Wayward Children 07 - Where the Drowned Girls Go, page 7
“So dreams can be dangerous, if you treat them like nourishment.”
The nameless girl looked to Emily, who nodded. Her face was pinched, and there was a hectic brightness in her eyes that spoke, silently, of tears. The matron ignored the signs of discontent in order to focus on Sumi.
“If a parent tells a child that something is poison, that something isn’t good food, is it the place of the child to argue, or to listen? After all, the parent knows more. The parent has had more time to learn the ways the world can destroy something delicate and lovely.”
“You’re not my parent,” said Sumi. “They’re dead. Both of them. You’d have to be a corpse, and maybe then you wouldn’t be lecturing me on whether dreams are real things or not. My door isn’t a dream.”
“It isn’t a dream, but it isn’t good food, either,” said the matron. “We are here, in this wonderful place, because we went through a door and into a world that shouldn’t have been there, a world that wasn’t good for us. You must not look at goblin men, you must not buy their fruit. A very wise woman said that. What do you think she meant?”
“I knew a woman who’d been to the Goblin Market, and she always said Rossetti was a well-intentioned hack,” said Sumi. “She died after I did. I guess she’s stayed that way, though, or she’d probably be here too, and we could all be miserable together.”
“Sumi, hush,” hissed Cora.
“You know she’s telling lies,” said Sumi. “You know you’re a mermaid. I’m sorry you felt like you had to run away to be safe, but no one gets to dry you out for their own sake. No one gets to hurt you like this.”
The matron’s lips pressed together into a thin, bloodless line. “We aren’t here to hurt you, Miss Onishi. We’re here to prepare you to live in the world where you were born. We’re here to teach you how to survive.”
“Died once, didn’t like it, not going to do it again,” said Sumi. “There. That’s survival. Can I go home now?”
“You can go to the headmaster’s office,” said the matron. She pointed to the door. “Now. Miss Miller will escort you there.”
Sumi rose. Her legs wanted to shake and her knees wanted to knock together and she didn’t let them. She was proud of that.
Cora rose less gracefully, face so pale that she looked like she was going to be sick. She walked to the door, waiting there for Sumi to catch up.
Together, the two girls walked out of the room, leaving the well-lit, oppressive classroom for the dim, equally oppressive hall.
More rooms lined the hallway than could possibly be in current use. Cora didn’t have a clear idea of the size of the student body—they were kept too isolated from one another, aside from mealtime and classes—but she was sure it was less than three hundred, which still made it considerably larger than Eleanor’s school. The matrons liked to imply that the majority of the students were voluntary enrollments, yearning to forget the weight that had been placed upon their shoulders by the worlds they’d been called upon to save. Cora wasn’t sure she believed them.
Rowena might be a voluntary enrollment. Cora still had no idea what kind of world the other girl had gone to, but from the way Rowena sometimes woke up screaming and clawing at the air, she was pretty sure it hadn’t been a pleasant one. And the girl without a name, she was voluntary. She had said so.
They walked, and the sound of their footsteps in their hard-soled, sensible shoes was like the tapping of a typewriter’s keys, strong and regular. Cora looked at Sumi crossly.
“You didn’t have to come here,” she said. “I’m here to save myself, not because I wanted someone to save me.”
“Heroism is addictive. Maybe that’s why it sounds so much like ‘heroin.’”
“Maybe,” agreed Cora. “But I’m fixing it. I’m breaking the Drowned Gods’ hold on me.” She flexed her rainbow-hued hands. “I’ll be free soon.”
“But at what cost?” asked Sumi softly.
Cora didn’t have an answer.
The sound of someone else breathing slipped into the space between their footfalls. Sumi slowed down, gesturing for Cora to do the same. Whoever it was wasn’t just breathing: they were crying, the sound soft and thin and pained. Sumi worried her lip momentarily between her teeth. Then she turned and followed the sound, working her way down the hall until she came to a door that had been left ever so slightly ajar.
Holding her breath to keep herself from making a sound, Sumi pressed her eye against the opening and peered through. There was a classroom, virtually identical to the one she’d just been ejected from, but there was no class, no matron: just a single teenage girl in a Whitethorn uniform, her hands pressed over her face to muffle the sound of her sobbing.
