The boys had been on edge already, but at the sound of an unexpected voice directly overhead, Reynie had thrown up his hands as if to ward off a blow, and Sticky had tried, unsuccessfully, to hide behind his suitcase. With a sheepish grin Reynie slid a chair under the gap. A moment later Constance’s tiny feet appeared, then the rest of her body, as Kate, hanging by her legs from a beam, lowered her carefully to the chair. The boys helped her to the floor while Kate secured her rope to the beam and climbed down to join them.
“Don’t bother thanking me,” she said to Constance, who was scowling and brushing insulation from her clothes.
“Why should I thank you? You drag me up into the ceiling, through a heating vent, crawling through spider webs in the dark, across all these hard boards saying, ‘Don’t put your knee there! You’ll fall through and break your neck!’ and ‘Don’t breathe so loudly! Someone will hear you!’ until my heart’s in my throat and my knees are killing me, and you expect me to thank you?”
“Not at all,” said Kate. “I was happy to do it.”
Constance’s eyes seemed ready to pop from her head.
“Did you ever consider just walking down the corridor?” Sticky asked.
“I figured we’d better have a hidden entrance,” she replied, “in case we want to meet secretly. I’ll bet those Executives are always patroling the place. I don’t like them a bit. Jillson made fun of my bucket, and she kept calling us ‘little squirts’ and bossing us around. I thought Constance was going to bite her leg off.”
“I considered it,” Constance said.
“She’s a tough-looking one, though,” Kate reflected. “Six feet tall, arms like a gorilla, and ties her ponytail with
“Let’s be sure not to cross her, then,” Reynie said, then told them what Jackson had said about Messengers.
“Jillson told us the same stuff,” said Kate. “So the voice we heard on the television must be some Messenger kid, right?”
“It must be. And it sounds like the other students don’t know much about what the Messengers do — they don’t get these ‘secret privileges’ until they become top students. That means we’ve got to rise to the top, and fast, so we can become Messengers and figure things out as soon as possible.”
“Why don’t we poke around and figure some things out for ourselves right now?” said Kate, who had a passion for poking around.
The others agreed, and so Kate fetched her rope and replaced the ceiling panel, and they set out down the corridor. Hurrying to keep up with Kate, who always moved in high gear, Reynie was almost to the dormitory exit before he noticed Constance wasn’t with them. They all went back. Constance stood just outside the boys’ room, pointing at a patch of mildew on the ceiling and wrinkling her nose. “That’s disgusting! I mean, that’s nasty! I
“Um, Constance,” Reynie said. “We’re in a hurry, remember?”
They set out again, this time keeping an eye on Constance. But aside from being easily distracted, Constance was an intolerably slow walker. When they urged her to hurry, she obstinately refused. When they let her fall behind, she was irritated they didn’t wait up.
“It’s not my fault my legs are shorter than yours,” she complained. “I can’t be expected to walk so quickly.”
“How about if one of us lets you ride piggyback?” Reynie suggested.
“That’s stupid,” Constance said. But in the end she let Kate hoist her up, and in this way, at last, they made it out of the dormitory and into sunlight.
The children decided to follow a narrow, well-kept track of crushed stone that zigzagged up a tall hill by the dormitory. In a few minutes they had reached the hilltop, where they were presented with an excellent view of the island. Its entire terrain was one series of hills after another, some of them gentle rises, some looming peaks.
The children gazed down upon their new school. The Institute’s gray stone buildings were so similar to one another and so closely packed it was difficult to judge precisely where one ended and another began. They were arranged in a rough U shape around the broad stone plaza and were connected by stone walkways and stone steps. Seen from this perspective, with the stone tower rising up just beyond the dormitory, the buildings gave the impression of a fortress rather than a school.
And yet, in the bright sun of morning, the Institute didn’t seem such a forbidding place, not as menacing as they’d imagined; in fact the whole island was rather lovely. The hillsides were a patchwork of sand, green vegetation, and clusters of boulders stitched together by crisscrossing gravel paths. And here and there along the paths, flowering cactuses had been planted in great stone pots. An energetic brook ran down from a nearby hill, following its course over and around the stones, sometimes spilling in miniature waterfalls as it made its way to the island shore, which lay but a short distance downhill from the Institute. Aside from the splash and murmur of water and the distant calls of cliff swallows, the island was remarkably silent, with no children in sight and only an occasional, white-uniformed worker sweeping a walkway or hastening off to some unknown duty.
“I guess everyone’s in class,” said Sticky. He gave Kate a quizzical look. “Why are you getting out your kaleidoscope?”
“It’s a spyglass in disguise,” Reynie said as Kate removed the kaleidoscope lens.
Kate trained her spyglass on the stone tower.
“Look, there’s a window just above the Institute flag. I’ll bet something important’s up there. It’s the highest window on the island. There’s always something important behind the highest window.” She handed Constance the spyglass.
“It’s probably just so they can reach the flag,” said Sticky. “There has to be a way to bring it in and clean it, you know.”
“Maybe,” said Kate. “It would be simple enough to sneak in and find out. The window’s not as high as it seems — not if you were on that hill. First you’d need to get over that rock wall” — she pointed near the top of the hill — “then hop the brook and climb the rest of the way up. The tower’s built right into the hillside, see? With a decent
