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Sharp shook her head, a brief shiver of rejection, and returned to her dance.

Rue strode closer. “Sharp, it’s me! Molly!”

Sharp stopped again, regarding her with distaste. She sniffed—an echo of the snorts she used to be so free with. “Molly’s grandmother, more like. You’re too old even to be that awful mother of hers.” She turned away, raising her arms to the music that wasn’t there.

“Sharp!” Rue set a hand to the woman’s upper arm, shocked by the thinness she found there.

Sharp stopped. She looked pointedly at the fingers on her sleeve. “Mollandra,” she said archly, “was a beautiful girl. You are a dirty, malodorous peasant.” She paused. “Where did your tooth go? Did you know you’d lost one?” She set a narrow finger to one of her front teeth. “It’s not very attractive.”

“Enough of this!” Rue moved towards the door, trying to pull Sharp with her. “We need to go. A Cruelty’s coming.”

“Did you bring Molly with you?” Sharp looked around as if there might be a child close by. “I do miss her. And the other one. I forget her name…I lost them somehow. I’m not sure—Have you seen them? Molly? And the dark girl?” One finger traced Tmanga’s scar on her own cheek.

“Sharp…” Rue’s hand fell away, an awful truth starting to dawn on her. “Sharp?” She met the confusion in her friend’s eyes. “Oh no.” She set her fingers to the old woman’s withered cheek. “How could this have happened to you?” And before Sharp could speak, a second terrible realization woke in Rue’s chest, squeezing the air from her lungs so she could only whisper it. “I’ve led him to you. I’ve led him here.” She faced the door. “I have to go.”

But a figure in black already stood there blocking the way.

34

Mollandra

Year Five

“Tell us, then.” Sharp sat on the end of Mollandra’s bed.

“Everything.” Tmanga from the next bed pulled up close.

The other members of the class—fewer than two dozen of them after the elixir—shot curious glances across the dormitory but knew better than to intrude on their privacy.

Mollandra sat cross-legged, unwilling to speak though knowing she must. They were memories she had buried as effectively as she knew how, and now that they bubbled to the surface, like shrivelled corpses in a tar pit, she knew that forgetting was part of what they had taught her back in her old home.

“My family. It wasn’t a normal one. I didn’t know that at the time. I didn’t know anything except what my parents told us.” Half of her mind was still in the courtyard, shrinking from the shock of Father’s appearance.

“You had brothers and sisters?” Tmanga asked. It seemed that every acolyte had siblings, too many of them. It was generally part of the story behind them being sold to the Academy. Tmanga was a rarity, having none. Sharp had eight siblings that she knew of. All of them sisters. She hadn’t been the oldest or the youngest, a fact that Mollandra had felt as an ache in her chest when Sharp first told it. There should be some easy reason like that for choosing which child to be rid of.

“I did. Brothers and sisters. Too many of them—”

“We all had too many,” Sharp said. “Except Tmanga, of course.”

“I had too many to make sense. I was the oldest.” Mollandra had been the oldest when she left, when she abandoned them. But there had been others, other Eldests, other abandonments. “I was the oldest, but none of us was under five and there were at least two dozen children in that house.”

“That is too many,” Tmanga agreed.

“Were they stealing babies?” Sharp asked. “Or were you all quins and quads?”

“Not even twins.” Mollandra shook her head. “It was bad there. Worse than here.”

Two sets of eyebrows elevated, but neither Sharp nor Tmanga called her a liar. Tmanga drew her knife as if taking comfort in the edge. “They killed their own?”

“Worse. They hunted us. Torture and fear. We were never safe. Not when we slept. Not any time. And it was our whole world. We didn’t even know there was an outside. Just walls and bars.”

Sharp’s face grew tight, her eyes narrow—the look she got when she was about to murder someone.

“Why?” Tmanga asked the obvious question.

“Some people just do stuff like that.” Sharp nodded, as if agreeing with a voice in her head. “They enjoy it. People say necromancy is evil. They’d call Undu a monster. But there are people in the city who smile and laugh and have friends and look like all the rest, yet under the skin they’re filth. Demons waiting to close the doors on the world and let themselves out.”

Mollandra unclenched the fists she hadn’t chosen to make. “They had a reason. I don’t properly know why, but there was a plan. They taught us things too. Fighting. Reading. It wasn’t like here, more chaotic, but we had lessons to learn. And…” She faltered. Next to the stalking and the hunting and the hurting, next to the biting and the twisting, it seemed a small thing, but somehow it was the worst, the hardest to remember, the most difficult to speak of.