IT HAD TURNED INTO A CRISP, PERFECT AUTUMN night. The sky was clear, and I could smell leaves in the air, and just a little bit of burning wood. We couldn’t walk through the square, obviously; we’d be seen by someone looking out one of the windows. So we had to run over a street and come around the long way, using off-school property. We’d approach Aldshot from behind. It would take about ten minutes to go this way, and we were now definitely breaking the rules, but we’d started this thing, and we had to continue it.

Once we were clear of the building and around the corner, we slowed to a fast walk.

“Rory,” Jazza said breathlessly. “Is this stupid, what we’re doing? Not because of the school thing, but because of, you know, the Ripper thing. What with him being out right now, killing people.”

“We’re fine,” I said, blowing on my hands as we hurried along. “We are literally walking around a corner. Together.”

“This is stupid, though. Isn’t it?”

“What you need to remember is that you are doing the interesting thing, and Charlotte is not. And if we get caught, I will claim I made you go. At gunpoint. I am American. People will assume I’m armed.”

We walked faster, speeding down one of the small residential streets that backed up to Wexford. Inside many of the flats, I could see lights and a few parties of people drinking. You could see the reflection of televisions in so many of those windows—the now-familiar bright red and white logo of BBC News shining out into the dark. We made a sharp left at the shuttered shoe repair shop and ran the last block to approach Aldshot from behind.

Aldshot was the twin of our building, except that it had the word MEN carved in bas-relief over the front door. Even without that hint, you could tell that this building was full of guys. Hawthorne had distinctive and pretty curtains in many windows, the occasional plant on the windowsill, or some other decorative item. Even the light was different, because of all the lamps girls brought in, with paper shades diffusing and coloring the light. In Aldshot, no one changed the curtains, so they were all the standard grayish green. The decorations on their windowsills tended to be stacks of bottles or cans or—in fancy cases—books. The lights were all the standard issue. Weird how two identical buildings could be so different.