Page 56 of The Library at Hellebore

“It was nothing. I wish the three of y’all hadn’t come.” They touched their cheek to Gracelynn’s as they said this. “But you were clearly trying to help my darlin’ here, so.”

“They lured me with the promise of escaping Snake Island,” I said.

Kevin’s gaze flicked to Gracelynn. “You told them I could do that?”

“I’m sorry! I know I shouldn’t have!”

“It’s all right,” said Kevin and they looked over to me then, guarded in their subsequent explanation. “I can’t. I don’t think I can, at least. And you should know it isn’t without risk. The shadows don’t mind me. Other people, on the other hand, they take them sometimes. I couldn’t promise you’d make it through, and that’s too high a risk to take.”

“But maybe it’s better than nothing,” I said.No, no, no.My hopes of escaping Hellebore were running through my fingers like so much sand. I was willing to be unmade, shredded by the shadows, at just the smallest chance of getting out of here.

“If you didn’t need rescuing, though,” Rowan said, “why are you here instead of out there?”

“Ah, well. I’m going to let the reason forthatexplain herself.”

The reason in question stepped meekly out of the darkness from behind Kevin: Johanna.

“Jo,” said Kevin, earning my instant fondness, “was caught sneaking into the library without permission. Obviously, the Librarian took offense to that.”

“Listen, I did absolutely nothing wrong. I came here to research an assignment!”

“Without permission,” said Kevin levelly.

At this, Johanna crumpled. She’d been lithe once. These days, she was just emaciated, eaten up by the rigors of our curriculum, by what was increasingly looking like a rigged game. Shadows—bruises or something worse, I couldn’t tell then—flowered along her arms, filled the undersides of her eyes. No faculty member would give an assignment that needed access to the library, not even Cartilage. The fact she was here said everything. Johanna was just behind, like the rest of us. Underwater, with no oxygen left in the tank.

“You’re lucky I was there,” said Kevin.

“I wasn’t expecting secret passages for some reason. How did you know this was here?” I asked.

Kevin shrugged a shoulder. “I didn’t. There was every chance that Jo and I would have found ourselves inside a rock face.”

“If you were wrong, wouldn’t you two have been…” Rowan drew a line with his thumb over his throat, finishing with a little choked noise, as though it wasn’t clear what he was alluding to.

“Big time,” said Kevin, kissing the top of Gracelynn’s head.

“Anyway,” said Jo loudly. She extricated a prettily filigreed wireframe from a jacket pocket, put it together, and set it down on the dust-smeared floor: a smokeless flame leapt into life a second after, radiating a pleasant bronze warmth and enough light to show that the ceiling was about eighteen feet high. The corridor in which we stood seemed to go forever in both directions, a narrow channel of space barely wide enough for us to traverse it single file. Johanna picked up the lantern, its light casting a fan of multi-jointed shadows over one wall. “Can you please just use the shadows already? The Librarian’s going to look in here at some point and I’d rather not be here when it arrives.”

I scanned the path in both directions as the others argued about how to get out of here. I couldn’t fathom the purpose of this space: it was too narrow to be an escape route, too ill-lit and too badly engineered to expedite the movement of staff or servants. I couldn’t imagine the Librarian needing this crawlspace either.

Worryingly, the passage reminded me of when I was eight; my mother, in a weird fit of charity, had taken me to a farm to see its myriad livestock. We petted horses and doe-eyedcalves, fed the ducklings at their algae-thatched pool before finishing the day with a trip to the abattoir, where we watched cows urged down a killing chute to their deaths on the other side; the owners had promised us steak to take home. I cried. My mother had chuckled, not unkindly, reminding me that life was eat or be eaten. The surfaced memory left me cold to the marrow.

“Okay,” said Kevin, loud enough to make me jump. “Okay, if anything happens, that’s on you. Y’all are lovely company, but I don’t want to keep you any longer. We can all go. If you’re open to it, anyway.”

“Open as a—” began Rowan gleefully.

“Don’t finish that sentence,” I said.

“Finally,” sighed Johanna.

“Ready,” said Gracelynn, softer than the rest of us, their fingers twining with Kevin’s.

Kevin gestured for all of us to link hands, then pressed a hand to their sternum and the world was bending in eye-watering ways. I thought I saw their hand reach through strata of realities, passing through bone to where their lungs nested; I thought I saw a wrought iron edifice of chains and barbed spires suspended in nothing; I thought I heard something scream just out of sight; thought I felt something brush my cheek, something with teeth and too many fingers; and I thought I felt a mouth close over the pane of my right shoulder, curious. It was like dying of the cold and burning alive at the same time, my tongue molten in my jaw. I felt past and future concatenated. I listened as the syllabary of time expanded into a thousand dead languages and then shrink into a single word and that word wasnow.

BEFORE

That last night before graduation, before all hell broke from the gates, Johanna woke me as the first eerie blue light of dawn crept through the sky. I startled at the weight of her settling on the corner of my bed, jolting from unconsciousness to wide-awake dignity.

“The fuck did I say about—”

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