A bonfire was ruled out. Too many bad memories. They opted for tiki torches, planting them in a circle in Town Square. The chairs and table were configured as they had been during the trials, but it was yet to be decided whether they would hold a trial for Martin. A more pressing matter was at hand. This meeting was about making a decision about the woman, away from the woman.
“Who is she?” Gabe asked.
“We think she was living in the hospital,” Martin said. “She believes she’s been here her whole life.”
“I never saw her in the hospital,” Sigrid said. “It does not mean she was not there. I never felt … correct in that place.”
“What’s her name?” Trent asked.
“Pudding something, I think,” Martin said without a hint of sarcasm.
“So stupid,” Henry grumbled. “She was jokin’. An old person’s idea of a joke.”
Stupid perhaps, but Martin couldn’t help it. He was hardly comfortable with kids his own age. Now he had an adult to decipher. And apparently, this one was insane.
Insane or not, the woman was surely someone, from somewhere, and the kids decided the only way to know her identity was the obvious one: ask her. If her answers were incomprehensible or illogical, then they’d lock her back up and go on with their lives. Martin didn’t necessarily think this was the best course of action, but his opinion was hardly valued anymore.
Tiberia was sent to fetch her. While they were waiting, the kids said very little. No one seemed to care what Martin or Henry had been doing during their weeks away. If anything, they were annoyed by the boys’ return and the introduction of this new problem.
The woman arrived with a bandage wrapped around her head and her arms tied behind her back. She appeared calm, pacing deliberately as Tiberia guided her to the table and sat her down at the end. Tiberia untied her wrists, whispered something in her ear, and backed away.
“The nurse said that if I answer your questions, then you’ll bring me Kitten,” the woman said firmly.
They had a kitten. They had six, actually. On the night of the fire, a litter of newborns had been nursing in an aluminum shed behind Nigel’s house. They were some of the only animals to survive. A boy named Vernon had taken them in, and the potpourri of tabbies were now waiting in large aquariums in the front window of the Smash Factory. If all went as planned, the woman would spot one that looked like her kitten and cease with her wild accusations. It didn’t matter really, though, because they would get answers first. Kittens were just bargaining chips.
“You got it,” Darla told her. “Answer our questions and we’ll bring you to your kitten. Easy peasy.” Darla had appointed herself lead inquisitor, and there had been no objections. History had told the kids that leadership came with few benefits.
“What do you want to know?” the woman said in a perfectly pleasant voice.
“Who are you?” Darla asked.
“Marjorie,” she said plainly.
“Where are you from, Marjorie?”
“I’m from here.”
“From Xibalba?”
“I don’t know what that word means.”
“You’re in it, lady,” Darla said. “But we haven’t ever met you. So what have you been doing since the Day?”
“Which day?”
“The day everyone left us.”
“The day they emptied the rooms, you mean?” The woman’s eyes narrowed on Darla, then moved to the crowd.
“Yes,” Darla said. “That day.”
“There are only children here,” Marjorie said suspiciously.
“Nice of you to notice,” Darla said. “Many of us would actually be considered adults in certain cultures, but yes, compared to you, we’re a bunch of toddlers.”
“It’s odd,” Marjorie said. “They empty the rooms and leave children in charge. But not even a place for my kitten, so smart and kind.”
“I’m sure your kitten is a prodigy,” Darla said, “and you can hear his clever purr once you tell us what you’ve been doing since that day they ‘emptied the rooms.’ ’Cause, you know, that’s all we really care about here. It was ages ago, Marjorie. Over two years.”
“More like a few weeks,” Marjorie said with a contemptuous snort. “Children have no concept of time.”
Martin didn’t like the tone of Marjorie’s voice. It was confident. When she had attacked him, her voice was a muddle of confusion and fear. Now it was sharp, sure. She truly believed what she was saying.
“Where were you a few weeks ago,” Martin asked, “when they left?”
Marjorie turned her gaze to Martin and she placed her fists on the table. He feared she might make a move for him, and he cocked his chin at Tiberia, who nodded in acknowledgment and stepped closer. But Marjorie didn’t budge. She simply said, “Martin Maple. You are one persistent boy. Do you know things that I don’t?”
“I believe it’s the other way around,” Martin said, fighting through the fear that was choking him almost as savagely as her hands had.
“On the day they all left, I woke up in a cage,” she said. Then she raised one fist, extended a finger, and pointed through the flicker of the tiki torches to the machine. “That cage.”
The machine, poised in the same spot as it had been on the day of its failed launch, did indeed look like a rocket ship, but it also resembled a metal-shelled birdcage.
“No one ever put you in there,” Martin said defiantly.
“You lie,” she shot back, her voice crackling with menace. “Did you lie to my kitten? When you took him from me? And I woke up in that cage? And are you going to lie again? Say you didn’t taunt me?”
“I never taunted you,” Martin said.
“You left Kitten’s birthday present in there,” she said. “The present I gave him.”
Darla seized the reins again, yelling, “What in the half-baked heck are you talking about, lady? We’ve done nothing to you!”
Marjorie opened her other fist. It held a marble.
“You left Kitten’s birthday present sitting in a sink in that cage,” she said. “I took it and I waited until I couldn’t hear your voices anymore and I escaped from in there. I went back to the hospital, where they’re supposed to look after me. But they were all gone. The doctors, the nurses, all of them. They emptied out the rooms. But when they come back someday, I’ll tell them what you did to me.”
From a distance, in the darkness, Martin couldn’t be sure she was holding the same marble that had been in the machine. Marjorie let out an exhausted breath. The marble fell from her hand and rolled across the table. As if guided by instinct, it rolled directly to Martin. He made a wall with his arm, stopping it.
It was the same one.
He began to put the pieces together.
“What is your name?” he asked her carefully.
“I told you. Marjorie,” she sighed.
“Your full name,” he said.
“Marjorie,” she said again. “Marjorie Rice. There. I’ve answered your questions. Where is Kitten?”
“Who is Kitten?” Martin asked.
“Kitten is my son.”