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“Take her.” Eldest, standing on the flower table, hefted Tune towards the ceiling hole where waiting arms would reach past the sharp and splintered edges to haul her through.

“I can’t…” Tune sobbed as they took her.

“You can.” Milk-Eye’s voice in the darkness. Milk-Eye would be a good leader. She still made mistakes, but she would try. She would try to save them. Not like Lip-Scar. He would have them work for his benefit, then abandon them all, scattering them as offerings to delay Father. Even without the benefit, Lip-Scar would want to rule them. He saw it as his due. You could see that in his eyes.

“You can. You will. You must.” Eldest pushed Tune’s feet, losing contact as the others lifted. “Find the blackness.”

It was an old mantra. Find the blackness. That was the poison that Father put into them, that was the dark forgetting that coiled around their bones. The art to releasing it was to release yourself, to let go of any holds that might offer safety and to drown in the oblivion, knowing that it didn’t want to ever let you go again. To do that was like deliberately burning yourself or pushing a needle into your own eye. The body doesn’t want to do it. The mind doesn’t want to do it. But in that oblivion sanctuary lay. Erase yourself and Father could no longer find you. All his sniffing, all his poking his sharp stick into corners, throwing back covers, tipping over tables, all of it would avail him nothing. Embrace that blackness and you would be gone.

18

Mollandra

Year Three

Even as the water level in the sump room reached the airholes set into the sides of the ten coffins, Mollandra still knew that Einsa would defeat the lock. She and Meery were the only two still trapped, but Meery’s uncanny luck and Einsa’s endless competence would see them free before…before…

“They’re drowning!” The words burst from Mollandra unbidden. “Get them out of there!”

Tmanga and Sharp were on her before she could move, each anchoring an arm while some few among her classmates tore their fascinated, horrified gazes from the coffins to glance her way in puzzlement. This was what the Academy did. This was how a hundred became three.

“She could still do it,” Tmanga grunted with the effort of holding Mollandra back.

Time passed with an impossible combination of agonizing sloth and the speed of a racing heart. The relentlessly rising water reached the top of the nearest coffin and flooded over the rusted metal plate.

Any noise from within the occupied coffins remained inaudible beneath the rush of water and the sound of acolytes whose survival depended on their fellows’ deaths urging Einsa and Meery to even now break free. Gholla had been tight with Meery since the first year, and her screams were already the heartbroken heartbreaking kind. Brooth, whose necromancy made Mollandra expect her to be as cold and strange as Undu, called Einsa’s name through streaming tears.

Mollandra fought her friends, on the very brink of violence. “I have to—”

An unexpected light lit within Einsa’s coffin, red rage shining out through every airhole, bleeding into the water.

“What…?” Mollandra’s comprehension failed.

Steam began to break from the surface of the troubled waters around Einsa’s coffin, bubbling fiercely. And into the acolytes’ astonished silence a muffled detonation thrust its way a mere heartbeat before a white explosion of frothing water and flame felled them all.

Darkness and confusion reigned until, after the passage of some unknown time, Instructor Akki returned bearing a lantern from the next chamber to replace the light that the wall of water had extinguished.

Free of Tmanga and Sharp now, and with her bearing restored, Mollandra rushed towards the coffins, splashing noisily through the knee-deep flood. The lid of Einsa’s was gone, blown off and sunk. And for one glorious moment Mollandra believed she would find her friend sitting up amid the steaming waters.

Tmanga splashed up to her side, Sharp on her heels.

“Give them nothing.” Tmanga put her hand on Mollandra’s shoulder.

“Akki’s looking for you to break,” Sharp hissed.

Einsa’s face was peaceful, and Mollandra envied her that, but the rest of her body gave the lie to that impression. Impossibly, livid burns marked her skin and sections of her robe lay torn or charred or both. Missing fingernails, and rust flakes jammed beneath those that remained, told the story of her final panic and hopeless struggle.

Mollandra turned and looked at Treecie, the acolyte who had occupied the coffin immediately before Einsa. There could be many interpretations for the girl’s look of sick fascination as she stared at the floating body. Many would be imagining that it could have so easily been them lying there, or would be still wrestling with the source and nature of that final explosion.

Two places along, Instructor Akki opened the last coffin that remained locked. Meery’s uncanny luck had finally deserted her. She wore a vacant expression, perhaps with a hint of mild surprise, long fair hair floating around her in the water that had ceased to rise.

Mollandra looked back at Treecie on the steps before returning her gaze to her friend. “Something…” Mollandra reached a hand towards Einsa’s coffin, her fingers questing as if they could pluck answers from amid the wisps of steam. She felt a strange quality in the air, as if veins of heat ran through it, like quartz through rock. The steam held a scent too—one unlike any that Mollandra had smelled before. A scent that infected her lungs and trembled in her blood, as if rage had been made accessible to all the senses. “There’s something there…”

“You look sick.” Sharp grinned, as if this were a good thing, as if their friend weren’t lying drowned just yards before them. “Your lips are blue.”

“She was so angry…” Mollandra recognized the trembling of her own weak necromancy. Kindness Undu had despaired of her, but the Kindness had always said the connection with loved ones was the strongest of all: Those we would most wish a peaceful sleep to are the very ones we’re most able to disturb.

Mollandra snapped around to face Treecie. “You did something. Something to the lock. That’s why she couldn’t get out!”