Chapter 38
Mollandra
Year Five
“You want me to eat brains?” Tmanga narrowed her eyes, peering first at Mollandra and then at the crinkled grey mass in her cupped hands. It was hard to tell which she was more suspicious of. “Cold brains?”
“They’re actually pretty warm.” Sharp licked the finger she’d poked in to test them.
Tmanga wrinkled her nose. “Is there nothing you won’t stick your fingers in?”
Sharp sucked the offending digit by way of answer before turning to Mollandra. “Explain it again but make sense this time.”
Mollandra took a deep breath and sighed it out, wincing at the pain from her tightly bound stab wound.
Clear fluid dripped between her fingers, the room stank of death, and Brenna’s cries of pain set her teeth on edge.
“Why did I just have to stitch up your face, Tmanga?” Mollandra realized that she had been in denial about the power of denial.
She was amazed that the pain from the girl’s freshly sliced cheek wasn’t a constant reminder of what had happened.
“How do you think Jemna and Takki ended up dead? Why is Brenna gut-stabbed? Why are half the beds charred, the room full of smoke? And—this is the clincher—why are there nearly a dozen dead children scattered around, half of them with their faces burned off?”
“It is a bit smoky.” Sharp nodded.
“What children?” Tmanga looked left and right, failing to see at least eight of them.
“Focus!” Mollandra would have grabbed them both again but shaking hadn’t worked, and now her hands were full of Grumble’s cooling brain. “What about Jemna and Takki?”
“They fought?” Sharp shrugged.
“They were in a three!”
“Over Brenna!” Tmanga said, triumphantly. “Jemna was sweet on her for sure.”
“This is how it works.” Mollandra spoke slowly and clearly, holding Tmanga’s gaze. “When they die, you forget them. It’s how the Ingredient works.” Milk-Eye’s burst of darkness might have played a role too. Even Mollandra’s memory of those moments was fuzzy.
“There are bodies on the floor? Corpses only you can see? Just you?” Tmanga frowned, concentrating. Sharp, on the other hand, had wandered off to see Brenna.
“Because they fed me the Ingredient when they had me. These were my family that attacked us. Part of it anyway. I thought my parents would come, but…”
“So, why am I looking at…that…goo?” Tmanga wrinkled her nose.
“It goes to the brain. It has to. Look, you can even see little black flecks…The elixir, I think that ends up in the heart, but the Ingredient, that’s all about the mind. See what it’s done to yours!”
“You’re telling me the floor’s covered in bodies?”
“Yes.”
“That I can’t see?”
“Yes.”
“Invisible bodies? Won’t we all keep tripping over them? They’re just going to lie there until they rot away and leave us kicking the bones about?”
“I don’t know,” Mollandra admitted. “And they’re not invisible. You just don’t see them. It’s complicated. You’re all stepping over them without remembering it the next moment.”
Sharp returned unexpectedly, throwing an arm over Mollandra’s shoulders.
“Is this a trick, Mollandra? You’re getting us to eat brains for a joke?
If it is, congratulations. It’s only taken five years, but you’ve developed a sense of humour.
Which makes precisely two of us in this place.
Treecie was funny too, but you killed her, so… ”
“Just eat the fucking brains, all right?”
“Why would it even work?” Tmanga asked.
Sharp elbowed her aside and gouged out a lump of the slimy mess, holding it quivering in the palm of one hand.
“Not too much—it’s dangerous.” Mollandra wanted to open their eyes, not lose them both. In sufficient quantity the Ingredient could wipe them from the world’s memory.
“You’re not going to eat that.” Tmanga stared.
“It’s how they did it to her. They fed it to you, yes?” Without waiting for an answer, Sharp crammed the stuff into her mouth, chewed briefly, then swallowed. “Needs salt. I’ve had worse in this place.”
“Your go.” Mollandra thrust the remainder at Tmanga.
“I’ll wait to see whether Sharp—”
“Wow! So many bodies!” Sharp stared around the room, eyes wide.
“You’re lying, aren’t you?” Tmanga scowled.
“You’ll never know if you don’t eat up.” Sharp focused on a piece of empty floor ahead of her. “This one’s missing a head!”
Tmanga huffed out a breath and took her own lump, smaller than Sharp’s.
She nibbled on it at first, then retched.
“Sharp…you lying cow…this is the worst thing I’ve ever tast—” She retched again.
Scowling her determination, she began pushing the rest of the stuff into her mouth, small grey lumps rolling wetly down her chin as she screwed her lips up and swallowed.
