It was Morning Muster time. The boys were marched outside into the drizzly gray courtyard. A light rain was falling, and bunched-up piles of clouds blackened the sky. Thunder rumbled in the not too far distance.

The boys trudged over to a line of small stone blocks on the ground, each about the size of a brick and spaced a few steps apart from one another. Without a word, each boy stepped up and squeezed his feet onto one, found his balance, and then stood at shaky attention. Jonathan took a breath and did the same.

The block was just wide enough for both his feet to fit on it, pressed tight together. The tips of his toes and the backs of his heels hung over the front and back. He wobbled and steadied himself and then looked up.

The courtyard was the size of a basketball court. He’d walked through it briefly his first day, following Mr. Vander in his handcuffs, but he’d been too tired and scared then to look close or notice much. He could see, to his right, the steep arched doorway, closed and locked, that led to the watery stairs he’d come in on. There were doorways on each wall that he could see, all closed.

The floor and walls of the courtyard were made of the same big gray blocks of stone that the rest of the building was made of. Green moss grew between the cracks in places. The walls stretched high above them, thirty or forty feet, blocking out most of the sky and a good deal of the light. The part of the sky that was visible was getting darker and more ominous by the second. There was a flash of lightning.

The courtyard’s stone block ground was flat and covered with so many big puddles that it was nearly one shallow lake. The surface of the puddles were pocked and pecked by more falling rain. Shifting snaps of wind whistled around the courtyard, chilling the boys and blowing Jonathan’s hair into and out of his eyes.

The door to their left swung open, and the whole group of men from breakfast slumped out with the Admiral at the front. The ridiculous wide hat, roughly triangular, sat on his head, and the sword still swung at his side. The last two men in line came out sideways, grunting and holding the Sinner’s Sorrow between them. They plocked it down with a wet thud on the stones before the boys. Jonathan looked at the kneeler’s sharp, hard edge and winced.

The men formed a line facing the boys. They stood in an oily black puddle with their boots and shoulders touching. Jonathan counted them—eight adults. The Admiral stood in the center of the line, his arms at his sides and his chin held regally high.

Mr. Warwick, standing on one end of the line, held the wooden handle of a big brass bell in his hand. When the two men who’d carried the Sinner’s Sorrow joined the line, he rang the bell. The dull metal clanging bounced around the grim gray walls and up to the storm-choked sky.

“Morning Muster, November the fifth!” Mr. Warwick hollered. The man on the other end of the line pulled some papers out of his coat pocket and held them with both hands in the wet wind.

“James Amherst!” he shouted.

“Here, sir. Content and well cared for, sir!” a boy Jonathan hadn’t met yet shouted back.

“David Okada!”

“Here, sir. Content and well cared for, sir!”

“Benedict Fellows!”

“Here, sir,” the kid called Benny answered. His voice sounded greasy even when he was shouting through a rainstorm. “Content and well cared for, sir!”

“Jonathan Grisby!”

Jonathan gulped and looked around. He almost stumbled off the block but caught himself.

“Here, sir,” he called. His voice sounded thin and meek and was nearly lost in the windblown rain. “Content and well cared for, sir!”

The Admiral smirked.

“Colin Kerrigan!”

“Here, thir.” Colin didn’t shout—Jonathan wasn’t sure he even could shout—but he did speak at more than a shy whisper. “Content and well cared for, thir.”

All the boys were called, sixteen in all, and each gave the same answer. When they were done, the man folded the papers and slipped them back into his coat. “Sixteen charges, sir, all present and all report being content and well cared for, sir.”

The Admiral grimaced and wrinkled his nose.

“Thank you, Mr. Washburn. Put it in your report.”

The Admiral stepped forward. He took a few soggy steps toward the line of boys, his eyes sliding like a snake from boy to boy. He poked at something between his teeth with his tongue.

He had just opened his foul mouth to speak when the boy to Jonathan’s right wobbled. The boy pinwheeled his arms to catch his balance, but it was too late and he dropped a foot off his block to the ground.

