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The first one to speak was Adam, who was, to give credit where credit is due, a work of technical perfection: six feet three, a body that could have been—and was, actually, repeatedly and with considerable enthusiasm—used in anatomy studies.

Radioactive blue eyes, Ken-doll features, a singular dimple indenting his right cheek, a soft cleft bisecting his chin, and so much blond hair it looked like he was wearing a gold-plated sheep rug for a hat.

He was gorgeous in a very airbrushed way, which would have been fine if not for the fact this was real life and no one in real life should look literally airbrushed.

Adam ran a hand through that ridiculous overgrowth of golden curls, and sank down onto the floor with a jangle of iron chains.

“Well,” he said, the beginning of a laugh collecting in his rich, French-inflected voice. “That was exciting.”

Portia impaled him with a withering stare.

“People get cavalier in life-or-death situations,” he said before jauntily adding, in a way that suggested he was not only amenable to being wrong but rather hoped he was, “It’s not a crime.”

“A hundred and seventeen dead,” came the phlegmatic rejoinder. Portia’s voice, in contrast, was more muffled, less mellifluous. It warbled. It sounded mealy. Like she was trying to talk through a mouth crammed with sharp hairs. “Wasted.”

“But not us.”

“No,” said Portia. “Thank the Mother.”

Adam shrugged. “Thank me, you mean.”

Portia bared her teeth at him. The damp, grayish dark made the threat display look almost like a human expression.

Almost but not quite as from between her teeth protruded the furred and dichroic points of a jumping spider’s chelicerae grown overly large.

Her eyes went from his face to mine, and I mouthed a tired What do you want me to do about it?

, earning me a not insignificant rolling of the eyes, which unnerved me more than I cared to admit, the conspiratorial playfulness at odds with her physical circumstance.

“Nah, I don’t wanna.”

I looked over to the owner of the voice.

I nodded at him; Rowan nodded back. There was a lot we’d probably have to talk about when there was an opening.

We hadn’t exactly resolved the whole bit where I’d been standing above his dead maybe-but-not-official girlfriend, Johanna, utterly sodden from the kill.

“Rowan,” I said.

“You’ll be relieved to know that Stefania didn’t make it out,” he said, patting himself down for a cigarette. “Or maybe mad? I don’t know. You seem like a likes-to-get-her-hands-dirty kind of girl. I used to like to think that you two were getting it on while me and Johanna were doing the deed.”

“Nice to see you’re still alive,” said Adam with sincere cheer, raking his eyes over Rowan. “Ironic, though, isn’t it? A deathworker still kicking it while everyone else is dead.”

The temperature in the already frigid library dropped several more points.

“I’d argue it’s fucking perfect, actually,” said Rowan, lighting a cigarette, sucking hard on it before blowing smoke into Adam’s face. “When all of you die, I’ll have an undead army.”

“You won’t.” It was a pale, soft-faced, utterly terrified-looking Scottish boy who spoke the words.

He had a doleful voice and a dense brogue and beautiful, long-fingered hands.

Eyes a washed-out, indeterminable shade of something maritime.

“This lot doesn’t leave anythin’ behind when they’re done.

Bones, skin, sinew, everything. They just absorb the lot. Can’t raise an army out of nothing.”

“How do you know so much?” I said.

“I accept your challenge, Eoan.” Rowan stabbed his cigarette in his direction, interrupting whatever response he might have had for me. “But first, Alessa—”

“Half live if Rowan dies,” said a deep male voice, one that made us all turn.

Ford, who had kept from the door throughout the faculty’s onslaught, was sitting with his legs splayed and his back to a bookshelf.

He lifted a loop of his own intestine and waggled it at us.

His other hand held a bloody athame. The act of clutching his own viscera was clearly soporific for him: he looked drowsy, content, utterly at peace with how his guts pooled between his thighs.

“Half live if Rowan dies.”

There was a drawn-out, uncertain silence.

“Are you sure?” said Adam.

“The entrails cannot lie.” He fished out and weighed his liver in the hand his intestines had previously occupied, the latter tossed onto the marble tiles with a greasy schlorp.

Once satisfied with its poundage, he lifted the organ to the blade of ashen light knifing from one of the library’s many narrow windows and frowned at its underside. “Half live if Rowan dies.”

The word hirsute didn’t begin to describe Ford’s abundance of beard and curls and overgrown brow, dark and sleek; he was a bear of a man, a figure cut straight from the annals of Viking history, a fact he recognized and celebrated, I think.

No one else on campus swanned through the winters swaddled in a bearskin coat with the poor animal’s head for a matching, still-attached-to-the-body-by-a-strip-of-neck-fur toque, and if Ford wasn’t quite so massive, so oppressively jacked, he’d have looked like any white trust-fund kid with a costume budget.

