The Prisoner's Dilemma (2 page)

“She left her bucket in the other room,” rasped Sticky, adjusting his spectacles with slippery fingers and smudging them in the process. He tugged a polishing cloth from his shirt pocket. It was as damp as a baby wipe.

Constance was incredulous. “Kate left her precious bucket behind?”

“The duct is a tight fit,” Sticky said, resignedly poking the cloth back into his pocket. “The bucket would have made too much noise, and we didn’t want Rhonda to hear.”

Reynie smiled. He was reminded of their very first day in this house, almost a year and a half ago now. Kate had squeezed through a heating duct then, too. He remembered her telling him how she’d tied her bucket to her feet and dragged it behind her, and how amazed he’d been by her account. It was strange to think he’d ever been surprised by Kate’s agility, or by the fact that she carried a red bucket with her wherever she went. Reynie had long since grown used to these things; they seemed perfectly normal to him now.

He was not at all startled, for instance, when Kate returned from her expedition in less time than it would have taken most people simply to walk down the hall. She emerged from the heating duct with a large horseshoe magnet—one of the several useful items she kept stored in her bucket—and in no time had stood it upright and propped open the window with it.

“That should stay,” Kate said with satisfaction, as wonderfully cool air drifted into the room, “but just to be sure…” From her pocket she produced a length of clear fishing twine, one end of which she tied to her magnet and the other to her wrist. “This way if the magnet slips I won’t have to fetch it later.”

All of this took Kate perhaps twenty seconds to accomplish. As soon as she’d finished, the children sat on the floor in a circle. It was pure habit. Anytime the four of them were alone they had a meeting. Together, privately, the children thought of themselves as the Mysterious Benedict Society, and as such they had held a great many meetings—some in extraordinarily dire circumstances.

“So what’s your team called?” asked Kate, twisting her legs into a pretzel-like configuration. “Sticky and I are the Winmates!” When this declaration met with baffled stares, she frowned. “Don’t you get it? It’s a play on words—a portly man’s toe, or… What did you say we call that, Sticky, when two words are kind of bundled together?”

“A portmanteau,” said Sticky.

“Right! A portmanteau! See, we’re called the Winmates because we’re
inmates
—like prison inmates, get it?—who
win.
” Kate looked back and forth at Reynie and Constance, searching their expressions for signs of delight.

“You gave yourselves a name?” asked Constance.

Now it was Kate’s turn to be baffled. “You didn’t? How can you have a team without a name?”

Reynie sneaked an amused glance at Sticky, who only shrugged. No need to point out whose idea this naming business had been.

“Anyway,” said Kate, leveling a stern gaze at Constance, “we can
all
win, you know. You simply have to choose Option A, and so will we.”

“Okay, okay,” said Constance, heaving a dramatic sigh. “Go on back to your room and let’s get this over with.”

Sticky narrowed his eyes. “And you’ll choose Option A?”

Constance pretended to notice something outside the window.

“That’s what I thought,” said Sticky. “Honestly, Constance, what’s the point? If you insist on doing it this way, we’ll have no choice but to choose Option B ourselves. Then we’ll
all
have more work to do.”

“It doesn’t make any difference to Constance,” Reynie pointed out. “She spends most of her kitchen duty coming up with irritating poems, anyway. She never actually cleans much.”

Constance huffed indignantly at this, not least because Reynie was right.

Kate gazed longingly at the window. “I wish we really were prisoners. Then we could just skip the negotiations and try to escape.”

“We
are
really prisoners,” said Sticky in a weary tone, and there was a general murmur of agreement.

Everyone knew Sticky was referring not to the exercise but to their overall situation. For months now, they and their families had been the guests of Mr. Benedict, the man who had first brought them together and to whom this house belonged. Though perhaps a bit odd, Mr. Benedict was a brilliant, good-natured, and profoundly kind man, and staying with him would have been a pleasant arrangement if only his guests had been able to choose the circumstances. But in fact they had been given no choice.

