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Trammeled, I did as told. The jamminess of that first bite surprised me as did my pleasure at crunching down on the seeds, the honeyed flavor saturating my tongue, so heady and sweet I was reeling from the taste.

I was intoxicated. I wanted to gorge myself.

I wanted to eat until I was full and aching with figs, until I could do nothing but wait for the wasps and the other small creatures of the garden to make me something new.

When I was done with that first fig, someone placed a second into the cup of my palms, and I ate that one with as much gusto as the last, lapping at the pith like an animal.

I’d have done the same to a third except none came into my possession.

Lovelorn, I gazed miserably up for more, every pretense of dignity forsworn for my gluttony.

I saw Professor Fleur gazing fondly down at me, with the expression of a doting shepherd looking upon her flock.

Eat, her expression seemed to urge. Eat and grow sleek, grow soft.

In my amber-tinged stupor, I barely noticed Rowan raising a hand.

“Professor Fleur?” he said. When she did not answer the first time, Rowan followed it with a train of “Professor Fleur? Oh, Professor Fleur. Professor Fleur!” in different intonations and with varying degrees of nasality until at last the beleaguered woman turned and snapped, exactly like a reptile, “What do you want?”

“You didn’t answer Alessa,” he said with complete innocence. “Are we the wasps or the figs?”

Before the woman could answer, Rowan added with a daggered smile, a softening in his voice that did nothing to corrode the cold lapis of his eyes, one corner of his mouth crooked into something dangerous, something like an invitation, a gauntlet thrown at her feet.

“Or am I thinking too small? Should I be asking if we’re the non-union farmhands who have no choice but to work for minimum pay, or the fat-cat consumers gleefully piling prosciutto and figs in their mouths as they get ready for that day’s orgy?”

“Mr. Rowan Gravesend, I could look forever and I would not find a subtle bone in your body, would I?”

“You’re making this too easy, Professor Fleur. You can’t tell me you weren’t asking me to make the joke.”

The fig-induced delirium was beginning to ebb and the void it created soon became tenanted by a migrainous sensation.

It wasn’t quite the same as the real thing.

My vision fractured into zigzag lines, half of it becoming nauseatingly kaleidoscopic, the other like an inverted film negative.

But where pain should have followed, there was instead a pressure in my belly, like I’d swallowed gallons of concrete and it was beginning to set.

When I licked my teeth, I tasted salt, rust, rot.

Rowan, digging through his pockets, made a small ah of pleasure as he found what he was looking for: a beat-up, jaundiced carton of cigarettes.

Without so much as a polite check-in to see if everyone else was all right with his habits, he lit up a cigarette, eliciting a tiny yowl of dismay from Fleur, the moment blessedly ruined.

An imperative, shrilled out without interest in decorum: “You will put that out.”

“You know, it’s hard to have sex when you have to avoid any skin contact.

Like, unbelievably hard. No pun intended.

” He jogged the elbow of the freckled, knob-jointed, red-headed boy to his immediate left.

Poor Eoan. He probably didn’t expect to be forced to continue associating with Rowan. “But there are ways. Johanna—”

Oh. That was how the two knew each other. Biblically, as they say.

At that point, I was coherent enough to muscle past the discomfort of those ocular distortions.

The edges of things still bled a liquid white flame and I continued to have to squint in order to focus, but that seemed meager enough a price to pay for the opportunity that presented.

With Professor Fleur distracted and the rest of the class mesmerized by Rowan’s antics, no one was watching me.

I staggered onto my feet. Sure enough, she ignored me, taking a few steps instead in Rowan’s direction.

“—is quite acrobatic, so that helps. You need someone who can come kissing-close to your short and curlies, and preferably, doesn’t mind actually kissing the short and curlies—”

“You can stop now,” said Eoan tremblingly. His watercolor eyes flicked in my direction. I shook my head, index finger raised to my lips. He dropped his gaze. “We don’t need to hear all of it.”

“Look, Professor Fleur asked.”

“She most certainly did not.”

“You will put that cigarette out,” repeated Professor Fleur, her voice wobbling with each effortful word, arrowing toward him.

Other students were beginning to notice my meanderings to the garden’s very edge, their expressions that of cats surveilling an interloper in their territory.

Lucky for me, they were still in the process of evaluating if my movements could be construed as misdeeds and whether, in an environment fickle as this, there was more value in tattling or ransoming my secret.

We weren’t yet elbows-deep in each other’s guts yet, you understand.

Outside of a few earnest killings, most of us were still hopeful for absolution, for atonement.

Murder tended to complicate receiving either.

“You will take off your gloves. You will put your hands to the grass, and you will tell my garden you are sorry.”

Rowan sucked on his cigarette until he rendered it to a stub. When he spoke, it was through a gargle of smoke. “You don’t know. You really don’t know.”

“I will not say it again: put out the cigarette.”

“ N, ” said Rowan. “ O. ”

As casually as I could, I strolled in the direction of the roses.

The other students were melting from where Fleur and Rowan were having their confrontation.

Though the murdering in the school was still unenthused, the atmosphere in Hellebore was such that everyone understood an increasing body count was inevitable.

Sullivan’s actions the first day had been illustrative.

Absolutely fuck-all happened after he murdered the boy, whoever the hell he was.

Not a single member of the faculty remarked on what he’d done.

The masked janitors—the servitors—simply mopped away the slaughter and that was the extent of it.

No investigation, no ostracization. Nothing.

So as Rowan continued mouthing off, our classmates provided him an increasingly wider berth.

“Put your hands on the grass.”

Rowan considered this. His eyes trailed over the garden until they reached mine, at which point he winked, a stage magician about to perform his favorite trick.

“You know what? Since you asked so nicely, I’ll do as you say,” he declared, cigarette hanging from the pout of his thin mouth. “I’ll put my hands on the grass.”

He shucked his gloves, making a big show of liberating his fingers, wiggling them at first as if to say, Look, I have nothing hidden. Theatrics concluded, his face shuttered, Rowan then set both very ordinary-seeming palms on the grass outside the borders of his picnic blanket.

And I felt it. I felt the innumerable microbial bodies, the vascular systems of the greenery, the tiny, half-awake saplings still in the soil, the beetles, the worms, the nameless worlds in the dark beneath the earth begin to die.

Softly, at first. Stutteringly, then in progressively more violent fits: death rolling across the patch of land.

The other students shrieked, clutching at one another, trying to avoid the brown rippling outward, the grass crisping, turning black, disintegrating.

“You’re a deathworker,” said Professor Fleur, withdrawing a step.

“Mmm.”

“How is he doing that?” A girl’s voice from somewhere behind me.

“Law of Contagion, I’m told,” said Rowan with far too much cheer. “If two things have been in contact with each other, a link forms. Saints make shit holy and, well, deathworkers make things dead.”

Fleur, her face entirely blanched of color, said, “Stop it.”

“I thought you told me to touch grass and apologize to the garden.” He bent his face to the dying green. “Sorry, garden.”

“Yes,” said Professor Fleur, her teeth gritted. “But now I need you to stop.”

“But I’m enjoying myself.”

I didn’t hear what Professor Fleur said in return because I saw my opportunity, and had slipped away as the fig trees were shriveling, and the students were beginning to realize those thin barriers of fabric would do little to shield them from Rowan’s power.

It was a gamble, but what wasn’t? I was still calculating my options when I saw Rowan look up to me and mouth the word run.

So I did.