Page 34 of The Teras Trials

“Well, let’s see,” I whisper, scanning the teras’ face. “Do you remember the stories you were ripped from? Did you experience the death every time it was spoken?”

The teras paces the cell, ignoring me, but I want to speak the line anyway.

“The Homeric Hymn to Apollo,” I say, “I know there’s something in there about you dying.” I can’t remember it. I don’t know it. But screw this beast to hell. “The writhing, the screaming. Apollo stole your life. I can’t wait for someone else to steal it again.”

It doesn’t react. I watch it a moment longer. Then I open the door and I am free.

* * *

Outside the trial, it is chaos.

One of the doors to my left swings open wildly and whacks the wall. Someone throws themselves out, screaming. The young woman drops to her knees and sobs. Blood pours from her shoulder. I catch sight of it; destroyed, open and sinewy and split apart by teeth. Someone wearing a white apron approaches her for healing.

“Show me.”

The voice startles me. I jump, and turn to find a Healer there for me, too. His skin is a russet-brown, his eyes are kind, but there’s a distant stare to him. He barely sees me. I see his lips moving as if in prayer, and then I register slowly that he is speaking to me. I hear none of it.

You’re in shock, something tells me. How fucking pathetic.

That last bit, of course, is from Thad.

The Healer stops trying to speak to me. He tugs me away from the door and puts something on the swelling of my left leg. I look down, startled to see my pant leg ripped apart. Red pinpricks dot my lower calf, and there’s a prickly numbness to it that makes it hardly seem like my leg. God, I am getting dizzy. My body feels wrong.

I blink, and then I’m sitting on a long wooden bench beneath a series of stained-glass windows. How long I have been sitting there, I don’t know, only that a good hundred people are milling about in this room with me. One of the trial doors opens and another student I don’t know steps out and collapses.

I don’t see Victoria, or Bellamy, or Leo. I don’t see the Lins. But then again, everything and everyone is a blur. I crane my head to search for them, but nausea swims into my head and makes the movement sickening.

There are too many people. It’s an odd expanse of a room; a fat hall with several closed doors leading off it. A hundred steps away, it curves to the left.

I look down at my leg. The swelling has gone down considerably. An itchy, blistering spot is growing near the puncture wound. I close my eyes and take a deep breath. This is normal, I remind myself. A thick layer of shock that is blocking everything else out. But the longer I sit there, the thinner that shock becomes.

A latent burst of adrenaline floods me. I double forward, feeling everything all at once: fear, shame, and swathes of anger filling me up. I remember the manticore, how I’d lain on my back beneath it, close to death. And now, locked in a room with fire and weapons, I’d still barely managed to make it out alive.

What am I without Thad? Shame is in me, tugging at the corner of my mind, but underneath it all is a logical fury that is growing.

It is the rage of a man who had come so close — God, I had come so damned close to real purpose, real drive and satisfaction— and here is just another wretched place. I want to lie down. I have that sinking feeling in me, where lying down forever feels attractive.

But then there’s an outraged bark from down the hall: someone is shouting madly. A few others and I swing around at the sound. It is so harsh after so much stiff silence.

Several people step away, like the anger is too much to hear after the trial. People are shaken. But I make myself stand. I make myself feel this; I soak up the rage and the anger and the weeping, and I step into the spaces other people are vacating. And through the crowd, once more, I see him.

Leo.

I stop walking.

Then I am moving without really thinking, and the crowd moves apart to accommodate me, and Leo is standing there like a stone in a river, and God, he’s alive. He is alive. Relief douses me, and I shake with the ebbing adrenaline and this new joy. The current pulls me towards him.

Leo is one of several students, animated and shouting: “How could you? How could you! What damned evil is in you to think you can throw us to teras and we’ll just take it?!”

And I realise the torment of what he has faced. I see these students, and I know they are not Londoners. They are xenos. They are men and women who have spent every day fighting for their lives, only to be drawn here by the promise of safety and learning and protection.

And there are teras here, too.

I see Leo jab his finger against someone’s chest and have to shift my way through the crowd to better make out his target. I freeze.

Dean Drearton faces Leo with a placid, detached smile. This was a different man, I think, than the one who solemnly greeted us all. Who spoke to Thad in his office. Who comforted my mother for our loss.

But no. They are one and the same. And the longer I look at him now, the more certain I am that he feels none of it. None of the weight of this trial, of the loss, of the deaths. This is only the first one.

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