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A pall of tension hung over that following morning, suffocating any attempt at conversation.

The seven of us separated quietly. I thought about hunting Ford down to demand a more complete picture of what was to come but that felt too much like submitting to one of those tests where they diagnose your potential for developing any variety of deadly ailments.

Knowing what hereditary cancers were advancing in your direction always seems like a strategic move until you realize there’s no actual stopping them.

So instead, I found an alcove in which to hide, somewhere that felt halfway defensible, removed from the main corridor.

The light that wept through the stained-glass windows of the library was blistering, molten.

I was exhausted. Enough to pour myself into a piebald armchair the color of tanning vellum and stay there.

I think I dozed. I must have. But between the temperature and the grime crusting my skin, the knowledge the Librarian was somewhere in here with us, I did not sleep.

But I dreamt nonetheless of its faces, its laughter—or hallucinated such things, at least. I’m not sure if it mattered.

“You look like shit,” came Minji’s voice at some point, waking me from those half dreams.

As the story went, Hellebore found Minji in the basement of a concert hall, the building staved in, beaten into rubble by a series of freak automobile accidents: like a skull, masonry could only take so much trauma before it broke.

Depending on who you asked, the school wasn’t even looking for Minji in the beginning.

They were there investigating the crashes, and what might have possessed stockbrokers and suburban ajummas to run their vehicles into the concert hall in a mass suicide event of unparalleled scale.

The answer was Minji, of course. In each of the drivers, they found an overgrowth of papillae in the meningeal stratum, foreign cells livid with what looked like villi.

The doctors said it was symptomatic of parasitic worms, but our experts in Hellebore knew better.

It was Minji’s hair.

No one knew why her hair did what it allegedly did or how those people came to be infested by it.

What was known was that it took Hellebore eighteen days to extract Minji from under the floorboards, and another week to pry open the teratoma in which she was encysted.

When she woke, she’d asked the medical team about her twin, except there was no trace of anyone else, nothing save for a swathe of corpses she admitted to having no knowledge of making.

“I feel like shit,” I said, blinking, trying and failing to augur the hour from the slant of the light. “Could be worse, though.”

“How so?”

“I could have been the one to encourage Adam to cut Eoan in half.”

“We’re alive, aren’t we?”

We. I recalled then that she had said we several times last night, had not thought about it then but was certainly thinking about in that moment: we, not as in us survivors, but as a pronoun for herself.

I was sure of that. Minji cocked a look at me before she stared out at the wall behind us, its surface papered with a reflective teal material.

Deep in the verdancy, gold-eyed foxes prowled through shrubbery and undergrowth, hunting the rabbits cowering in the stylized foliage.

Unable to help myself, I asked, “Has Ford—”

“Has Ford what?” said Minji.

I swallowed. “Has he tried anything?”

She considered this. Her smock was blotched with blooms of rust and flaking gore, but it only somehow added to the tenderness of her appearance.

Bathed in the light, with her wide face and ascetic features, she was a lithograph of a fairy-tale princess: a child bride awaiting her hero, simultaneously very young and terribly ancient.

Her eyes however belonged to something older and hungrier than royalty itself. When she spoke, it was without emotion.

“Does it matter if he has?”

Minji cocked her head in one direction and then the next, an animalic gesture exacerbated by her unblinking regard.

“Honestly? Yes,” I said, tapping at my cracked lower lip.

None of us had thought to bring lip balm to graduation, which feels like a collective oversight when I think about it.

Perhaps there is a divergent timeline where our success was recorded for posterity and our pictures were distributed to all the major newspapers.

Wouldn’t it have been terrible if we were inducted into adulthood looking less than groomed?

“Yes, it has always mattered. Even if you don’t seem to think it matters. ”

“It doesn’t. Men have been terrible for as long as your kind have existed,” said Minji with clinical plainness, the your in that sentence given no special inflection, spoken in the same deadened tone as the rest of her statement.

“ My kind?” I repeated. There it was.

Minji shrugged. There wasn’t any challenge in her expression, nothing that suggested she thought this revelation sig nificant or even an epiphany at all. As the line goes, for her, this was a normal Wednesday. “Mine too, I suppose. Most of this body is still human. The brain is human. Mostly.”

“You—I didn’t—you didn’t tell me,” I said haltingly, looking Minji over from temples to toes, unable to demarcate what differentiated her from human.

Questions frothed. I had a hundred things to ask, a thousand memories to dissect and interrogate, but my tongue sat leaden in my mouth, heavy as a gravestone.

“You didn’t ask.”

“Fair,” I said again. It wasn’t a cop-out if it was true.

Minji sank into the armchair with me, her leg sliding over my thigh, an entirely sororal gesture, as was the arm curling around my shoulders.

She rested her head in the hollow of my clavicle and despite recent epiphanies, I closed my eyes, glutting myself on the sensation, on the somehow clean salt smell of her.

