Page 34 of Bone Year

The low vibration cuts off abruptly, and the nausea recedes along with the unease that surged through me moments ago. I release my grip on the desk and realize my knuckles have gone white. Beside me, Lux slowly straightens, her face tinged green. Across the way, the angel with the silver-streaked braids exhales shakily and loosens her death grip on the wood too.

“Lesson one.” Nestor wipes the instrument on his sleeve and tucks it back into his coat. “The twisted creatures do not obey the rules of death as we understand them. If you retain only one thing from my class, let it be that. It could save your life one day.”

He scans the room, cataloging each of our faces. What does he see? Terror, probably. Revulsion, maybe. A few students still look like they might pass out. The pale shifter with the green eyes has finally blinked, some of the tension leaving his shoulders now that the thing is truly dead. A girl near the front, small with delicate pointed ears and hair the color of autumn leaves, has tears streaming silently down her freckled cheeks.

What does he see when he looks at me?

His light-blue eyes stop on my face, and an unnerving giggle escapes his throat before he moves closer to the table. Something about that laugh makes my skin prickle.

“Welcome, bone year students, to Architecture of Flesh.” He spreads his arms wide in greeting. “It’s going to be a fun year.”

He slaps his hand down on the metal table loud enough that I flinch. The girl with the autumn hair flinches too. The angel across the aisle doesn’t move, but I see her wings twitch out of the corner of my eye.

“This here is a hollowstag. You may have seen its distant relatives before, prancing through the forest like cute little deer that flee from predators.” He tilts his head as he examines the cadaver with something like affection. “This guy here is a little more scary than his relatives.”

He reaches into the creature’s open chest and plucks one of the glowing strands like he’s playing a stringed instrument. A faint hum fills the room, and my breakfast roils in my stomach again. I swallow hard, willing myself not to be sick.

“Should’ve skipped breakfast,” the angel mutters. I want to tell her I was thinking the same thing.

“The organs of a hollowstag are suspended by strands of pure current. We don’t know how this happens. We don’t know why.” He plucks another strand, producing a different tone, almost musical. “What we do know is that this current allows the creature to emit a low-frequency vibration that induces panic and vomiting in any living being within range.” He smiles, and it’s not a reassuring expression. “As you’ve experienced firsthand.”

“Why would it need to do that?” someone asks from behind me.

I look back to see a guy with long brown hair and high cheekbones. He looks genuinely curious rather than horrified, which is more than I can say for most of the class. His skin has a faint bronze undertone, and there’s something almost feline about the way he holds himself. Another shifter maybe. I wish I knew how to tell for sure. Maybe I’ll learn that in my next class.

“Excellent question.” Nestor points at the student without looking. “Hollowstags are not predators. They don’t hunt us. They don’t feed on flesh. So why evolve such a terrifying defense mechanism?”

He waits for an answer, but no one speaks. Twenty students and not even one willing to guess.

“Because they are heralds,” he says with relish, drawing it out like it tastes good on his tongue. “Hollowstags appear before mass fissure events. Always and without fail. They emerge from the deep forests and the mountain passes. Days, sometimes hours before a fissure tears open and spills its horrors into our world.”

He leans forward, bracing his hands on the table, his eyes glittering with something between madness and fascination. In this light with that expression, he looks less like a professor and more like something that crawled out of a fissure himself.

“They’re warnings, living, screaming, panic-inducing warnings. And for centuries, we ignored them.” He straightens, clasping his hands behind his back. “We won’t be making that mistake again.”

His gaze sweeps across the room one more time, lingering on faces seemingly at random. The green-eyed shifter. The crying fae girl. The angel with the silver braids. Draven, who still looks bored. And then me. When his eyes pass over me again, I feel the weight of it like a physical thing.

He claps his hands together. “Who wants to touch it?”

I throw my hand up along with a dozen other people, and Lux grabs it, pulling it back down beside me.

“Yuck.” She scrunches her nose. “Why do you want to touch that thing?”

I laugh, “What are you doing here if things like this gross you out?”

“I want to heal people, not dissect crawlers and twisted creatures.” She shudders. “Those are the exact things I want to stay away from.”

I slide off the bench and stretch my legs. “Come on, you don’t have to touch it. Let’s get a closer look. Besides, it’s not a twisted creature. He said it’s a herald. They only have a bad reputation because they look scary.”

She sighs but gets up with me.

Most of the class has formed a line down one of the aisles, only a few people going up at a time to speak with the professor and peer inside the creature’s open cavity. The air near the front smells worse, thick with something organic and faintly sweet, like decay masked by preserving chemicals.

“The Mirror Ceremony is supposed to be after dinner tonight,” the angel with silver threaded through her braids says to the guy standing next to her. “I hope it doesn’t get pushed back again.”

“Yes, I can’t wait to meet my eidolon,” Lux chimes in, and they both turn to look at us.

“Er, sorry to interrupt.” She tucks a strand of pink hair behind her ear. “I’m Lux. This is Maelis.”