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“Sharp, however, you should fear. I’ve personally witnessed her kill three men and a cow…it was a cow, wasn’t it?”

“Donkey,” Sharp said. She twisted Percival’s arm further up behind his back. “I’m not proud of the donkey.”

“Killed three men and a donkey with a book…Sharp had the book, not the donkey. I’m sorry if that wasn’t clear. And it wasn’t that big a volume. About this size.”

“Iron-bound,” Sharp said as she steered Percival towards the double doors.

“Iron-bound! Yes.” Rue shook her head. “How do you remember that when you can’t remember my name from breakfast to lunch? Or what we’re doing here for longer than it takes me to explain—”

Sharp accelerated Percival across the last few yards, using the allied principles of leverage and pain rather than brute force. She also caused him to bend forward, resulting in him hitting the doors headfirst.

He collapsed immediately, any groan lost in the boom as the doors shook.

“Well! What do you know?” Sharp looked over her shoulder at Rue. “Locked.”

38

Mollandra

Year Five

“You want me to eat brains?” Tmanga narrowed her eyes, peering first at Mollandra and then at the crinkled grey mass in her cupped hands. It was hard to tell which she was more suspicious of. “Cold brains?”

“They’re actually pretty warm.” Sharp licked the finger she’d poked in to test them.

Tmanga wrinkled her nose. “Is there nothing you won’t stick your fingers in?”

Sharp sucked the offending digit by way of answer before turning to Mollandra. “Explain it again but make sense this time.”

Mollandra took a deep breath and sighed it out, wincing at the pain from her tightly bound stab wound. Clear fluid dripped between her fingers, the room stank of death, and Brenna’s cries of pain set her teeth on edge. “Why did I just have to stitch up your face, Tmanga?” Mollandra realized that she had been in denial about the power of denial. She was amazed that the pain from the girl’s freshly sliced cheek wasn’t a constant reminder of what had happened. “How do you think Jemna and Takki ended up dead? Why is Brenna gut-stabbed? Why are half the beds charred, the room full of smoke? And—this is the clincher—why are there nearly a dozen dead children scattered around, half of them with their faces burned off?”

“It is a bit smoky.” Sharp nodded.

“What children?” Tmanga looked left and right, failing to see at least eight of them.

“Focus!” Mollandra would have grabbed them both again but shaking hadn’t worked, and now her hands were full of Grumble’s cooling brain. “What about Jemna and Takki?”

“They fought?” Sharp shrugged.

“They were in a three!”

“Over Brenna!” Tmanga said, triumphantly. “Jemna was sweet on her for sure.”

“This is how it works.” Mollandra spoke slowly and clearly, holding Tmanga’s gaze. “When they die, you forget them. It’s how the Ingredient works.” Milk-Eye’s burst of darkness might have played a role too. Even Mollandra’s memory of those moments was fuzzy.

“There are bodies on the floor? Corpses only you can see? Just you?” Tmanga frowned, concentrating. Sharp, on the other hand, had wandered off to see Brenna.

“Because they fed me the Ingredient when they had me. These were my family that attacked us. Part of it anyway. I thought my parents would come, but…”

“So, why am I looking at…that…goo?” Tmanga wrinkled her nose.

“It goes to the brain. It has to. Look, you can even see little black flecks…The elixir, I think that ends up in the heart, but the Ingredient, that’s all about the mind. See what it’s done to yours!”

“You’re telling me the floor’s covered in bodies?”

“Yes.”

“That I can’t see?”