Wilder Girls(26)

I don’t know if Byatt ever will be again. And I can’t let that stand.

   I wait until the moon is high. My mattress groans as I get out of bed, and I hold my breath, wait to make sure Reese hasn’t heard. Nothing from her bunk. I edge toward the door, and she’s still, her hair burning in the black as I slip into the hallway.

It’s empty; only a few snatches of talk from the dorms breaking the quiet. The youngest girls are whispering about something, laughter here, a hush there, and they don’t hear a thing as I tiptoe past to crouch where the hallway opens to the mezzanine.

There’s the door to the infirmary staircase, shut tight as always. Without a key, there’s no way past it for me. So the best way to get to the infirmary rooms, then, is the roof. It slants up from the second floor to the roof deck, with dormers for each window poking out. If I get up there, I can sneak around the back side, climb through one of the windows without Gun Shift or Headmistress catching me.

I count to ten. Even steps so the floorboards don’t creak.

I never minded the dark before Raxter. Never had it, really, not on the base with the steady glare of the floodlights. Here, it feels different, somehow alive.

I tug my jacket around me tight. And go, across the open mezzanine, past the top of the staircase and into the mouth of the north wing. There’s no one here as I make my way down the corridor. Just empty rooms. A handful of faculty offices, papers long since burned. Bare bed frames in teachers’ dorms. Chairs broken up for kindling. At the end is the Gun Shift room, the admissions sign still on the door. The open window, chilled fall air gusting through. My way out.

   It’s easy, hoisting myself up like I did every day for Gun Shift. Strange without Byatt behind me to swat at my heels, but soon enough I’m crouched low on the slope of the roof, shingles wet with melted frost under my hands. On the deck above me, I can see the silhouettes of two girls with their guns aimed. They’re looking straight ahead, out at the woods as they talk softly to each other. Good. As long as I’m quiet, they won’t notice.

I crawl forward, toward the nearest dormer. Through it I can see one of the infirmary rooms, just a bed and bare mattress draped in shadow, door closed to the hallway. No Byatt, but no Headmistress either. I notch my shoulder in under the window frame and start to work it up.

The wood’s warped after a year and a half without maintenance, and I have to stop every few shoves, make sure the girls on Gun Shift haven’t heard me. Feet slipping on the shredded shingles, and below me the night swallows the ground, but I don’t look. One, two, three, and the window shudders up, opens maybe a foot.

I don’t go through. I wait, crouched on the sill, and I watch as Headmistress’s candle lights up a strip at the bottom of the door and fades out. Footsteps tapping on the stairs as she heads down to the second floor. And then quiet.

I go in headfirst, scramble up to standing. There are six rooms on the third floor, three at the front and back each. I’m in the one closest to the stairs. Five more to check before someone catches me.

   Cross to the door, test the latch. It’s unlocked. These doors have bolts on the outside, left over from the house’s earliest days and put to use after we got sick, but with nobody here, Headmistress must not bother doing them up. I pull it open with both hands.

Out in the narrow hallway I stop again and listen. The house is never silent, not one this old and not now that everything’s changed, but I don’t hear Headmistress or Welch anywhere. Don’t hear Byatt either, but I tell myself she’s probably just asleep.

I try the opposite door. Unlocked, too, and the room empty just like the other.

It’s fine. Four more rooms. Four more places she could be.

But the third one’s empty, and the fourth, and by the time I get to the fifth room, I’m breathing hard. I can hear my heart beating in my ears, and she’s not here, she isn’t, she isn’t.

Sixth door. Swinging wide. The bed empty, mattress askew and dipped in moonlight. And there, amid a set of scuff marks on the floor, a needle and thread. Byatt’s. The ones she always carried in her pocket, the ones she used to fix me.

She’s gone.

Dread, cold and spreading, but I push it away. Something happened, but whatever it was, she got through it, like she gets through everything. She’s somewhere, and she’s alive. I should check the offices on the second floor, and every classroom, and hell, maybe the big storage closet just to be—

   A sound on the stairs. Someone’s coming.

I freeze, then snatch up the needle and thread and hurry back to the first room. The open window still waiting, air gusting through. No time, can’t climb out without making too much noise, and there’s a light, Headmistress’s candle, closer, closer—here. It stops in front of the door to this room.

Can’t move. Can’t breathe. If Headmistress comes in, if she catches me, I don’t know what she’ll do.

And then something I haven’t heard in a year and a half, not since Mr. Harker left. The crackle of static, the filter and hiss of a walkie-talkie, and a voice. A man’s voice. It’s like cold water in my veins, and a shiver scrapes over me.

“Raxter, call in, over.”

There’s a beep, and then a hitch in the static. “This is Raxter, over.”

I jerk with surprise and narrowly miss hitting my head against the window frame. It’s Welch, not Headmistress like I was expecting. Welch doesn’t come up here much, if ever.