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“Thank you.” Mollandra had nothing more to say in the face of an evil so deep and so old and, as Sharp had said, so terribly, wrongly ordinary. Innocence and vulnerability were the world’s tinder, and trust too thin a shield to keep them from the flame.

“It’s not enough,” Tmanga said, dry-eyed.

“What?” Mollandra turned angrily on the girl. Sharp would rather have literally sliced herself open than have opened in the way she just had. “How is that not enough?”

“How can we kill them unless we know their names?” Tmanga replied.

Sharp laid her head on Tmanga’s shoulder. “I’ll give you one name. The worst. The rest I’ll kill by myself.” She paused, opened her mouth to speak, winced in pain, frowned, and sealed her lips.

“Tell us.” Mollandra’s nails dug into her palms. “Say it.” Having told some of her own story, she knew now that speaking the name aloud, no matter how painful, would draw some of the venom from it.

Sharp gritted her teeth. “Matrin.” She whispered it. “Matrin Smith.” She gave a shocked laugh. “I told you it was pathetically ordinary.”

“When we leave this place we will kill anyone guilty of high crimes, no matter how low they lie.” Tmanga spoke without anger, only certainty.

“We will.” Mollandra nodded. She paused, looking at Tmanga, still by Sharp’s side.

“She wants you to blub now,” Sharp said. “Bare your soul so we can be a three.”

Tmanga pursed her lips. “You assume I’ve been holding out on you both. You think that where Sharp’s shallows hid such depths, my silences are full of secrets.” Her smooth brow furrowed. Tmanga so rarely frowned that Mollandra could imagine her older than Kindness Marta with no more wrinkles than a still pond. “My parents sold me here. I was their only child, and they were not poor. I dreamed that first night that as they walked away from the Academy’s gates my mother scattered those coins by the roadside, like sowing corn, as if she wanted to be rid of every part of me.

“I blame her, of course, and my father, who let it happen—he was always a weak man—but the idea and the insistence, that was all my mother. I blame her but I’m not angry with her.”

Mollandra had never seen Tmanga angry. It was part of the reason that she had never been able to fully trust her.

“I’m angry for you,” said Sharp in a tone that suggested she had heard the story before.

“My mother wasn’t cruel. She just didn’t…care. At least not as much as other people do. And that was the problem. She saw the same thing in me, just more of it. She knew I didn’t love her, not like children are supposed to love their mothers. And she didn’t love me as much as she should. That bond, the one that will pull a mother into the fire if you throw her baby into the hearth…she never felt that. I guess I made her feel guilty.

“It annoyed her. We argued, or at least she did. The more silent I was, the more she raged. She did this.” Tmanga touched the pink scar she’d brought with her to the Academy. “None of it was anything to me. Just weather.” She frowned that un-Tmanga-like frown. “You know, until I came here, and they started trying to kill me…I don’t think I’d ever felt anything. Not really. Everything had been so…flat…before that. I found out that even terror is better than nothing.

“I’m exactly the sort of monster they’re always looking for. I couldn’t have been a part of the world. I would have just lain down and starved. Or done terrible things. At least this way there will be a reason for those terrible things…” Her dark eyes found Mollandra’s. “It’s not what you want to hear, but it’s the truth. The Creed has given me direction. This place, horrific as it is…I wouldn’t leave it. And this, right now.” She gestured between her heart and Mollandra’s. “It’s as deep as I go. Sharp’s not the shallow one. It’s me. Ankle-deep. I’ve spent my life watching, never properly taking part, standing to the side, not feeling the highs or the lows.”

“It sounds lonely,” Mollandra said. She’d known it, really, that Tmanga had always stood apart from them.

“It’s what I know. What I am. We can’t change our natures. The Kindnesses understand that. They know that all they can do is reveal what we are.” Tmanga shrugged. “I’ll promise to stand with you both. To die with you both. To serve the Creed. But I can’t ever love you.”

“And if I died tomorrow?” Mollandra asked, somewhere between hurt and disbelief.

“I would avenge you.”

“Because of the Creed?”

“Because of the Creed.”

“But how would you feel?” Mollandra asked.

“I think…” Tmanga rubbed at the cheek scar her mother had given her. “I think…nothing. But you’d have to die for me to be sure. Maybe I’d surprise myself and be sad.”

“She’d be sad.” Sharp took hold of Tmanga’s arm. “But not as sad as if I died. She loves us both.”

“I do not.”

“She just thinks she doesn’t.” Sharp nodded confidently. “She’s not lying. Just wrong.”

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Rue