Chapter 46: 46 Night in london

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46: Night in london 46: Night in london Mrs.

Hargrove closed the gate behind Kairan with a sharp bang, as if the noise itself were part of the house rules.

“Wait,” she said to the two officers, before they let them leave.

“Fill out the form.

Name, time of discovery, location.” Carrow pulled out a notebook and pen, wrote quickly, and handed it to the woman.

She scanned it through narrowed eyes, then looked back at Kairan, as if comparing what was written with what was in front of her.

“No last name,” she said.

It wasn’t a question.

“He doesn’t have one,” Carrow said.

“Or he won’t tell us.” “Same thing, all right.” Mrs.

Hargrove folded the paper and slipped it into her pocket.

“All right.

I’ll handle it from here.” Reilly hesitated in the doorway a moment too long, his eyes once again on Kairan’s face.

“Goodnight,” he said, as if he didn’t know what else to say to a child who had disturbed him more than any criminal he’d encountered on duty.

Kairan didn’t answer.

He let them walk down the street until the gate closed, and with it, the noise of the city was shut out.

Mrs.

Hargrove looked him up and down, the lamp flickering in her hand.

“How old are you?” “Eight.” “Where are you from?” “Far away.” “The cops already told me that.

I want the name of a place.

A city.

A town.” Kairan stared at her without answering.

Not because she didn’t want to speak, but because there wasn’t a word in that language she’d learned from a book that could translate the Abyss into something a woman like her was ready to hear.

Mrs.

Hargrove waited three seconds, then snorted, as if she’d seen other children do the exact same thing and had stopped finding it interesting.

“Good,” she said.

“I’ll keep the questions to myself until tomorrow.

Tonight, you just need a bed.” She turned, and the lamp cast long shadows on the walls of a narrow corridor, the wallpaper peeling at the corners.

“Follow me.

And walk slowly; the others are asleep.” Kairan followed her down the corridor.

His eyes moved from door to door, counting, cataloging, measuring distances as he always did, out of habit, in every unfamiliar place he found himself in.

He noticed a staircase leading to an upper floor.

He noticed a door ajar, from which came a light snoring.

He noticed, at the end of the corridor, a smaller door than the others, locked from the outside.

“What’s there?” he asked, indicating it with a nod.

Ms.

Hargrove turned slightly.

“It’s none of your business.” Kairan didn’t press her.

But he noted it anyway, the way he would have marked a suspicious door in a corridor in the Dark Tower: to be checked later, when the time came.

They went upstairs.

Mrs.

Hargrove opened a door onto a long, narrow room lined with eight beds, most occupied by sleeping forms under gray blankets.

Only one bed, near the window, was empty.

“That’s yours,” she said, gesturing with her lamp.

“Up at six.

Breakfast at six-thirty.

If you’re not down in time, you miss your meal.

We don’t make exceptions for anyone here, and we certainly won’t for you.” “Understood,” Kairan said.

She looked at him a moment longer than necessary, as if something in his response was too calm, too composed, bothering her more than she could admit.

“We’ll talk tomorrow,” she said finally.

“Where you really come from.

And those eyes.” He left, closing the door softly, and his footsteps receded down the corridor until they faded completely.

Kairan stood still for a moment, standing beside the empty bed, while the breathing of the other children filled the room with a slow, steady rhythm he’d never heard before with such intensity: in the Abyss, one always slept with one ear awake, ready to react.

Here, however, those bodies slept as if no threat could ever reach them in that bed, under that roof.

He sat on the edge of the mattress.

It was softer than anything he’d ever slept on, and for a moment, the softness felt almost wrong, as if his body still expected the hardness of stone.

He looked out the window.

The city lights continued to pulse in the low mist, and in the distance, beyond the rooftops, loomed the silhouette of a towering tower, dotted with lit windows all the way to the top, taller than any structure he’d ever seen in the Abyss.

She wondered if in that tower, too, there lived someone who commanded all the others, as Zaroth had commanded the Dark Tower.

She wondered if the rules of that world were truly so different from the ones they knew, or if they simply hid better, under gentler lights.

A child in the next bed turned in his sleep, muttering something incomprehensible, and for a moment Kairan watched him with an attention that wasn’t entirely necessary.

He could Seeing the profile of a face marked by a yellowish bruise on the left cheekbone, now almost healed, he thought.

A shock.

He filed that detail away too.

He lay down, without undressing, his hands clasped on his chest, his eyes turned to the peeling ceiling.

He didn’t close his eyelids immediately.

He remained staring at the cracks in the plaster, mentally tracing their path as if studying a map, until sleep came upon him, suddenly and deeply, as he had rarely felt, in a bed that wasn’t his, in a city whose full name he didn’t yet know, in a world that had only just begun to reveal to him how little, deep down, he truly knew.