Mourning bells ring twice more at lunchtime. Anne-Marie, the last of the Year 7s, has met her fate, along with a boy from Year 6. So it is a somber crew that sits down to eat.

“Imagine,” says Marya, “Year Seven is gone now!”

Aoife, who has started eating again, doesn’t even glance up. But Nessa can see the two tiny dorms in her mind’s eye, the beds empty and quiet until September.

“They didn’t even make their one in ten,” Marya continues. She comes from one of those homes where nobody saw anything wrong with speaking from a full mouth, so that food could be consumed and generously shared all at the same time.

“We’ll make up for it!” says Nicole, but nobody likes to say such things, or even to hear them, and she shuts up when their eyes slip away from her.

“I would hate to be the last,” says Marya now, waving little fists about. “Can you imagine?” And they can. Among all the terrible outcomes, it’s one that crops up again and again. Watching your friends live or die, while all the time the odds of finding yourself in the Grey Land keep climbing. Far better to be taken soon. But not now. Never right now!

“Look, how’re we going to do this?” asks Megan at last. “I was thinking, we wait for the lists of hunters and hunted to go up. The chances of all of us being in one of those groups have got to be tinier than Conor’s wee piggy eyes. Am I right?” They all nod. “And then, if Nessa is a hunted, she arranges to meet up with one of our hunters so she can be ‘caught’ and get out of the forest right away. Or vice versa.”

It’s such an obvious plan that there are specific rules and penalties against it. But Megan thinks that even if they get in trouble, they’ll have saved their friend’s life for another fortnight. And that might be enough, for who knows what will happen in two weeks? Conor could be Called. Or Nessa.

“I’m always nervous of the Cage,” says Nicole, but Megan rolls her eyes.

“It’s the best and only time off I ever get in this place. Away from your snoring, Nicole.”

“I do not snore!”

“It must be a drill you keep under your pillow then!”

And Marya claps her hands and Nicole groans, because there’s nothing she can do now: Megan’s poor witticism will reach every dorm by nightfall.

Nessa grins too, until she realizes she hasn’t thought of Anto all morning. But already he’s creeping back into her head. “What do I care?” he said.

But here is Megan again, dragging her back to reality with a squeeze of her arm. “I need you focused,” she says. “Danú’s tits, but you’re a dozy slut.” This is Megan’s version of gentle.

“I thought that’s how you liked your sluts?” says Nicole, finally scoring a point. She’s off her game today. Maybe afraid of what will happen tonight if she takes part in balking Conor of his prey.

And so she should be! thinks Nessa.

Then everybody jumps, because Liz Sweeney is right there at the table with them.

“Well, well,” she says, looking from one face to another, before finally settling on Aoife. “So you weren’t able to keep your mouth shut, I see.” She grins as if she doesn’t mind at all—which means Conor doesn’t. He’s no fool, whatever else Nessa may think of him, and that means he has already guessed their oh-so-obvious plan, and that he has taken it into account.

“Mind if I join you?” she says.

“Yes,” Megan replies, but Liz Sweeney simply grins and slides into Squeaky Emma’s empty chair.

Ms. Breen is not yet at the top table. She’s stuck in her office with the human wreckage that calls itself Frank O’Leary squashed into the hard chair in front of her. His face is thinner than ever now, his legs too long for the space between him and her desk, his eyes glistening hollows.

“Oh, Frank,” she says, “you’re not leaving me with much choice, are you?”

“You promised … ,” he says. It’s the voice of an Egyptian mummy—far away and all the words crumbling to dust the instant they reach her ears. His breath too stinks of the tomb. It is all she can do not to gag. “You said … after she … when I lost my wife. You said I’d retire with dignity at the end of the year … Over Christmas, you said.”

She sighs, rubbing her eyes and thinking they can’t look much better than his. She sleeps badly, always waiting for the sound of mourning bells, despite the fact that they never ring without her say-so, and never at night. But there’s only so much a mind can take before it snaps: year after year of watching the murder of her beloved children here in the school. Of pretending wisdom and calm when all she wants is to be locked up somewhere quiet where the decisions are taken away from her.

