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“No!” Bek’s cry lost itself in the onlookers’ roar.

Stabbing the Kindness suddenly became the only logical thing to do. Bek swung, bringing Einsa’s seven-inch hunting knife down in an overhead blow aimed squarely between the woman’s shoulder blades.

In a rush of motion Bek found herself on the ground. She remembered the punch against her chest and not much else. She tried to get up, but her body paid only vague attention to such commands. She lay within a forest of legs, with the Kindness’s black robe sweeping the flagstones beside her.

Rather than look up at the woman towering above, Bek lolled her head to the side and found Mollandra, also curled on the floor, alone save for Wenda standing close by. Mollandra rose as Bek watched. Wenda, drawn by the drama around Bek, had her back to her defeated opponent. Any noise Mollandra might have made was drowned out by the commotion filling the hall. The girl rose as if pulled by an invisible thread, and although she held a glittering blade, and although her face hung open, blood spurting from her gaping cheek, Wenda didn’t notice her at all, seeming unable to look away from the spectacle of Bek’s disaster.

As Bek struggled to draw a breath into corrupted lungs, she saw the hilt of Einsa’s knife jutting from her own breast. She wanted to ask how Terra could have been so fast. How the woman had even known to move. But she let the questions go. She let everything go. And the last thing she saw before the darkness took her was Mollandra. Bek saw her sister then, recognizing her as the scales fell from her eyes. She smiled even as blood sputtered from her lips. Sister.

Mollandra stepped up behind Wenda while the darkness fell and drove her blade deep.

12

Einsa

Year Two

Einsa carried the knife that Kindness Terra had wrested from Bek and used to kill her. It had been Einsa who brought the blade to the Academy—a gift of sorts from her mother, who had been a Kindness herself—and the blade had probably taken many lives in the woman’s hands. It had always felt as if it still belonged to her mother, and that Einsa was merely its custodian. But now she could only think of it as Bek’s knife. The weapon with which she had tried and failed to change their world.

The knife hadn’t been all that Einsa’s mother had given her. There was a reason behind forbidding Kindnesses children. A reason beyond issues of focus and purity and the plain meanness that seemed to underlie much of the Creed. There was in Einsa an anger and a fire that ran contrary to her nature. Her calm and her tolerance, her blunt good humour, all of these were gifts from her father. The man who would have fought to keep her from this place if her mother hadn’t fled from him with Einsa the year before she died. He would have fought and he would have failed. Just as Bek had. Her mother, Einsa had since reflected, had by her abandonment saved her husband’s life.

Einsa had spoken to her mother about the rage—not the natural anger born of circumstance, but something other, something alien, flowing in her blood, coiled around her bones.

“They put it in me,” her mother had said, twisting her mouth. “And through my blood I put it in you. It’s good that you are your father’s daughter. Never let that fire out. It will consume you and everything you love.”

And even as Bek lay dying and the fire had uncoiled within Einsa, smouldering on her skin, she had kept faith with her mother. The moment had passed, and by the time she left the chamber with the others, only sorrow remained.

Mollandra now kept a knife at her hip too. The one with which she’d killed Wenda and that she had been allowed to keep. Instructor Jane, who taught, along with torture, the binding and stitching of one’s own wounds, had sewn up the girl’s cheek with precision but little care for aesthetics. She had hidden away the exposed teeth and gums once more, leaving Mollandra with a permanent half smile that gave fairer warning of the child’s hidden dangers.

With Wenda gone, her three became a two and Sharp parted ways with Tmanga to join Einsa and Mollandra. Einsa would rather have had Tmanga, but the girl didn’t ask. Both of them were among the most competent in the class, but where Tmanga was levelheaded and considered every action, Sharp would jump in with both feet, relying on her savagery to turn things her way.

Kindness Terra had not condemned Bek’s attack. Rather she had afforded the corpse a modicum more respect than was usual at the Academy and said that initiative was a requirement in all Kindnesses, but that it should be tempered with realism.

Einsa, Tmanga, and Sharp had left their friends on the cold stone floor of the Wound Garden while Mollandra had been taken to have her face repaired. The next lesson had been the weekly instalment of the Creed, delivered by Kindness Marta, whose ordinariness Einsa was beginning to see for the superpower it was. Nobody would ever underestimate the threat Sharp posed. Put Sharp’s spirit behind a dull face that would seem to have been plucked from the breadline in any poverty trap, and that threat simultaneously vanished and multiplied.

Even though in the Academy everything mattered and slacking off was as likely to get you killed as blind testing in the poisons laboratory, Einsa slumped across her desk and let the Kindness’s words slide over her. It was good that Mollandra’s wound had kept her from the lesson—she would still be raging. When she’d understood that Bek was dead, she’d ignored her blood loss and the hopelessness of the act and had tried to throw herself at Kindness Terra. If Tmanga hadn’t had the foresight to be ready to trip her, Mollandra too would be dead.

Einsa had seen over a score of her classmates killed since Lucia’s mysterious demise on the first night, but somehow it hadn’t prepared her for Bek’s passing. Bek had had an air of permanence about her that made a lie of whatever cough was eating her from the inside. Bek could make you believe, even Einsa who had steeled herself against emotion, knowing it for the weakness it was: chains to hold you in place, chains to drag you down.

“I was sure she’d make it.” Einsa realized she’d muttered her thoughts out loud.

Sharp elbowed her to silence, then returned her attention to scratching down the Kindness’s words. Of all the deaths to date, perhaps the most shocking had been when Keeka, who aspired to being class clown, their light in dark places, had mistaken Kindness Marta’s motherly looks and quiet ways for softness. She’d begun to talk in class, pass notes, feign sleeping. On Keeka’s last day she had been rocking back in her chair humming some stupid tune to which she’d put words mocking all the instructors. Kindness Marta somehow made the trip from the front of the room to Keeka’s side unseen. All she did was touch a finger to the girl’s forehead. A gentle push put her past the point of no return and her chair fell over backwards. Ninety-nine times out of a hundred this would have ended in painful embarrassment. The way that the Kindness walked off without looking back and didn’t so much as flinch at the crack of skull on stone convinced the acolytes that Kindness Marta understood that this would be the hundredth time.

Returning to stand before the chalkboard, the Kindness had written in large white letters, When there is no need for speed, always wait for your moment.

Einsa, brought back to focus by Sharp’s sharp elbow, forced herself to listen to the Kindness’s words. For several long minutes the woman merely repeated elements of the Creed, making a virtue of the implacable nature of the Kindnesses, lauding their refusal of compromise, and extolling the way in which the roots of that harshness ran through the Academy.

“Today an acolyte attempted to kill Kindness Terra.”

Scores of faces looked up from their slates. Kindness Marta suddenly had the class’s full attention just as she had had it the day she tipped Keeka into oblivion.

“The Academy of Kindness has taken in one hundred and seventy-three classes and not once in nearly two centuries—”

Einsa blinked. Surely someone else had tried to turn the tables on their tormentors in all those years?

“—has any class run its course from one hundred to three without such an attack.”

Einsa slumped. Not only had Bek failed, worse: she was nothing special, as expected as the sunrise.