Chapter 10
CHAPTER
I wasn’t the only one who screamed.
All around me, my classmates kicked and shrieked as dozens of those stalks whipped out and curled around their limbs, too.
Mine was pulling me toward it, those bristles latching onto my skin like leeches.
I tried to reach out for Emelle, but she was yanked backward into hers, and on her other side, Rodhi let loose a stream of curses as he was snared, too.
Even Gileon’s brute thrashing couldn’t tear through the plant’s hold, his rhino beetle fluttering around his head frantically.
Mrs. Wildenberg, however, remained untouched.
She calmly surveyed us in the middle of the thicket, and for a heart-stopping moment I wondered if she’d brought us here to die.
“Giant sundew,” she crowed finally.
We all quieted down despite the slight stinging I was sure everyone else was feeling where those bristles had latched onto our skin.
Mrs. Wildenberg gave a wrinkled smile. “They feed on insects, rodents, and sometimes even larger creatures—such as humans.”
Strangely enough, I caught Dazmine’s eye from across the thicket.
She looked away, but not before I caught the slightly raised eyebrow that seemed to say: yep, Mrs. Wildenberg is definitely insane.
“Sundews take several hours to digest their prey,” the elderly instructor continued, turning in a slow circle, “and that’s when their prey are the size of our palms. So rest assured you all would take days.
” A dry laugh crackled out of her. “But we aren’t here to dissolve into puddles of protein. We’re here to learn a new language.”
And then she began to make her hobbled rounds, clicking her tongue in eerie, rapid intervals. Tk tk tk tk. Tk tk tk tk.
One by one, the bristled stalks relaxed their grips on us and unraveled, lifting skyward to resume their gentle swaying. I rubbed my arms, where tiny, oozing dots had joined all the bug bites. Great.
“Now, what use do we have for our carnivorous friends?”
In the silence that followed, I couldn’t help but think that if Fergus and Jenia were still here, they’d be throwing a hissy fit together about what had just occurred.
Now, though, the class stood unnervingly still, listening with rapt attention.
As Ms. Pincette had said, our own lives were at stake if we didn’t take these classes seriously—because taming a sundew might be a part of our first quarterly practice test. Or even our Final Test.
“Anyone?” Mrs. Wildenberg asked.
Norman Pollard flashed two fingers in the air.
“Yes…uh…Nelson, isn’t it?”
“They’re good for infestations of invasive bugs?”
“Yes, but what else?” When no one answered, Mrs. Wildenberg said, “Security guards, of course! Historic Wild Whisperers have found that sundews are happy to act like guard dogs, so they’ve bred and magically altered these ones to heighten that characteristic.
In fact, in Belliview, many of these plants are potted and placed on either side of high-security doors to ward off intruders. ”
“Shit, I knew that,” Rodhi hissed on the other side of Gileon. “I’ve seen them guarding the entrance to the local bank.”
“But don’t they get… mad?” Cilia spoke up. “When they’re uprooted and potted?”
“Oh no, no, no.” Mrs. Wildenberg beamed.
“In fact, sundews enjoy the superior status of transportability. But I warn you, it takes a special temperament to train them. None of the carnivorous plants take as kindly to the gentle type, as some of you found out when you were feeding the butterworts last year. But these beauties are a lot fiercer than butterworts.”
She cast a dewy-eyed smile to the nearest sundew as if she’d never seen anything as cute, then started teaching us how to click our tongues in a way the sundews could understand.
After we’d all spent a few rounds practicing, she began partnering us up to practice—not by name, but by pointing at each of us with a gnarled finger.
“You with you. And you with you. And you with you.”
By the time she’d paired me with Dazmine, I was one hundred percent sure our instructor still hadn’t picked up on a single name or social relationship in the class. The glares Dazmine sent me as I trudged over to her could have come close to shattering my wall of ice.
“Hi,” I said.
“Hi,” Dazmine said flatly.
You did something to Jenia and Fergus, and I’m going to find out what seemed to hover between us. Trying to ignore it, I nodded at the nearest swaying stalk. “Do you want me to go first, or do you want to?”
Dazmine sighed and pinched the bridge of her nose. “I’ll go.”
She stalked over to the plant and touched its bristled edges.
Instantly, it snapped around her hand and spiraled up her arm, the bulbed bristles digging in. Dazmine didn’t even wince. She just threw me a look over her shoulder and said, “Go on. Free me.”
It wasn’t really a command, I sensed. It was a dare. To see if I was the kind of person who relished watching others get hurt. To see if I’d hesitate to help someone trapped and in need of rescue.
I didn’t hesitate. Immediately, I began clicking my tongue the way Mrs. Wildenberg had demonstrated. Tk tk tk tk. Tk tk tk tk.
The sundew twitched, but didn’t relent.
“Dammit,” I spat, and tried again. Dazmine watched me intently from within her confines of flesh-eating bristles.
