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“Enough.” Undu let her go. She stepped back, addressing the class. “The young struggle to connect to the dead. Life has you in its teeth and is shaking you too fiercely for you to hear the river’s flow. Most of the lessons I teach you here will go to the river with you unused. But for the three who leave this place wearing the black as I did…those three at least have a chance—a small chance—of growing old. And the old dip their toes in the river every night. When you’re old, with the right training and a bit of aptitude, any of you might do what little Bek did here in front of us.”

She knows my name, Bek thought. She must know all our names. And in an instant she was forced to reframe her view of the woman yet again.

Undu returned her gaze to Bek, staring at her as every other girl was. “To find this power in a child means that we have had a true necromancer break her fast with us. That or she’s close to her own death, dipping her toes in the river to test the temperature.”

Beneath the glitter of those small eyes, Bek’s lungs burned again, but she refused to cough and instead snarled at the Kindness, who turned away with a small smile.

“Who else would like to touch your dead friend here?” Undu raised her voice.

Silence. At least nobody fell off a table this time.

“Anyone?” Undu humped her shoulders at the sides of her head in a shrug. “All of you will do it, then. Form a queue. Make sure it’s a good feel—it’s the last she’ll ever get.” The Kindness watched as they shuffled, pushed, and finally began to take their turns. “Get used to it, ladies. Death will be your companion here. You’ll be carrying the dead out or you’ll be carried out yourself.”

Eventually all of them had set hands upon the dead girl, some trembling, some sullen. Sharp grinned her wide grin, Mollandra crept by quiet as a mouse, Einsa stone-faced, Tmanga bored. Some girls sniffed and cried—for themselves, Bek thought, since Lucia had given nobody anything to miss her by. Little Brooth, almost as pale as Undu, spent longest, fascination in her dark eyes.

Undu shooed the last acolyte away. “There’s more…” She set two fingers to Lucia’s throat and rolled her eyes up into her head till only the whites showed. Strangely, it was this, not the corpse and its stink, that caused a dark girl towards the back to lose custody of her breakfast.

Undu wrinkled her pale forehead in discomfort and reached for where her own throat was lost in folds of flesh and the black of her hard-won robe. She coughed, croaked, and spoke as if her voice had first to force its way through a straw:

“Some little bitch came at me! Me! In the night. Tried to choke me…”

A pause in which horrified glances were swapped back and forth. Bek stared only at her feet, trying to forget the awful constriction she’d endured as she shared Lucia’s last moments.

“No, I didn’t see which one it was! That just means I’ll have to punish them all! I’ll grab—”

Kindness Undu took her hand from Lucia’s neck and blinked as her eyes resumed their normal positions. She coughed, swallowed, and coughed again. “As you heard, Lucia is still quite angry about last night’s events and not yet reconciled to the fact that she is dead. She remains on our side of the river, her discontent blinding her to its presence, leaving her deaf to the muted rush of time’s passage, dark and liquid, ever flowing.”

Bek noticed that Einsa on her right and Mollandra on her left were both considerably closer to her now, pressed up for comfort. What part she’d played herself in closing those gaps she didn’t know, but she was glad of the press of warm bodies and hoped it would erase the memory of Lucia’s cooling flesh.

Undu made to take up the sheet and cover Lucia again. An audible sigh hissed out of the audience, part of it Bek’s own relief.

The Kindness paused. “But wait,” she said, smiling as if at some old joke. “There’s more.” She made a pale fist and raised it above Lucia’s chest. “It would be a crime to let all that anger go to waste, would it not, children? Perhaps a greater crime than the murder itself, for we here at the Academy are agents of retribution, daughters of anger, forged to remind the world of its duties.”

And with that she struck down, hard, fist striking Lucia’s breastbone. Once! Twice! Three meaty impacts, each jolting the corpse, until on the third, Lucia sat up sharply, turned her bloody eyes towards the rows of watching acolytes and, in the same voice that Undu had used when speaking for her, demanded, “Which bitch killed me?”

8

Bek

Year One

Lucia Aqualas Divinanar had looked like being a bit of a nightmare while she was alive. Dead, she was all of a nightmare. Her corpse rampaged between the long benches, scattering stools as she lunged for any acolyte foolish enough to let her get close. She’d broken the arm of one girl, who managed to twist free and crawl away under the tables. But even as Bek turned from her own escape to watch, Lucia knocked down another acolyte and grabbed her ankles. She swung the girl—who had sat close to Bek at breakfast—overhead in an arc, bringing her down to wrap around a stool. The cracking sounds as her spine made a U-shape in the wrong direction were not those of wood breaking.

Added to the violence was an incoherent roaring that seemed too loud to be issuing from her foam-filled mouth.

Kindness Undu had positioned herself at the main doors and announced that nobody had permission to leave the lesson until they dealt with Lucia, or the corpse ran out of steam.

“She doesn’t look tired yet…!” Einsa had to shout for Bek to hear her, even though she, Mollandra, and a score of other acolytes were as far away from Lucia as they could get. They huddled together on the platform, where the Kindnesses and instructors had eaten, and pressed themselves against the wall.

“Do the dead get tired?” Bek asked. She’d only just regained her breath after running frantically from their last safe haven to this one.

“Get ready…” Mollandra hadn’t said it loudly enough to be heard, but as Bek turned to see if she could press farther into the crowd, she read the words on the smaller girl’s lips.

Glancing back, she saw Lucia throw down the smock she must have torn from someone and turn to glower at their end of the hall. Something in the weight of her deranged stare fastened a choking band around Bek’s throat, reminding her once more of how the girl had died.

The acolytes started to shift to the left, anticipating Lucia’s charge down the right-hand side of the hall. It hadn’t yet occurred to Lucia’s cooling brain that she could leap from table to table. If she started to copy what some of the girls had been doing to evade her, she’d be nearly impossible to escape.

“We can’t run forever!” Bek shouted. She certainly couldn’t. Her diseased lungs already felt like nets trying to hold water. “Undu could be lying about Lucia getting tired.”