Chapter 9: Off the Clock

Teddy deleted the clip in front of her at nine in the morning, with Dot standing over him holding the ladle.

"Gone," Teddy said, and showed her the empty screen. "The cliff is gone. I only have the dinner and the assessors."

That should have been the end of it.

At sunset Dot climbed her stump and read Rule Six to the whole island, off a card Katja had not written.

"Rule Six. What happens on the north cliff stays on the north cliff."

Sixty-one people looked carefully at the sky.

A woman came forward and pressed a jar of blackberry jam into Katja's hands without a word and walked away.

The old man with the bad chest said, "Lovely weather."

Katja stood holding the jam and learned the limits of a rule.

She wrote another card before the lanterns went out.

NIGHT RULE. FROM LANTERNS OUT TO FIRST LIGHT, TALKING TO HARVEY DOES NOT COUNT. BY DAY, IT DOES. NO EXCEPTIONS.

She pinned it to her own tarp.

She waited ten minutes, and then she lifted the flap.

Harvey was sitting outside, against the rock with his knees up.

He took the card from her hand and read it twice in the lantern light.

Then he looked up very slowly.

"That's a lot of words for you," he said.

She did not say anything.

"Does the card apply right now? It's dark. There's nobody around, and I'd like to be sure what I'm allowed to say."

"It applies," Katja said. "Everything off the clock. Until the light."

His whole face changed.

She sat down next to him, close enough that their shoulders touched, and they did not say anything for a while.

Then he began to ask her questions, one at a time, in a quiet voice, and she answered them.

It was easy and it was strange.

She had spent days handing out cards, and now there was no limit, and she found she had a great deal to say.

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