Mostly, what he looked like was a particularly unsavory kind of dangerous.

“Well, in that case,” said Adam brightly, “ come here, Rowan.”

“Fuck. You.”

“Everyone stop, ” sobbed a quiet voice, and we did.

A short, wide-set, very doll-like person stood huddled against the library doors, their brow still pressed to the wood. They’d been crying. The knuckles of their clenched hands were crusted with blood.

“Gracelynn, I can’t believe it. You used the voice on me,” said Adam, with unsettling pleasure.

“Eight of us,” said Gracelynn brokenly. “There are only eight of us left. Kevin, they, they—” They let out a tea-kettle shriek of despair, unable to help themselves, hands balled, a fist shoved into their teeth.

They screamed until they were wrung of breath and it was just an airless keening, almost too high-pitched to hear, their expression so mangled by their agony, they were made into a stranger in the ruin.

When Gracelynn had exhausted their capacity for that, they said, pantingly, “We can’t fucking fight with each other. We’re all that’s left. ”

“Eight?” floated in Rowan’s voice. “Who’s—oh, there’s Minji. What are you doing on the bookshelf?”

“So?” said Portia quietly to Gracelynn, her mouth working like she was trying to exorcise a lump of taffy from between her teeth. I knew better though. We all did. “What does that matter?”

“We need to take care of each other,” wept Gracelynn. “People sacrificed themselves for us.”

“Sacrificed?” said Adam. “I don’t know about that. I’m pretty sure Kevin would prefer to be alive right now in your stead. They probably were just coy about it.”

“Jesus Christ,” I snarled. “Lay off.”

Countless poets and philosophers have made a career out of asserting that love is the strongest force in the universe.

Before that moment, I’d have disagreed. Entropy seemed a better contender for the title.

But I found myself revising that opinion at the sight of Gracelynn staring up at Adam with a naked pity.

“They’re a better person than you ever were,” said Gracelynn like that was enough, like that was all the answer needed.

And I thought, Yes, Kevin was that. There’d been no pause.

Kevin had not faltered when the faculty washed from the podium, they only stood to shove Gracelynn into my arms, resolve in their expression.

Don’t let Gracelynn look back, they told me.

“They’re also dead. ” Adam laughed, sounding like Christmas had come early for him.

He practically sang the next words. I didn’t know someone could make an accusation sound so frolicsome.

His attention pinballed through the room before it set itself on me.

“You know, I’d heard rumors about you but I’d thought they were all lies.

Then you got that one kill just under the wire.

Although killing your roommate seems rather cliched, doesn’t it?

Was it jealousy? Was it because she was prettier than you? ”

“It’s more complicated than that,” I said.

It was.

“I know I’d love to hear all about it,” said Rowan.

“Wait, wait, Alessa did what now?” Eoan turned his doleful gaze on me, some of that habitual misery leaching away so horror could overtake his face instead. “Johanna—no, she was a joy. She was the brightest thing in the school. She can’t be dead, no.”

“As a doorknob,” said Rowan with suicidal affability.

“But why ?” demanded Eoan.

“She might be dead, but I don’t believe Alessa did it,” said Gracelynn, raising their head again. “That’s not who she is. She wouldn’t.”

“Actually, I would,” I said. Unlike Adam, I didn’t believe in taking credit where it wasn’t due. “But like I said, it was complicated—”

“It’s Hellebore, after all,” said Minji from her perch. “We’re all monsters here.”

Gracelynn’s face lost its color, went as pale as their brown skin would permit.

They shook their head, lavender bangs clinging to their forehead.

Like the rest of us, they were soaked in other people’s insides, a nice shared souvenir from our recent troubles.

“No, no. That’s not… Alessa, tell them—”

“Makes you question everything, doesn’t it?” said Adam ecstatically.

“Shut up,” rose Portia’s voice. “And look.”

It was then we all saw that a note, written in our headmaster’s very officious hand, had been slid under the door and was being waved at us. When we fell silent, whoever was on the other end gave the paper a little push, and it fluttered fully into the room.

“What the fuck?” said Rowan.

Adam squatted down, picking up the note. He read through it several times before crumpling it in a hand and tossing it on the floor.

“What the hell does it say?” I asked.

“That only one of us can survive this,” said Adam, with no expression at all. “And the winner gets to leave Hellebore.”

We all scrambled for the crumpled paper, in case Adam was fucking with us, liar that he was.

Rowan managed to grab it first, plunging onto his belly to seize the paper, and we relented—none of us wanting to risk bumping up against him.

Bad enough we were trapped here. No one wanted to add dying of accelerated sepsis on top of it all.

Beaming triumphantly, Rowan rose and unfolded the note, holding it out for us to read. There it was, in the headmaster’s unmistakable scrawl:

Finish the job. Last one alive will be allowed to leave Hellebore. Be quick. You have three days.