Page 8 of The Library at Hellebore

The Korean girl looked over, a perfect eyebrow creeping upward. “Lying doesn’t become you.”

“I’m not lying, Minji,” he said. “The entire point of Ministry families is to minimize the risk of unnecessary casualties.I’d prefer there be no corpses. But sometimes, one does what is needed to survive.”

Sullivan spoke with, if not the arrogance, then the self-possession of someone whose family was paid handsomely to submit to routine inspections, to being surveilled from cradle to cremation. I didn’t want to throw in too early with any one party, not before I had a better understanding of the ecosystem of personalities, but I suspected he was being truthful. That was the whole point, after all. Ostensibly all that surveillance was for the safety of the families and the security of the world at large: if they could predict when a god might come to drive them to destructive impulses, countermeasures could be devised. Suicides could be arranged. It made sense that he didn’t want for there to be more death.

Then again, the Ministry wasn’tactuallya governmental body with the best interests of the world at heart. (Although how many governments care, honestly?) They were a conglomeration of corporations who’d purportedly sworn to serve and protect in the legislative sense of the phrase, but there were the rumors of the Ministry contracting out the services of those families under their care. Only when it was strictly necessary, of course.

“Sullivan Rivers,” he introduced himself politely to me.

“He’s a bit of a whiner, I’m afraid,” said Portia. “He complained so very loudly when they said he couldn’t share a dorm room with his girlfriend, Delilah. Kicked up anactualtantrum. I thought Professor Hammer was going to have a kitten.”

“I wouldn’t be surprised if he did,” said Minji. “The faculty here is… strange.”

“Strange? Try fucking weird? Like, everything’s off about them. Don’t you think it’s kinda suspicious how all theirnames are nouns?” hissed a pompadoured boy to her right. “Hammer, Crystal, Rock, Cartilage.”

Sullivan stared at Portia, his calm facade still uncracked. “We weretoldwe could share quarters. I merely pointed that out to the administration.”

“Total tantrum,” said Portia.

“Don’t you think that’s a bit judgy?” Minji asked her seatmate. “Maybe it’s school policy.”

“How the hell would that make for good school policy?” demanded Pompadour.

“A complaint is not a tantrum, Miss du Lac,” said Sullivan.

“I’ll stop here,” said Portia. “Wouldn’t want him throwing another one of those.”

“Miss du Lac—”

A tremor of music ended our chattering. Unseen cellos were joined by a low bellowing of trombones, with trumpets rushing after like they’d arrived too late to the performance. The sound of them drove the masked workers in the orchestra pit into comical panic: they flung their arms up, sprinted in pointless circles, colliding with one another, before at last surrendering to whatever fate they had briefly thought of eluding and prostrating themselves, bowing and scraping, quivering like gelatin. The lights dimmed until only the raised dais was illuminated and, as if on cue, the restive crowd began to quiet, silence rippling outward from the stage. Soon, there was no sound at all, not a cough or a chuckle, barely a hiss of respiration, only two hundred eyes warily evaluating the stage with the care of rats being proffered a poisoned cheese roulette.

The air flinched; the light winked out for a papercut’s width of a second, barely long enough to be registered save as the tiniest of haptic jolts. Between one blink and the next, a figure made itself known: tall, straight-backed, imperious,and narrow as a rapier. Like the servitors in the pit, who were now emitting agonized noises, it was masked and impossible to gender, its silhouette such that it could be male, female, some fantastical conjugation of the two, or neither. Unlike the miserable figures in the opera pit, it was dressed beautifully, the folds of its opaline robes seizing and refracting the light. The overall effect was mesmerizing, a carefully plotted performance. The figure looked as if it were enameled in church glass, ethereal yet formidable.

“Students,” it said in an old woman’s voice, cracked but still impossibly resonant. “Beloved class.”

Portia: “That’s the headmaster. Headmistress. Interchangeable, really. Depending on how much you like the patriarchy.”

“Very little,” I whispered.

“Oh, wecanbe friends then,” said Portia with a dazzling smile, and despite earlier, I felt myself warming again.

“It is my honor to welcome you to Hellebore. My great joy to say yes, this is where you begin your journey to redemption, to wholesomeness—”

“Wholesomeness, my god,” grumbled Sullivan. “You’d think they could have hired a speechwriter.”

“Not everyone has Ministry money.”

“The sins of the father shall be inherited by the son, I see.”

“The sins of capitalism, more like it,” Portia bit back.

“—to a future where you are loved,accepted,” continued the headmistress, walking up to a pulpit that origami-ed up from the floor, lacquered panes of pale wood collapsing upward into place, gaining elaborate cartouches, growing foliated, “where your potential is fulfilled. Where you can be of proper use to the world and to the people around you because yes, it is important that we are of service to our communities.”

“Communities that abandoned us,” said Portia. “My parents sent me to boarding school and never came back for me. Ended up living in an attic for years. Miss Minchin was a god-awful substitute.”

“Minchin?” I said. “Like in the book?”

Portia opened her mouth, halfway to an answer, face lighting with delight, when the headmaster drowned out whatever reply she was assembling.

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