“The holes!” said someone. “They make a hole in your head like the Tartars! I bet!”
“Shut up! What else did the nurse say?” someone else put in. By this time, a dozen or more children were clustered around her table, their daemons as desperate to know as they were, all wide-eyed and tense.
The blond girl went on: “Tony wanted to know what they was gonna do with Ratter, see. And the nurse says, Well, she's going to sleep too, just like when you do. And Tony says, You're gonna kill her, en't yer? 1 know you are. We all know that's what happens. And the nurse says, No, of course not. It's just a little operation. Just a little cut. It won't even hurt, but we put you to sleep to make sure.
All the room had gone quiet now. The nurse who'd been supervising had left for a moment, and the hatch to the kitchen was shut so no one could hear from there.
“What sort of cut?” said a boy, his voice quiet and frightened. “Did she say what sort of cut?”
“She just said, It's something to make you more grown up. She said everyone had to have it, that's why grownups' daemons don't change like ours do. So they have a cut to make them one shape forever, and that's how you get grown up.”
“But—”
“Does that mean—”
“What, all grownups've had this cut?”
“What about—”
Suddenly all the voices stopped as if they themselves had been cut, and all eyes turned to the door. Sister Clara stood there, bland and mild and matter-of-fact, and beside her was a man in a white coat whom Lyra hadn't seen before.
“Bridget McGinn,” he said.
The blond girl stood up trembling. Her squirrel daemon clutched her breast.
“Yes, sir?” she said, her voice hardly audible.
“Finish your drink and come with Sister Clara,” he said. “The rest of you run along and go to your classes.”
Obediently the children stacked their mugs on the stainless-steel trolley before leaving in silence. No one looked at Bridget McGinn except Lyra, and she saw the blond girl's face vivid with fear.
The rest of that morning was spent in exercise. There was a small gymnasium at the station, because it was hard to exercise outside during the long polar night, and each group of children took turns to play in there, under the supervision of a nurse. They had to form teams and throw balls around, and at first Lyra, who had never in her life played at anything like this, was at a loss what to do. But she was quick and athletic, and a natural leader, and soon found herself enjoying it. The shouts of the children, the shrieks and hoots of the daemons, filled the little gymnasium and soon banished fearful thoughts; which of course was exactly what the exercise was intended to do.
At lunchtime, when the children were lining up once again in the canteen, Lyra felt Pantalaimon give a chirrup of recognition, and turned to find Billy Costa standing just behind her.
“Roger told me you was here,” he muttered.
“Your brother's coming, and John Faa and a whole band of gyptians,” she said. “They're going to take you home.”
He nearly cried aloud with joy, but subdued the cry into a cough.
“And you got to call me Lizzie,” Lyra said, “never Lyra. And you got to tell me everything you know, right.”
They sat together, with Roger close by. It was easier to do this at lunchtime, when children spent more time coming and going between the tables and the counter, where bland-looking adults served equally bland food. Under the clatter of knives and forks and plates Billy and Roger both told her as much as they knew. Billy had heard from a nurse that children who had had the operation were often taken to hostels further south, which might explain how Tony Makarios came to be wandering in the wild. But Roger had something even more interesting to tell her.
“I found a hiding place,” he said.
“What? Where?”
“See that picture…” He meant the big photogram of the tropical beach. “If you look in the top right corner, you see that ceiling panel?”
The ceiling consisted of large rectangular panels set in a framework of metal strips, and the corner of the panel above the picture had lifted slightly.
“I saw that,” Roger said, “and I thought the others might be like it, so I lifted 'em, and they're all loose. They just lift up. Me and this boy tried it one night in our dormitory, before they took him away. There's a space up there and you can crawl inside….”
“How far can you crawl in the ceiling?”
“I dunno. We just went in a little way. We reckoned when it was time we could hide up there, but they'd probably find us.”
Lyra saw it not as a hiding place but as a highway. It was the best thing she'd heard since she'd arrived. But before they could talk any more, a doctor banged on a table with a spoon and began to speak.
“Listen, children,” he said. “Listen carefully. Every so often we have to have a fire drill. It's very important that we all get dressed properly and make our way outside without any panic. So we're going to have a practice fire drill this afternoon. When the bell, rings you must stop whatever you're doing and do what the nearest grownup says. Remember where they take you. That's the place you must go to if there's a real fire.”
Well, thought Lyra, there's an idea.
During the first part of the afternoon, Lyra and four other girls were tested for Dust. The doctors didn't say that was what they were doing, but it was easy to guess. They were taken one by one to a laboratory, and of course this made them all very frightened; how cruel it would be, Lyra thought, if she perished without striking a blow at them! But they were not going to do that operation just yet, it seemed.