Chapter 3
CHAPTER
“I’ll meet you guys in the dining hall,” I said ten minutes later, when we’d all made our way back down Bascite Boulevard toward our houses. “I’ve got to go grab something for my head.”
Indeed, my headache had only increased its tempo on the walk over, probably due to the burst of conversation as everyone who’d witnessed Jenia’s exile ran off to tell the rest of the Institute what had happened.
The birds, too, flew overhead, chirping and squawking about the gossip to every Wild Whisperer they could find.
Only my own group remained somber, as if even Rodhi couldn’t think of anything else to say.
“Okay.” Emelle tried to smile at me, but her lips wobbled. “But don’t be late. I heard Cook convinced some lemurs to bring her morel mushrooms for the potato pie tonight.”
It was the best bit of normalcy she could offer after what had just happened.
I squeezed her hand in thanks and nodded at the others before racing into my house’s foyer ahead of them, up the stairs and to the second-year’s floor.
Here, chipped wooden doors lined the hallway, interspersed with windows where potted plants waved from their windowsills as I passed.
After our fourth quarterly test last year, my class of Wild Whisperers had switched from the communal bunkroom to this hall of four-person dorm rooms, so I now shared a space with Emelle and two others: a girl named Cilia, who hung with Mitzi Hodges, and Dazmine Temperton, who—
Walked out of our room right as I was opening it.
Well, shit. In the chaos of the last half an hour, I’d forgotten… forgotten that Dazmine had been Jenia’s best friend. She rarely talked to any of us, always slipping out of bed first thing in the morning and returning late at night, her face always impassive, unreadable.
Now, though, Dazmine’s usually perfect, bronze-toned cheeks were streaked with tears, and her chin was quivering.
“I’m sorry,” I whispered before I could think twice about it. “I know Jenia and I didn’t really get along, but I’m still sorry that it happened to her. That there was nothing anyone could do.”
That there was nothing you could do, I meant to say beneath the layers, because from the puffiness of her face, I knew my frustration was nothing compared to her agony at losing her friend forever.
Dazmine took a step back. Her gaze squeezed into something hateful and cold.
“It should have been you,” she said.
Now it was me who stumbled back. “What?”
“It should have been you,” Dazmine repeated without flinching, crossing her arms. “I don’t know what happened when those pirates everyone is talking about breached the shield, but I do know that Fergus and Jenia were trying to get me in on a plan to…
” Her eyes darted behind my shoulder for a moment, as if to make sure the hallway behind me was clear, “to pull some kind of prank on you. I refused, and then—then suddenly Jenia comes back completely deranged and mutilated, Fergus doesn’t come back at all, and you’re just… completely fine?”
I took another step back. Not because this was the most Dazmine had ever talked to me, even as a suitemate…
not even because she’d just admitted something horrible—that Jenia and Fergus had been planning to…
to embarrass or hurt me in some way. No, I took that step back because I suddenly remembered what Quinn herself had told Dyonisia in the Testing Center three months ago: There was a prank.
I was just going into the jungle to play a little prank with my friends.
Did that mean Quinn had been in on it, too—whatever it was that Dazmine herself had denied joining? Was that why Quinn had been interrogated right before me, because she’d been involved in an altercation with me?
“I know Jenia had her quirks, and sometimes she took things too far.” Dazmine’s throat bobbed. A single tear broke through the corner of her eye and marked a lazy path down her cheek. “But you did something to her, Rayna. You did something to both her and Fergus.”
She took three steps forward then, until she was hovering right in front of my face and I could see that single tear wobbling on her jawline up close.
“And I’m going to find out what.”
She brushed past me, not quite jostling my shoulder but whipping me with the flared edges of her braids.
“Well, that was awkward.”
I jumped at the voice, but it was just Willa, my dearest mouse friend, sniffling on her hind legs from my nest of pillows. Ever since I’d moved into this four-person room, she’d taken to sleeping in my bed with me at night.
“You heard all that?”
