“Well, you aren’t alive. And you go around and do things.”
“I,” said Silas, “am precisely what I am, and nothing more. I am, as you say, not alive. But if I am ended, I shall simply cease to be. My kind are, or we are not. If you see what I mean.”
“Not really.”
Silas sighed. The rain was done and the cloudy gloaming had become true twilight. “Bod,” he said, “there are many reasons why it is important that we keep you safe.”
Bod said, “The person who hurt my family. The one who wants to kill me. You are certain that he’s still out there?” It was something he had been thinking about for a while now, and he knew what he wanted.
“Yes. He’s still out there.”
“Then,” said Bod, and said the unsayable, “I want to go to school.”
Silas was imperturbable. The world could have ended, and he would not have turned a hair. But now his mouth opened and his brow furrowed, and he said only,
“What?”
“I’ve learned a lot in this graveyard,” said Bod. “I can Fade and I can Haunt. I can open a ghoul-gate and I know the constellations. But there’s a world out there, with the sea in it, and islands, and shipwrecks and pigs. I mean, it’s filled with things I don’t know. And the teachers here have taught me lots of things, but I need more. If I’m going to survive out there, one day.”
Silas seemed unimpressed. “Out of the question. Here we can keep you safe. How could we keep you safe, out there? Outside, anything could happen.”
“Yes,” agreed Bod. “That’s the potential thing you were talking about.” He fell silent. Then, “Someone killed my mother and my father and my sister.”
“Yes. Someone did.”
“A man?”
“A man.”
“Which means,” said Bod, “you’re asking the wrong question.”
Silas raised an eyebrow. “How so?”
“Well,” said Bod. “If I go outside in the world, the question isn’t ‘who will keep me safe from him?’”
“No?”
“No. It’s ‘who will keep him safe from me?’”
Twigs scratched against the high windows, as if they needed to be let in. Silas flicked an imaginary speck o
f dust from his sleeve with a fingernail as sharp as a blade. He said, “We will need to find you a school.”
No one noticed the boy, not at first. No one even noticed that they hadn’t noticed him. He sat halfway back in class. He didn’t answer much, not unless he was directly asked a question, and even then his answers were short and forgettable, colorless: he faded, in mind and in memory.
“Do you think they’re religious, his family?” asked Mr. Kirby, in the teachers’ staff room. He was marking essays.
“Whose family?” asked Mrs. McKinnon.
“Owens in Eight B,” said Mr. Kirby.
“The tall spotty lad?”
“I don’t think so. Sort of medium height.”
Mrs. McKinnon shrugged. “What about him?”
“Handwrites everything,” said Mr. Kirby. “Lovely handwriting. What they used to call copperplate.”