The Admiral’s mouth snapped shut and he raised one of his cockroach eyebrows. He shook his head and clucked his tongue.

“To the Sorrow, Miguel Vargas.”

The boy’s head dropped.

“Yes, sir,” he mumbled and slouched to the Sinner’s Sorrow, its black wood dotted now with raindrops. He knelt on the horrible device and squinched his eyes shut. Jonathan remembered well the bite of that sharp rail. He bit his lip and looked away from Miguel.

The Admiral watched him for a moment and then looked back to the boys still on the blocks.

“Boys, we have a new student among us. As I’m sure you know. A young Jonathan Grisby, twelve years old.” As he talked, the Admiral strode slowly down the line of balancing boys. He stopped before Jonathan. “Ten weeks we are supposed to have him. But for a crime of his magnitude, I think we may need him longer.” Jonathan met the Admiral’s sinisterly gloating eyes for a second, then looked quickly away.

The Admiral resumed walking down the line. “I thought it a good idea this morning,” he said, his voice booming so as to be heard over the rising wind and growing thunder, “to remind you all what you are and why you are here. For Jonathan Grisby’s benefit.”

At the end of the line, a boy’s foot dropped to the ground. Without a word he shook his head and walked to the Sinner’s Sorrow. Miguel jumped gratefully up from the kneeler and limped stiffly back to his stone block. The new boy scowled and took his place on his knees. The Admiral waited for them each to get into place before continuing. By now he was back at the center of the line, and he took a step back so he could throw his grisly gaze over all his charges.

“Bloody, disgusting little scabs, boys,” he said. He enunciated each word clearly and precisely. “That is what you are. The very scabs of civilized society.” He smiled an ugly, pinched smile, then let it drop from his face. “And why, you might ask, do I call you scabs?” He started walking again, his eyes up at the clouds and the occasional, quick flickers of lightning. His voice lilted and rose like a schoolteacher’s. “Scabs, as you know, are nasty little things. An otherwise healthy body gets a wound. A disfigurement. And it begins to bleed, that wound. And it forms a dirty little scab. Good for nothing. An unhealthy nastiness. An ugliness. Well, boys, it is our civilization itself that is sick. It is too tolerant. Too soft. It is … wounded. Bleeding from its rottenness. And you, lads, are the scabs. The bad little bits that nobody wants.”

He stopped and cleared his throat. Scratched at his nose. Looked at the line of boys with distaste. “And so society sends you here. Society picks you off like the little scabs that you are and flicks you out here to my island. To try and turn you into something better. And if I can’t?” The Admiral lowered his chin and looked at them from under his eyebrows. “Well, at least we keep you out of the way for a while. And we give you what you deserve.”

He raised his head again and trudged deliberately through them, between two boys. His elbow bumped one—not too gently—and the boy stumbled to the ground. He kicked at a puddle and took the second boy’s place on the kneeler.

When the Admiral’s voice bellowed again, it was moving behind them.

“So what can we do with you? Why are you all such incorrigible delinquents? It’s simple.” The Admiral paused dramatically. “Weakness. And rot. You’ve been spoiled and now you are rotten and weak and it is up to me to fix you. So, at Slabhenge, we do not do what other schools do. We do not read stories. We do not talk about your … feelings. We do not play with numbers or write tedious essays about what you did last summer. What you did last summer was get weak and rotten. What you do here is work. You work. And, yes, sometimes you suffer. That, I’m afraid, is the cost of improvement. That is where strength comes from, boys.”

The Admiral’s voice circled slowly around until he was once again standing before them. The rain had picked up and was now a bit more than sprinkling. It dripped down Jonathan’s face and off the brim of the Admiral’s hat. The puddles were growing, swallowing the few blocks left between them. It was almost as dark as night, and flashes of lightning splashed the courtyard with wild shadows.

