Dead Voices

Ollie pulled out her watch. Coco had given it back to her in Hemlock Lodge. The word LOVE had returned to the watch face. Ollie held it to her cheek a moment.

“Thanks, Mom,” she said softly. “I love you.”

“Thanks a lot,” Coco added from the floor.

Then Ollie tucked the watch under her pillow, and they all fell asleep to the quiet of a windless winter night, and Mr. Adler and Coco’s mom playing music very softly downstairs.

Turn the page for a sample of Katherine Arden’s . . .

1

OCTOBER IN EAST EVANSBURG, and the last warm sun of the year slanted red through the sugar maples. Olivia Adler sat nearest the big window in Mr. Easton’s math class, trying, catlike, to fit her entire body into a patch of light. She wished she were on the other side of the glass. You don’t waste October sunshine. Soon the old autumn sun would bed down in cloud blankets, and there would be weeks of gray rain before it finally decided to snow. But Mr. Easton was teaching fractions and had no sympathy for Olivia’s fidgets.

“Now,” he said from the front of the room. His chalk squeaked on the board. Mike Campbell flinched. Mike Campbell got the shivers from squeaking blackboards and, for some reason, from people licking paper napkins. The sixth grade licked napkins around him as much as possible.

“Can anyone tell me how to convert three-sixteenths to a decimal?” asked Mr. Easton. He scanned the room for a victim. “Coco?”

“Um,” said Coco Zintner, hastily shutting a sparkling pink notebook. “Ah,” she added wisely, squinting at the board.

Point one eight seven five, thought Olivia idly, but she did not raise her hand to rescue Coco. She made a line of purple ink on her scratch paper, turned it into a flower, then a palm tree. Her attention wandered back to the window. What if a vampire army came through the gates right now? Or no, it’s sunny. Werewolves? Or what if the Brewsters’ Halloween skeleton decided to unhook himself from the third-floor window and lurch out the door?

Ollie liked this idea. She had a mental image of Officer Perkins, who got cats out of trees and filed police reports about pies stolen off windowsills, approaching a wandering skeleton. I’m sorry, Mr. Bones, you’re going to have to put your skin on—

A large foot landed by her desk. Ollie jumped. Coco had either conquered or been conquered by three-sixteenths, and now Mr. Easton was passing out math quizzes. The whole class groaned.

“Were you paying attention, Ollie?” asked Mr. Easton, putting her paper on her desk.

“Yep,” said Ollie, and added, a little at random, “point one eight seven five.” Mr. Bones had failed to appear. Lazy skeleton. He could have gotten them out of their math quiz.

Mr. Easton looked unconvinced but moved on.

Ollie eyed her quiz. Please convert 9/8 to a decimal. Right. Ollie didn’t use a calculator or scratch paper. The idea of using either had always puzzled her, as though someone had suggested she needed a spyglass to read a book. She scribbled answers as fast as her pencil could write, put her quiz on Mr. Easton’s desk, and waited, half out of her seat, for the bell to ring.

Before the ringing had died away, Ollie seized her bag, inserted a crumpled heap of would-be homework, stowed a novel, and bolted for the door.

She had almost made it out when a voice behind her said, “Ollie.”

Ollie stopped; Lily Mayhew and Jenna Gehrmann nearly tripped over her. Then the whole class was going around her like she was a rock in a river. Ollie trudged back to Mr. Easton’s desk.

Why me, she wondered irritably. Phil Greenblatt had spent the last hour picking his nose and sticking boogers onto the seat in front of him. Lily had hacked her big sister’s phone and screenshotted some texts Annabelle sent her boyfriend. The sixth grade had been giggling over them all day. And Mr. Easton wanted to talk to her?

Ollie stopped in front of the teacher’s desk. “Yes? I turned in my quiz and everything so—”

Mr. Easton had a wide mouth and a large nose that drooped over his upper lip. A neatly trimmed mustache took up the tiny bit of space remaining. Usually he looked like a friendly walrus. Now he looked impatient. “Your quiz is letter-perfect, as you know, Ollie,” he said. “No complaints on that score.”

Ollie knew that. She waited.

“You should be doing eighth-grade math,” Mr. Easton said. “At least.”

“No,” said Ollie.

Mr. Easton looked sympathetic now, as th

ough he knew why she didn’t want to do eighth-grade math. He probably did. Ollie had him for homeroom and life sciences, as well as math.

Ollie did not mind impatient teachers, but she did not like sympathy face. She crossed her arms.

Mr. Easton hastily changed the subject. “Actually, I wanted to talk to you about chess club. We’re missing you this fall. The other kids, you know, really appreciated that you took the time to work with them on their opening gambits last year, and there’s the interscholastic tournament coming up soon so—”