Page 6

“I’m using the terms loosely. Don’t mind me.

We can dissect that another time,” Portia said, winking, wafting a hand through the bright antiseptic air as we pulled up to an overcrowded vestibule.

The walls were the same deoxygenated red as Portia’s hair, softly embossed with the school’s heraldry, a repeating pattern of antlered skull and wasps.

Stairs rose on either side, leading to an elaborately stuccoed mezzanine, its floor cradled by plaster gods.

Overhead, a chandelier rocked impotently, unneeded with the pitiless white sun gouting from the skylight.

Everyone under its glow looked terrible.

“Oh, I have to go help with getting everyone inside the atrium.” Portia sighed, rubbernecking at the crowd.

The older girl peeled away then, vanishing into the throng.

It wasn’t so much an assembly as it was a crush of bodies, like cattle herded into an abattoir.

The flesh mannequins were doing their part in teasing the knots of gathered students into proper queues, an endeavor that was only partially successful: no one wanted to be within ten feet of the stinking, towering automatons and each time one moved too close, the crowd melted back in disgust. Sometimes, this meant a line against the wall would form.

Other times, students simply fled the hamburger-faced caretakers, pelting up and down the steps, creating even more chaos.

I felt a light touch on the small of my back as I was staring at the tableau.

“Assembly,” gurgled a meat man, nudging me forward.

“Yeah, yeah, yeah,” I mumbled.

It was less of an ordeal than I thought it would be, even with the pheromonal stink of about a hundred very sweaty twentysomethings in close quarters.

We were bullied up the stairs and into an enormous atrium, operatic in size, with balcony windows and an orchestra pit that was being aggressively mopped by a trio of masked individuals.

All three shared an androgynous litheness, their crimson-wrappered bodies lean but wide-shouldered.

I stared at them, unnerved for reasons that wouldn’t explain themselves, until my attention was taken by one of the meat men as it lumbered up to me.

“Phones,” it said.

“You want my phone?” I shook my head. “No, what the fuck?”

“Phone,” it said again gently, and with an urgency I hadn’t expected from a talking stack of uncooked burger patties.

Its tone was conciliatory, as if it knew how terrible a demand it was making of me, but also what would happen if I refused to comply.

It stooped so we were at eye level, and clots of meat wept from its subsequent attempt to contort its face into a smile.

“Jesus.” I withdrew a step, producing the aforementioned item.

The truth was I didn’t care; it was a burner, like every phone I’d ever possessed.

The Internet was a mistake, as they say: being traceable is never good, especially not here, not now, not in a world where something might come stalking down the road to ask for your soul.

Never mind the fact I probably had a few warrants out for me. “Take it.”

It accepted the device with a slow, sage nod before turning to a Korean girl, who produced a rose-gold iPhone without comment but with a roll of her eyes.

The meat man continued trundling down the queue of students and the air smelled faintly rotten in its wake.

The girl and I exchanged looks as it vanished into the press of bodies.

“All this power in the school and what they’re afraid of is a few telecommunication devices,” she said.

She had on a spectacular hanbok, red upon reds, the colors of muscle.

White peonies were embroidered on the fabric; they looked like scars trellissing her thighs, the curve of her torso. “It makes you wonder, doesn’t it?”

“Maybe they don’t want us to post anything incriminating.”

Her smile was venomous. “Who’d believe us?”

We shuffled into the auditorium, drifting down two different aisles only to find ourselves seated in the same row.

I sighed in relief at the chilliness of the room, sinking into a velveted copper chair.

The Korean girl sat on the opposite side of a gorgeous tawny-skinned boy, his ruby-buttoned dress uniform as beautiful as his face, its elegance only slightly marred by the pattern of symbols monogrammed over the fabric.

Everyone looked immaculate. Hellebore loved youth and worshiped beauty.

The girl paid me no attention despite our earlier interaction, keeping her unblinking stare on the stage.

The boy however looked sympathetically over to me.

