The Betrayals(2)

There is a snap. The Rat is alone again.

She stands up. She drops the fledgling. Some instinct, deeper than logic, makes her expect a noise like breaking glass; but whatever sound it makes as it hits the floor is drowned out by the rush of blood in her ears. She doesn’t kill things very often. It has made her pulse rise into a drumbeat, a booming stutter in her head that won’t slow down. She uncurls her hands. Somehow there is blood on them. A scratch across her knuckles starts to sting. At one end, where it’s deepest, a dark bead swells, overflows and runs down her wrist. She puts her hand to her mouth and sucks at the broken skin, tasting iron. Her heartbeat trembles in her bones as if they’re hollow.

There are footsteps in the passage. For a fraction of a second the Rat thinks the rhythm of her heart has doubled or tripled. But she is always listening; it only takes that split second to hear the difference between the hot thick thump of her heart and the click of shoes on stone. She scrats a foothold in the side of the hearth and swings herself up into the chimney, bracing herself with her back and feet, muscles taut, deep in the darkest shadow. There is a movement in the doorway, a flick of a pale robe. The Rat closes her eyes, wary of the moonlight reflecting off them. It is too late to climb higher; any movement will make a noise.

The figure walks forward into the room. The footsteps pause. The Rat breathes shallowly, her ribs tight with the effort of silence. Her nose is full of the scent of old ash. A long time – a minute, a second – passes. Then she can’t help herself, and she opens her eyes a slit. She stares through the flickering smudge of her eyelashes. She recognises the figure in white: the female. All the ones in white are male, except this one. The female-male, the odd one out. She is standing where the Rat stood: on the edge of the space, poised behind the silver line. She is looking at the moonlight too. But whatever she sees, it is not what the Rat saw. The Rat clenches her teeth. Her muscles are aching.

The white one makes a movement. It is a strange cut-off gesture, the beginning of something and its end, both at once. It is like a thread linked to her wrist. She lets her hand drop, and is still again.

Then, as if the Rat has made a noise, she looks round. The silence snaps taut. The Rat freezes, pulling deeper into the shadow. Her breath catches. Something tickles the underside of her forearm. A line of wetness is crawling from her wrist towards her elbow, dark on her pale skin. Any moment now it will drip.

The white one frowns. She tilts her head, as if to see a different angle of light and shadows. In the moonlight her face is a vertical half-mask. Her mouth opens.

The drop of blood falls. There is an instant when the Rat feels its absence, the infinitesimal lightening of her body. Then it ticks on the floor.

‘Who’s there?’

The Rat doesn’t move. If the white one comes closer, she will claw her way upwards, climb frantically until she reaches the narrowing in the chimney where she can brace herself and rest. But every movement will send a rain of old soot and mortar down into the hearth, and then they will know she is here. They will search and peer and drag her out. There will be men with hands, faces with eyes. They will try to make her human, and hate her when they fail. She knows enough about the world to know that.

‘Is someone there?’

Sometimes the grey ones have seen her. A glimpse, a flash, a half-print in the dust. But no one listens to them when they say either there is a girl in the walls or the school is haunted. They would believe this one.

The white one takes another step. The shadows slide over her. She sees the owl in its fractured huddle on the hearthstone. She stops.

The Rat is shaking all over now. Her shoulders burn. Sweat is soaking into her shirt, the hot smell of herself wafting from armpits and scalp. Her hand stings. There is a loose stone beside her head, where a tall man could reach. If she reached for it, she would fall. But she would fall with it in her hand. It is heavy enough, big enough to crack a skull. Her heartbeat accelerates, so loud she is sure the white one will hear. If the white one hears …

The Rat’s fingers curl against the stone. Grit pushes into the tender space under her nails.

The white one turns away. One moment she is there, staring into the Rat’s shadow with a line between her eyebrows: then she is gone, out of the doorway in a whirl of white, moonlit to dark in an instant. Her footsteps fade.

The Rat waits. After a long time she lets herself down. Her bare feet press the floor. She stretches her arms, slowly, knowing better than to relax. Even when one danger is past, there is always another. But at least she can breathe freely. She is glad that she didn’t have to kill the white one. The thought is like a newly missing tooth: she explores the shape of it. Perhaps she isn’t glad. Perhaps she is disappointed.

She shakes herself. Glad, disappointed … She is the Rat. Life is simple for rats. She does what she has to, no more or less. More and less are for humans. More and less are this hall, the empty space, the white one’s gesture-that-was-not-a-gesture. The Rat has no part in that. She will not be human, no matter what happens. Only tonight the moonlight tempted her in.

Her foot brushes the dead owl. A rat would sniff it and leave it: scarce tricky flesh, bony and unappetising. It is easier to steal food from the kitchens, and she has no other use for a bundle of bones and feathers. But she picks it up. She crosses the hall with it swinging from her grasp. She knocked the setting clot off her hand when she lowered her feet to the floor, and now she feels a fresh tickle of blood rolling down between her fingers. The scratch itself is throbbing. She will steal wine and honey from the kitchen, clean it and wrap it in a rag; even a rat would choose not to lose its paw.