Mr. Benedict was the guardian of an enormously powerful invention known as the Whisperer—a dangerous machine coveted by its equally dangerous inventor, Ledroptha Curtain, who happened to be Mr. Benedict’s brother—and because of their close connection to Mr. Benedict, the children were thought to be at risk. The government authorities, therefore, had ordered that the children and their families be kept under close guard. (Actually, the original order had called for them to be separated and whisked away to secret locations—much to the children’s dismay—but Mr. Benedict had not allowed this. His home was already well-guarded, he’d insisted, and room could be made for everyone there. In the end, the authorities had grudgingly relented; Mr. Benedict could be very persuasive.)

The children understood there was good reason for such precautions. Mr. Curtain was cunning and ruthless, with several vicious men in his employ, and the children and their families were obvious targets. No one doubted that they would be snatched up and used as bargaining chips if left unprotected, for Mr. Curtain would do anything to regain possession of his Whisperer. (And just the thought of such a reunion inspired dread in everyone, not least the children.) Still, after months of being forbidden to play outside alone, or ever to go anywhere in town, the young members of the Society were feeling more than a little oppressed.

“If we were
really
really prisoners, though,” said Kate, “I could have us out of here in a heartbeat.”

“Through the window?” Reynie asked, following her gaze. “Is your rope long enough?”

“Well, there’d be a bit of a drop at the bottom,” she admitted, and her friends exchanged doubtful glances. Kate might be a perfect judge of distance, but her definition of “a bit of a drop” was much different from their own.

“Seeing as how I might break if we tried that,” said Sticky, “how about this instead?” He gestured toward the door, which was locked from the outside with a dead bolt—but whose hinges were on the inside. “You could remove the hinges, right? With proper leverage we could pull that side open enough to squeeze through.”

“Wait a minute,” said Constance, aghast. “You mean the Executives could have broken out of here that easily? Just by taking the hinges off?”

She was referring to Jackson, Jillson, and Martina Crowe, three nasty individuals who had mistreated the children in the past (they were all former Executives of Mr. Curtain), and who had certainly not grown any more trustworthy since their capture. As part of the investigation surrounding Mr. Curtain, they had on a few occasions been brought to the house to be questioned. By themselves they presented no real threat—they were nothing like Mr. Curtain’s wicked Ten Men—but the authorities, ever cautious, had insisted that dead bolts be installed on two rooms, and that anything that might be used for escape be removed from them.

“Those guys aren’t like Kate, remember,” said Sticky. “They don’t carry tools around with them—they wouldn’t be allowed, you know, even if they wanted to. Besides, even if they got the hinges off, they’d never get past the guards.”

“Well, I hope they’ve stopped coming,” Constance said. “I’m sick of seeing their stupid mean faces.”

Kate snorted. “You
wouldn’t
see them if you stayed away like you’re supposed to. But you always manage to cross paths, don’t you? So you can stick your tongue out at them.”

“If they weren’t in the house,” Constance replied haughtily, “I wouldn’t be tempted to do that.”

“Anyway,” said Kate, rolling her eyes, “back to Sticky’s question, we could get through the door, but not very quietly—Rhonda would surely hear us.” She drummed her fingers thoughtfully on her bucket. “She didn’t say whether or not she was armed, did she? When she was explaining the exercise?”

“No, but she did say she was the only guard,” said Sticky. “Remember? Constance demanded to speak to a different guard—someone who would give us better options—and Rhonda sighed and said for the purposes of this exercise we should assume she’s the only one.”

“It was a perfectly reasonable demand,” Constance protested as the others tittered, remembering Rhonda’s look of exasperation.

“I don’t think she meant for the number of guards to matter,” said Reynie, still chuckling. “After all, we can’t
really
escape. I mean, it’s not as if we’re going to attack Rhonda, right? And we can’t even set foot outside the house without permission.”