I glared at him. Anyone wearing the Ministry’s heraldry was immediately suspect.

“Your luggage hasn’t arrived then, I assume? It can take some time, I’m told. Something to do with the school’s helpers being so new to the role,” he said, nodding at the three in the orchestral pit. “The reanimated rarely make for good workers.”

“You should listen to Sullivan,” said a familiar voice. “He’s Ministry-born. They know all about corpses. Well, the making of them, anyway.”

That explained the branding.

I strung an arm over the back of my chair, looking over as Portia seated herself, her smile languid and slightly animal.

A challenge lounged in her expression, one that the boy didn’t take, only met with a cool stare: her charms washed over him like rainwater.

Instead of gawking like me, he twirled a finger in the air and half bowed at the waist.

“Miss Portia du Lac,” said Sullivan in a voice coached to resonate through ballrooms and trading floors. His accent made me think of New Orleans, except with the vowels tidied and trimmed by years of finishing school. “It’s always a pleasure. ”

“What about my luggage, anyway?” I said.

“Your outfit,” he said, eyes sliding over to me again. With a little thrust of his chin he continued, “You don’t look like someone who’d choose to wear that. The uniforms aren’t mandatory, you know.”

Sullivan smiled with earnest compassion, like this was a favor he’d extended, a kindness of unimaginable scale. When I didn’t answer, he bobbed his head graciously, and looked back to the stage. A second passed and then another before he said, less graciously, “We don’t try to make them.”

The Korean girl looked over, a perfect eyebrow creeping upward. “Lying doesn’t become you.”

“I’m not lying, Minji,” he said. “The entire point of Ministry families is to minimize the risk of unnecessary casualties. I’d prefer there be no corpses. But sometimes, one does what is needed to survive.”

Sullivan spoke with, if not the arrogance, then the self-possession of someone whose family was paid handsomely to submit to routine inspections, to being surveilled from cradle to cremation.

I didn’t want to throw in too early with any one party, not before I had a better understanding of the ecosystem of personalities, but I suspected he was being truthful.

That was the whole point, after all. Ostensibly all that surveillance was for the safety of the families and the security of the world at large: if they could predict when a god might come to drive them to destructive impulses, countermeasures could be devised.

Suicides could be arranged. It made sense that he didn’t want for there to be more death.

Then again, the Ministry wasn’t actually a governmental body with the best interests of the world at heart.

(Although how many governments care, honestly?) They were a conglomeration of corporations who’d purportedly sworn to serve and protect in the legislative sense of the phrase, but there were the rumors of the Ministry contracting out the services of those families under their care.

Only when it was strictly necessary, of course.

“Sullivan Rivers,” he introduced himself politely to me.

“He’s a bit of a whiner, I’m afraid,” said Portia. “He complained so very loudly when they said he couldn’t share a dorm room with his girlfriend, Delilah. Kicked up an actual tantrum. I thought Professor Hammer was going to have a kitten.”

“I wouldn’t be surprised if he did,” said Minji. “The faculty here is… strange.”

“Strange? Try fucking weird? Like, everything’s off about them. Don’t you think it’s kinda suspicious how all their names are nouns?” hissed a pompadoured boy to her right. “Hammer, Crystal, Rock, Cartilage.”

Sullivan stared at Portia, his calm facade still uncracked. “We were told we could share quarters. I merely pointed that out to the administration.”

“Total tantrum,” said Portia.

“Don’t you think that’s a bit judgy?” Minji asked her seatmate. “Maybe it’s school policy.”

“How the hell would that make for good school policy?” demanded Pompadour.

“A complaint is not a tantrum, Miss du Lac,” said Sullivan.

“I’ll stop here,” said Portia. “Wouldn’t want him throwing another one of those.”

“Miss du Lac—”

A tremor of music ended our chattering. Unseen cellos were joined by a low bellowing of trombones, with trumpets rushing after like they’d arrived too late to the performance.

