
Reynie glanced at her absently and looked back toward the window. He was seldom caught off guard anymore by these flashes of perception. Neither were Sticky and Kate, who leaned eagerly toward him.
“Well?” said Kate. “What is it, Reynie? What do you have in mind?”
“Option C,” Reynie replied, and gave them a sly smile.
When Rhonda Kazembe knocked on the door some minutes later, she received no reply. From inside the room, however, came a suspicious sound of frenzied movement. She knocked again, and this time heard a hushed voice saying “Hurry up!” and (even more disconcerting) “Don’t look down!” These words were enough to make her scrabble at the dead bolt, especially since the voice had sounded like Kate’s. How could Kate even be in this room? As she unlocked the door Rhonda heard the distinct sound of a window slamming shut, and in rising alarm she burst into the room. Her mouth fell open. The room was empty.
Rhonda, a graceful young woman with coal-black skin and lustrous braided hair, was every bit as intelligent as she was lovely. She instantly saw what had happened. In the far wall gaped an exposed heating duct; the register had been removed. That would explain how Kate had gotten into the room (and no doubt Sticky, too). “Oh, but surely!” she cried, flying to the window. “Surely they didn’t!”
Raising the window with a bang, Rhonda held it open with one hand and leaned over the sill to look below. The children were nowhere to be seen. She looked up toward the eaves. Still nothing.
Much relieved yet equally puzzled, Rhonda frowned as she lowered the window. Had they fled through the heating duct, then? But those urgent words (“Don’t look down!”) and the slamming window had led her to believe…
Rhonda closed her eyes. The door. They had been behind the door.
Even before she turned, Rhonda knew what she would see. Sure enough, there they were, having already crept out of the room and now standing in the hallway. Reynie and Sticky were grinning and waving; Constance, like a pint-sized, pudgy princess, had raised her chin to demonstrate her smug superiority; and Kate was leaning in through the doorway, one hand on the doorknob, the other gripping a horseshoe magnet and a tangle of twine. With a wink and a half-apologetic smile, she pulled the door closed. The dead bolt turned with a click.
For a moment Rhonda stared at the locked door, slowly shaking her head. And then, with laughter bubbling up in her throat, she began to clap.
Mr. Benedict was amused. This was hardly unusual. Sometimes, in fact, Mr. Benedict’s amusement sent him right off to sleep, for he had a condition called narcolepsy that caused him to nod off at unexpected moments. These episodes occurred most often when he experienced strong emotion, and especially when he was laughing. His assistants (who were also, as it happened, his adopted daughters) did what they could to protect him—he could hardly take two steps without Rhonda or Number Two shadowing him watchfully in case he should fall asleep and topple over—and Mr. Benedict guarded against such incidents himself by always wearing a green plaid suit, which he had discovered long ago to have a calming effect.
Nevertheless, the occasional bout of sudden sleep was inevitable, and as a result Mr. Benedict’s thick white hair was perpetually tousled, and his face, as often as not, was unevenly shaven and marked with razor nicks. (Unfortunately nothing was more comical, Mr. Benedict said, than the sight of himself in the shaving mirror, where his bright green eyes and long, lumpy nose—together with a false white beard of shaving lather—put him in mind of Santa Claus.) He also wore spectacles of the sturdiest variety, the better to protect against shattering in the event of a fall. But as the best kind of fall was one prevented, it was not uncommon to see an amused Mr. Benedict diligently suppressing his laughter. Such was the case now, as he sat at the dining room table with Rhonda and the children.
“The point of the exercise,” said Mr. Benedict, the corners of his mouth twitching, “was more philosophical than strategic, you see. More than anything, it was meant to be an examination of the consequences of one’s actions on others. Sticky, I am sure, could recite the aims of the original Prisoner’s Dilemma, but Rhonda and I had thought to adapt the game for our own purposes.” Here Mr. Benedict allowed himself a smile, adding, “Just as you did yourselves.”
The children, thus far pleased by Mr. Benedict’s response to their solution, began to feel uneasy. They sensed that they had overlooked something they ought not to have overlooked—a misgiving intensified by the appearance of Number Two, who just then came storming into the dining room. The young woman’s normally yellowish complexion had darkened almost to the same hue as her rusty red hair; and her expression, stern to begin with, positively radiated disapproval now. If the children didn’t know Number Two loved them, they might have thought she meant to put them on the curb and be done with them forever.