Just then Constance stiffened and looked over her shoulder at the wall. “Uh-oh!” she hissed. “Here she comes!”

They all held their breath. When Constance made pronouncements of this kind, she was always right. Sure enough, a moment later footsteps sounded outside the door, followed by a knock. “Constance? Reynie? Everything all right in there? Have you decided yet?”

“We need more time!” Reynie called.

“Are you sure?” There was a note of concern in Rhonda’s muted voice. They heard the dead bolt turning. “Do you need a drink of water or anything?”

“We’re fine!” Reynie cried quickly. “Just a few more minutes, please!”

“Very well, but please hurry,” Rhonda replied, and she locked the door again without entering. “We have more lessons to get through, you know.”

“That was close,” Kate whispered when Rhonda’s footsteps had receded. “I thought about hiding behind the door, but my magnet would have given us away regardless.”

“Not to mention
me,
” Sticky pointed out. “I couldn’t even have stood up in time, much less hidden behind the door.”

“Sure you could have,” said Kate. “I was going to help you.”

Sticky stared at her, appalled. He had a vivid mental image of his arm being yanked out of its socket.

“And I was going to use the twine to jerk the magnet over to me,” Kate said casually (as if accomplishing all this in the space of a second was the sort of thing anyone might do), “but then, of course, the window would slam shut, which is not exactly something Rhonda would fail to notice. So it was pointless to try.”

“It’s all pointless, anyway,” Sticky said, thrusting his chin into his hands. “We’re never going to change Constance’s mind. I think we’ll just have to betray each other and get on with it.”

“I suppose you’re right,” said Kate. “Oh well, I don’t mind washing if you boys will dry…” She trailed off, having noticed Reynie staring at the window with his brow furrowed. “Reynie, what’s the matter?”

Constance’s brow was furrowed, too. But she was staring at Reynie. “He’s getting an idea!” she said, her face lighting up.

Reynie glanced at her absently and looked back toward the window. He was seldom caught off guard anymore by these flashes of perception. Neither were Sticky and Kate, who leaned eagerly toward him.

“Well?” said Kate. “What is it, Reynie? What do you have in mind?”

“Option C,” Reynie replied, and gave them a sly smile.

When Rhonda Kazembe knocked on the door some minutes later, she received no reply. From inside the room, however, came a suspicious sound of frenzied movement. She knocked again, and this time heard a hushed voice saying “Hurry up!” and (even more disconcerting) “Don’t look down!” These words were enough to make her scrabble at the dead bolt, especially since the voice had sounded like Kate’s. How could Kate even
be
in this room? As she unlocked the door Rhonda heard the distinct sound of a window slamming shut, and in rising alarm she burst into the room. Her mouth fell open. The room was empty.

Rhonda, a graceful young woman with coal-black skin and lustrous braided hair, was every bit as intelligent as she was lovely. She instantly saw what had happened. In the far wall gaped an exposed heating duct; the register had been removed. That would explain how Kate had gotten into the room (and no doubt Sticky, too). “Oh, but surely!” she cried, flying to the window. “Surely they didn’t!”

Raising the window with a bang, Rhonda held it open with one hand and leaned over the sill to look below. The children were nowhere to be seen. She looked up toward the eaves. Still nothing.

Much relieved yet equally puzzled, Rhonda frowned as she lowered the window. Had they fled through the heating duct, then? But those urgent words (“Don’t look down!”) and the slamming window had led her to believe…

Rhonda closed her eyes. The door. They had been behind the door.

Even before she turned, Rhonda knew what she would see. Sure enough, there they were, having already crept out of the room and now standing in the hallway. Reynie and Sticky were grinning and waving; Constance, like a pint-sized, pudgy princess, had raised her chin to demonstrate her smug superiority; and Kate was leaning in through the doorway, one hand on the doorknob, the other gripping a horseshoe magnet and a tangle of twine. With a wink and a half-apologetic smile, she pulled the door closed. The dead bolt turned with a click.