The sound of them drove the masked workers in the orchestra pit into comical panic: they flung their arms up, sprinted in pointless circles, colliding with one another, before at last surrendering to whatever fate they had briefly thought of eluding and prostrating themselves, bowing and scraping, quivering like gelatin.

The lights dimmed until only the raised dais was illuminated and, as if on cue, the restive crowd began to quiet, silence rippling outward from the stage.

Soon, there was no sound at all, not a cough or a chuckle, barely a hiss of respiration, only two hundred eyes warily evaluating the stage with the care of rats being proffered a poisoned cheese roulette.

The air flinched; the light winked out for a papercut’s width of a second, barely long enough to be registered save as the tiniest of haptic jolts.

Between one blink and the next, a figure made itself known: tall, straight-backed, imperious, and narrow as a rapier.

Like the servitors in the pit, who were now emitting agonized noises, it was masked and impossible to gender, its silhouette such that it could be male, female, some fantastical conjugation of the two, or neither.

Unlike the miserable figures in the opera pit, it was dressed beautifully, the folds of its opaline robes seizing and refracting the light.

The overall effect was mesmerizing, a carefully plotted performance.

The figure looked as if it were enameled in church glass, ethereal yet formidable.

“Students,” it said in an old woman’s voice, cracked but still impossibly resonant. “Beloved class.”

Portia: “That’s the headmaster. Headmistress. Interchangeable, really. Depending on how much you like the patriarchy.”

“Very little,” I whispered.

“Oh, we can be friends then,” said Portia with a dazzling smile, and despite earlier, I felt myself warming again.

“It is my honor to welcome you to Hellebore. My great joy to say yes, this is where you begin your journey to redemption, to wholesomeness—”

“Wholesomeness, my god,” grumbled Sullivan. “You’d think they could have hired a speechwriter.”

“Not everyone has Ministry money.”

“The sins of the father shall be inherited by the son, I see.”

“The sins of capitalism, more like it,” Portia bit back.

“—to a future where you are loved, accepted, ” continued the headmistress, walking up to a pulpit that origami-ed up from the floor, lacquered panes of pale wood collapsing upward into place, gaining elaborate cartouches, growing foliated, “where your potential is fulfilled. Where you can be of proper use to the world and to the people around you because yes, it is important that we are of service to our communities.”

“Communities that abandoned us,” said Portia. “My parents sent me to boarding school and never came back for me. Ended up living in an attic for years. Miss Minchin was a god-awful substitute.”

“Minchin?” I said. “Like in the book?”

Portia opened her mouth, halfway to an answer, face lighting with delight, when the headmaster drowned out whatever reply she was assembling.

“For the next year, you will be trained, you will be taught how to comport yourself, to function as people instead of monsters.”

“I thought you said you did three years here, Miss du Lac,” muttered Sullivan. “When did they change the policies?”

“I’ve no clue. Maybe they found a more efficient way of dealing with us miscreants.”

“All of you, shut up,” hissed the Korean girl. “I’m trying to listen.”

The headmistress went on and on and on. Her speech was an ouroborosian affair: a tide of promises feeding into denouncements of our characters and then assurances that we could be better than we are, that we could be refined, improved upon, cleansed.

Over and over, she tore us apart and stitched us up with hope, dragging us under until we were drowning in the sweetness of her voice.

Wouldn’t it be lovely, she said to the enraptured crowd, her words boring deeper into us, to be wanted by the world, welcomed by it?

All our sins forgotten, the error of our conception forgiven.

With great vehemence, she read out a list of names: alumni, she said, who’d gone on to be taxonomized as heroes, ministers, leaders, people who could come and go as desired, be allowed mortgages and mistakes, picket-fenced dreams of families and legacies that wouldn’t upset the world.

“You could be like that too,” she said. “You could be loved. You could be useful. ”

Here’s what they don’t tell you about little boy lucifers and girls who won’t stay dead: being needed is all any of us really wanted.

So, yeah. Fuck that bitch for knowing the right words.

Because if she hadn’t, well, maybe Sullivan would be alive right now.