13. Nada, Zilch, Nought
There’s some kind of mandatory sports situation at the school on Saturdays. Briar watches out of the window as clumps of scholars stumble from their houses in various genres of kit, heading for a newly arrived fleet of minibuses, their view smudged and misty in the fine summer rain.
‘Where are they going?’ they ask Katie - which, it turns out, is the Eden Dame’s name.
They’re in the house kitchen; Briar had been hunting for more porridge when Katie offered them a cup of tea, and although Briar declined, it’s broken the ice.
She hasn’t said anything about Briar’s smarting face, or the fact that they wince every time they move their right shoulder. She actually seems kind of cool.
Briar has started dividing the faculty in their mind into those who are thaumaturges and those who aren’t; the security staff and some of the Dames and Housemasters, it seems, are, but Briar can’t imagine how someone with power could end up working a job like this. It would feel extremely rude to ask.
‘They’re off to the sports grounds. Got the pool and the gym here, but no room here for anything outside bigger than the cricket pitch until they get around to demolishing some of the condemned buildings, so they all get bussed ten minutes down the road.
’ She studies Briar over her mug. ‘You went to that party, with Adams?’
‘No,’ Briar lies, opening the last cupboard and finding an entire, slightly dented box of Simply Strawberry, which will probably be disgusting. On the plus side, removing the box reveals a small, dusty two-cup cafetière. They’re just one bag of coffee grounds away from experiencing joy again.
‘Hmmm. Well, it’ll be quiet round here until lunchtime, and then the quiet will abruptly stop.’
‘Am I allowed to use the gym?’ Briar says, daring to hope. ‘The one on campus?’
‘I can’t imagine anyone would care.’
Katie gives them directions. Come nine o’clock, Briar is mechanically loading up grainy grey plates over a squat rack, the way they’ve done hundreds of times before.
They’ve missed this. It’s not that they haven’t been getting any heavy lifting in - spending about seven hours a day in the attic is certainly a workout - but there’s something different about falling back into a familiar routine.
The breathwork, the bunch and burn and release, shaking to failure, the floaty ache in their muscles when an hour is up.
The gym smells like disinfectant with a hint of unwashed pubescent boy, but even that is sort of reassuringly normal.
The pink soreness in their face and shoulder is just fuel for the fire.
Briar’s here seeking pain, after all, even if that’s not how they’d ever word it aloud.
There’s no better place to be while angry, no better way to exorcise some of the poison from their system.
It’s like last night has opened the floodgates. Briar just can’t pretend not to care about any of this any more.
Maybe the only person they’ve been fooling is themself.
It’s been useful armour, a conscious hardening of the heart over the years every time the memories snuck in, but in less than a week that armour has all been stripped away.
There’s new grief, too; the loss of Seb and Temple the first time around had been the disappointments of a child - but the feeling that they’re lost to Briar all over again has more permanence now, because they’re right here, within arm’s reach, but Briar can never have either of them back the way they once were.
It hurts, and Briar hates how much it hurts, hates that not even pushing past their limits, straining until they groan aloud, can bring their racing thoughts back under their control.
Afterwards they shower, careful to avoid their stitches, and then go in search of another hitherto unexplored part of Temple: the IT suite, the only access to the internet on the whole campus.
Briar hasn’t revisited their Temple research since childhood, but suddenly, armed with all this new and unbearable knowledge, they desperately want to know what the world thinks is happening behind these walls.
Finding it requires entering the east wing, which is reached from the main building by way of the cloisters, which might be Briar’s favourite part of the school other than the library.
If they’d studied here, they’d have loved sitting on the benches in the courtyard, the one under the oak tree a particular favourite.
On a grey day like this Briar can almost picture how life would be here in autumn, crisp and bright, scholars kicking their way through a golden carpet of leaves on their way to classes, swaddled in their scarves.
No, Briar reminds themself. You’d have been fighting for your life to survive here, not reading under oak trees in a fucking scarf.
The east wing is dark and quiet, Briar’s footsteps echoing off the flagstones.
