Claudia clenches every muscle in her body while Alistairfinishes tending to her wound. What is happening? Where did all that time go?
“What day is it?” she asks. They’ve all blurred together at this point, and now she’s worried she’s lost even more days to this strange fugue state.
The men give each other concerned looks.
“Technically, it’s now Friday,” Angel says.
Friday.
The day for detention with a dying man.
She reaches for the strawberry tarts that Angel brought her and takes a massive bite. She’s going to need way more sweets to get through this.
ORTESLUX
Orteslux grants the gift of faith. Guardian of the veil between life and death, he hears the prayers of scholars asking for assurance when confronting the unknown.
The Book of Cygnus: Orteslux 1:1–2
In the evening, Claudia descends to the underbelly of the school beneath the Scientia wing. The detention room is called the white room because it’s made out of bones. Only animal bones, according to Alistair, who gave Claudia a special tonic for surviving her time down here. Apparently, the place is rich with the magic of Orteslux, Scientia’s god of death and flowers. It’s meant to evoke the sense of dying—not in a physical sense but an existential one. It reminds students of their own mortality, how close they always are to the end. The dread begins the moment they enter and ceases the second they leave.
“I think we’re at the level where I can tell you this story now,” Alistair said back when Claudia told him about detention. “That damn room is the reason they call me Bones. Triche threw me in for three hours after he caught me smoking inside the greenhouse. A fire hazard, he said. Needless to say, I wasn’t exactly sober upon entry, and I was starving. That made the whole effect worse. I lost my mind a little bit.”
Claudia leaned in. “What did you do?”
Looking down, he said, “Remember how I said the room is made of bones? Well… it’s possible I may have eaten some fish bones that were part of the floor.”
“You ate floor bones?!”
“Claud, I was high and my body convinced me I was dying. I went into survival mode.”
“Still.” She shivered, then smiled. “You ate dirty old fish bones.”
He groaned. “Yes. I ate dirty old fish bones. I was picking them out of my teeth for days.” He shuddered at the memory, running his tongue over his teeth. “They’re very tiny, you know.”
Claudia then rolled the vial of black tonic in her hand. “So this is to ensure I don’t eat dirty—”
“—old fish bones, yes.”
“All right. Well, thank you very much, Bones.”
He rolled his eyes. “You’re welcome, Star Girl.”
Now, sitting centered in the white room like a beating heart in a rib cage, Claudia chugs Alis’s tonic and waits for the existential dread to ebb. There’s nothing in here to distract from it, save for the quiet ticking clock on the wall behind her.
Her vision is glassy and blurred as she surveys the room. Sitting closely together, there are two chairs with flimsy desks attached, but the rest of the room is vast and empty. It makes her feel like a dead body waiting to be examined by a coroner.
Mostly, though, she’s not thinking about her own death. She’s thinking about Cassius’s.
One month. Technically less than a month now that it’s been a week since the stars gave her that fatal message. At this point, she has no idea how she’s going to save Cassius, or if it’s even a possibility.
How will it happen? A fall? A slit throat? Will he, like Odette, simply not wake up?
She looks up at the clock—definitely not a Roe timepiece, for the arms are made from chicken feet—and wonders where Cassius is. He was supposed to arrive five minutes ago.
Maybe Triche forgave him and rescinded his punishment. Maybe all is forgiven and the High Sage will help Cassius break his curse, and that will be enough to save his life.
Just as the tonic takes effect and hope sparks in her chest, Cassius walks in. His face falls the moment he steps through the bone-lined door.