But unlike Frank O’Leary, every morning she finds anew the strength she needs. She has been at this horrible game so long now that in the worst of times habit alone is just enough to keep her back straight.

“Listen, Frank,” she says, “you walked out of a class. I’m pretty sure you’ve had a nervous breakdown. Aren’t you? That means you’re delicate now. Too delicate for this kind of work.” She knows her words are cruel, that her job has made a monster of her, yet she does not stop. “The students need the best if they are to live.”

“Nobody knows more about the Grey Land than I do.”

“I know that. Your writings are brilliant. Why don’t you concentrate there?”

He manages to raise his chin. “Alanna,” he says, using her first name, as he has not done in over a year, “listen, I … ” And then he shocks her by slipping out of the chair and going onto his knees in front of her, his long fingers damp on the edge of her desk. “There’s only … a month to go. Six weeks anyway. Let me … let me leave with dignity. In my own time. I couldn’t take it. I just … ” He hangs there, and Alanna Breen thinks to herself that he is the most pathetic thing she has ever seen.

But she remembers his laughter from his better times, a great, braying roar that filled the staffroom from end to end. And it might not be the worst thing to wait for Christmas. The students will spend two weeks with their families, allowing time for the induction of a new member of staff. Less disruptive all round.

She sighs. “Get up, Frank. It’s all right. Until Christmas will be all right, but not—I repeat—not if you can’t handle the children, do you hear me? Walk out again like that and I’ll have to get somebody else. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I need to address the students.” She flies out the door before he can babble his gratitude. And straight away, in the hallway, she runs into Horner, yet another broken man. He stops to allow her past and, as always in his presence, it is a struggle not to break into a run to get away.

Only Tompkins can get through to that man, and only Tompkins, it seems, can tolerate his fishlike stare and his eternal silences. Not for the first time, she wonders what they must have gone through together, that the steadfast, overwhelmingly … normal Tompkins can subject himself to all of that.

And then she’s through the door and into the steamy warmth. The students are already on their tea, so she wastes no time in calling for silence.

“All right!” she says, and pauses as her eye comes to rest on the empty Year 7 table. She remembers a year when one poor girl had to linger there alone all the way to March.

“Listen now,” she says. “I speak so that the Nation will survive.” These words always sober even the rowdiest of Year 4s. “We, the staff of the college, would like to apologize to you, our students.” She sees their puzzled looks. “A few weeks ago, during a hunt, some of our Year Fives found … well, you all know by now what they found, don’t you? And our attempts to cover it up proved to be not only pointless, but dangerous. Yes. Your curiosity is natural. Especially when it pertains to your survival. When we hid the girl in the rock from you, it resulted in three Year Fives being Called at once.” And she makes no mention of Anto, the boy who returned alive and who refuses to come out of his room to sit at the top table with the remaining veteran, Melanie.

The doctors have sent a report down from Dublin about his “condition,” and she is itching to read it. For the moment, however, Ms. Breen’s business is here.

“I’m sorry we were secretive. So let me give you my word on this: The girl has been removed from the forest along with all traces of the boulder she died in. We think the … the power of the place has gone with her. But we can’t be sure, so we have fenced off the entire mound. Let me emphasize, the fence is not there to stop you seeing anything, because I’m giving you my word now that there is nothing more to see. And I further promise that should the scientists make new discoveries about the girl in the rock, we will be open about it from now on.”

This is a lie.

She doesn’t tell the children that some of the scientists were against fencing off the mound in the first place. The strange feeling reported by the students once the rock had been cut open fascinates the investigators. “We could learn so much more,” one grey-beard suggested, “if we could map that feeling of theirs. If we could deliberately provoke the Call somehow.”

She growled the scientists into silence, protecting her young from the monsters from Dublin. She worries that certain parts of the government might yet try to force her hand.

But for the moment she is confident that the problem has been resolved.