Page 28 of The Library at Hellebore

But he had fought.

If I lived to be a hundred, which seemed unlikely then given my circumstances, I would remember that Sullivan Rivers had fought.

Minji, perched on the armrest of the battered couch, swung her legs as she said, “You know, we’ve only seen Ford read one organ. Perhaps we need him to take a proper look at the rest of them. That way we can be sure of who is making the right decision.”

“You know what?” said Adam with a dazzling smile, striding over to Ford. “Let’s do it.”

With that, Adam drove his fist straight into the other man’s belly.His knuckles sank through fabric and flesh like so much butter warming on a counter, his arm igniting when he was elbow-deep in Ford’s abdominal captivity, and Ford screamed like a pig halfway in the slaughter.

With excruciating care, Adam removed loop after loop of blackened intestine.

“Tell me what happens, oracle,” said Adam in his normal voice, smiling throughout, smiling like it was nothing, like it couldn’t possibly hurt.

Ford squealed in idiot torment, a black stain leaching across the front of his jeans. The air filled with the smell of piss, of bowels dispensing what little they’d collected.

“You’rekillinghim,” Gracelynn, snarling, desperate, half rising. “Stop it!”

“Haruspices don’t die that easily,” said Adam, holding on for a moment longer before he released his grip on Ford, flinging him away, viscera suppurating out of the cauterized hole in the other man’s belly. Ford tumbled forward, facedown on the mosaiced floor. I thought I heard Minji giggle.

“Happy?” said Adam, looking at me, ash sleeting from his fingers. “Don’t tell me I never do anything for you.”

“I won’t,” said Minji. “We promise.”

“You’re a fucking bastard, Adam. You’re a monster,” came Gracelynn’s bellowing rejoinder, and I could chart in the inflection of Adam’s smile, her transmutation in his mind, how she went from risible novelty to an insult that required addressing.

But before he could do anything more, the room filled with the sound of Eoan screaming.

BEFORE

To my absolute dismay, I shared more classes with Johanna than anyone else I had come to know, which was to say we were in five together. Three of which we lacked any aptitude for, as they either involved some talent with fire (Adam lorded over the rest of us there) or economics (banal, everyday economics, entirely unmagical, taught inexplicably by the snow-haired counselor whose general advice involved variations of the wordendure). I excelled at Abdominal Infrastructure, along with Rowan, of course, though none of us had any love for the professor, a starched and formal horror of a man named Professor Cartilage, who droned on and on and on while the corpses we were meant to autopsy and process rotted before our eyes.

One day, Cartilage made us descend into the bowels of Hellebore for class. From the roof to its grandiose main hall, the school was three stories in height. It’d been intimated that there was a basement and though we weren’t expressly forbidden from exploring the subterranean levels, those few who’d ventured bathyal-ward in the first few months of our enrollment did not come back. So we left it alone. We were already learning there were too many ways to die in Hellebore. Thus, when Professor Cartilage gave his instructions several daysahead of our next class, we all railed against them, suspicious of his intent.

“Could be a test,” said a pale, fox-featured Russian girl, wringing the ends of her hair, which fell long and straight, a shade of blond only fractionally deeper than her skin. “Back home, one of the rehabilitation centers would do it too.”

“Do what?” asked Johanna, all naïveté and wide eyes.

The girl rolled her eyes in answer. All twenty of us were sprawled in our usual classroom, a carbon copy of every other: glossy dark wood, an omnipresent scent of pine resin, uncomfortable chairs. Twin oak-skinned boys, taller than the rest of us, exchanged looks.

“See who complies. See who doesn’t,” said one of them.

“The ones who don’t,” said the other, tone as clipped as their companion’s, “die.”

“We could just ask the professor, you know,” said a beautiful older woman who looked for all the world like she’d survived a bad marriage and single parenthood and now was pursuing second chances through an education in something new. Except, of course, this wasHellebore,and I had to wonder why she was here.

It was a reasonable enough proposition and we went en masse to his office, an ordeal that took nearly all day to complete due to Hellebore’s spatial inconsistencies. Hellebore kept changing: slowly, illogically, expanding in places, narrowing in others. Facilities moved, the professors’ wing especially. We’d nearly given up when a door presented itself, a brass placard announcing the name of its occupant:CARTILAGE. Entering, unfortunately, we found nothing but a note that stated in his swooping calligraphic writing,Latecomers will be punished.

We took the warning to heart.

Getting to the basement proved as difficult as locating Professor Cartilage’s office. On the ground floor, we discovered more doors than were reasonable. One yielded a path to the gardens, although it was placed on the opposite end of the building to them; one opened to darkness and the sound of a girl sobbing rhythmically; one to a pool in which a thing with no face swam; one to a rock face. We tried eight doors next. Two hid a masked, shrieking thing that leapt out and dragged a student inside. The first time it happened, Johanna wailed until an older student slapped her with military efficacy: teeth clattered out of her mouth as she slumped on the gray concrete, clutching at her jaw.

“I heard stories about Cartilage,” said the woman heartlessly. The weak light grayed her face, made her look older still, and tinged her eye sockets green. “If we’re late, we’re going to wish it’d been us instead.”

The second time a student was taken, no one even looked back.

The ninth door we opened spilled into a stairwell that helixed down into a deep apricot-tinged darkness. Someone sang softly at the bottom.

It was Ford.

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