فصل 22

CHAPTER 22

DANGER COMING

EACH DAY MOLLY FOUGHT A GRIM BATTLE against loneliness and despair.

Nobody spoke to her. She called out to the guards, pleading with them for information, or even just human conversation, but they never answered. And so she sat, day after day, in the tiny, dank, foul-smelling cell, sometimes sobbing quietly, sometimes talking to herself, finding it harder and harder to keep out the awful thought:

I will never get out of here.

She had no way to mark the passage of time save by the delivery of the awful food and the wretched, twice-daily spectacle of the exhausted prisoners trudging past. She dared not call out to them, for fear the guards would hurt them. But she waited for them eagerly, listening for the clanking of their chains in the hallway, pressing her face to her cell bars in anticipation of the only real human contact in her otherwise relentlessly bleak day.

As the prisoners passed, she and James always met eyes, each trying to cheer the other up, to communicate the simple message: I’m still here, still alive.

But James was not the only prisoner with whom she exchanged looks. She was now certain that she knew the fourth man in line, the one who had looked at her so intently when she arrived. It took her several days to recognize him, but once she did, she was sure.

It was Thomas.

He had clearly been down in the tunnels longer than the others. His face was gaunt, his arms and legs bone-thin, his filthy clothes nothing but shreds and tatters. But it was Thomas.

Molly had spent a great deal of time—time was all she had—thinking about what his presence meant. She understood why she and James had been taken captive; they had learned von Schatten’s secret. But as far as Molly knew, Thomas knew nothing about von Schatten. Yet he had apparently been taken captive before either James or Molly.

Why?

The more Molly thought about it, the more certain she became that the reason had to be the island. Very few people even knew of its existence; Thomas had actually lived there. Molly believed that was why he had been captured: von Schatten, or Ombra, or whatever he was, wanted Thomas’s knowledge of the island. If Molly was right, there was a connection between the island and the strange activity in the Underground.

What was it?

Molly didn’t know the answer. But she knew that whatever it was, it could only mean trouble for the island and her dear friends who lived there. She wished there were some way she could send a warning to let Peter and the Mollusks know that they were in danger. But she couldn’t even get a message to the streets of London above her, let alone to an island far out at sea. She could only clutch the bars of her tiny, dim cell, waiting for the next brief glimpse of James and Thomas, her next brief chance to exchange the unspoken message that had become the only thing that any of them had left to cling to.

I’m still alive.