Page 38 of The Library at Hellebore

“Only because of incompetence,” she said cheerfully. “And sentimentality, really. People never know how to react whena child is on trial. I had it on good authority that at least half of them were convinced of your guilt but they felt bad about sentencing someone so young and sweet.What a lovely girl,they said to one another.It’d be wrong to destroy her life.”

The headmaster fanned out the papers and gestured me closer. Reluctantly, I complied, studying what she had on display. It was everything. My school records, printouts from CCTV footage, witness testimonials, rental agreements, pages from a journal that I had kept between the ages of fifteen and twenty; pages I knew had been burned down to cremains. I swallowed, raising my gaze to her once I’d taken stock of her trove.

“What do you want?”

“I don’t want anything,” said the headmaster. “Well, no. That’s a lie. What I want is for you to know that if Hellebore had not intervened, you’d have been lobotomized. You’d have had your brain sliced up before they shipped you off to do some governmental dirty work. I promise, you don’t want to be part of that.”

“So you want me to be grateful.”

Her smile lengthened by an eighth of an inch. “No, no. I don’t want that. I don’t care if you’re grateful. I want you to know that Hellebore has enough power to circumvent the ambitions of entire governmental bodies. That the word of God has less authority than my signature. And if you think you can escape the school, that there is any way you can leave without graduating, you’re not only a vicious little creature but a very stupid one.”

The headmaster sat down behind her desk, fingers tented, her expression mild.

“Any questions?”

We’re the wasps.

If she thought she was going to get a rise out of me, she was sorely mistaken. I kept my expression bored and tepid, with a slightly astringent sneer for good measure. I cannot count the number of people who have attempted to cajole, cow, and otherwise coerce me into doing what they wanted. It was one of the central reasons behind why I ran; my mother was no saint but she didn’t deserve being subjected to that carousel of bullies tiptoeing up to our porch, half of which seemed to think threatening her would motivate me toward compliance. (Spoiler: it did not.)

Here now was another person, anotherstupidpunter, gleefully trying to extort obedience from me. Briefly, I entertained the notion of testing my powers on the headmaster but a) I was angry, not stupid, and b) even if I successfully deposed the headmaster, there would be the rest of Hellebore to contend with and even I wasn’t arrogant enough to think I’d survive that. Not yet.

She looked me over. “Some of you are the wasps. Some of you, like Miss Khoury, even rise to become queens. But you’re not that. You’re a corpse soaking in enzymatic secretions, hoping to be useful for the first time in your life. You’re not a wasp, no. You’re just raw material until you learn better. And for your sake,” said the headmaster with the satisfaction of a dowager explaining she had spent her fortune and her vulturous children would inherit nothing but lifelong resentment, “I hope you do. What else do you want to know?”

“Threatening me isn’t going to work.”

“I’m not threatening you,” said the headmaster with another effervescent laugh. She gestured the servitor closer, crooking two fingers in its direction. When it had shambled into reach, she wove one finger in a circle and the masked figure broke into sobs. As I watched, it went down first on oneknee and then another, retrieving from a drawer in the headmistress’s monolithic desk the daintiest pearl-handled bone saw I’d seen in my life.

“A threat is a statement ofintention.What I said was fact,” she said, hooking a leg over the knee of the servitor. She propped an elbow on the armrest of her chair and set her chin in her palm. Almost imperceptibly, the headmistress nodded, the tiniest motion of her chin. In answer, the servitor ran the bone saw over its mask and around its skull, like it was a tin of dog food being roughly opened up. When that was done, the headmistress slid a nail under the lid of the servitor’s skull and flipped it open, revealing an expanse of brain. “You are a vicious, stupid creature who thinks of nothing but surviving to the next day. Fortunately for you, I know what to do with food-animals. Which is to say, I allow them to live until their appointed time unless they fuck up, in which case—”

She hooked a finger into the servitor’s skull, dragging it along the rim, before lifting the accumulated brain to her mouth. Her tongue was pale and gray as it lapped up the clot of gray matter, her smile languid. I didn’t have a comeback to that, to any of what was going on. She took in how I was trembling: teeth gritted, fury radiant enough that I could pretend I couldn’t see my own fear through the glare.

“Now get out of my office. You’ve wasted enough of my time already.”

DAY TWO

I couldn’t tell you how long I had walked in this agony of reflection, half hoping something, anything, would happen, and it’d all just end there. I was acutely aware the Librarian was there in the building with us, but where? I was no longer just physically tired; I was also emotionally exhausted. There was only so much trauma one could accumulate before the nervous system buckled under its weight. In comparison to everything else, being eaten alive felt simple at this point.

Mostly, it’d been Ford’s eyes. As I was moving to leave the alcove, I saw the lost look give way, just for a second, to fear. He was in there. The lights were on but the doors were locked and the windows barred. Whatever else Minji had done, she had not—not fully, at least—disconnected his awareness from the world, which made me wonder if he’d been conscious of those hairs burrowing into him, if he’d been screaming inside the walls of his own mind as those fine strands punctured his corneal membranes.

I found myself wondering if it had hurt worse because he hadn’t been permitted to scream.

“There you are. I’ve been looking all over for you.”

I jolted at Rowan’s voice. He slunk out from around a corner. I stared at his face. The deep shadows of the corridor had aged him somehow. I could see how if the years got to sap whatlittle puppy fat he had it would crevice. I could tell where the weak jaw would recede into an excess of jowls. If he lived to be an old man, Rowan would thin to a long-limbed strip of ruddy-skinned jerky.

“What do you want?”

“Did you fucking see what happened to Ford? I didn’t know Minji could do that. I didn’t know a person could do that. I’ve seen a lot of shit but that was in a class of its own. Like, what kind of—” Rowan’s hands shook as he patted at his pockets, his sleeves rolled up his bony arms. “Shit, where are my cigarettes?”

“Maybe because she’s not a person.”

Rowan stopped his search, wide-eyed as he said, “Shut up.”

Long welts of blue shadow dappled the walls. I could still feel the weight of Minji’s slender frame nestled against my side, hear those voices, and it’d been easy then to forget what she was with the salt scent of her skin in my nose, easy to put aside the fact she wasn’t a human as much as she was a reservoir of parasites. I ground the nail of my index finger against the meat of my thumb, slicing at the skin until it was pared away, the pinprick agony enough to reground me in the moment.

“Between the teachers and the Librarian and Minji, I’m beginning to wonder what the hell Hellebore really is,” I said. There was so much blood in the proverbial water, it was almost a clot in my lungs. “Do you remember what the Librarian said?”

Rowan didn’t get the chance to answer. Gracelynn barreled in, relief washing across their features as they laid their velveteen eyes on us.

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