Chapter 2: Under Observation

“Rook. Rook.”

A child’s voice went off beside his ear like a smoke alarm with a stone in it, and kept going, and went around his head once, remodeling as it went. He tried to bury his ear in his armpit. It followed him, spitting, and poured itself into the ear hole in two installments, thunder and then rain: “Matron! Come quick! Rook moved! He moved!”

That should have brought the ceiling down. His floating mind lost its footing and dropped into his skull, and the water of it came out of his eyes and forced his lids apart, and the world came in.

Everything was sharp. He lay still and admired it before it occurred to him to wonder about it. No lamp on anywhere, and he could count the rust scales peeling off the pipe in the corner, see the thread of grit in the joint where the wall met the floor, read the stain spread across the ceiling like a map of somewhere he almost knew. Had his eyes always been this good? He didn’t think so. He didn’t think much of anything, was the trouble.

The room was small. Fifteen feet by twelve, near enough, and that was a guess doing its best. A door in one wall that a grown man would have had to duck through, and the one window, and bare walls gone gray in patches where the damp had been at them. A pipe stood in the corner with a bent neck for a tap and no basin under it, only a black hole in the floor. The whole place smelled of drains, and the drains smelled fresh, and under that was wet stone and old cloth and something the kid was giving off, which was mostly milk.

Then a large face came down over him, and he revised his estimate of the room, because the room now contained something that size.

It was a kid. It took him a second to get there, because there was so much of him. Swollen, red-eyed, fat enough that his features had been pushed out of their proper arrangement, a big soft meat face with a nose on it somewhere, and under the nose a rope of snot coming down at a wobble, half an inch from Rook’s own.

Rook made a noise and got himself a foot sideways, out from under it.

The room went end over end. He got both hands up to his head and got them into his hair instead, which came away in a matted handful and kept coming, down to his waist, apparently. He sat there holding a fistful of it.

Who am I? He stared at the far wall and waited for the sparks to clear. Where am I? What do I do? Is this haircut a statement?

The door opened.

A woman came in with a basin against her hip. She checked at the threshold, half a step, a pause she set down and then stepped over, and came on, and nudged the kid out of her road with the flat of her foot. “Shut up. Move.”

Her face was a good face. Nose, eyes, everything where it belonged, and he was arranging his own features to go with it, meaning to give her a decent smile, when her hand came down and took him by the hair.

Her hand was small and callused across the palm and the base of the fingers, hard as rope, and her grip nearly unscrewed his head. She turned it, tilted it, put her thumb along his skull and her fingers behind his ear, and thumped it once with two knuckles, and listened. “Brainless idiot.” She let go. “Wait.”

And she was gone, at a stride, the door left open behind her.

Rook sat with his hair in his eyes. Awake, and the rest of him not told yet.

She wasn’t old. Not young, either. He went over what he had of her while the room stopped turning. Clothes thin and mended in three places, gone shiny at the elbows. Knuckles thickened, wrists corded. A smell off her of hot water and something sour, and under that a washed cleanness, lye soap. A woman who did heavy work with her hands and did it without gloves.

And then the other things, which didn’t fit. The hair: heavy, black, well fed, and clean. The teeth, when she opened her mouth to tell him to wait: even, white, all of them. The jaw narrow and soft at the corners, the muscle there small and slack. A jaw like that doesn’t chew gristle.

She’s somebody to me. She had crossed the room and had her hands in his hair without asking, and people don’t do that. Nobody had ever had to introduce them. But there was no warmth in it either. At the door she had looked at him and then not, and the not-looking had been quick and practiced, and what she had taken away with it was a thing he could only call disgust with something under it that she was working to keep still.

A relative? Then she’d be uglier about it, and he’d know her face. Somebody he owed money to? He didn’t feel like a man with money. Somebody who was afraid of him? He was flat on his back and couldn’t lift his own head.

The guess he settled on when he gave up was that she was dosing a sick animal in the last week before the sale, and doing it the way it gets done, without liking it.

“Rook.”

The kid had come up on him again. “Rook, you got sick all of a sudden. We were scared to death. Master came by three times to look at you and he yelled at Matron. Rook. Are you better?”

“Mm.”

He said it, and then heard it. The word had come up out of him smooth and unhesitating, and he was fairly sure, almost certain, that it wasn’t his. Not the word. All of it. The whole language, rolling off his tongue as though it had been there all along, and underneath, at the back, a small steady wrongness, the way a stair isn’t there when you put your foot down.

He said, “I heard you calling, so I woke up.”

The kid’s mouth came open and stayed open. He stared at Rook the way you’d stare at a dog that had asked after your family.

Rook considered him. Then he considered the ceiling. Then he said, “Water?”

The mouth stayed open. A finger came up, slowly, and pointed.

There was a pipe in the corner where the kid pointed. It was the pipe he had already found. Rusted the color of an old nail, bent over at the neck, and nothing under it but the black mouth of a drain in the floor. A cup hung on a nail beside it, steel, dented so it wouldn’t sit flat, which was a promise about the water.

