But Water knew better. Water resonated with the pain, and embedded deep within the foundations of the school was a burning, nagging shadow of something terrible. Something inhuman. And that sense, that wrongness, twined itself around Tenn’s heart. Water echoed the monster’s hymn, and Tenn’s body had no choice but to march to its cadence. It tugged him forward. It told him to obey.
He left his quarterstaff in the room and slid out the door. A small part of him was dimly aware of how silent the hall was, how loud his footsteps were on the tile. But the twins didn’t stir. He had meant to tell them something. Something about the safety of this place, but Water was louder in his head than his own thoughts. He could only move with the tide, a stick caught in the stream.
He didn’t stop at the lobby. He continued down into the basement, toward the room where the laundry machines and Ping-Pong tables were. The room was more than just a lounge. Doors lined every wall, and behind them was a series of tunnels that linked to every building on campus. He could practically feel the ghosts of his classmates here, but the perception was dim, lost under the crashing of his mutinous Sphere. He slipped through the lounge like a sleepwalker, past sofas and tables littered with magazines, and made his way to a door at the far end. It opened silently under his touch, the hall beyond stagnant with dead air.
The door at the other end of the long hall was locked. Water roared like rapids.
A flick of Earth, and the lock crumbled. When he stepped inside, Water stabbed him with agony, a pierce that coiled through his guts and made his eyes flutter. The walls in here breathed pain. And that pain, that crippling hurt, drew him forward and filled him with a new sort of ecstasy. A different sort of hunger.
In a small corner of his mind, he knew the room should have been like many of the other downstairs lounges, with sofas and tables and bookshelves. But this room looked like a kitchen. Knives dangled from grids on the ceiling and steel bowls piled on every surface. Rows of metal tables were meticulously arranged side by side in the middle of the room, more knives and bowls artfully displayed on top. Stacks of wood or metal were piled along the walls in pyramids. Tenn didn’t need light to know that there was no dust in here. He could sense it—the cleanliness, the almost sterile scent in the otherwise-stale air. And yet, despite the order, he knew the walls should be bleeding. They were screaming curses through his veins. He pitched forward. The door slammed shut behind him.
That’s when he noticed the body.
It was the mouth of the whirlpool, and Water left him no choice but to fall toward it. The slumped corpse against the wall dragged him forward, tugged at Water with a hook he had no desire to escape. It was male. Older. The flesh tight over sharp bones. Tenn dropped at the body’s side, his head spinning, spinning. I shouldn’t, I shouldn’t—I need to get out of here, I need—Water drowned the fear. It sang a horrible ecstasy. The body was wearing a suit, a wool suit. Tenn’s fingers brushed the rough fabric. His hand pulled itself toward the body’s face. Fingertips brushed dead skin. Water screamed.
“Dmitri,” she says. “You love me, right?”
He nods, though he doesn’t mean it. Of course he can’t mean it. Not after this.
“And you see the good I’m doing, yes?”
He nods again. It’s all he can do, really; it’s impossible to talk through the gag, and the ropes tying his wrists to the chair are strong. He’d given up struggling hours ago. The walls are thick down here. Even if he could have screamed, no one would have heard him. Even if he managed to escape these bonds, there was nowhere for him to run. The whole faculty has gone insane.
Get the kids out. Get the kids out. Those had been his last words, before Helena pulled him down here. Those had been his last words, and he didn’t know if anyone had heeded him.
Helena pushes herself away from the desk. Her black hair is pulled back in a ponytail, and she wears the pencil skirt and white blouse that he’d always joked made her look like a sexy librarian. He isn’t joking now. And neither is she.
She holds a scalpel from one of the art studios. It’s already covered in his blood. His skin burns with cold and pain, his blood dripping in slow rivulets to the sterile tiles below. She hadn’t hesitated the slightest bit when she’d brought the blade to his flesh. Not the first time. And not the second or twentieth.
She leans in close, her green eyes blazing.
“Then you understand why I must do this.” Her eyes flash to the blade in her hand. She isn’t a Howl—one of the monsters that had been kept out of sight of society until yesterday. He knows that much. She’s worse. He’d watched her slow progression toward madness and power. And like everyone else at the Academy, he’d done nothing to stop it.
Hell, he might have encouraged it.
He’d been on the admissions board, and had handpicked the students she used for subjects. He’d found fuel for her madness. So much of this was his fault...
“I’ve studied the words of the Dark Lady. I know her secrets. And I think,” she says, leaning in, like this is some intimate secret and not his death sentence, “I think I can become just like her. I could become a goddess.”
The Sphere of Water courses in her stomach. You’re unstable, he wants to say. The Spheres have made you crazy. But there was no logic with her, no reasoning. Not anymore.
“With these runes, I can keep you sane. I know the science. The base creatures, they lose their minds. Only those of Water or Fire or Air have sentience, but even that is fragile. But I know. I know how to keep you mine. I know how to give you power.”
He can’t scream as she pushes the blade into his skin, scratching marks along his arms and chest that he can’t see and can’t comprehend. Runes to bind you to me, she’d said. Runes to make you like the Kin. Runes to let you keep your magic. There had been tears in her eyes the first time she’d made a cut, unflinching as she’d been.
Not anymore.
Now she’s smiling, his blood staining her lips a deeper crimson as her scalpel licks him again.
Tenn surfaced from the flood, barely able to gasp as Water’s grip loosened and reality crashed against the waves. His thoughts were dim, congealing. He knew those people. Dmitri had been his biology teacher. And Helena...he knew her all too well.
She had been Silveron’s president.
Dmitri’s body twitched beneath his hand, breath escaping in a hiss from long-silent lips. A voice inside of Tenn screamed, begged him to run from the Howl at his fingertips, the Howl that was slowly coming back to life, but Water bellowed louder. Water wanted to help Dmitri, wanted to mirror his pain.
Water won.
“Please,” Steven cries. “Please don’t do this.”
The boy squirms on the table, but the ropes hold him strong. Helena stands beside Dmitri, watching him work, watching as he sobs with hunger and hatred.
She hands him the knife.