Tmanga bent double, holding on to her belly for several long moments before straightening, still with her lips pursed in disgust. “Oh, you bitch! Sharp! Come here!”
And just like that the pair were chasing all over the smoke-laden dormitory, skipping over dead children, vaulting charred beds, paying no heed to the corpses of their classmates.
Mollandra watched them for a short while. It seemed that a kind of madness descended when memory and reality disagreed so thoroughly. To make sense of such discord required the kind of logic exercised in dreams.
She knelt by the nearest corpse, a girl a few years younger than herself, her chest a charred ruin from which blackened ribs reached, guarding the crater of her heart.
A victim of Sharp’s holy wrath. Had this been one of the sisters she had run from Mother and Night-Father with?
She couldn’t tell. There were new ones here, added after her escape.
The girl’s pinched, pale face held something familiar, but perhaps it was just echoes of the same horror she saw beneath her own reflection.
Sharp’s laughter cut against Mollandra’s sadness.
There was no victory here, just sorrow and guilt.
It had been her escape that had caused all this.
Would more come? Would Father and Mother descend on the Academy?
Mollandra glanced towards the door for the twentieth time since the attack ended.
Surely the Kindnesses would come. They must have sensed Sharp’s rage?
Unless, somehow, the intruders had shielded it with the null aura that surrounded them…
“Wait!” Sharp stopped suddenly in mid-chase.
Tmanga crashed into her back. “What?”
“There really are bodies…” Sharp’s eyes moved from one to the other.
“You remember killing them now?” Mollandra stood, holding her side.
Sharp’s smooth brow, rarely bothered with frowns, now furrowed. “Maybe…”
“How about you?” Mollandra confronted Tmanga. “You can’t see this?” She crouched and lifted a dead boy’s hand to wave at her friend. “Nothing?”
“I see them.” Tmanga nodded. “It’s like those drawings Kindness Marta showed us in Creed. You see them one way, then you see how they can be a different thing, and the first way of looking at them is gone. Illusions.”
“We need to get rid of them,” Mollandra said.
“What for?” Sharp flomped back on the bed. “The servants will do it.”
Tmanga turned the nearest invader over with her foot.
A boy not more than ten, still clutching both his knives.
“Because if Kindness Marta thinks Mollandra is drawing this sort of trouble she’ll probably just kill her.
They kill nearly a hundred girls a year in this place for no good reason.
You think they’ll hesitate if they actually have a reason? ”
“So, what do we do? Pile them in the corner and throw a blanket over them?” Sharp snorted. “They smell bad enough already. We can’t turn our dormitory into the catacombs.”
“Whatever we do, it needs to be quick. The forgetting comes after the eating.”
“There must be a dozen of them.” Tmanga rolled the child over again, hiding his face. “We’d have all been dead if Sharp hadn’t raged.”
“I did rather save the day.” Sharp inspected her hands as if looking for charred patches or perhaps a lingering flame.
It hadn’t been the grand full-blown rage of a legendary Kindness, but it had certainly been beyond expectation for any acolyte. By saving Sharp in the vault, Mollandra had left her far more dangerous than she had been before. A volcano ready to erupt.
“We can’t carry them,” Mollandra said.
“Carry them where?”
“To the catacombs. It’s the best place to hide them. Among the dead. But there’s too many. Even if we could get the others to help. And they won’t even admit that there are any bodies unless…”
“Unless you convince them to turn cannibal first,” Tmanga said. “And why should they? If the Kindnesses get rid of you it improves their chances.”
“We’ll walk them there on their own feet,” Sharp announced.
“You can’t get a corpse to do much more than twitch.” Mollandra had never seen Sharp raise the dead much beyond a slouched sitting position.
“But I’m feeling good today. Different. That energy…” Sharp’s gaze returned to her hands. “It’s still echoing inside me. It could help. If we’re quick. And besides—these ones are still warm.” She licked her fingers rather unnecessarily.
“She’s right.” Tmanga nodded. “The quicker we do it, the easier it will be. And if we do it as a three…”
The Kindnesses had shown that whatever power the goddesses gave them would double if two joined together in the effort, but if three were to join, the power far more than tripled, scaling beyond what a whole class might achieve in total.
The difficult part was, of course, the joining.
It required trust in a place that would slit trust’s throat in a heartbeat.
More than trust, it required understanding, which is something different and perhaps deeper than friendship.