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Tmanga turned the nearest invader over with her foot. A boy not more than ten, still clutching both his knives. “Because if Kindness Marta thinks Mollandra is drawing this sort of trouble she’ll probably just kill her. They kill nearly a hundred girls a year in this place for no good reason. You think they’ll hesitate if they actually have a reason?”

“So, what do we do? Pile them in the corner and throw a blanket over them?” Sharp snorted. “They smell bad enough already. We can’t turn our dormitory into the catacombs.”

“Whatever we do, it needs to be quick. The forgetting comes after the eating.”

“There must be a dozen of them.” Tmanga rolled the child over again, hiding his face. “We’d have all been dead if Sharp hadn’t raged.”

“I did rather save the day.” Sharp inspected her hands as if looking for charred patches or perhaps a lingering flame.

It hadn’t been the grand full-blown rage of a legendary Kindness, but it had certainly been beyond expectation for any acolyte. By saving Sharp in the vault, Mollandra had left her far more dangerous than she had been before. A volcano ready to erupt.

“We can’t carry them,” Mollandra said.

“Carry them where?”

“To the catacombs. It’s the best place to hide them. Among the dead. But there’s too many. Even if we could get the others to help. And they won’t even admit that there are any bodies unless…”

“Unless you convince them to turn cannibal first,” Tmanga said. “And why should they? If the Kindnesses get rid of you it improves their chances.”

“We’ll walk them there on their own feet,” Sharp announced.

“You can’t get a corpse to do much more than twitch.” Mollandra had never seen Sharp raise the dead much beyond a slouched sitting position.

“But I’m feeling good today. Different. That energy…” Sharp’s gaze returned to her hands. “It’s still echoing inside me. It could help. If we’re quick. And besides—these ones are still warm.” She licked her fingers rather unnecessarily.

“She’s right.” Tmanga nodded. “The quicker we do it, the easier it will be. And if we do it as a three…”

The Kindnesses had shown that whatever power the goddesses gave them would double if two joined together in the effort, but if three were to join, the power far more than tripled, scaling beyond what a whole class might achieve in total. The difficult part was, of course, the joining. It required trust in a place that would slit trust’s throat in a heartbeat. More than trust, it required understanding, which is something different and perhaps deeper than friendship.

Mollandra took Sharp’s hand. Understanding Sharp wasn’t hard, up to a point. She was an elemental creature, pure as a cat, transparently selfish, recklessly violent. But fathoms down a secret self lurked, a different kind of soul that seldom spoke but with a conscience and faithfulness that might colour what lay above if stirred with sufficient vigour.

And Sharp herself showed an unexpected ability to cut through pretence and to know by instinct, rather than by intellect, what was true about a person and what was not.

Tmanga, on the other hand, was the weakest link in their chain of trust, the stumbling block when it came to unlocking the power of their trio. Tmanga might be flesh and blood, but she was also one secret wrapped around another, wrapped around another. Where the horror of Mollandra’s past had armoured her against the new terrors of the Academy, and where Sharp’s endless shallows had kept their training from touching her too deeply, it was for Tmanga her privacy that had kept her sane. None of them had seen her true self and all of them knew it. The instructors had sought to break her but had never done more than scrape away a new layer.

Mollandra laced her fingers with Sharp’s much more pale ones. She grasped Tmanga’s hand, much darker than hers, and extended both arms towards the dead. She summoned Sharp onto the backs of her eyelids, flaming and glorious as she had been in the rage whose afterimages had so recently faded. She painted Tmanga over Sharp, watchful, knowing, calculating. She placed herself in their hands more fully than merely locking fingers.

Their trio had never properly interlocked, and the fact that none of the others in the class had either was cold comfort. The barriers that had kept them apart, barriers of mistrust and fear, were the same ones that had kept them alive for nearly five long Academy years. They lived in a place that punished any square inch of flesh left exposed, and yet to make a trio function they had to do so much more than temporarily lower their guard.

They had worked on it, though. Mollandra had saved Sharp from immolating in her own fire. Tmanga tried to show that something more human lay behind her shields. Sharp still had her edges but was more likely to cut herself than to cut Mollandra or Tmanga.

Strength and focus built, then built again, as if their power were a ball passed between the three of them, back and forth at ever faster speeds, daring any of them to drop it. Their joined potential passed beyond any effort that they could make alone, surpassing the sum of such efforts. The rate of increase was slowing, the game of passing becoming ever more difficult, the burden heavier and harder to hold.

The deaths echoed all around Mollandra. Her own blood loss had taken her closer to the river. Faint, very faint, but louder than she had ever heard them. The volume of the corpses’ discontent swelled as she heard with Sharp’s ears too, then again as Tmanga’s senses joined hers. All around them dead hearts strained to beat, some still twitching. All around them flesh that had been too young to die listened in vain for the commands that would never come. At least not from the owners of that flesh.

Will stacked upon will, purpose on purpose, desire on desire. Mollandra didn’t need to open her eyes to know that the bodies had begun to stir. Not just one or two, but all of them, limbs starting to reach with the urgency of their last moments, violence shuddering through them, their anger like that of Lucia Aqualas Divinanar, ready to fill each of them till their skins burst. The danger and the skill concerned the twisting of that spigot connecting the deadlands to those of the living. Too small a turn and the departed would barely twitch in death’s consuming sleep. Too great and their rage—always the first emotion to return—would pour through, creating new foes every bit as dangerous as the ones the acolytes had already fought.

A new idea found root in Mollandra’s head. Might they turn these creatures on those who had for years tortured and killed their charges? If the instructors and Kindnesses couldn’t see the children of the manor, who knew what could be achieved? But on reflection, it seemed more likely that the erasure impacted those closest to them at the time of death and might have had no effect at all on the wider population of the Academy.

Tmanga provided the judgement so absent in Sharp and so conflicted in Mollandra, filtering through just enough anger to animate limbs and restore the instinct to put one foot in front of the next to keep from falling.

The trio’s building strength plateaued, far shy of the multiples the Kindnesses promised. They hadn’t yet reached ninefold their separate strengths, certainly not twenty-seven times, but it had been enough.

Slowly, leaving the fallen acolytes in place, the trio led the way out of the dormitory holding hands, and the dead children followed in a stumbling parade.

“Over the wall,” Mollandra muttered.

It would send more of a message, and besides, there were more doors and gates between the dormitories and the catacombs.