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Rowan looked at me as Adam’s laughter faded down the hallway. “Really?”

I shrugged. “I don’t think he has any cause to lie about the Librarian.”

“I meant the other thing,” said Rowan. “ Feeding me to the faculty?”

His words would have elicited guilt in most people.

All it got from me was exasperation. Rowan’s kicked-puppy expression offended me.

It was sincere. He was hurt. Deeply, truly, monstrously hurt; it said something about the magnitude of that pain that it cracked through his habitual smirk and something about who I was as a person that all his agony solicited was a faint worry it’d slow us down.

With the Librarian up and moving, we couldn’t afford dramatics.

“I’m sorry,” I said.

“I can tell you don’t mean it.”

“No, I don’t,” I said, eyes going to the door. “But can I grovel later? We should be trying to get out of here.”

Rowan hesitated, but self-preservation won over self-pity. He straightened his smile and touched two fingers to the edge of his right brow bone, where a pale white scar feathered the skin. I had to wonder if he’d done it to himself on purpose.

“What’s your plan then?”

I ran my tongue over chapped lips. The thought of the Librarian undulating through the stacks unnerved me in a way I wasn’t prepared to address; not then, not in the near future, not ever.

I was fully prepared to shelve every memory of the creature away in the repressed folder, damn the consequences of having more unresolved trauma.

As a result, out didn’t feel like an option.

I scanned the room hopefully and, to my relief, spotted a narrow passage with stairs leading into a grayish murk.

“Up?” said Rowan, following my gaze.

We heard a thunk outside the room as though an enormous weight was setting itself onto the mosaiced floor, the scratching of nails against wood, fingers tapping tunelessly along the walls; it could have been anything, a trick of the space, our exhausted imaginations.

Nonetheless, Rowan and I both exchanged looks and without saying much more, slunk single-file up the steps, our breath held tight in case something was listening to see if we were there.

One set of stairs became a dozen more, a spiraling assortment: some were wood and others wrought iron, the former sleekly oiled and the latter so rusted, ochre flaked away at the touch of our hands.

“I didn’t know the library even went this high,” whispered Rowan.

I glanced over the rails. The world below flickered, fractalizing: it lost depth, gained it the next breath, seemingly adjusting to whatever (I realized as nausea welled) I thought it should be.

“It doesn’t,” I said. “Don’t look down.”

Eventually, there were no more stairs to climb, ending at a single windowless corridor that led us to a cul-de-sac.

The wall before us showed a canopied autumnal glade, the shadowed ground soaked in the gory light of a dying day.

Through the trees, I could see antlered shapes that seemed to shift position each time my attention drifted, advancing closer until I could almost see leering bone. I ignored them as best as I could.

“I did not do all that cardio for a dead end,” sighed Rowan, both hands on his thighs as he bent over, dry-heaving from exertion.

“That’s because this probably isn’t a dead end.” I trailed my fingers over the carved stone, feeling my way through the bas-reliefs, the bronze and blood foliage. Whoever had made them had taken care to engrave the veins of the leaves too. “This thing’s way too obvious. It can’t just be a wall—”

“Well, Occam’s razor—”

One of the branches let out a click as I pulled on it.

“Point made. Carry on,” said Rowan, straightening.

Stone warped and wood shuddered as unseen mechanisms woke behind the wall. Dust fountained through the stale, varnish-smelling air and a door appeared where there was none before, swinging inward, allowing access to a flight of stone stairs.

“More stairs?” groaned Rowan, looking behind us. “Maybe I’ll just go and let the Librarian eat—”

Wordless, I grabbed a fistful of his shirt and dragged him along.

We went up the stairs, the narrowest we’d had to navigate yet.

There was no light source, just whatever seeped through the door we’d entered and that didn’t last, thinning to near nonexistence by the time we reached the final step, thready and gray and unnatural.

“Wouldn’t it be funny if we walk straight into the Librarian’s mouth?” said Rowan as we reached the top.

I ignored him. The room we eventually found ourselves in was barely larger than a broom closet.

Its walls and floor were scratched with so many tally marks, they gave the room a lenticular effect, undulating whenever I moved.

I wondered who’d carved them onto the bare stone and how long they had spent time here, trapped.

I could have counted the tally marks, I suppose, but that seemed churlish somehow, cruel even.

There was something peculiarly vulnerable about the gloomy confined space; it had the air of a forgotten child, one hidden away out of shame.

A single slit window let in almost no light from the world outside and standing there, breathing that dust, I felt a jolt of recognition—like I’d put weight on a bone I had not realized I’d broken.

Somehow, I knew this place. I had no idea how or why, but I knew it the way a child knows to be scared of the dark.

In the center of this barren claustrophobic space was a familiar pulpit: the headmistress had given her speech during orientation from here, I was sure of that.

I recognized the belled roof and its excess of gothic ornamentation.

At the time, I’d sat too far away to see what else it was decorated with and, of course, there were wasps, split-open figs, the carnivorous deer that seemed common to Hellebore’s aesthetic but instead of the knights, there were slender, lissome youth of varying genders, like what you might see in the paintings of the old masters.

They laid prone under the insects and stags, eyes closed, faces calm: a pyre of bodies, an offering.

“Pretty on the nose,” I said.

“Well, to be on the nose, they’d need to be eating…”

I ignored Rowan. The carved rosewood of the pulpit held a sheen of fresh lacquer, its panels scratched in places by claw marks. As I strode closer, I realized something unexpected: inside the pulpit, curled up fetally, was a person.

“Eoan?”

The Scottish boy raised a bleak frightened stare.

“No more,” he whimpered. “I know you’re hungry but no more, not right now.”

“Eoan, what are you talking about?” I asked, gingerly approaching him.

