Page 138 of Losing Wendy

“It was written in the tapestry, no matter how many times the Middle Sister tried to undo it. I was going to help Thomas butcher the warden. But it wasn’t going to stop there. Thomas had our files, each and every one of them, underneath his bed. Thomas had the names of our parents, their addresses, our siblings even. Every person who knew they were sending us away. Every person who could have raised their voice to stop it. He was going to have us butcher them all.

“He’d already started recruiting them. I didn’t even know it at the time,” says Nettle. “I thought our plan to take down the wardenwas the only one, but he’d already planted seeds in the minds of the other boys. All but Peter, who was on staff at that point. He wanted to kill Peter too, for knowing what they did to us at that orphanage, and choosing to come back and work there. The things he was going to convince us to do, Wendy…”

“Peter brought you here, convinced the Sister to extract you from your realm to keep you from becoming killers? To give you a chance at a life where you could remain innocent?” I ask.

“Innocentis rather subjective,” scoffs Nettle. “Hard to be innocent when someone’s held you to your bed in the middle of the night while your friends are trying to pretend they’re asleep.”

“You were innocent, though. Even if you didn’t feel it. You didn’t do anything wrong,” I insist.

Nettle’s shaking now. “I hate that Sister. She came for us too late. If she really wanted us to stay innocent, she would have slit our throats in the middle of the night before we ever set foot in that wretched place.”

My words of comfort get hung up in my throat. For some reason, they don’t feel appropriate. Instead, I say, “I thought Peter was supposed to end you when you came of age, but that wasn’t it at all. He was supposed to kill you if you showed signs of becoming murderers.”

Nettle nods, then swallows. “He was never going to be able to do it, though.”

My mind goes to Joel. Of him coaxing a rat into the fire.

A stone forms in my belly.

“You didn’t tell me it was all Thomas’s idea,” whispers Simon to Nettle. “You said we were all going to grow up to slaughter our parents. But all this time, he was the one who was going to put our hands to the hilt.”

“He was hardly going to have to,” Nettle insists. “Thomas, Benjamin, and Smalls were going to die the week of the massacre, after the guard rounded them up and caught them. Joel was going to hang a week later. Simon here was going to run off to Estelle and stalk whores in the night, never to be caught. I—” Nettle stops,steeling himself.

My heart thuds as I watch realization click into place behind Simon’s eyes. “Ironic that Thomas was the one to die first.”

No. “Your memories were wiped in the hopes that none of you would remember the atrocities you suffered before,” I say. “So none of you would remember what had driven you to plot against your family, your town. Peter was trying to cure you.”

Nettle’s eyes are glowing with rage now. I can’t help but notice the way his grip tightens on my brother, John’s head slumped to the side. “You can wipe someone’s mind, but you can’t wipe someone’s soul. It’s like trying to yank a fishing hook out of your flesh once it’s already wrapped around a tendon. You can’t rip that out without losing something else in the process.”

“You knew, somehow,” says Simon, his gaze blank as he stares at Nettle. “You knew it was me who killed Thomas. I thought it was because you could see it in my eyes, see through my grief. I thought it was because you remembered something about me, something from before. Something that made me a killer through and through. You came to me afterward and told me you could help me. That you could protect me. Keep me from hurting anyone else. I was so sure I was a monster, I never stopped to question how you knew.”

My heart stops in my chest. “Thomas’s death wasn’t an accident, was it?”

Nettle’s rage is visceral now, reddening his features. “Peter and the Sister might have wiped Thomas’s memories, but they couldn’t wipe what was in his heart. You can’t just fix someone like that, someone like him.”

My mind goes back to the picture, the happy-go-lucky smiling boy on the parchment. Is it true that a darkness lurked beneath the surface, unable to be expunged?

“Clearly he and Victor were close,” I say. “It’s not as if he wasn’t capable of loving.”

“He wasn’t healed. Like I said, it’s not possible to fix someone like Thomas. He came out of the womb with some part of his soulmissing. One day, he was going to snap, and then he was going to kill us all.”

“You told Thomas what you remembered,” I say.

Nettle rolls his eyes. “I gave Thomas the chance to repent. A chance to convince me he’d changed. He denied having those inclinations.”

“That’s because he didn’tremember,” I say, exasperation slipping into my tone. “That’s why he started asking Peter questions. You frightened him, and he wanted to know if you were telling the truth.”

“Whether he remembered or not is of no consequence. The point is that he was hiding his inclinations, refusing to admit to them. He knew he was a monster, yet he wouldn’t let me help him. Besides, he kept telling everyone that I was lying about remembering our pasts. Trying to undermine me in case I ever thought it prudent to tell them about the freak living in their midst. He did such a swell job of making me look like a sniveling idiot grasping for attention, even Peter didn’t take it seriously. Of course, then when you got here and started asking about what I remembered, I had to think fast. I’d heard Michael singing that nursery rhyme, so I knew if I referenced it, you’d recognize the details and think I was confused.”

“How did you do it?” Simon asks, eyes glassed over. “How did you kill Thomas?”

“Rushweed,” I answer for Nettle, realization washing over me. “He dosed Thomas with rushweed before you and he wrestled. Made it look like an accident. Knew you’d choke him from watching you wrestle all the other times.” Victor’s warning when he gifted me the pouch of rushweed after Tink’s first attack returns to my mind. “If you steep it, the effect is delayed, but it’s dangerous because it can cause breathing difficulty with exertion. Nettle slipped it into Thomas’s tea. The exertion of wrestling must have activated the rushweed. His muscles would have gone limp. He wasn’t able to tap on your arm and tell you he couldn’t breathe.”

Simon gags. “You. You made me kill my friend. You made me like it.”

“Better he ruin one of us than all of us,” says Nettle. “We all have it in us, somewhere—that craving for blood. The inclination to take our pain out on something living. It’s tattooed on our souls. You’re the purest of us, Simon. It had to be you. I knew you’d be the only one who could handle it. Who could learn to get the cravings under control.”

Simon’s shaking now.

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