You’d think a lifetime alone would inoculate you against touch starvation but then you’re proven wrong.

“Hivemind or weird alien creature?”

“I don’t want to talk about it,” she said, finality in her tone.

Because I did understand boundaries, I dropped it.

We sat there for an indeterminate period, time macerating, ablating cohesion, softening enough that past and present and future seemed to accordion together, and it felt both like the instant when it became clear we were becoming friends and like we were standing at the other’s funerals, eulogizing the dead like we were just girls, miraculous in our mundanity. The air rippled with heat.

“She was dying.”

I didn’t have to ask who.

“We asked. She said yes.” Minji’s voice was low and confessional. “They’d been experimenting on her.”

“Who?”

“She didn’t say. We wish we remembered but we don’t.

” She nestled closer. Unburdened of her—its?

Their?—need for subterfuge, her voice developed and discarded accents seemingly at random, rising and descending in octave, increasing in tempo, slowing, the changes occurring sometimes mid-sentence, resulting in an utterly schizophrenic listening experience.

I might have been unnerved if the last twenty hours hadn’t already been so bizarre.

“That is a lie. We remember some things. We remember begging. We remember the laboratory. We remember being unwound, measured.”

As she said this, Minji palmed her stomach.

“And someone talking about profit margins and patents, of course.” Laughter squeezed out of her, ebbing in a moment.

I stroked my hand over the shining expanse of her black hair. Easy enough to pretend we were sisters, that she was just here to confide a nightmare, and I wasn’t frightened by the fact I couldn’t parse which part of her was human and which part of her was not. Flesh lied, it seemed.

“Of course,” I said gently and because it felt important, I asked: “Do you know why they were…”

Minji nuzzled even closer. “Because no one would notice if she was missing.”

It wasn’t the question I asked but maybe it should have been.

History ran red after all with missing girls, forgotten girls.

Sluts and martyrs and everyone in between.

Of course, Minji’s vessel had been one of them.

I squirmed until I could look her full in the face.

Her eyes were very nearly black even in that rich peacock light.

“Why did you choose her?”

“Because she was alone,” said Minji in someone and something else’s voice, each word laid down like it was glass, like we’d both shatter if she spoke too loud. “Because she asked.”

Then her face hardened, locking like a door.

“Because of all these things, we’re going to protect her, you understand. With luck, we’ll figure out something before we have to kill each other. But if it comes to it: no hard feelings, Alessa. We can promise it will be quick, at least.”

“I wouldn’t expect anything less.”

Minji smiled thinly and we sat then in a new silence, aware we had, very companionably and without a shred of animosity in our hearts, declared, in fewer words than perhaps were merited, that we would eventually be at each other’s throats.

Whether such a time would come to pass was irrelevant.

The words couldn’t be taken back and a sliver of me would always regret our honesty in that moment.

Minji parted her lips, was beginning to speak when I saw a face crane around a corner.

Ford.

“Get fucked,” I told him.

He had a court once, a smaller one than what Adam or Sullivan had kept, but there were people who’d whored themselves for his guidance.

I wondered what he told them about graduation.

If he’d lied, if he read them false futures, if he gilded those lies with their biggest wants.

Or if all this had come out of left field for him as well, a possibility I didn’t like entertaining as it opened the door to other worries, like how many others of his prognostications were false, and I was full up on anxieties and heartache at the time.

“I seek the love of my days, my promised one, she who will live in my heart and she who will survive in your flesh,” said Ford, eyes only for Minji.

I knew that look. There wasn’t a woman anywhere who hadn’t, at one point or another, seen a man drape his arm over a sister’s shoulder and thought, If I let you out of my sight, this is the last time anyone will see her alive.

Looking at Ford then, I knew. I knew what was coming.

I was almost part of that statistic before.

“Out,” I said.

“My beloved, my light.” He half moaned those words. They were an offering, a sacrifice he made of himself. “You said you had use of me.”

Minji unstrung from my arms to stride toward him, her expression flat as polished tone.

Her hair, previously orderly, writhed and shuddered, rising from its coiffure to float through the air like she was moving underwater.

I thought, There you are. It was so obvious.

I didn’t understand how I could have mistaken her for human.

Going on tiptoes, she gently tucked his damp curls behind his ears, a gesture that would have almost been tender if not for how opaque her face was: she might as well have been an engraving, or the flat of a sharpened blade.

“I do,” she said soothingly, tone ritualistic. “And you will give me all of you?”

“All of me for all of you.”

It wasn’t ever Minji who’d been the one at risk.

She bent her head to him, pressing her mouth to his glistening cheek, and there was such a lost look in his eyes, the surrender of a calf in a killing chute.

To my surprise, I pitied him. Kissing my fingers to the pair in salute, I left my armchair and the alcove and Ford to whatever justice waited for him in the blaze of that strangely quiet afternoon.