Page 84 of The Teras Trials

Don’t feel it. Don’t regret what you’ve done.

I stand tall. “I was going to say that it was necessary. That I could have left you there, too, to be mauled to death. I could have, and I didn’t, and I had to make a choice. I bore it, and in the moment I chose you. So you can hate me. I will take your hate, Victoria, because it means you live. It means you live. But don’t forget: you live because of me.”

“Bastard,” she murmurs. She stares at me from under her brow, frowning, and wipes her tears away with the flat of her palm. Then she backs herself against the wall well away from me, away from Leo too. But she does not cry again.

We only have to wait a further five or so minutes before the Lins return, puffing and exhausted but with the salve in hand. As for what comes next, they all turn to me. I regret ever stepping up that first night. I regret a lot of things, then.

Clearing my throat, I nod to the salve gripped tight in Silas’ hands. “We need to make sure it eats it all. Get as many people as we can out—” this statement causes a particular kind of tightening in the air, a collective breath being drawn, as if to say, now? Now you want to get them all out? As if Fred wasn’t the one who sacrificed a whole table of students. As if I was the one who had run first. “—and close the doors. Let the beast die slowly.”

I try to frame that last part like a punishment for the teras, and not the riskiest part of the plan, but no one says anything about it, because what else is there to do? The hemlock is the only plan we have. We must follow through.

Silas puts his hands through his hair and over his face and that somehow puts resolve back in him. “Alright. Okay. We need—meat. Lather it with the salve. And it seems to like moving prey. So we’ll have to. . .”

He doesn’t finish.

Moving prey. Like the manticore. I distracted that beast by running, then, to give my brother a few more gasping breaths. But this thing is lithe, not bulky like that beast. Quicker. That distraction would be suicide.

Fred bites her nails and glances over to Victoria, who has started to drift, staring out into the rain and losing herself to the lulling rainfall and the night. Leo is quiet, too. Just watching me. I feel—exposed. More naked to him than I ever have been, even after the ways he’s touched me, even though he’s seen me beg.

I turn back to Silas, because it’s safer to stare at that man than anyone else right now. He’s the most collected. He knows what we must do.

And I know, of course, where we will get the meat. There is an abundance of the stuff, torn apart, stringy, fresh, just beyond the door. But I can’t say this aloud. I’ll lose the others, whoever is still hanging on to the sense that we can complete these trials with a shred of our morality intact.

I just put my arms down by my side, very stiffly, grinding my hands into tight fists so they act as tiny weights to ground me. Then I walk back to the great hall.

“Cass,” Leo murmurs as I pass, unwinding his arms. I half expect him to reach out and stop me, or to graze his fingers along my shoulder if just for the comfort. But then I’m past him and out of range and he hasn’t moved at all.

I am alone as I approach the doors. The others linger back, even though the doors are still securely shut. I press my ear to the wood and wait. My body braces for a cacophony, or pleading. But there is nothing except a soft hum that might have been my own fluttering heart, or perhaps the sound of chewing on the other side of the door. Adrenaline bludgeons back my sense until I feel nothing beyond my duty. I push one door open but it doesn’t move smoothly. The hinges groan and creak and I freeze with only a fraction of it open, waiting for the teras to come screaming.

I hear more clearly the sounds of flesh tearing. There is a wetness, and a persistent chewing like the meat is tough and stringy. I hear breathing, too; firstly the heavy panting of the teras as it eats, happily grunting, but underneath that is an ambient struggling; several humans desperately trying to smother the sounds of their living. I can’t see anyone like this, though, so I risk opening the door further.

At once, my body seizes. The visual onslaught is immense and thick. The floors are starkly red with new blood, and smeared with the gore of bodies, of things that had tumbled out from shredded stomachs and bowels, brown or black with their density. A body near the door still twitches and pulses pinkly. The almost-corpse has been torn asunder, stomach gaping. I can’t tell who it had once been. I pray I never knew them.

At my feet is Bellamy. I’m certain of it. So certain, in fact, I refuse to look down. I stare at the end of the hall, at the upturned table and a pile of bodies that the teras feasts on—the table Fred led it to. I can’t see anyone else. They are hunkered down behind tables.

I swallow, and pray, and think, God, there is no way I’m a good man. Because the closest body to the door is Bellamy’s. And I need the meat of him. I need to use the man I sacrificed—the boy, really—a friend I left. I need to bend down and drag his lifeless body through the door. I need to slather him in hemlock salve and dance his cadaver about to earn the teras’ attention. I need to throw him to it and pray he is consumed whole, torn apart and chewed and digested until the hemlock finds purchase in the Nemean Lion’s blood. And I can justify it to myself, I can say: everyone else in that room has no chance at living unless you do this. I can say: it is a final ‘fuck you’ from Bellamy, a chance for his flesh to get revenge. But in this dark and claustrophobic choice, there is also clarity.

My justifications are bullshit. And if I do this, I lose Victoria. I do this, and I lose myself. I am bewildered by the choice, or the lack thereof.

I don’t see what else I can do.

So I force myself to look at him. Right near the door. Dead. Bellamy has fallen in a perfect tableau, arm outstretched, reaching for the handle. An arm’s length away. He was so close. And I am the reason he is like this.

He is missing one leg. His left has been torn off. Half of his thigh is still attached, but barely. Stringy tendons have plopped onto the floor and pieces of them trail towards the mostly intact lower leg, which is still neatly sitting in the pant leg. The teras had given up on him, perhaps when he’d stopped twitching. Perhaps someone else on that other table still lived and convulsed enough to catch the lion’s eye. Whatever the reason, Bellamy has been left mostly intact. Which is worse, I think, because he is so close. So tangible. Eurydice at the mouth of the underworld, moments before she is lost forever. Almost free. Almost alive.

I gently shut the door and go back to the others, the bearer of news that will render me unsalvageable.

“Well?” Silas says.

“You have the right of it. It’s the only plan. The teras is at the back eating. It’s given up on all the bodies that aren’t twitching. So we have to. . . make one move.”

Fred closes her eyes and steels herself. She takes a deep breath and that is the extent of her emotion. I want her to feel what I feel. Maybe she does. Maybe the guilt is rotting her gut, making her mad, and she just had a better way of hiding it than I do. Part of me—the part that is drowning, and wants to drown with someone else—is desperate to say: the teras is eating the people you sacrificed. But there is no point to this pettiness. I will make myself the blackguard; I will bear all their misdirected guilt and anger; I will be a saviour in truth and a devil in the histories. Why does it matter so much to me? I am not a godly man. My faith branded me hell spawn from birth. Why does it matter so much? Why do I care what they think? I am a walking sin; I am carnally depraved. Another mark against my name can hardly hurt me.

But it does hurt. Leo, whispering, it is not a sin to love in my mind, Victoria confiding in me, Bellamy exhausted and straightforward telling me I really thought the University was good.

Have I become so twisted that I will do this to my friend?

But inevitably I tell them, “There is a body near the door. It’s the closest one and the most intact. We bring it out, put the salve on it, push it back in for the teras.”

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