by Eva Chase
“You should find someone else to sit with,” I said.
Ryo blinked at me, only confused, not yet understanding. “Is everything okay, Trix?”
Everything was fine. I’d gotten my head on straight, stopped letting myself get distracted by the scraps of tenderness and desire that shouldn’t have tempted me in the first place.
“No problems here,” I said in the same even voice as before. “I’ve just been doing some thinking, and I’ve decided it’s better if we only talk when we have real news to pass on. The work we’ve been doing—that’s what really matters. What we should be focused on.”
The furrow in his forehead dug deeper. “And you’ve been focused on it plenty. There’s nothing wrong with taking some time for yourself in the moments in between.”
There is if it’s all based on a lie.
I held his gaze steadily. “This is what I want. And hopefully this whole situation will be over soon, and then it won’t matter anymore.”
The confusion in Ryo’s expression was bleeding away into concern and a little hurt. “Trix, if something’s happened—if I said or did something that made you think—”
Oh, God, I couldn’t stand here listening to him trying to make this up to me as if I were some kind of innocent victim.
“It’s got nothing to do with that,” I interrupted. “This just makes everything simpler for all of us.”
Before he could protest anymore, I fled out the door, taking my omelet with me.
I didn’t trust Ryo not to follow me into the hall, so I went right through the front entrance and made my way over to the pool and my pathetic attempt at a garden. The first bite of the omelet left a faintly bitter aftertaste on my tongue. I forced it all down anyway, because I wasn’t going to let myself waste away from literal starvation here.
When I looked up, it was immediately clear that I hadn’t gone far enough. Not just Ryo but Jenson and Elias too were striding across the lawn toward me. Ryo must have gathered the troops.
Taking off on them didn’t seem likely to work. I stood there waiting for them, my spine going rigid. The dark stretch of the campus woods filled the edge of my vision. Cade could be prowling along the edges of the forest right now—he might see this confrontation. What would he make of it?
Why did they have to make everything so complicated? As soon as I’d found my brother, my path forward should have been obvious.
The guys stopped a few feet from where I stood, forming a semi-circle around me. Jenson was frowning, and Elias was studying me with his dark eyes. I wrapped one arm across my torso to steady myself.
“What’s going on, Trix?” Jenson asked.
“I’ve just changed my mind about how I want things to be between me and all of you,” I said. “Is it really that big of a deal? Can’t you just accept it and move on?”
“Of course we will if that’s how you feel,” Ryo said. “We just want to be sure—with the way things are around here—if something else is going on that you’re afraid to talk about or you think we’ll get in trouble because of it, I hope you know we’re still here, and we don’t care about trouble. If there’s any way you can tell us, we’ll listen.”
They wouldn’t like what they’d hear—that was for sure. I shook my head, tossing my hair back over my shoulder. “There’s nothing more to it. This is just me telling you to back off. We don’t have to be friends or—or anything else for us to keep figuring out how to get the hell out of this place.”
Elias’s expression had turned increasingly thoughtful in a way that pricked at my skin. “No, we don’t. I hope we haven’t given you any reason to believe we expect you to offer more than that.”
“I’ve got to say I’m starting to feel that way considering how determined you are to badger me about the decision.” I shifted my weight uneasily, my mind lingering on Cade’s form possibly looking on from the shadows between the trees. “Was that really what all your help was about in the first place—a way to make nice in the hopes you’d get into my pants?”
Jenson outright flinched, and Ryo’s face grayed. “You know that was never what we—”
“I don’t know anything,” I shot back. If giving it to them straight wouldn’t do the trick, then I’d just have to shove them away, even if that tactic sent an ache through my gut. “Other than I’m telling you to back off and none of you seem capable of listening to me. Just based on that, it looks like you care a lot more about what you want than what I do.”
“Trix,” Jenson started, his voice rough.
Elias held up his hand. Even out here when it was just the four of us, he still had that authoritative air that’d made him believable as a teacher.
“I think Beatrix is being very clear,” he said. “She wants space—we should give that to her.” He held my gaze. “I’m sorry if we got too pushy. We were worried about you, but I trust that you can let us know if you need anything from us after all.”
“Are we really going to just—” Jenson tried again, and cut himself off at a sharp look from the brawnier guy. He scowled, but when Elias gestured, he turned to tramp with him and Ryo back toward the school.
My shoulders came down by fractions of inches as the distance between us grew. The ache in my gut expanded too. That sense of loss was only longing for a fantasy that had always been ephemeral, though. The fact that it hurt now was all the more reason I shouldn’t have let it go on even this long.
I couldn’t hang back here for the rest of the morning. I had laundry duty after breakfast. Once the guys had plenty of time to get a head start on me, I marched back inside, dropped my plate off in the kitchen, and went down to the cool cement room I’d become increasingly familiar with over the past week.
I was the first person on this shift to arrive. I guessed I should go grab the bins of dirty linens to start hauling them down. But as I turned to leave again, a punch of rose scent hit my nose.
