The Students Nobody Recalls

The room beyond the door is warm, and lamplit, and it has been lived in. That is the first thing Wren understands, and it rearranges everything. Room 4 of the Tenth Corridor is not a secret kept empty. It is not a sealed thing. It has four beds with rumpled covers and a window with a plant on the sill and a fire that someone has banked low, and three students looking up at her from where they sit — and the look on their faces is not the look of people caught. It is the look of people who have been waiting, for a while, and have stopped expecting, and are now carefully not letting themselves hope. "Oh," says the nearest one, a boy with ink on his fingers, very quietly. "Oh, it worked. The card worked. You can see us." "I can see you," Wren says. Her voice comes out steadier than she feels. "Should I not be able to?" "No," says the girl by the window, and she says it kindly, which is somehow worse than if she had said it cruelly. "No, you shouldn't. Nobody can. That's rather the entire point of us." She sets down the book she has been reading — that was the page-turning, then — and stands, and Wren sees that she is perhaps seventeen, and that her grey-and-green uniform is real and correct and that there is a small frayed patch at the cuff where a year of wear has worn it. A year. At least a year. "My name is Cass," the girl says. "This is Pem, and that's Tobias asleep, he'll be cross he missed you. We are the Tenth Corridor. There are eleven of us, across the four rooms, and we have all of us sat the Brackenhall examination and passed it and been admitted, properly, by letter, exactly the way you were." She holds Wren's eyes very steadily. "And then, on the day each of us arrived, the school looked at what we'd scored — at how we'd scored it, at the particular shape of the minds that scored that way — and the school decided that we were the kind of student it would rather not have walking about where the others could see us. So it put us here. Down a corridor it taught everyone to forget. And it kept us. Fed, taught, safe, even — Brackenhall is not cruel, Wren, that's the hard part, it would be so much easier if it were cruel. It simply decided we were better kept than known." Wren stands in the doorway with her guttering candle and feels the stone of luck she has carried all summer turn over in her pocket and become, finally, fully, the thing she has suspected since the gate. Not luck. A decision. Somebody, reading her examination, had decided. "What kind of mind," she says slowly, "scores the way we score?" It is the right question. She sees Cass register that it is the right question — sees the careful not-hoping on the older girl's face crack, at last, into something braver. "A noticing one," Cass says. "A mind that doesn't believe a thing just because the school says it twice. A mind that, shown nine corridors and a rhyme with a hole in it, goes and counts the doors." She almost smiles. "They don't hide us because we're dangerous, Wren. They hide us because we're the ones who'd find out. Every student Brackenhall has ever buried down the Tenth Corridor is a student who could not be trusted not to ask. And they were right about all of us. You're standing here. You asked." Behind Wren, very faintly, far down the impossible corridor, a bell begins to ring — not an hour bell, something else, something with an edge to it, and she sees all three of them go still. "That's the round," Pem says, the boy with the inky fingers, getting to his feet. "Dame Orrell walks the ninth at the turn of the night. She can't see our corridor — none of the staff can, that's how they bear doing this to us, they made themselves forget too — but she can see you, Wren. You're still on the map. You're still real to them, for tonight, until they file you." He looks at her, and there is the whole weight of a buried year in it. "So this is the only choice you're going to get, and you get about a minute to make it. Go back. Walk to the ninth, be found in your bed, let them quietly correct your card in the morning, and you'll wake up tomorrow unable to find this corridor ever again, and you'll be lucky, and you'll never know what you forgot." "Or," Cass says. "Or," Pem agrees, "you come in, and you shut the door, and tomorrow you're one of the students nobody recalls. And the eleven of us become twelve. And twelve, Wren —" and now the older boy does smile, and it is a sharp, hopeful, dangerous thing — "twelve noticing minds, down one forgotten corridor, with nothing left to lose and a great deal left to ask, is a rather different number than eleven." Down the ninth corridor, the bell rings again, closer. Wren Halloway looks back the way she came — at the bright, sanctioned, nine-cornered school that has decided she is better kept than known — and then she looks at the warm lamplit room and the rumpled beds and the three buried students watching her with their carefully rationed hope. She does things properly, Wren. Or not at all. She steps inside, and she shuts the door.