He got up along the wall with one hand flat on it and washed his hands. The water came out thin and quit twice before it came again, and he stood with his hand under it and waited, then filled the cup and drank. It tasted of nothing, which was better than most of the things it could have tasted of. He drank it slowly, leaning on the pipe, and watched the kid come back into his body. Somewhere above the ceiling, water moved through a pipe and stopped.

“You—“ The kid swallowed. “Are you talking to me?”

“Shouldn’t I be?”

“You didn’t use to talk.” Big-eyed. “You went ages and ages. Days. You never said anything that long.”

“Didn’t I.” Rook drank. I was that cool?

Then he caught up with himself. He had come out of it saying full sentences and asking questions, and the kid was looking at him like a lock had fallen off a door. That was a detail worth keeping until he knew the shape of the room.

“Thing is,” he said, “I don’t like talking. Never did. But my head’s all swelled up today.” He pressed his temple, wincing on purpose. “Gas. See how much bigger it is than usual? Twice the size. It has to come out through the mouth, or it goes looking for another way out.”

The kid looked at him. Whatever they taught in whatever passed for kindergarten here, the difference between a gut and a brain was not on the curriculum. He nodded, wide-eyed.

“Gone to my brain,” Rook said. “I’ll probably get stupid.”

“You’re already stupid.”

Rook let his hand down. “Thank you.”

“But you didn’t hit it when you fell, did you?” The kid was anxious now, hands working. “Rook. You didn’t hit your head and get un-stupid? Because the customer paid the deposit. In a few days he pays the rest, and then he takes you away, and if he gets you home and finds out—“

“Hold on.” Rook set the cup down on the floor, because his hand had gone cold on it. “A customer.”

“The customer.”

“For me.”

“Master says there’s nothing like you,” said the kid, and then did something with his face and his hands that Rook would remember. He pulled himself up, pinched his voice small and high, and raised one finger in the air like a man making a point at a table.

“’Our Rook is a rare black coat and black eyes,’” he recited. “’Look how big he stands. Look at the bone in that face. And a quiet one. A well-behaved idiot. You will not find better condition anywhere in the trade. Topside, this one is worth a car. Under thirty thousand, we do not talk.’”

He dropped back into himself, beaming.

“Impressive,” Rook said.

The floor was cold under him and the drain smelled, and thirty thousand of what sat there not meaning anything, and worth a car sat next to it meaning even less.

“So you can’t get sick,” the kid explained earnestly. “And you can’t die. Not for a few days.”

“I’ll try.” Rook turned the cup around on the floor with one finger, as though he were thinking about something else. “Funny, though. How’d I get sick in the first place?”

The kid came apart into hands and elbows, the whole business at once. Rook sorted the pieces as they came. Off his feed the day before yesterday. Up half the night, throwing up everything he put down. And then today, standing up, and going over backwards like a plank, and the floor coming up to meet him.

“So the head’s from the floor,” the kid concluded.

“Mm.” First half sounds like bad food. The second half doesn’t sound like anything. People die from landing wrong. Nobody lands wrong and gets his head wiped.

“Master doesn’t know either,” the kid said. “You’re to stay in the hospital while they watch you a few days. That’s what he told Matron.”

Rook looked at the pipe. He looked at the wall. The drain breathed up at him.

“This is a hospital?”

“Uh-huh!”

Worse than a pen, he thought.

He got himself upright and went to the door and stood in it, and the air outside was the same air, only more of it.

The door had no lock on it. That was the first thing, and he knew what no lock meant: it meant the lock was somewhere else. What he could see of the world was a yard with walls around it like a prison yard, too high to see over and pale along the top, and out of this yard one narrow lane running twenty, thirty yards, and at the far end of that a gate with two locks on it, one high and one low, both of them the kind you don’t pick with a hairpin.

The wall of his own room had rows of paint on it. Marks in lines, some short, some long, in a red gone brown. Maybe writing. He stood and looked at it a while and it went on being marks. He could not get one letter out of it. Not one shape he could hold up and say, that one. Numbers, maybe. Letters, maybe. Or somebody’s bad idea of decoration.

So the good news was that, on top of whatever was wrong with his brain, he was also illiterate.

Over the wall there was nothing but the top of the wall, so he stood still and let his ears do it. Traffic, a long way off, moving slow. A piece of music with somebody’s voice over it. A man shouting at somebody and not getting an answer. It came in thin and far, the way the street comes into a room where the curtains are shut, and it told him there was a city out there and that it was not near.

“What kind of sick man gets kept behind a wall?”

“I don’t know.” The kid had come up behind him and taken hold of his shirt. “Rook, don’t go wandering. You should lie back down. Matron’s gone to get Master. They’ll be right back.”

“Who’s Master?”

“Master is Mr. Charles.” The kid said it with his chin up. “Mr. Charles is a great Harpocratian.”

“Harp—“ Rook tried it. “Harpo-what?”

“And Matron?”

“Matron?” The kid tilted his head, thrown by the question. “Matron’s not a person.”

“Then what is she?”

“Matron’s a berry.”

“A berry,” Rook said, and turned the word over once and put it down where he could find it again.

