Page 108

The library is quiet at this hour, the morning light sneaking through the high windows. We take a table near the back, not too close to anyone, and I set my pencil and notebook in front of me, primed to take notes, and Baz sets the paper down between us.

The title is dry and academic: On the Formation of Corrupted Returns: A Historical and Theoretical Framework, by Professor R. Achterberg.

“Achterberg?”

“Yes. But I have no idea who it is, there’s nothing on them that I can find. Could be a pen name.”

He clears his throat and starts reading.

The opening argument is straightforward enough: Hollow formation as symptom rather than accident, which is not the Mortis’s official position but is defensible in the literature apparently, because Achterberg cites a dozen sources in the first three pages and Baz reads the citations in a flat voice that means he’s cross-referencing them in his head as he goes. The paper’s thesis is that the veil is a membrane with pressure on both sides, and that corrupted returns cluster around a few specific conditions, including particular locations, dates, and alignments of the Bleeding with periods of high necromantic activity. All of this corresponds with what Baz already told me about it, his theory coming to life.

“He maps the historical incidents,” Baz says, turning a page. “Hollow appearances from the last two hundred years, plotted against Bleeding dates and proximity to significant veil-sites. The Thorn Temple comes up more than anywhere else.”

“Thorn Temple,” I muse, recalling the long-abandoned island I pass on the way to the Brackens and back.

He runs his finger down a column of figures. “It’s not random. There’s a clear pattern.”

“So, what’s the pattern?”

“Well, it’s as I thought. The incidents cluster when the Bleeding is deepest and in this case, when there’s been sustained necromantic practice near the Temple site. As if the activity of all our students reaching into the veil, all the Keeper workings, the Veil Trials, etcetera, thins or stretches something.” He turns another page. “Achterberg calls it the membrane, which is what I call it. Whatever it is, it has two sides, and when one side is under enough pressure, things come through.”

I think about the fact that I’ve called it the membrane before, when I was in the Mire. Then I think about the Mire, about the water that flooded the school, and I shiver. “Keep reading,” I say.

The next section is about the Thorn Temple specifically, the pre-Mortis cult that built it on that island, what they worshipped, and what they believed. Achterberg writes about it with the detached tone of someone describing an extinct species, cataloging their practices with academic precision. “The cult understood the membrane not as a barrier but as a skin between two kinds of living. They worshipped the thing on the other side not because they feared it but because they had made an arrangement with it.”

“What kind of arrangement?” I ask. My lip is curling at the notion of skin.

Baz reads: “Historical accounts suggest a transactional relationship between the cult’s practitioners and the entity they termed the Unnamed God. The practitioners thinned the membrane through sustained ritual activity, directing the dead—specifically those who had perished in large numbers, and in concentrated events—toward the entity rather than allowing them to disperse naturally through the veil. In exchange, the entity granted its servants a capacity not achievable through standard Mortis necromantic training: the ability to direct Hollows as vessels rather than simply avoid or dispel them.”

I put my pencil down.

“He’s describing puppet mastery,” I say. “Over Hollows.”

“Yes.”

“That’s not a Mortis specialty.”

“No,” Baz says grimly. “It sure isn’t.” He looks at the page. “He describes it as something the entity bestows. Not a trained skill but a granted one, if it deems you worthy enough. Feed it the unreachable dead, thin the membrane for it, and it gives you control over what comes through.”

Suddenly the room feels deathly quiet. Somewhere across the library a student turns a page.

I think about the plague-dead, unreachable in the veil and about what Baz found in the intake records, about the bodies going in and not coming back out. Something has been feeding the dead somewhere for years. Then I think about what Baz found in the intake records two months ago, before he died, and which we’ve been painstakingly reconstructing since.

I think about the Hollow in the halls, then outside my door, and the slime on the corridor floor, and the strange, directed quality of it, as if it was not wandering, nor confused.

But waiting.

Waiting for directions.

I think about my sister and my father and then I have to shake my head.

“Keep reading,” I say again.

The closing section is what makes my hands go cold. Achterberg describes the conditions under which a dormant cult practice might be revived. He frames it as theoretical, an academic exercise in historical extrapolation and describes what the early signs would look like: The Bleeding accelerating, onset earlier each year with the gap itself widening. Hollow incidents clustering near veil-thin sites rather than dispersing randomly. The plague-dead becoming unreachable, pulled somewhere rather than simply gone.

Baz stops reading.

He looks up at me.