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She nods and falls into step with me like she’s done it a hundred times, as if we spend our days walking around the school together. My hand flexes at my side, fighting the urge to reach out and grab hers, as if that’s something we do as well. We go up the stone staircase from the pier along the inside of the water gate wall, and into the long shadow of the east wing where the lantern light doesn’t quite reach, keeping us in shadow.

The night around us is quiet in the way the Mortis always gets after a Trial, the worn-out second-years back in their rooms, the teachers fighting the urge to snooze in the teacher’s lounge before they have to head back. The Bleeding sky overhead is still the deeper red it gets with the thinning of the veil, but still enough light reflecting off the water to turn the stones under our feet to a muted copper. Everything feels hushed, like we’re walking through a whisper.

“Tell me what happened,” I say to her. “During the Trial. I assume that’s what you want to discuss with me.”

She keeps her voice low as she tells me the whole of it from the moment Caranthis gave her the assignment. The crossing. Finding Emilita Vidalgo and getting the name for a village called Pietranera. The exchange. The reach for her father and sister. What should have been there and wasn’t. As I listen, my heart starts to race because everything she’s telling me corresponds with what I’ve been researching…I’m not sure how, but it does.

“I have been looking at this for a little over two years,” I say carefully. “I didn’t know what it was…and honestly I still don’t. But I know it’s something. I know it’s connected.”

She turns her head toward me without stopping. “What have you been looking at?”

“The intake records. Every single dead body that comes into the Mortis is logged and every single dead body that leaves is logged, and the records are kept in the registrar’s office under a lock that was very easy for me to pick. In the ordinary years the numbers match. In the plague years? They don’t. 1762 is five bodies short. 1814 is seven. An archivist from before 1700 wrote a note in a margin that reads more than we accounted for but I have no idea who wrote it. The plague before that one, I haven’t got the records for yet. The current plague, or should I say our last plague, god willing, doesn’t have enough years on it to come to anything conclusive, but what I do have is a Bleeding chart that shows the Bleeding is accelerating earlier and earlier each and every year, which you have no doubt noticed.”

“So what does that mean?”

“Well, my working theory is that something is pulling the dead through from the plague years and has been pulling them through for a long time, and whatever is doing it, the Bleeding is tracking it.”

She gives her head a shake. “I’m afraid I still don’t understand what you’re saying.”

We come to a stop by the sea wall and I look up at the sky, pointing at it.

“The Bleeding tracks pressure on the veil, yes? That’s no surprise, that’s what everyone here agrees on. The veil is a membrane and the Bleeding is basically a bruise on that membrane. The thinner the veil, the deeper the bruise, the more you can see through to the red on the other side, the blood underneath, so to speak. What I’ve been charting is that the pressure is increasing. Earlier every year and the gap widening, correct? So…something on the other side is pushing. Pushing harder and sooner.”

She shivers, her face growing pale. “What’s pushing?”

“I don’t know,” I say, though that’s half a lie. It’s true I don’t know, but I have theories. Theories she doesn’t want to hear, that she shouldn’t hear, given that her sister and father might be victims. “The registrar records and the way they correspond with the arrival of the Bleeding tell me that the plague-dead go in and don’t come back out. They aren’t dispersing the way the dead should. They’re being taken.”

Her eyes go round as saucers and I know I’m already saying too much. “Taken where?”

I shrug. “Through. To whatever is pressing from the other side. And the more it takes, the harder it pushes, and the earlier the sky turns red.”

I don’t tell her that my main theory is that there is something back there eating the plague-dead. No, I don’t think I’ll ever tell her that.

“And you’ve known this for quite a while,” she says after a beat.

“I’ve suspected it, yes. Tonight you confirmed it.”

“And you haven’t told anyone.”

“I haven’t had anyone to tell.”

I would have told Roen but, well, I’m not about to go there, not right now.

She looks at me for a long beat and the deep plum red of that damned sky is reflected in her eyes.

“We’re not supposed to be able to raise plague-dead,” she says. “That’s the one line we don’t cross. Renata says it is the only line this school is agreed on. So why…”

I exhale heavily and run my hand down my face. “I don’t know. Not yet. I know the dead are being taken from where they ought to be and I know the mechanism is sophisticated enough to leave no bodies behind that anyone has found. I know…whoever,” I nearly say whatever but manage to rein it in, “is doing it has had access to the Mortis for at least three plague cycles. I know, now, that it’s being done from this side. The intake records tell me the bodies come in, but what I did not know until tonight, until you told me, is that they truly aren’t found on the other side.”

She falls silent and part of me feels bad for loading all of this information on her, especially since it’s very personal. But the other part of me feels relief in that I don’t have to carry all of this by myself anymore.

“The Hollow I saw in the corridor…” she says after a minute.

I blink at her. “The what?”

“Oh, right,” she says, giving me a sheepish smile. “I suppose I’ve been withholding something too.”

We start walking again and she launches into the Hollow that she saw in the halls of Mortis.