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“Yes.”
“Invisible bodies? Won’t we all keep tripping over them? They’re just going to lie there until they rot away and leave us kicking the bones about?”
“I don’t know,” Mollandra admitted. “And they’re not invisible. You just don’t see them. It’s complicated. You’re all stepping over them without remembering it the next moment.”
Sharp returned unexpectedly, throwing an arm over Mollandra’s shoulders. “Is this a trick, Mollandra? You’re getting us to eat brains for a joke? If it is, congratulations. It’s only taken five years, but you’ve developed a sense of humour. Which makes precisely two of us in this place. Treecie was funny too, but you killed her, so…”
“Just eat the fucking brains, all right?”
“Why would it even work?” Tmanga asked.
Sharp elbowed her aside and gouged out a lump of the slimy mess, holding it quivering in the palm of one hand.
“Not too much—it’s dangerous.” Mollandra wanted to open their eyes, not lose them both. In sufficient quantity the Ingredient could wipe them from the world’s memory.
“You’re not going to eat that.” Tmanga stared.
“It’s how they did it to her. They fed it to you, yes?” Without waiting for an answer, Sharp crammed the stuff into her mouth, chewed briefly, then swallowed. “Needs salt. I’ve had worse in this place.”
“Your go.” Mollandra thrust the remainder at Tmanga.
“I’ll wait to see whether Sharp—”
“Wow! So many bodies!” Sharp stared around the room, eyes wide.
“You’re lying, aren’t you?” Tmanga scowled.
“You’ll never know if you don’t eat up.” Sharp focused on a piece of empty floor ahead of her. “This one’s missing a head!”
Tmanga huffed out a breath and took her own lump, smaller than Sharp’s. She nibbled on it at first, then retched. “Sharp…you lying cow…this is the worst thing I’ve ever tast—” She retched again. Scowling her determination, she began pushing the rest of the stuff into her mouth, small grey lumps rolling wetly down her chin as she screwed her lips up and swallowed.
Tmanga bent double, holding on to her belly for several long moments before straightening, still with her lips pursed in disgust. “Oh, you bitch! Sharp! Come here!”
And just like that the pair were chasing all over the smoke-laden dormitory, skipping over dead children, vaulting charred beds, paying no heed to the corpses of their classmates.
Mollandra watched them for a short while. It seemed that a kind of madness descended when memory and reality disagreed so thoroughly. To make sense of such discord required the kind of logic exercised in dreams.
She knelt by the nearest corpse, a girl a few years younger than herself, her chest a charred ruin from which blackened ribs reached, guarding the crater of her heart. A victim of Sharp’s holy wrath. Had this been one of the sisters she had run from Mother and Night-Father with? She couldn’t tell. There were new ones here, added after her escape. The girl’s pinched, pale face held something familiar, but perhaps it was just echoes of the same horror she saw beneath her own reflection. Sharp’s laughter cut against Mollandra’s sadness. There was no victory here, just sorrow and guilt. It had been her escape that had caused all this.
Would more come? Would Father and Mother descend on the Academy? Mollandra glanced towards the door for the twentieth time since the attack ended. Surely the Kindnesses would come. They must have sensed Sharp’s rage? Unless, somehow, the intruders had shielded it with the null aura that surrounded them…
“Wait!” Sharp stopped suddenly in mid-chase.
Tmanga crashed into her back. “What?”
“There really are bodies…” Sharp’s eyes moved from one to the other.
“You remember killing them now?” Mollandra stood, holding her side.
Sharp’s smooth brow, rarely bothered with frowns, now furrowed. “Maybe…”
“How about you?” Mollandra confronted Tmanga. “You can’t see this?” She crouched and lifted a dead boy’s hand to wave at her friend. “Nothing?”
“I see them.” Tmanga nodded. “It’s like those drawings Kindness Marta showed us in Creed. You see them one way, then you see how they can be a different thing, and the first way of looking at them is gone. Illusions.”
“We need to get rid of them,” Mollandra said.
“What for?” Sharp flomped back on the bed. “The servants will do it.”