“We will work the weakness out of you!” With a flourish the Admiral yanked his sword out of its scabbard. It flashed bright silver in the dim, stormy light. “We will cut all the rottenness out of your character, if we can. We will certainly try. Just as society cut the rottenness out of itself by sending your worthless hides to Slabhenge, Slabhenge will cut the rottenness out of you. We will bleed the infection right out of you.”

The Admiral took a step backward toward the line of men, his eyes still on the boys. The boy on the Sinner’s Sorrow whined piteously and rocked from one knee to the other. The Admiral looked at him and rolled his eyes.

“Oh, back to your block, you baby,” he muttered, and the boy jumped up and scrambled back onto his stone block.

The Admiral backed up until he was again in line, shoulder to shoulder with the others in the puddle. He raised his sword and pointed it straight up at the coal-black clouds that rumbled and flashed overhead.

“Work!” he hollered, practically screaming now to be heard over the gusts and crashes and rain. There was a tingling in the air. A buzzing, a charge, a vibration. “Suffering! Discipline! You are dirty little scabs, you devils, and you’ve been sent to hell!”

As the Admiral spoke, the metal buttons on his jacket began to glow with a strange blue light. There was a crackling, like static all around. Then a great blinding flash.

A hot-white bolt of lightning shot down from the black clouds and through the upheld sword in the Admiral’s hand. Spidery lines of electricity surged and cracked through the crowd of adults, and in one blink of a bit of a second, the puddle at their feet burned to a hissing white burst and the world was split by a deafening cannon crack.

The boys screamed and jumped and covered their faces, and Jonathan felt himself thrown off his block and onto his rear on the ground.

Then, all was still. Jonathan sat on the wet stone with his eyes squeezed shut and heard nothing.

Bit by bit, sounds came back. A fading rumble of thunder. The rain dripping on the walls and puddles of the prison. Gusts of wind whistling between the towers. Jonathan lowered his arms and blinked open his eyes.

Two boys still stood on their blocks. The rest were on the ground, like him. They were all looking at where the Admiral and his men had been standing a moment before.

The men were still there. But they all lay in a heap on the ground. Perfectly still. Rain pattered softly on their coats, their boots, their bare hands. The air reeked of steam and burning and electricity and lightning. No one moved.

Slowly—first one, then two, then all of them—the boys crept closer. Step by step they formed a cautious half circle around the pile of grown-ups. No one got too close. There was the Admiral, facedown, his hat on the ground and the sword still in his hand. There was Mr. Warwick, on his back, his one eye open and gaping up at the storm.

“Is he …” one of the boys started to say.

“Are they …” another began.

There was a crack of thunder and they all jumped, but no one stepped away. They hardly noticed the rain pouring down around them.

“Oh, man. Are they … dead?” It was Walter who finally managed to ask the question they were all wondering.

“We need to check,” the big kid named Tony said.

“How?” Sebastian asked breathlessly.

Colin took one step closer to the steaming bodies.

“Thomeone needth to check for a pulth.”

Sebastian nodded.

“Right. Do it, Colin.”

“Me? I don’t want—”

“Just do it, Colin. You’re closest.”

Colin stepped forward. He tiptoed between the bodies like he was afraid they’d wake up. He shied away from Mr. Warwick’s staring eye and reached down toward the Admiral. His hand stopped inches from the Admiral’s neck and he looked up at Sebastian with wide eyes.

“Do it,” Sebastian snapped.

Colin tucked the corners of his mouth into a frown and stretched down the last bit. He felt with his fingers past the Admiral’s collar, trying to find the neck. Jonathan cringed and braced himself, expecting the Admiral to leap up at any moment with a furious roar.

But there was no leaping. No fury. No roar.

Colin stood motionless for a moment, his eyes on the ground and his mouth still frowning and the fingers of one hand held to the soggy neck of the Admiral of Slabhenge. Then he blinked and looked up at the boys gathered at a fearful distance around him.

“He’th dead,” Colin whispered. “Dead ath a doornail.”