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When I returned to the dormitory, Johanna was awake and inconsolable, a towheaded wraith pacing in front of our shared room.

She jolted a look up as my footsteps rang along the treacherous corridor, relief flooding her features.

Her eyes were the deep green of the summer, the whites splattered with red: she’d stayed up waiting, it seemed, although for whom was anyone’s guess.

“You’re safe,” she sighed with nearly theatrical relief, rushing up with arms spread. “I was so worried. I thought Portia would try to induct you, or—or worse.”

“That should be a happy thought,” I said, unable as always to help my own vitriol, resenting how this made us such a trope: she the sunshine-bright girl and I the unlikable grump who she’d win over with consistent attention and care. “You’d be able to move Stefania in like you wanted.”

Low and obvious as that blow was, Johanna still winced. “That was a mistake, Alessa. You were gone. What was I supposed to do?”

“Wait for a body.”

“Here? In Hellebore?” Gone then was her usual Pollyanna disposition.

In its place, a ruthless clarity I hadn’t expected of her, wouldn’t even have imagined her capable of.

Sunrise poured through the serried line of windows, burnishing the corridor with pools of yolk-yellow and wine-colored light.

“Anywhere else, I’d have been busy calling the authorities, trying to figure out where the hell you were.

But in case you didn’t notice, we don’t really have the option here.

People disappear all the time. What was I supposed to think? ”

“You could have had more faith I’d come back,” I said, aware at this point I was simply being a bitch. “You could have gone looking for me.”

“I tried,” she snarled. “We tried. We didn’t sleep for two nights. We were out looking for you. Stefania was about to kill me for that.”

“You never told me.” I was staggered. I didn’t expect the fury in her voice, how her face looked now that it was husked of what I finally recognized as a front, the glutinous sweetness no more than an affectation. Most of all, I didn’t expect how much this made me like her.

“You didn’t ask. You never ask, do you? You just go straight to being an asshole,” Johanna hissed. Her anger receded with the next breath. She looked even worse for wear than before.

“Look,” she spat. She wasn’t much taller than me but she loomed then in her righteousness, her grave dignity.

Her eyes gleamed like strange stars in the bright tussled cloud of her hair.

“I am sorry for whatever shitty situation you had to dig your way out of to be alive right now, but that doesn’t give you fucking permission to be such a bitch all the time. ”

“You can’t blame me for being impressed. I’ve been listening to you snore for months and this is the first time I’m seeing you have an actual backbone. I thought all you did was cry and run away.”

“Who the fuck hurt you ?” A surreptitious chorus of clicks in the hallway alerted me to doors being opened: we were beginning to attract attention, which was never a good thing in the school.

“I’m sorry, Alessa, but you’re not the only one who’s suffered in this life.

If you had any idea what I’d done to survive, you wouldn’t be half as willing to be so mean to me.

Not that it matters. I really just want to be your friend. ”

“Why?”

“Because people like us? We’re all we have.”

It should have come across as twee. It should have felt stupid to hear, like some prepubescent declaration of undying friendship or a little girl’s vehement oath that she would change the world for the better, just you wait.

But there was such sincerity to Johanna’s exasperation, to her rage at being misapprehended time and time again, that the words developed force enough to drive me to a shame-faced quiet.

I blinked in that new silence, chastened, flayed.

“I don’t want to be your friend,” I said after we’d both had time to steep in the aftermath of her tirade.

“Fine,” said Johanna. “Can we be civil, though?”

That I could do.

“Only if you promise to cry less.”

“Absolutely not.” She gave a sniff. “Crying’s healthy.”

Her mask rose back up then, like someone pulled on a curtain’s strings, even as the door to our shared room cracked open and Rowan emerged from inside, knuckling at an eye. He flashed me a yellow-toothed smile.

“Am I interrupting something?”

“Not yet,” said Rowan, slinging an arm around Johanna.

She tittered at this, her smile doting. Johanna looked like she thought he had hung the moon and the sun in the sky.

You don’t know what I’ve done to survive.

It dawned on me this was perhaps her continuing to survive, doing what was necessary.

I’d never asked and at this point I suspected she would never tell, but I wondered then if he was insurance against what was hunting her.

If all the scraping and fawning was just that.

Whatever the case, I had a nagging feeling that of the two of us, Johanna perhaps was the stronger one.

“Do you two need some privacy?” I asked.

“No,” said Rowan. “I was just keeping her company until you got back.”

Another little giggle. “You’re so sweet, Rowan.”

You don’t know what I’ve done to survive.

“In that case, excuse me.” I shouldered past them both into the room, which smelled unusually of sandalwood and oud.

Someone had put up candles everywhere: in the eaves, on the mantle of our unlit fireplace, the nightstands, the communal shelf now wretched with all the reference texts, half-filled notebooks, and books that Johanna and I had procured over the months.

Settling onto my own bed, tidied now to a catalog-quality condition, I said to Rowan, who stood there in the threshold like the memory of a nightmare, “What the hell were you trying to find in the library, anyway?”

“You were looking for something in the library?” said Johanna, voice girlish and piping, no more than a living doll again.

“Information on how to escape,” said Rowan from the doorway and he was almost gorgeous silhouetted like that with the golden light tracing his profile. “And maybe some resurrection spells.”

“Why the fuck for?”

“I owe a lot of people for being born.”

“Fair enough. Welp, I’m going to sleep,” I said, crawling under my duvet.

It was unconscionable that we had class in a few hours and the world would continue to turn.

Our midnight adventures would have consequences, I was so very sure of that.

The headmaster was likely to have something to say.

But then again, the Librarian had been desperate to die.

Surely, that was a violation of its professional obligations.

If so, perhaps it’d keep our misdeeds as secret as its own desires.

Or maybe Portia, spurned, would rat us out.

Who the fuck knew. Either way, there’d be more classes.

“Classes are in two hours,” said Rowan.

“Good night,” I said.

“I’ll make her some coffee, don’t worry about it,” said Johanna, fussing over the battered electric kettle as the pipes groaned and gurgled from being forced to do their plumber-given duty.

The reservoir of essentials had grown since: instant coffee, tea, ginger chews, dissolvable packets of citrus-flavored flu medicine, saltines—whatever one needed to start a morning, soothe a hangover, and survive a minor illness.

“Anyway, we’re on for a round two, right?” Rowan asked, a little too loudly.

“Good night.”

The biggest surprise of the night, as it turned out, was how quickly I could sink into a dead sleep even after all the nightmare fuel I had just lived through. I fluffed my pillow, and when unconsciousness arrived, it came without dreams.