Page 30 of The Library at Hellebore
“Correct,” said our teacher monotonously, hands swimming down to Ford’s neck. “There’s a bucket with live dipteran larvae just behind you. The scoop is inside. Be generous with your application of the larvae. Today’s research involves understanding what occurs when undying tissue is subjected to myiasis. Will the rate of consumption be outpaced by the rate of healing? How much oxygenation do the dipteran larvae require in order to continue growth?”
“Please,” said Ford. “I don’t want this.”
“Why?” I said. “This is—”
Someone retched. This felt like unmerited grotesquerie, even for Hellebore. I stared down at Ford, repulsed by our mandate, sick to my bowels at the idea of us systematically introducing maggots into a man’s living tissue, all for irrelevant hypotheticals.
“Science,” said Professor Cartilage.
“Bullshit,” I snapped.
“In the same way pig carcasses are used in lieu of humancadavers,” he said, unmoved, “we must use alternatives where necessary in order to continue our studies. If it helps, Miss Li, this is important work you will be doing. You’ll be ensuring the survival of species outside our own.”
There it was again. He’d called ithumanscience.
“What species?”
Ford was trying to eel free of the altar, kicking at the air for leverage. Skin tore as Ford writhed, begging, and if not for the professor’s hands around the haruspex’s throat, the man might have escaped. But for all Professor Cartilage’s featherlight appearance, his grip on Ford was steel. When Ford opened his mouth to scream again, our professor, with the expression of someone waiting his turn at the post office, broke his neck.
“Begin,” said Professor Cartilage.
DAY ONE
At Hellebore, it was monsters all the way down.
Bad enough we had to worry about the faculty outside and the Librarian sleeping in the walls. Now there was a new concern right in our midst. We turned as a group to see Eoan backpedaling from the stop-motion nightmare Portia was becoming, the latter twitching forward on her hands and knees. She wasmolting.A sheath of muscle tissue and crumbling bone trailed from her, like a dress half-shed, clinging wetly to her waist.
Gone, her skin and her very red hair. Gone, the leanly muscled slope of her back and her lithe legs, her expressive hands. Gone, those velvet-soft eyes of hers—no, I amended the thought as I took in her new face, the cracked skull with chitin blooming through a maze of fractures, like she was a piece ofkintsugiinverted. No, her eyes were still there, only multiplied: a shining constellation of sable gazing benevolently down on us. I’d thought her gorgeous before in her humanity, but she seemed a miracle now, with the near translucence of her frame. Portia shuddered. Through the mess of her transformation, I could see organs shifting inside, undergoing mitosis and metamorphosis still: intestine fractalizing into tubules; a heart becoming seven then unfurling into a single red organlike a crooked finger set over her still human spine, which was reassessing just how many vertebrae she really needed.
She chirruped at Eoan, a dissonantly kittenish noise, almost cute (a word no one should associate with an overgrown arachnid). She’d been human a second ago. I was sure of that. Had we missed something? Did something catalyze this? Those thoughts came after, long after the fact, and the blood was pooling black and thick. The only thing resounding in my mind then was:
Oh shit.
Portia exploded forward.
I started in her direction and slammed into Adam’s outstretched arm.
“Wait,” he said, calmer than anyone had the right to be, his expression one of academic interest. “Just listen to what she’s saying—”
“She’s going to kill him,” panted Gracelynn, feral with worry. “We have to—”
“No, she’s not. Justwatch.”
“She’s hungry,” said Minji from somewhere behind me, unbothered.
Not everyone who came to Hellebore was a murderer. Accidentally guilty of manslaughter, sure, that part was inevitable. Powers like what burned through us have an elemental voracity, the carnivorousness of a natural disaster: they can’t help but cause hurt. But most of us never started out wanting to commit homicide, for all that the school made it so easy to forget such aspirations.
By graduation, though, there wasn’t a student in our class with clean hands, and anyone who might have objected to this was dead. The eight of us were not what anyone would callgood. Even Gracelynn, for all their softness. Someone with more of a heart would have told Adam to fuck himself, would have hesitated less, would have leapt to help Eoan because that was what you did when you were a good person.
But we hadn’t survived this long by putting too many others first. We’d been taught too well.
So we did nothing.
Surprisingly, Adam was right. Chelicerae scythed out from the ruins of Portia’s face as pedipalps reached from her throat, all said appendages coming to close gently over Eoan’s cheeks. And while spiders had no tongues, Portia seemed to have no knowledge of that: a red stem of muscle wormed out of her mouth and between the boy’s lips.
“Is it weird I find this kinda hot?” said Rowan.
“No one asked you anything,” said Minji.
