His mouth bristled with razor blades. It was like seeing into the maw of a shark—only so much more unsettling than that. Because once he was done showing off, he drew back. And somehow the teeth did, too. They seemed to melt down into something more ordinary, all at once. As if that flash of fang had just been a kind of optical illusion.
Though, of course, she knew it hadn’t been.
Her trembling attested to that.
As did his satisfaction on seeing it.
“So now you can see. If I actuallywantedto murder you, Mina, I would have done it by now,” he said. Then just as she was trying to find a way out of that, he continued. Almost casually. “Do you know how many times and in how many ways I could have killed you before today? You took a wrong turn the first time you set foot in this place—and down the deadliest hallway in the building, no less. Anyone who felt like murder was a great idea would barely have had to lift a finger. Then there was the maze and all the mistakes you made in there. Telling the competition things you could keep to yourself, letting yourself get caught out by a maze shift, not staying hidden when you should. And then just in case any of that wasn’t bad enough: Youwentandsleptoutsideyourbed. Youknewnot to, you had the guide thattoldyou not to, and you did it anyway. Anything at all can get to you when you do something as foolish as that.”
He shook his head over that last idea.
As if her ability to throw away her every chance truly amazed him.
But she couldn’t fight back. She couldn’t defend her decisions. She was too busy thinking of what all this meant. What him knowing about the sleep thing suggested.Oh god, it wasn’t a dream at all, she thought in a great rush. Hardly able to believe it, but forced to admit it all the same. “That wasyou,” she gasped.
And he didn’t even try to deny it.
“Ofcourseit was me.”
“But that’s unhinged.”
“I don’t see why.”
“Because you just left me. Why did you just leave me? Why didn’t you end it? Whyhaven’tyou ended it? If you want to get rid of me, just get it over with. Stop dancing around it, or settling for trying to drive me away with threats and schemes. Drink me dry and then dump me somewhere,” she managed to say. And was amazed at herself for doing it, with her mind still reeling from the memory of that thing stepping up onto her bed. Of it reaching down, with clawed hands.
But he justshrugged.
“Do you have any idea what a mess a human body makes?” he asked, as if he was talking about a minor inconvenience. And one he felt she should just automatically understand. He didn’t even elaborate further—he just attended to another problem, as he waited for her agreement:
His broken nose.
It had stopped bleeding, but it was out of shape. So as she was still trying to digest the first thing, he reached up and just snapped it back into place. One-handed, not even a flinch about it—despite howdisgustingit sounded. It crunched, like someone stepping on bird bones.
But she couldn’t deny it looked better once he had.
You’d barely have known it had been broken, if it were not for the hint of blood he left behind, when he swiped at it with his sleeve. Then he licked over that space between his upper lip and his nose, and even that was gone.
She had to try not to sound stunned in reply. To be as blasé as him about something that made her sick and shaky. “Ah. Then it’s not just that you don’t want to. It’s that garbage disposal is hard.”
“I wouldn’t say hard. Just likely to expose me to attention I cannot endure.”
“Yeah. What is the price for trespassing here again?”
“They behead and then burn you.”
He said the words so matter-of-factly, she knew they had to be true. But for some reason, she had the strongest urge to say he was wrong. That this could not be the case. The books had made the price sound like barely anything at all—just a slap on the wrist.
And instead, it was something that made her want to clutch at herself.
She had to really fight her own horror over the way things were, to use it against him. “Well, you better be careful, then. And not just when it comes to hiding corpses. I mean who knows what someone might say, if they were given enough reason to,” she said.
And tried to take some satisfaction from the way his face dropped.
“Are you actually trying tothreatenme?”
“It’s not as if you’ve left me with any choice, if I want to live here in peace.”
“There will never be any peace here for you. Three third years are plotting to strand you in the forest, as we speak. They think it’ll be funny to watch someone so helpless trying to fight off those trees. You know—the ones that exposure to the Underneath has turned into things that need to feed.”
