Riley judders awake to find Noon at her side, holding a bowl.
‘I’m sorry,’ Riley says.
‘Eat.’ Noon pushes the spoon against Riley’s mouth. It clicks against her teeth.
‘Please,’ Riley says with her jaw locked shut. Keeping her eyes on Noon she works the leather cuffs around her wrist so that the bitten part is hidden on the underside.
‘Did you see him?’ Noon asks, tapping the spoon against Riley’s set teeth.
Riley shakes her head.
‘Yes, you did.’ Noon forces the rim of the spoon between Riley’s jaws and forces them apart. ‘Eat.’ The thick mushroom taste makes Riley gag. She thinks grimly of the hours to come. The blurring between real and unreal both terrifies and exhausts her. There is no way to know how much blood she has lost.
‘You’ll want to kill yourself, you know,’ Noon says, conversational. ‘But you won’t be able to. We decide when you die and what you believe.’
‘Mommy?’ Rufus peeps around Noon’s legs.
Riley tips her head back and breathes. ‘You brought a kid to—?’
‘Kind of late for morals,’ Noon says, taking the opportunity of Riley’s open mouth to shove a spoonful of mushrooms in.
‘Mommy,’ Rufus says brightly.
Riley chokes. All she can smell or taste is mushroom; the thick meat-earth scent fills her nostrils like mulch, gathers at the back of her throat.
Noon makes a new cut in Riley’s arm, vertical, following the line of the vein. It’s the kind of cut you use to end things for real. The blood is a pulse, it is a solid thing making its way out of her flesh.
Rufus watches the thin stream of blood as it falls through the air. He puts out a pink finger to touch it.
‘No.’ Noon pulls him gently away. ‘Let it go to the land.’ A peep comes from behind her. Three small shapes come out of the shadows. Hallie, Whitey and Peach look at Riley with serious faces.
‘You’re sick,’ Riley says.
‘They want to watch,’ Noon says. ‘It’s not often someone gives all their blood to the land anymore.’
‘Who are you people?’ Riley whispers. ‘You call yourselves the Nowhere children but you’re demons.’
‘Haven’t you guessed yet?’ Noon asks. ‘We’re not the Nowhere children. They are.’
‘I don’t understand.’ There is a warm blaze of light on Riley’s cheek. It must be sunset, she thinks, vague.
‘Their lives were taken,’ Noon says. ‘We wear their bones around our necks. That’s how they recognise us. They know we’ll look after them, protect them. We owe the Nowhere children that.’
‘Look,’ Noon says softly. She shines her flashlight down into the sunken place. ‘Leaf built this place over them. He had a trap door that went down here. But I wanted them to be open to the sky. So we broke open the floor and opened it. We made them a garden. We cleared away the remains of the wall that collapsed, down there. It took nearly a year.’
Riley blinks.
‘Really look,’ Noon says. ‘You’re always so busy watching out for danger, Riley – you never actually see things.’
Riley looks, following the torch beam as it tracks through the green, across the earth and stones. It comes to rest on a twisting lilac tree. Five round stones are set in a circle at its foot.
‘That’s not real.’ A feeling is building in Riley.
‘Yes, it is. You know what those are.’ The smooth round shapes set in a circle are not stones. The skulls are small, almost fully buried in the earth, only their rounded tops are exposed. The bone is old, worn to a smooth sheen. The upper rim of one eye socket is just showing above the earth.
‘Cal, Everett, Danny, Midnight, Dawn, me – we were never the Nowhere children,’ Noon says. ‘We take care of them.’
Riley closes her eyes. She understands that Noon wants her to lose her mind. It’s part of her punishment. She won’t let it happen. ‘That’s not true,’ she says again.
