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So why this? Why this?

“Well, you’re alive.”

When I turn, Fred is standing there. Her hair is frizzed and she has smears of dirt over her face. I crane for Silas.

“I sent him back to the rooms,” Fred said. She sounds serious and drained. All the while she speaks to me, she is staring straight at the dean.

Leo goes to comfort her, but stops himself. Fred tenses at the approach of his hand. “Are you alright?” Leo asks.

“I’m alive,” she says quickly.

Leo grimaces. “That’s not what I asked.”

“I’m alive,” she says again. “Despite what I’ve signed up for.”

Fred falls silent after that, even when the dean tells us to move out and rest, even as we pass him on our exit.

All of us are furious. All of us are burning with it.

This is only the first trial.

I don’t know what to do.

12

LESSON TWELVE

We are given a day's respite. Or at least, this is what we are told. The dean gently reminds us to wear our uniforms for the next trial, and reiterates it will start two days from now. We’re too exhausted and shell shocked to question any of this. I move in a haze, blood in my ears and my head. Everything is pounding. Everything feels unreal. Teras behind the wards. All the University spouts is a lie.

Every prospective student flees to their rooms, despite there being no order to remain there. By all accounts, we should have had free reign of the grounds—to an extent. The entire front half of the University seems unoccupied, save for us. I assume this means students in the later years are further into the campus, but Blood Hunters are the only indication of graduates here.

When we step into the tower, Silas is standing there with rum. I don’t know where he’s gotten it from and in all honesty, I couldn’t care less. That glass is the best thing I have ever seen.

“You are a God-send,” I murmur.

“You might not say that when you see I’ve maybe had more than my fair share,” he says, raising the bottle high. I see the line of it is greatly reduced, but I can’t fault him. He pours me a glass and presses it into my hand.

“Are you alright?” I ask.

His brow creases. “Are you?”

Neither one of us speak, because we both know the answer. So, I raise my glass to him and we each put back a shot, a toast to being alive, a toast to feeling stripped of any good emotion, a toast to getting drunk.

I welcome the alcohol’s burning in a fog and sit by the window. Very soon, the sunset comes, and then the rain. A fire is going. Everyone sits together in a comfortable, necessary silence.

It might have been cosy if this obliterating betrayal wasn’t sitting overhead like a fat guillotine. I throw another whole drink down my throat without really tasting it. The burn is good. I light a cigarette and go to pour another.

All of us drink and recover some sense of feeling human. I smoke, and inhale, and keep it in my lungs until I feel them burning. The act centres me, makes me feel tethered to my body even when my mind starts to slip. The shock remains, though it's softer. It’s not sitting in my flesh so much as is the awareness of being lied to. There is horror at the institution, and at my family. At what Thaddeus had kept from me. Fear at what I have signed myself up for.

Then we all look at one another. Speaking will unleash all of our shared anger. Whoever speaks first will be lancing an ugly boil, and so another minute yawns wide between us as we wait for the first of us to speak.

It is Victoria. She slips her hand from Bellamy’s back and brings it into her lap. Quietly but with determination, she says, “Can we leave?”

No one says anything. I had expected more questions, more general outrage at what we had gone through. But the mood is morose.

I take another drag of my cigarette and sigh. “With those Blood Hunters? No.”

Victoria makes a noise of protest and I stop her.