Smelling roses wasn’t at all unusual on its own, but I’d never caught a whiff that thick down here before. I dragged in another breath, and the smell congealed in my lungs. A shiver ran down my back.
This didn’t feel right.
Without another thought, my feet carried me toward the dryer I’d been using. I braced my hands on its cool side and peered behind it.
The bottom of my stomach dropped out. I stared, swiped at my eyes, and stared some more, getting queasier by the second.
The passage I’d spent so many nights chiseling away at, the one that I’d been sure had almost broken through to the secret space on the other side… no longer existed. The wall was the same solid, dimpled but otherwise unmarked concrete surface it’d been when I’d first started.
The hole hadn’t even been filled in, at least not by any method I could imagine. It’d simply vanished as if it’d never been there in the first place.
Chapter Twenty-Four
Trix
The sound of voices entering the basement broke me from my shock. Before the other students on laundry duty could reach the room, I ducked down and peered under the dryer.
As I’d already guessed, my tools had vanished too. Somehow I doubted they’d reappear back in the maintenance shed. They were gone for good.
I straightened up with a chill spreading through my abdomen. The staff must have found out, whether they knew I was the one who’d carved that passage or not. Who else could have sealed the hole over so completely? Had they picked up on my activities last night and just decided not to interrupt me in the moment? Had one of the students noticed and tattled on me?
The others came in hauling a couple of laundry baskets, and I got to work stuffing the sheets and pillowcases into the washing machines on autopilot. My mind kept whirring away.
Violet and her roommates had seemed suspicious about me being down here the other day. Maybe one of them had poked around some more. None of them had acted happy about the fact that I might be working against the school’s interests somehow.
What had Violet said when I’d
talked to her later that day? Something about taking a stand of her own—about making sure the staff wouldn’t hurt her anymore. She’d claimed that she felt bad about criticizing me… but maybe she’d just been covering her tracks. I didn’t have any reason to think she liked me all that much. She could have gone to the staff and offered to make a deal: her information in exchange for them backing off on her.
I stewed on the possibilities through the rest of laundry duty, the physical labor only sharpening my thoughts. While I carried bins of clean linens back upstairs to their homes, I scanned the halls and rooms I passed for that cloud of dark hair and the partly scarred face beneath.
Was Violet a good enough liar that she’d be able to blow off a confrontation? I was going to find out—because I needed to know exactly what she’d told them, if anything.
I spotted her on my final trek through the school building. When I came out of the girls’ bathroom after restocking the towel shelves, my former roommate was just coming out of the Tolerance classroom with several other students, all of them pale and a little unsteady on their feet. My stomach turned with the memory of my own experiences with Professor Marsden’s “teaching” methods.
Maybe I could learn something just by observing before I took this to a direct confrontation. I meandered after Violet, keeping a careful distance. She headed down the stairs to the first floor and stepped into the sitting room. I went around the other side of the stairs by the portraits and watched her through the rungs of the banister.
All she did was go to the front window and stand there, gazing toward the gate. Her hands opened and clenched at her sides. With a jerk of her body, she strode to the front door and charged outside.
Where the hell was she going like that? I hustled to the door and eased it open.
Violet had already crossed most of the lawn between the school building at the wall to the left of the gate, her steps brisk. Something glinted in her hand. An uneasy tension coiled around my gut.
I slipped outside, hesitated for a moment, and then followed her once she’d marched into the shelter of the scattered trees at the north end of campus. Whatever she was up to, it didn’t seem to have anything to do with the staff. That didn’t mean it was a good thing, though. The rigid defiance in her posture set off alarm bells I couldn’t ignore.
I skirted the wall, heading in the same direction Violet had gone. She’d gotten far enough ahead of me in the sparse forest that I couldn’t make her out anymore. A fresh wave of uneasiness prickled over me. I sped up my pace until I was just shy of jogging.
Her form came into view up ahead, right by the wall. A pair of steel scissors yawned open in her hands—around the stem of a rose. Her rose, if I remembered from my past explorations right. My pulse stuttered, and I threw myself forward.
“Violet!”
She glanced up at me without changing her grip on the scissors. Her eyes shone stark and wild. “I’m not letting them call the shots anymore,” she said. “It’s my fucking life, and I decide what happens to it.”
Before I could reach her, she slammed the scissors’ blades closed.
The rose’s stem was tough, and the scissors, which I guessed she’d stolen from the kitchen at some point, weren’t the sharpest ever. They sliced most but not all the way through. The rose drooped forward, hanging by a sliver—and Violet shuddered so violently the scissors fell from her hands. She staggered back and crumpled over.
“No!” I dashed the rest of the way to her and dropped to my knees at her side. Her breath came slow and shallow, but her jaw hung limp, and she didn’t rouse when I shook her shoulder.
Her rose was still alive, but only barely. It wasn’t going to stay alive like that. Had she meant to commit this disjointed sort of suicide, or had she been hoping that if she severed the thing connecting her to the school, she’d be able to go free?
Even if I’d known for sure she’d wanted to die, I didn’t think I could have left her and done nothing. Not knowing—I had to try to save her. I looked up at the rose, sorting through all the gardening knowledge I’d accumulated over the years.
