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“You might think that the record for the earliest attempt was on day one, and indeed there have been…five…such attacks. But the record was in fact set fifty years ago when one enterprising girl broke into the Academy a week before intake and attempted to murder all three resident Kindnesses with an explosive device. The longest any class has gone without an acolyte trying to kill a Kindness is Year Five.

“Although such acts of rebellion are in some ways reflections of the Creed in which I inculcate my pupils, they are also wasteful and misguided. Such initiative is not rewarded with mercy. The system here is designed not to break, and it will not break.

“It has been my habit to use a class’s first attack as the sign that it is time to add a further level of explanation to what we do here. This is a talk that I withhold since the brutality, misfortune, and cruelty that the world throws at us does not come wrapped in justification, and acolytes under my care should experience the sharp edges of existence raw and without the comfort of any higher calling.

“A wise man once said that anger is an energy. In the Wound Garden, Kindness Terra instructs you to put anger aside when you fight, for it clouds judgement and narrows choices. It is easier to teach you the technicalities of killing with a sharp edge when your emotion is controlled. Young Bek would have had a better chance of catching Kindness Terra unawares had she not worn her rage so openly. Still a vanishingly slim chance, but a better one.

“But those few of you that we release upon the world at the end of your harrowing are not sent as warriors or soldiers or assassins. They are sent as avatars of the Kindly Ones. It is not sufficient that you be deadly, you must be what they are, you must embody anger, your blood must smoulder, ready to burst into flame at a moment’s notice.

“Have we upset you? Oh dear…Have we made you girls cross? Do you burn to get even? Does an ache for justice gnaw at your bones even now? It’s almost as if it were planned that way, no?

“To survive this place, you must consume that anger before it consumes you. You must become it—wield it rather than be wielded by it.”

Marta slowly scanned the desks, meeting every gaze, her eyes flint in the almost motherly ordinariness of her face. “Our anger is unceasing.”

Einsa returned that stare, saying nothing, hating the woman all the more.

“Our anger…is unceasing.” Marta, whose threat had always lain hidden, seemed suddenly lit by a different light, as if some unseen window had opened to a place of horror and in its harsh illumination every trace of softness, every touch of the ordinary had burned away. She seemed for those moments to be a different kind of creature, gaunt, lips drawn back from teeth more feral than should be possible, every tendon straining, every muscle bunched, and an awful, ancient hunger glittering in the pits of darkness that were her eyes.

“Our anger is unceasing,” she repeated, each word resonant with threat.

“Our anger is unceasing.” Einsa joined in with the class. She felt that anger today. Bek’s death had lit a greater fire than the Kindness’s words ever could. Einsa had been born with the rage of the Kindly Ones burning in her, and only the love she had for her remaining friends had kept Bek’s death from making an inferno of it.

“We are vengeance.” Marta stamped her foot, and dark tongues of flame shadowed her like an echo, finding an answer in Einsa.

“We are vengeance.” Fifty-eight feet stamped the reply.

“High or low, we carry justice.” Fist thumped to chest.

“High or low.” Einsa pounded just beneath her collarbone. “Justice.” Would it have been justice if Bek’s blow had landed? Einsa thought so, but truly she hadn’t cared about rights or wrongs. She’d just wanted to see her friend win. “I am vengeance. High or low.” She locked eyes with Kindness Marta, undaunted by her aspect and throwing the weight of her own rage behind that stare. She found no give in the woman, but perhaps, for a moment, she saw a measure of respect.

In the silence that followed, the Kindness dwindled once more to a middle-aged woman, but there was no doubting that any of the acolytes present would ever look at her again without also seeing the ghost of who she truly was.

Einsa left the lesson lost in her thoughts, easy prey for any acolyte who fancied reducing the odds or simply getting the practice. It seemed that Bek watched her from everywhere the shadows gathered, pale, silent, still with the knife in her breast. Bek with her patience and her resignation, both at odds with her vision and her kindness. It had been the compassion or the foresight that had somehow brought little Mollandra into their circle that first night and made the trio. Which of the two, vision or kindness, Einsa still didn’t know.

She wiped away a hot, angry tear, then cursed. Einsa didn’t cry. Crying was weakness—the dam breaking—the beginning of the end in a place like this, not that there were any other places like this.

A hand on her shoulder, brief then gone before she could reach for a weapon.

“Courage.” Tmanga passed her.

That night Mollandra had come to the dormitory with the ugly black stitches holding together the wound that Wenda had given her. She approached her bed and let her gaze settle on Sharp, who sat with her usual nonchalance, cross-legged on Bek’s cot. Mollandra’s blue eyes sought out Tmanga, still in her own place halfway across the room, then returned to Sharp.

“What?” Sharp looked up, with her own slightly unhinged good humour challenging the smaller girl’s newly acquired half smile.

A fragile moment hung between them, and for the first time Einsa saw a hint of fear in Sharp, a nervous something that turned into her ever-dangerous laugh. It wasn’t until that moment, viewing little Mollandra through another’s eyes, that Einsa was able to revise the opinion she’d forged on the first day.

“What?” Sharp asked again, tensing as if ready to attack or be attacked.

Mollandra held up three fingers, sweeping them round to indicate herself, Einsa, and Sharp. Through gritted teeth and with evident pain she said, “No more leaving.”

Sharp had the grace to show a fleeting instant of guilt at that, her glance flickering towards Tmanga. “No more leaving.” She laughed. “Kindnesses or corpses. It’s us three. Nobody else.”

13

Rue

Rue left the bodies behind her. The dead brother had killed the living one and both had fallen beyond her reach. Tabtha lay lifeless in a pool of her own blood and surprise. Rue had been leaving the bodies behind her all her life, a trail of murder, retribution, and sometimes justice that punctuated her story all the way to this particular day and this particular moment.