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“That took far too long,” I said tiredly as the doors heaved apart.

The vestibule was tacky with the remnants of the faculty, no longer a tide of flesh-colored appetite but just meat, like everyone else was.

I’d thought I’d be dead already but with so much flesh, so much meat around me, I could move my death around: store my soul where it couldn’t reach and watch as it ate the faculty, emptied them, made them scream.

All said and done, I was proud. We’d done something historic: Hellebore was empty, its halls hollowed, its hopes ended.

No longer would it feed magic to the starving world.

No longer would eat it through generations of kids whose only sin was being born with a reservoir of latent power.

Hellebore was over and the slow decomposition of our society, stunted by those brilliant governmental minds, would resume; it’d be a fucking catastrophe, I’m sure, but they started it: those bastards should have left me alone.

Because dear god, can I hold a grudge.

Sunlight blasted through the corridor, white and searing.

The Ministry agents—I knew the symbol embossed on their chest way too well, seeing as Sullivan had been practically monogramed from head to toe with it—in their blue hazmat suits, faces occluded by their tinted masks, looked almost comical.

Their shoulders were disproportionately widened by the plastic.

Inversely, their feet, stuffed into black rubber boots, seemed hilariously petite.

Maybe I was just tired. At that point I’d gone without sleep for three days.

My perception had become glutinous; everything was softer now around the edges.

I couldn’t tell if the voices murmuring at the periphery of my consciousness were projects of my exhausted mind or the teachers chastising me for what I’d done.

They were laughing then: lowly, like the sound of applause from an adjacent room.

“What happened to the school?” said one of the agents, inching forward. He, for reasons I couldn’t conjecture, raised a handgun at me.

I blinked stupidly at the weapon, an animal faced with an unfamiliar death. Surely, they must have been informed about what Hellebore was. Or perhaps they were just that confident in the supremacy of firearms. I decided then this vanguard was American and suddenly, the world made more sense again.

“I happened.”