Page 24

I could smell the garden dying as I raced away, a sweet vegetal rot that clogged the nose and coated the insides of my mouth.

Flowers bloomed with sudden frantic energy and died with equal zeal, lining my escape with a crisp carpet of graying petals.

Alarms blared. I couldn’t tell if it was because of Rowan’s antics or because Hellebore had been alerted to my attempted escape, but the bells were tolling and the best-case scenario would still likely involve someone looking around and going, “Where the fuck is Alessa?”

I increased my pace.

No one stopped me as I hit the roses’ broad-leafed shadows; no one came to intervene as I wormed into the foliage, pressing into the thorns with abandon, hoping they’d take their pound of flesh and let me go.

I was nearly sodden with my blood when the ozonic scent of open air overtook the roses’ stench.

A second later, my vision flooded with a white glare.

I was free.

Free enough, at any rate. Free to travail down the bluff and whatever other obstacles would surface along the massif, to die in the process: to get my head smashed open, have the splinters of my bones bake in the sun once the birds had their way with my guts.

Most people might balk at calling that freedom, I guess, but at that moment, it was to me.

When you have had your every freedom pared from you, you learn to hoard the manner and time and method of your death: it becomes the only thing that is really yours.

I blinked until my sight welled back: everything still a little too bright, limned in phosphorus.

Birds wheeled through the air, unperturbed by how I clung to the roses, half of me flung outward like a ship’s prow, my weight balanced on the ball of my right foot.

A childish part of me half expected an applause of heroic music.

What I received instead was an echoing scream as somewhere a rabbit was dragged out of its burrow and eaten.

Welp, I remember thinking.

Gingerly, I repositioned myself for the downward crawl, going to my belly and heaving my legs over the edge. I dug my toes into the cliff face, levered myself lower, lower, and—

There was the weight of a hand settling on my left shoulder, and then, polished floor under my feet.

Before I could sufficiently process either of these sensations, the pressure on my collarbone increased.

The air stuttered; a sharp taste of tin, like bloodying my tongue along the lid of a can.

I was being pushed down into the deep cradle of an emerald armchair, sinking into its cushions, but also I was falling, hands losing purchase; my grip slackened, the mountain howling up, hungry.

“Miss Li.”

My head ricocheted back into the cool velvet. I blinked twice, mouth still syrupy with magic.

The room I was now in was bedecked in cold jewel shadows: furniture in onyx and night-dark emerald, crushed satin curtains the color of old blood in a back alley.

Portraits filled the walls in serried columns, the subjects in school colors.

They regarded me with the same phobic wonder as the woman standing before me.

“Headmaster,” I said, flashing her the sunniest who, me? grin.

Divested of her mask, she looked even less human than she usually did.

There was something of a coyote to her features, an elongated quality to her limbs and jaw, like there’d been a muzzle there before it had been hammered flat: the bones cracked and configured to simulate personhood.

Between her and Professor Fleur I was beginning to wonder if the entire faculty were even human.

A plait of ivory hair draped over the headmaster’s right shoulder.

She wore a cassock—absinthe green where the light shone on the fabric, the material patterned with the school crest, padded at the shoulders—like the people in the paintings behind her, who I could only assume were headmasters past. Incense wafted through the room—her office, I corrected myself, as I took in the plinth of a desk squatting in the middle of the space, the folders stacked high on the surface.

Beside it stood one of the masked servitors, trembling.

“Your complete attention when you’re speaking with me, Miss Li.” She took my chin very lightly in a gloved hand and angled my face, dropping to a knee so her eyes were on the same level. Her touch was cool.

“Just taking in the sights.”

“Focus,” she said, both hands on my cheeks. “When you are spoken to, you focus. Do we understand?”

“Sure.”

The headmaster could fuck herself with her pointy, buttercup-buckled boots.

“Hellebores,” said the headmaster. “Like the school.”

“What?”

“They’re hellebores,” she clarified, the ghost of a smile wafting over her predator face. This close, she smelled animalic, carnal. “Not buttercups. You should know better. Your father was a man who loved nature, wasn’t he?”

My blood went to ice. “Can you read my thoughts?”

“No,” said the headmaster, winking. “But I can see where your eyes are looking.”

She rose then, letting go of my face. Despite her platitudes, I remained suspicious and watched as best I could as she circled around to the back of my chair, until she coiled both arms around my shoulders.

“That wasn’t very wise,” she chided.

I had too much dignity to feign innocence. We both knew what I’d done and I wasn’t going to give her the pleasure of seeing me cower from punishment. So I tipped my chin up at a rebellious angle, earning a low chuckle.

“Nor is touching me without consent.”

“You lost all rights to consent when you enrolled—”

“Enrolled?”

I started to rise only to feel her nails puncture my skin, feel her push down, holding me in place.

The headmaster might have looked like a length of bone swaddled in jacquard, but she was strong.

Monstrously so. I could not move no matter how I writhed; the mountains around Hellebore would have yielded before her grip did.

Unable to glare at her, I settled for glaring at a portrait of a wizened man who leered at me from across space and time and pigment, his mouth crumpled in a way that made me think he wore fedoras whenever he could.

Something about the consistency of his skin, an odd shiny glutinousness, that made me think he was related to the current headmaster.

“I was kidnapped —”

“Is that how you see our charity?” asked the headmaster in a tone of false horror, erupting into a guffaw.

The alligator snap of her laughter had the servitor flinching so hard, it went down to its knees, arms clasped around its legs.