His eyes were a perfect smoldering white, smoke wisping from under their lids.

I touched a hand to his shoulder only to flinch away: he was hot, scalding hot.

Steam boiled from his collar and his rolled-up sleeves, his miserable mouth: he smelled of blood and a tang of something bitter.

“Something’s wrong with him,” Rowan said urgently, shifting his weight from one foot to another. “You might want to give him some space.”

“No more,” moaned Eoan again, shuddering. The front of his shirt was very red and so damp it plastered over the ladders of his ribs.

“You’re okay,” I said, wishing I had some way to protect my hands. Luckily, Rowan had his gloves. With care, he lowered himself to a knee, gathering Eoan from the floor.

“What’s going on here, Eoan?” said Rowan.

Eoan laughed shakily, eyelids trembling.

“I had to—I had to make sure she—”

“It. They tell us to use it. ”

“—the Librarian’s not a thing, is she? She’s a person,” moaned Eoan as Rowan carefully draped an arm under the former’s own, holding him upright. Despite the boy’s delicacy, Rowan still staggered a little from his weight. “Should treat her like this one.”

“What happened, Eoan?” I asked, registering too late he’d mentioned the Librarian.

“Fed her. Fed her until she was stuffed. Only thing I could do. If she’s full, she won’t eat us.

Maybe that way, she wouldn’t—” Whatever else he might have said went lost in the paroxysm that followed, Eoan seizing first at the fingers, the wrists, the arms, back arching until he lifted out of the cradle of Rowan’s embrace, toppling onto the ground again, convulsing.

“What the hell is going on?” I backed up as did Rowan. “Did you let him touch your skin?”

“No, no. Fuck, no. I was careful. ”

Whimpering in agony, Eoan began to creep toward a machine embedded in the pulpit.

The contraption was a bizarre monstrosity of glass tubes and metal filaments, unidentifiable blocks of metal through which tendrilled a million small wires, weaving it to the inside wall of the pulpit.

A funnel constructed of matte black plastic protruded from the stand where a scripture might have rested.

Eoan, groaning, crawled up to his knees and bent his head over the funnel.

Then he started to retch.

What came out wasn’t vomit but slick white meat, meat that writhed and wailed and laughed sometimes like a child as it was fed down into whatever pipes circulated through the pulpit because there had to be some; where else would it all be going?

Thank fuck I couldn’t see its face, couldn’t tell if there was a mouth or eyes.

In my life, I’d witnessed some truly profane things—the consumption of Sullivan Rivers being a prime example—but this still was a firm contender for the cake.

Rowan went pale. “The fuuuuck.”

“The goddamned steak,” I said suddenly as Eoan continued to groan; he was practically bellowing, the sounds crawling out of him scarcely human, more tortured bull than anything identifiably person-like.

“What are you talking about?”

I shook my head as Eoan lolled bonelessly back onto the floor, drenched by a spray of pale tendrils, like intestinal worms or maybe veins leached of all color. “That’s why their food was separate from ours in the dining hall. The faculty’s.”

“I thought it was because it was fancy shit.”

“If only.”

Gently, Eoan removed a shimmery blue pocket square from his coat—the color was surreally bright, lurid even like a piece of the open sky cut out and placed in his palm—and cupped it over his mouth, gagging as he began to pull at those colorless threads. Clumps loosened and came free.

“You kept the school fed,” I said with a brittle tenderness even as Eoan wadded up the bloodied pocket square, storing it away. “The faculty, the Librarian. You kept them from digging into us.”

“They told me it’d only be a year,” the Scottish boy panted, lacquered with sweat, his eyes no longer white but their soft pastel green again. “Serve for a year and they’d close up the portal inside me. But they lied, I suppose. I don’t know why I thought they wouldn’t.”

He broke into a sobbing humorless laugh, cackling until there wasn’t any air left in him and he was wheezing like an animal with its throat cut.

“I should have known better,” said Eoan when he had recovered enough. “We all should have.”

“You knew?” Rowan was hollow-eyed. His hands crooked into claws, face blazing with a fatal grief. “You fucking knew. You knew this was waiting for us. How could you let this happen? Why didn’t you tell us?”

“ I didn’t know anything about this,” whimpered Eoan, crawling backward from us or at least trying, his hands skidding frictionless through the gore he’d left on the base of pulpit.

“They didn’t tell me. They said to feed them.

That’s all. I didn’t know. I thought, it’s not actually human flesh, is it?

Whatever comes out of the portal. I’m sorry, I’m so sorry.

If I’d known I’d have said something. I swear it.

It’s my fault for not asking the right questions, but I did not know this was how it’d end.

I—I only did this to make the pain stop. Please, you have to believe me.”

“Give me one good reason,” Rowan said.

“You’d have done the same too.”

All the color fled Rowan’s face: he was white as chalk, as clean dead bone.

He withdrew a single step, his face closing like a door, his expression banging shut.

It was so hard to ascribe any malice to Eoan, with his soft eyes and softer brogue, the congenital melancholy that seemed to permeate his elfin features, but not for the first time I wondered if it was an act.

I scanned his face as he spoke but from where I stood, it remained sinless as marble.

“None of us are good people. We aren’t. We deserve this. ”

“Just because you’re a sell-out,” hissed Rowan.

“I am. Never said I wasn’t. But I fed her, the Librarian,” said Eoan after a moment, curling into a ball. “So she won’t hurt anybody. I did it for all of us. That has to mean something, doesn’t it? Don’t hate me. I didn’t want to hurt anyone.”

“Too little too late on all those fronts, don’t you think?” I asked. “We’re still fucked.”

“But we’re not dead. Not yet.”

I couldn’t help the sneer from crawling onto my face.

“Ain’t that a pity.”