“Wow, you really suck at this,” she said after my fifth try. “It’s supposed to be a click, not a cluck. What are you, a peahen?”
“Gee, thanks, Dazmine,” I gritted out. “I’m literally trying to save your life right now, so how about some helpful pointers instead of insults?”
She scoffed, as if the prospect of acid spreading in her bloodstream right now didn’t faze her in the slightest. “I talked to some of those fire ants over lunch break, and you know what they told me?”
I didn’t answer her, sure that it was a trick question. I just tried clicking my tongue again… to no avail. The damn sundew only twitched.
“They told me,” Dazmine plunged on, “that you asked a bunch of them to attack me, Fergus, and Jenia last year. And apparently, the ants obliged.” She threw back her head and gave a bark of a laugh.
“Now I know why I felt like I was on the verge of a panic attack when Ms. Pincette unveiled that tank. Why I could barely breathe during that class. But what I can’t figure out—” She squinted at me.
“—is why I don’t remember the attack. Because when I think really hard about blistering, raging welts all over my body, I do remember it…
but the memory is muddled. Like someone tampered with my head. ”
I gawked at her. The sound of the rest of the class clicking their tongues might as well have been miles away.
Had I set a horde of ants on Dazmine last year?
And Jenia and Fergus, too? Back in Ms. Pincette’s classroom, the pain in my head had certainly jolted, like a memory trying to unleash itself.
But again, what did Steeler have to do with ants?
And why would he have erased that memory from me—from all of us—if I had been the culprit?
Dazmine clicked her tongue in rapid succession.
The bristled stalks released her with an unspooling flick.
“Seems like you’re better with trees and vines than you are with meat-eating death traps, Rayna,” she said, a hint of triumph in her tone. Like she’d caught me bloody-handed. Which… maybe she had. “Kind of weird for someone who carries a knife everywhere she goes, don’t you think?”
When the usual thumping sounds of partying began to ripple down Bascite Boulevard that night, I snuck to the grove of black bamboo and practiced throwing my new knives again and again, imagining that the stalks of dark bark were hundreds of murderous pirates with fangs.
As soon as I got the hang of them, they became easier to throw than my crescent blade. Swifter and deadlier, these ones hit more accurately, and I relished the feeling of finally hitting my mark perfectly.
“You saw him, didn’t you?” Jagaros asked from behind me.
I didn’t flinch. I’d known he would be watching.
“How can you tell?” I threw another knife.
“Your smell,” Jagaros said simply.
“Let me guess. Black bamboo.”
I didn’t know where the edge in my voice was coming from.
But with the pain in my head gone for the time being, with my mask dissolved, I was just tired of…
of trying to be nice. Of pretending that I might be a perfectly fine, completely whole person, rather than someone with this mess of ice shards swirling within me.
Jagaros didn’t answer. I went to retrieve my knives and slowly turned to face him.
“That day you found me on the beach…” I began, tossing the knife from hand to hand.
“You advised me to tell the Good Council I was… roughhousing with you.” I’d had a cascade of bruises down my body back then—bruises I couldn’t remember getting.
Lexington had claimed they’d come from Steeler’s own hands, but if Jagaros had wanted me to pretend otherwise… “What do you know?”
I’d asked him this question before, of course, but never so firmly. And he’d never done more than flick his tail and change the subject.
Now, though, the white tiger studied me with his head cocked.
“A great deal more than you, Rayna Drey,” he answered finally.
I caught my knife with one hand and pointed it at him instinctively. “Don’t be a smartass. What do you know?”
There was more to Jagaros beneath that silky black and white coat, I knew—so much more than he was willing to let on. I just didn’t know whether that something would end up hurting me or helping me.
“Why are you really training me?” I continued. “Is it just so that I can defend myself against Steeler, or is there another reason?” Tears blazed in the back of my throat, but I forced them back down. “If you knew he hurt me in the past, why would you try to cover that up?”
Jagaros eyed the tip of my blade with something like interest—and perhaps a flicker of surprise.
Usually, he would threaten to eat me if I dared talk to him like that, but now he just rumbled, “Everything will come to light soon enough, Rayna Drey.” His eyes pinned me with a greenish glow.
“And this time, that light will be permanent.”
Then he turned and padded into the darkness gathering beyond the grove, the jut of his shoulders alternating with each step. I stood there, frozen, my knife extended, watching him go in disbelief.
What he was doing to me was even worse than what I’d been doing to Emelle: not just keeping his own secrets, but keeping my secrets from me. Everything will come to light soon enough—that meant he knew about my past with Steeler and was hiding it from me, I was sure.
“Yeah, well, don’t bother coming back until I see the light!” I called out, the words bursting past my lips before I could stop them. “I wouldn’t want to be alone in the jungle with someone who might be working against me!”
Jagaros paused right on the threshold of the distant shadows, his spine stiffening as if he might say something back.
Only to slink forward again a moment later until his feline silhouette melted into nothing but night.