Free Life Eternal by Yvonne Woon Page B

and Prediction
    Child Psychology
    French
    Advanced Latin
     
    I scanned the class rank list until I found my name. Winters, Renée. Number one. I stared at it, still incredulous. Out of curiosity, I looked for LaGuerre, Clementine. She was number two.

 
    I T WAS A BRISK S EPTEMBER MORNING, THE SUN spilling into the halls as I climbed up the three flights of stairs that led to History of Monitors, my first class of the semester. The room had beamed ceilings and pigeons roosting on window ledges, their chests puffing as they slept. I envied them. My weekend had been sleepless, and with no one to talk to, the days had become languid and distorted, like a dream. I took a seat, watching Mr. Pollet fiddle with a projector in the back of the room, his underarms damp with sweat.
    There were only nine others around the table, including Anya, Clementine, Brett, and a few boys I didn’t know. When the bell rang, Mr. Pollet straightened himself out and took his place at the blackboard.
    “Montreal is a city underground,” he said, dabbing his pink forehead. “It’s the only city built by Monitors, for Monitors, and is therefore the only Monitor safehold in existence, the only Monitor fortress.”
    He crossed the room to switch off the lights, and turned on the projector. “Monitors first emigrated here from France, with the dream of designing a place where they could study the Undead in an enclosed environment. Thus, they chose to settle on an island, where they built a network of tunnels underneath the city to keep them safe from the Undead, who cannot go underground.”
    He pressed a button on his remote control, and the first slide appeared. It was a photograph of a normal city street. On the sidewalk was a small hut that looked like an outhouse.
    “An entrance to the tunnel network,” he said, and clicked to the next slide, a photograph of the stairs inside leading down under the earth.
    He clicked ahead. A tunnel entrance beneath a building. A staircase in the back of an alley. A wooden hut on the side of Mont Royal, which marked the center of the city.
    “And conveniently, they all connect here.”
    He showed a black-and-white illustration of a sprawling gothic building with castle spires and pointed alcoves. “This is the Royal Victoria Hospital, just after it was built by the Monitors. Of course, at the time it was called Hôpital Saint-Laurent.”
    Something within me began to throb with anticipation, as if years of effort had led up to this moment. I was suddenly overwhelmed with the need to know what rested behind its walls. Not the patients or the doctors and nurses, but something else.…
    “In the early days, when Monitors ran the city, Royal Victoria was one of the first hospitals in North America to treat Undead children. Later, during the 1890s, the hospital was taken over by the Plebeians, but this sketch was drawn during the time of the Monitors.”
    I blinked and the image was in color.
    “Tunnels from all across the city led directly to the hospital supply room. That way, if there was ever an Undead attack, the Monitors could easily access supplies like gauze, ointments, and scissors in the hospital.”
    I blinked again, and the flags on the building’s spires seemed to move in the wind.
    “After the Monitoring community began to die out, we slowly lost control over Montreal.”
    I blinked once more, and the classroom around me seemed to collapse into itself.
    “Today, Montreal is no longer run by Monitors, nor is the hospital. In fact, most people here are not even aware that we or the Undead exist.”
    That was the last thing I heard before everything went black.
    The next thing I knew, I was in the image, standing in the grass on the lawn in front of the hospital. It was a crisp autumn day, a slight breeze making the flags on the spires billow. I was holding a bouquet of flowers.
    Four ambulances were parked in the driveway outside the hospital as I walked toward the entrance and through the double