“Well, duh. I hear everything. Except my cousin Barty when he snores. I put earplugs in for that.”
I didn’t even want to know what Willa’s earplugs were made of.
Closing the door behind me, I strode to the arched glass window by Emelle’s bed, where she kept her bedside table topped with a chiseled stone birdfeeder—every weekend, she foraged for seeds and nuts all by herself so that she could keep that feeder filled to the brim, a treat for any kind of winged visitor.
No matter how many times she opened that window to let a bird in, though, a tangle of ivy always cloaked the outside of it as soon as she closed it again. Like a curtain made of foliage.
Now, I grunted slightly as I nudged open the window as much as the ivy would let me, then hummed at the vines.
As much as I did need a pain reliever for my head, I also needed to bring my knife in for the night. The jungle could only keep it safe for so long before a monkey or sloth tried to steal it.
The process took a good two or three minutes, since all the vines had to pass my weapon along their endless, fibrous chain. During that time, my head spun and spun and spun with everything that had happened in the last half hour.
The octopus’s claim. Jenia’s exile and the second brand I’d spied beneath her arm. Coen Steeler in my head. Dazmine’s accusation.
I could feel Willa watching me, her whiskers twitching in my periphery, but I didn’t dare turn fully in her direction for fear she’d read it all on my face: absolute and utter chaos.
A wrecked version of the mask I’d gotten so good at donning.
I had half a mind to run back to that grove of black bamboo and bask in its scent all night, to forget…
The ivy outside the window twitched, and a single tendril of plant snaked inside the cracked opening, slithering in midair to place my knife in the palm of my hand.
I hummed my thanks, shut the window, and shoved the knife in my nightstand drawer, ignoring the sound of all the rolling, clinking objects in the back, before taking out a capsule of cat’s claw extract for my headache.
Willa watched me swallow it, her whiskers twitching.
“You don’t have to pretend around me, Rayna.” She scrambled closer to me, her little glass-black eyes shining with concern. “This isn’t the first rough day you’ve had since… since it all happened. This is just the first day you’ve let your hands shake a bit.”
My hands were definitely shaking as I sat at the edge of my bed and clasped my fingers in my lap, trying to steady them. If nothing else, that rolling and clinking in the back of my drawer—that sound of the twelve little things I’d stuffed away—had sent me right over the edge.
Out of everything that had happened today, Steeler’s voice in my head surprised me the least. Predators can’t stay away from their prey, dear one, Dyonisia had told me three months ago.
And despite the fact that Kitterfol Lexington showed up every week to ask me about my progress, despite the fact that I should have told him everything I knew, I’d managed to keep one thing from the Good Council’s head Mind Manipulator: I was almost positive Steeler had been sneaking into this house, this very room, and watching me sleep every week since he’d left.
Who else would leave a little black pearl on my nightstand every Monday morning? Why else would I have twelve of those pearls rolling and clinking together in the back of my knife drawer right now?
It didn’t matter how hard I tried to stay awake to catch him.
I always ended up falling asleep and waking up to a new pearl staring me in the face until I hastily stuffed it away.
As if I could deny the fact that Steeler had somehow cleaved through the shield again and again without alerting the Good Council’s spies to his presence.
But I couldn’t deny it anymore. He’d spoken to me. Alerted me to his upper hand. And now—rather than simply wanting to catch him and turn him in—my blood was singing to spill some of his.
Willa clawed her way onto my lap. I tried to soften my expression for her but… it just wouldn’t budge. I could feel my face hardening again, and my fingers had already steadied themselves in my lap.
“This isn’t the right version of you, Rayna,” she said. “I know that. You know that. And I think your friends know it, too.”
I didn’t answer right away. I just gave her head a gentle, single-finger pet, then set her back down on the bed and started toward the door. Dinner. Emelle and the others would be expecting me for dinner, where I’d steal a slice of cheese for Willa herself.
When I reached the doorframe, however, I looked back.
And my words felt like I’d swallowed all those pearls one by one.
“I’ll find the right version of myself again when Steeler is dead.”