There’s an actual gargoyle halfway down the hall, mouth agape, perpetually threatening to spew its guts into the dry fountain bowl below.
It doesn’t feel like the right place for an IT suite, but eventually, Briar finds the door.
Locked, of course, but Briar came armed with keys.
Inside it’s grey-carpeted, and has that comforting warm plastic smell and the steady, low background hum of machinery.
The computer literacy posters tacked on the walls look decades old.
Did you know you can copy and paste information using this one simple trick?
Briar boots up one of the struggling desktops and discovers that they need a login ID.
They go to the adjacent office - also locked, also not a problem - and find a small laminated piece of card with admin credentials tucked behind a keyboard.
They open a browser and try a search engine.
Blocked.
Social media?
Blocked.
Email, blocked. YouTube, blocked. In fact, it turns out that the only sites available are saved as shortcuts: the school’s library system, digital academic archives, and Temple email, which Briar can only assume is internal-only.
Briar has seen scholars clutching work written by hand, but now they wonder if everything is analogue. Part of the secrecy that keeps Temple separate from the outside world.
It’s like hitting a physical wall. Maddening, how much it feels like having part of your brain switched off. They’ll have to drive out somewhere, sit parked up in a turning place with signal if they want any more answers.
Briar takes a wrong turn on their way back towards Eden.
So many of the hallways look the same here that it takes them a while to realise, by which point they’ve made two more turns, gone past a wet floor sign coated in dust and reached the dead end of a corridor, a small nondescript door set into pitted stone.
Briar wouldn’t have paid it any mind, except for the fact that it’s got a hand written note on it that says OUT OF ORDER.
What’s out of order? The door? Whatever’s beyond the door? Briar scans the frame for a symbol, as they’ve become accustomed to doing, and only finds an uneven notch in the stone that looks intentionally chipped away, cracks protruding from the top.
They try some of the oldest keys from their ring with no luck, then pick through the others, trying to find a match.
There’s one that’s a warm bronze colour, the same finish as the lock; it looks almost mouldy, and Briar realises it’s the key they found in the attic briefcase, carried around in a back pocket and then slipped onto their ring at the end of the day.
It sticks at first, and Briar is about to give up when on a final hard jiggle it clicks into place and turns, the door cracking open in a shower of rust.
Inside it’s completely dark apart from a single, narrow crack of horizontal light on what must be the far wall. Briar fumbles for the light switch; when they find it, it takes a moment for the overhead to come on, like it’s being awoken from a long slumber.
It’s an office. A beautiful office. The room is octagonal with high ceilings, a small fireplace to the left, a desk tucked into the oppo-site wall, tall bookshelves and squashy sofas overseen by floral oil paintings.
It looks like the base of a tower, although they’ve got no idea where the stairs to ascend might be.
There’s a small sink over by the desk, a flannel on a hook ossified solid.
The blinds are closed over every small, arched window, the only slit of light coming in where one hasn’t quite met the bottom of the sill.
For all its beauty, the room is a mess. Books absolutely everywhere, the bin upturned, papers and belongings strewn across the dark rug.
Eerier still is the fact that everything’s covered in a thick layer of dust. It looks like the aftermath of some natural disaster, a life interrupted.
Somebody got up from this desk expecting to come back, left the room and never returned.
The remains of that person’s lunch are still sitting by the clunky keyboard: chequered sandwich wrapping, a collapsed smear of something brown and slimy that might once have been fruit, an open packet of crisps that looks like it was only half-eaten when it was abandoned.
Gas leak? Carbon monoxide poisoning? Briar goes to the desk, bends over the papers there and eventually finds the school newsletter open next to the crisps, dated July 1998. The calendar hanging askew from a nail driven into the wall corroborates this.
Thirty years. Briar lingers over the desk, trying not to touch anything.
There’s a Japanese cat figurine with one paw raised, a sparse thank-you card (‘To Robert, thanks for everything, from Sarah’), Post-its in various faded neons lining the monitor with notes written in illegible, spiky handwriting.
The computer itself has been removed, the cables left dangling.
It seems strange that someone might have come back to appropriate office equipment but not bothered to throw out the rotting banana.