“With not one thought,” said Number Two, pointing her finger at them, “not a single thought for how your trick might affect Rhonda, what do you do? You pretend to go outside without protection? You pretend to climb out the window on the third floor? You—” She interrupted herself to bite angrily into an apple, which she chewed with great ferocity, glowering all the while.
Reynie could hear her teeth crunching and grinding all the way from his seat at the other end of the table. He wished he were sitting even farther away than that—preferably somewhere in the distant past. Number Two’s words had stung him like a slap. She was right. He had been so pleased with his idea that he hadn’t really considered whether it was a decent thing to do. Rhonda gave no sign of being upset, but during those first few moments she must have been worried—indeed, he had counted on it—and looking back on his decision, Reynie was ashamed.
“We’re sorry!” blurted Kate, who evidently felt the same way. “Oh, Rhonda, that was stupid of us! It seemed funny at the time, but—”
“It was funny,” Constance interjected. “Just because you’re sorry doesn’t mean it wasn’t funny.”
“Constance has a point,” said Rhonda with an easy smile. “But I do appreciate your apology, Kate, and I can see from the boys’ faces that they’re sorry as well. Really, it’s all right.”
“All right?” Number Two snarled. “When our only concern is for their safety? When our every thought and deed—”
“Number Two,” said Mr. Benedict gently, “I quite concur. But as we are pressed for time, would you be so kind as to fetch the duty schedule? We need to reconfigure it.”
Number Two swung about and stalked into the kitchen. Even from a distance they could hear her fierce attacks on the apple; each bite sounded like a spade being thrust into gravel. Reynie suspected Mr. Benedict was giving her an opportunity to calm down.
“Our original plan,” Mr. Benedict told the children, “was to release you from kitchen duty next week, thereby offsetting any extra work you had to put in this week as a result of the exercise. We wanted the consequences to seem real, you see, to heighten the effect, but we didn’t actually intend to work you like galley slaves. This way Rhonda could tell you the truth, if not the entire truth, and perhaps keep Constance from seeing through the ruse. Constance might have seen through it anyway, of course—we thought that worth investigating, too. Ah, thank you so much,” he said as Number Two, somewhat calmer now, returned with the duty schedule.
“Why do we have to change the schedule?” asked Constance, who found the scheduling of duties even more insufferably tedious than the duties themselves. “Can’t we just keep it as it is?”
“Today is errand day,” Rhonda said. “That’s why
we chose it for this particular exercise. We needed to reschedule duties, anyway.”
“I thought things were unusually quiet around here,” Sticky said. “Errand day—well, that explains it.”
Errand day was when all the adult houseguests went out to deal with shopping and business. These prized forays into Stonetown came but once every two or three weeks, always on a different day and never announced beforehand. The adults claimed this was for security reasons, and no doubt it was, but Reynie suspected they were also glad to avoid any begging and pleading, since the children were never allowed to go anywhere themselves.
Kate jumped to her feet. “Don’t bother with the schedule, Mr. Benedict. Let me take extra duty today. It’ll make me feel better.”
“Me, too,” said Reynie.
“Yeah… same here,” said Sticky, trying to sound upbeat despite the sinking feeling in his belly. Kitchen duty with Kate was exhausting—you had to work madly to keep up—and he generally avoided it when he could.
“Count me in!” chirped Constance, and everyone turned to her in astonishment. She burst into laughter at this, for of course she had only been kidding.
The good thing about kitchen duty on errand day was the reduced quantity of lunch dishes. With the exception of Mr. Benedict, who claimed responsibility for Constance, all of the children’s guardians were absent. Gone from the table were the Washingtons, Miss Perumal and her mother Mrs. Perumal, and Kate’s father Milligan, whose own errand was to protect the other guardians as they ran theirs.
The bad thing about kitchen duty on errand day was the notable lack of wonderful aromas in the air, for their friend Moocho Brazos—a former circus strong man and, more to the point, a marvelous cook—was also out running errands, which meant soup and sandwiches for lunch, and nothing baking in the oven.
“I wonder where they are right now,” said Kate, passing another well-scrubbed plate to Sticky, who had hardly started drying the last one.
“I hope they remember to bring us something,” called Constance from the pantry, where she was pretending to be busy. “I meant to give them a list.”