The kid looked him over and nodded slowly, the way old men nod, and said, “So it really is gas. You’re not un-stupid. That’s all right, then.”

“Thanks.”

“You thought she was a person because she’s with Master all the time,” the kid said patiently, unfolding it for the idiot’s benefit. “She’s not. She’s a berry, same as us. Only she’s a better one. She’s a dam. She runs us, and she had all of us.”

“You’re telling me she’s your mother.”

“What?” The kid’s face screwed up. “No. She’s not a mother, she’s a matron. Ma-tron.” He said it again, slower, as though Rook were having trouble with the word.

Rook looked past him at the marks on the wall, and let it go.

“And you’ve got brothers and sisters,” he said.

The kid’s brow went up. “Brothers?”

“Forget it.”

She had me, he thought. I’d remember that, wouldn’t I. So the word for it was in the language and the word for the woman was in the language and the two of them had never been introduced.

He turned, and the light caught the wall by the door.

There was glass in it, a windowpane gone opaque with dirt, and a piece of light went across it at that moment, and in the glass there was a man standing next to the fat kid. A tall man, thin, all frame and no packing, black hair hanging in dead greasy ropes to the middle of his back, and a ghost’s face on him that he knew. It was his own face, which he had never once seen from the outside and which was, so far, the worst thing about all of this. Young, was the part he couldn’t get comfortable with. Somewhere between a boy and a man.

He lifted his hand. The man in the glass lifted his hand. The fingers were long, the nails black, and the wrist bone stood out of the sleeve like a knob on a door.

Then a thought came up soft, like a bubble off the bottom of a glass. Isn’t that about how old I was when I met teacher?

It went up and touched the top and came apart.

“Teacher?” he said.

The kid turned his head. Rook looked at himself in the dirty glass and the dirty glass looked back.

Who’s teacher? I had a teacher? And he taught me this? Not one letter?

“When’s Matron coming back?” The kid tugged his shirt. “I’m supposed to be back.”

“Right.” Rook turned around. “What are you in here for?”

The kid went shy about it, twisting. “Checkup. I’m underweight.”

He was not underweight. He was a small boy in the body of a fair-sized pig.

Rook was opening his mouth to say something cheerful about fresh air and walking, and got as far as the first word of it, when the kid said, glum, “So I have to keep gaining. It’s not fair.”

Rook closed his mouth and opened it again. “Honey,” he said, “by what species’ standard are you underweight?”

The kid wrinkled up his face. “By the feeder standard!”

“The what?”

“You’re not a feeder,” the kid said, in case that was the worry. “You’re all stringy. Have you seen you?”

“I’d rather not.” Rook got down on his heels so the two of them were face to face, which he paid for in the spine. “You know a lot. All this. You know more than I do, and I woke up today with nothing in my head at all. You ought to teach me.”

That age will take flattery straight through the chest, and this one was no different. He inflated. “Okay!”

“What’s your name?”

“Six!”

“Six.” Rook turned it over. “Just Six?”

“I’m the sixth berry Matron had, so I’m Six.” He was put out about something. “Except the sixth berry from the other dams is Six too. There’s lots of Sixes where I come from. Yours are nicer.”

“Mm. And what’s a feeder? Am I one?”

“I just told you, you’re not!” Six’s eyes went round at the insult of it. “You think a feeder’s built like you? Feeders are round. Feeders are heavy. A feeder’s got to make weight.” He said it like a proud rule, then slumped. “You’re something else.”

“All right.” Rook settled his elbows on his knees. “What am I, then?”

Six said, “You’re a sire!”

Rook’s hand came up and caught the doorframe. “Wait. Say that again, young sir. Slow.”

“Si-ire!”

Two syllables, and they got hot in his hands, and he thought his forebrain might actually have gone, right there, in real time, with a witness.

Then Six’s head snapped around. “Oh! It’s Master! The great Mr. Charles is here!”

Rook looked where the finger pointed, and the great Mr. Charles was coming across the yard.

Five feet, near enough, and built like the door he meant to come through. No neck. The shoulders were the widest part of him, wide as a man’s and then some, and each arm came off them thick as a thigh, twenty-eight inches around the sleeve by the look of it, with a hairless patch where the plaid pulled tight. The head sat on top of all that, a low triangle with two big ears and a tuft of gray between them, the small nose working, the mouth under it open enough to show a corner of tooth. He came on hunched, the way a thing with a spine built for four directions comes on, and carried his short thick forepaws curled in front of his chest, and out of each of them showed four nails with a shine on them.

The clothes were the difficult part. Plaid shirt, collar flat and neat under the triangle chin. Denim overalls, the real kind, with a pencil clipped in the bib pocket and a ring of keys on the belt loop, and a pair of square-framed glasses sitting on the pointed snout without the least apology.

Charles stopped in the doorway and tilted his head, and the glasses caught the light.

“Master!” Six let go of Rook’s shirt and got both hands into a knot. “Master, Rook’s better!”

Rook took half a step back and his shoulders found the doorframe.

Breeding stock, he thought. For a big gray rat.

The pencil in the bib pocket. The keys. He looked at those, and he waited.