“As a kidnapping? As an act of violence? Goodness me, that will never do.”

At the never do, the headmaster released me, allowing me to spring to my feet and move a comfortable distance away from her reach, aware that the foot of space stretching between us would mean nothing if she decided she would be a bitch about it, but as with a lot of things, it was the thought that counted.

“It was an act of grace, my dear,” said the headmaster. “A stay of execution, you could say.”

A downy chill settled over me, sinking through skin into marrow.

“What are you talking about?”

“My girl,” she said, flowing to her desk.

Her fingers ran over the manila folders—each of them unmarked and a lightless indigo—until they arrived at one in particular.

She pinched one corner and pulled, freeing it, before extracting a sheaf of papers from its mouth.

I caught a glimpse of a face in the documents, and another frisson of cold worked down my spine: it was a photo of me; a younger me, a mugshot from when I was found with my stepfather’s corpse, thirteen with bad hair and acne-pocked skin and the thousand-yard stare of a child who hadn’t quite come to terms with the fact that not only was she a murderer, she didn’t dislike being one.

“You have been under our observation since the day you tore your father in half.”

“I was cleared of all charges.”

“Only because of incompetence,” she said cheerfully.

“And sentimentality, really. People never know how to react when a child is on trial. I had it on good authority that at least half of them were convinced of your guilt but they felt bad about sentencing someone so young and sweet. What a lovely girl, they said to one another. It’d be wrong to destroy her life. ”

The headmaster fanned out the papers and gestured me closer.

Reluctantly, I complied, studying what she had on display.

It was everything. My school records, printouts from CCTV footage, witness testimonials, rental agreements, pages from a journal that I had kept between the ages of fifteen and twenty; pages I knew had been burned down to cremains.

I swallowed, raising my gaze to her once I’d taken stock of her trove.

“What do you want?”

“I don’t want anything,” said the headmaster.

“Well, no. That’s a lie. What I want is for you to know that if Hellebore had not intervened, you’d have been lobotomized.

You’d have had your brain sliced up before they shipped you off to do some governmental dirty work.

I promise, you don’t want to be part of that. ”

“So you want me to be grateful.”

Her smile lengthened by an eighth of an inch.

“No, no. I don’t want that. I don’t care if you’re grateful.

I want you to know that Hellebore has enough power to circumvent the ambitions of entire governmental bodies.

That the word of God has less authority than my signature.

And if you think you can escape the school, that there is any way you can leave without graduating, you’re not only a vicious little creature but a very stupid one. ”

The headmaster sat down behind her desk, fingers tented, her expression mild.

“Any questions?”

We’re the wasps.

If she thought she was going to get a rise out of me, she was sorely mistaken.

I kept my expression bored and tepid, with a slightly astringent sneer for good measure.

I cannot count the number of people who have attempted to cajole, cow, and otherwise coerce me into doing what they wanted.

It was one of the central reasons behind why I ran; my mother was no saint but she didn’t deserve being subjected to that carousel of bullies tiptoeing up to our porch, half of which seemed to think threatening her would motivate me toward compliance. (Spoiler: it did not.)

Here now was another person, another stupid punter, gleefully trying to extort obedience from me.

Briefly, I entertained the notion of testing my powers on the headmaster but a) I was angry, not stupid, and b) even if I successfully deposed the headmaster, there would be the rest of Hellebore to contend with and even I wasn’t arrogant enough to think I’d survive that. Not yet.

She looked me over. “Some of you are the wasps. Some of you, like Miss Khoury, even rise to become queens. But you’re not that.

You’re a corpse soaking in enzymatic secretions, hoping to be useful for the first time in your life.

You’re not a wasp, no. You’re just raw material until you learn better.

And for your sake,” said the headmaster with the satisfaction of a dowager explaining she had spent her fortune and her vulturous children would inherit nothing but lifelong resentment, “I hope you do. What else do you want to know?”

“Threatening me isn’t going to work.”

“I’m not threatening you,” said the headmaster with another effervescent laugh.

She gestured the servitor closer, crooking two fingers in its direction.

When it had shambled into reach, she wove one finger in a circle and the masked figure broke into sobs.

As I watched, it went down first on one knee and then another, retrieving from a drawer in the headmistress’s monolithic desk the daintiest pearl-handled bone saw I’d seen in my life.

“A threat is a statement of intention. What I said was fact,” she said, hooking a leg over the knee of the servitor.

She propped an elbow on the armrest of her chair and set her chin in her palm.

Almost imperceptibly, the headmistress nodded, the tiniest motion of her chin.

In answer, the servitor ran the bone saw over its mask and around its skull, like it was a tin of dog food being roughly opened up.

When that was done, the headmistress slid a nail under the lid of the servitor’s skull and flipped it open, revealing an expanse of brain.

“You are a vicious, stupid creature who thinks of nothing but surviving to the next day. Fortunately for you, I know what to do with food-animals. Which is to say, I allow them to live until their appointed time unless they fuck up, in which case—”

She hooked a finger into the servitor’s skull, dragging it along the rim, before lifting the accumulated brain to her mouth.

Her tongue was pale and gray as it lapped up the clot of gray matter, her smile languid.

I didn’t have a comeback to that, to any of what was going on.

She took in how I was trembling: teeth gritted, fury radiant enough that I could pretend I couldn’t see my own fear through the glare.

“Now get out of my office. You’ve wasted enough of my time already.”