I’d taken a few roses from the Monroes’ bush to start fresh plants I’d managed to sell for a little cash. I didn’t have the gardening chemicals I’d used to help that along here, but I could make full use of what I did have.
I ran back to the shed against the side of the school and fumbled through the shelves for a few things that might help: gardening shears, a glass jar I emptied several rusty nails out of, a little spade. Then I sprinted back to the spot where Violet had fallen as quickly as I could.
My heart beat at the base of my throat as I snipped the rose the rest of the way off the bush. Violet didn’t stir, but her chest kept its faint rise and fall. The rose in my hand still held most of its bloom, only a little brown along the edges of the petals. Now I had to make sure it stayed that way. I had no idea how much time I had until the connection between it and my former roommate destroyed them both.
It wasn’t quite as long a cutting as I’d have wanted, but I’d have to make do. Grateful for the experience that guided my shaky hands, I snipped the lowest leaves off the stem and used one edge of the shears to carve a small slit at the bottom. Then I dug into the earth just in front of the larger bush, stirring up the soil. It was still moist from the recent rain—at least that worked in my favor.
Carefully, I eased the stem halfway down into the earth and patted the dirt firm around it to hold it up. The leaves trembled as I eased the jar over the part aboveground to hold in the moisture and protect it from wandering animals. There. I sat back on my heels, my breath rushing out of me.
My approach might not be good enough for new roots to sprout. I’d never tried without a concoction meant to stimulate that growth. But leaving the bloom dangling from the bush would have meant certain, swift death. I just wished there was more I could do.
Violet stirred, her eyelids fluttering. With the unmarked side of her face against the ground and only the scars showing, she looked even more wounded than usual.
“Violet?” I said tentatively.
Her eyelids twitched again. She wheezed, but the breath was a little steadier than the ones before. Her hand fumbled across the weedy ground in front of her. I scooted over to grasp it.
“Hey. Are you awake? Can you talk to me?”
She managed to peer up at me. Her lips jerked at a painful angle. Her whole body trembled as her fingers tightened around mine.
“I replanted it,” I said, braced for anger at my admission. “Your rose—so that it can keep growing. I’m not sure—if it dies, then you—”
She closed her eyes for a second and seemed to gird herself. “Okay,” she said in a rasp of a voice. “Fuck.”
She didn’t sound as if she wanted to be dead right now. A hint of relief trickled through me, mostly overshadowed by my fear that I hadn’t actually saved her, only prolonged a drawn-out demise. I glanced toward the school. I couldn’t leave her lying here for who knew how long until she—maybe—got her strength back.
“If you can move a little, I can help you get back to the school so you can recover somewhere more comfortable,” I said. “Or I can go get help.”
Her head gave a sharp shake before I’d quite finished that second sentence. Violet was probably pissed off enough that she had even one spectator to her disastrous stunt. Her body swayed, stiffened, and then lurched upright far enough that I could leverage her weight against mine. I stood slowly, bringing her with me, her arm clamped across my shoulders.
“Here we go,” I said, willing myself not to tense up at having another person I wasn’t even sure I liked that much clinging so closely to me.
She could plant her feet well enough to keep herself upright, but I more dragged her than supported her walking through the trees and across the lawn. By the time we made it to the school, my own breath was coming short, my shoulders aching from supporting so much of her weight. We staggered up the steps and into the sitting room.
The thought of attempting the larger staircases to get Violet up to the dorm made me wince. I helped her onto the sofa instead. She lay down and curled up with her face to the padded back of the seat. No word of thanks. She hadn’t said anything other than those first two words when I’d told her what was going on.
I couldn’t say I regretted intervening, though.
Would the staff realize what I’d done just now—that I knew about the roses and their significance, that I’d meddled with that one? Between that and the discovered passage in the basement, how much longer did I have before they decided to use their power to send me back to the beginning of my journey here again?
Would I remember what I’d already been through the next time, or would that fade away like it had all the other times before?
Maybe if I came up with some kind of story to redirect them before they put all the pieces together, I could buy myself a little more time.
I hurried up to the second-floor classrooms, but the Composition room was empty. Out of all the professors, Hubert was my best chance at getting any kind of sympathy. I’d made at least a little progress warming her up to me. I wavered and then headed back downstairs to the hall with the staff offices.
Did the professors actually live in their rooms when they didn’t need to be directing students here, or did they vanish to some supernatural realm? I had no idea, but Hubert opened the door a few seconds after my knock. Her hair was piled in its usual heap on top of her head, her gaze as piercing as ever.
“Yes, Miss Corbyn?” she said. Her voice sounded snippier than the last couple of times we’d talked. Because I’d interrupted something or because she knew I’d been working against the staff after all?
“Something’s happened to one of the students,” I said. “I’m not sure what to do.”
At a regular school, I’d imagine a teacher hearing that would have hustled right out to take in the situation. Instead, Professor Hubert motioned me inside with an only partly stifled sigh. “Why don’t you explain?”