She was tall, or would have been, if she’d been standing, with the kind of broad shoulders that came from a childhood spent doing heavy labor, layering muscle over muscle. Her hair was dark blonde, the color of old hay, and like Sumi’s, had been tamed into a braid. Also like Sumi’s, it was doing its best to escape, breaking free in wisps and irrepressible curls, until it looked like a dandelion on the verge of going to seed.
Cora gasped, the sound small and quickly stifled. Regan was enough of a recognizable figure around the school that seeing her face wasn’t necessary.
Lingering in this empty classroom, talking to this crying girl, would make them late reaching the headmaster’s office. The cameras would have picked them up by now, and would know the path she was supposed to be taking. There were cameras everywhere except the bathrooms, even in the dorm rooms where they slept, making privacy as much of a longed-for dream as rainbows and fires and the flight of the moon mantas. Once they were late, they’d be in trouble. Once they were in trouble, almost anything could happen, and very little of it would be anything they’d enjoy.
Cora knew she should hurry Sumi along, and leave Regan for someone else to find. But she’d already been a bully once today, and if she walked away from Regan while she was crying, if she left Regan alone, maybe she wouldn’t be able to call herself a hero anymore. Maybe this was where she got to choose.
“Be sure,” she whispered to herself, and stepped into the classroom with Sumi at her heels, easing the door shut behind them.
The latch clicked softly when it snapped home. Regan froze, her last sob transforming into a strangled, agonized squeaking sound. Cora winced. She was making things worse. She seemed to have a talent for it here, in this school, where there were too many rules and none of them understood what it was to be merciful.
“I’m made of candy,” said Sumi.
Regan slowly lowered her hands and turned, staring at Sumi. She had a wide, friendly face, the sort of face that belonged on the other side of a breakfast table, smiling and happy and ready to face the day. It didn’t deserve to be miserable and streaked with tears. That wasn’t fair.
“What?” she asked.
“Candy. I’m made of candy. Technically I think that makes me a really fancy doll, since people are supposed to be made of meat. Only I’m made of meat, too, because the Baker baked me back into being a girl, instead of a kind of pastry, so I bleed and stuff, and I guess I can probably die again. I haven’t tried it.” Sumi cocked her head and smiled, as encouragingly as she could. “Okay. Your turn.”
Regan blinked slowly. “I … what?”
“I just said something big and ridiculous and impossible that can’t possibly be so. Now it’s your turn to say something big and ridiculous and impossible. I want you to believe me, so I’ll believe you, and then we’ll be friends, because friends believe each other. It’s your turn.”
Regan stared at her for a moment, eyes wide and wet and a little bit wild, like she was thinking of running away, like she was thinking of escape. She shifted her gaze to Cora.
Cora shrugged. “I’m a mermaid.”
Finally, slowly, Regan said, “I can talk to horses.”
“All horses, or only special horses?”
“Only special horses at first, but…” Regan hesitated. “There was a door.”
Sumi nodded encouragement. She wanted to rush the other girl, wanted to remind her that there was always a door someplace where a door wasn’t supposed to be, there was always a sign saying to be sure, there was always a choice. They didn’t have much time before the matrons realized they were missing and started flicking through the camera feeds, and then …
The punishment for this was going to be enormous. Sumi rejoiced, because when they got punished, they were going to be punished for doing something, not just for being who they were and not who the adults around them wanted them to be. Doing was always better than just being. Doing was a choice.
“I didn’t mean to go through,” said Regan. “I knew it wasn’t right, a door being where a door wasn’t supposed to be—where a door couldn’t be. Who puts a door next to a creek? It’s silly. It doesn’t make sense. But it was there, and I was so alone, and I thought, what can it hurt? No one’s going to miss me. And then, on the other side, I could talk to … not horses, because there weren’t horses there, not really, but anything with hooves; and anything with hooves could talk to me. They all wanted to talk to me. And they were such amazing things. Centaurs and hippogriffs and beasts like horses but with all kinds of different wings, and kelpies and silenes and it was … it was home, you know? I went home. I finally knew where home was, and it was so good, and I was so happy.”
“And then you found another door, and you wound up where you’d been in the beginning, but now you knew there was something better out there, and it was like trying to go back to nothing but oatmeal after you’d finally tasted cake,” said Sumi sympathetically. She was snipping off the tail of Regan’s story and she felt bad about that, she honestly did. Time was running out. “We haven’t met before. I’m Sumi. You were on the morning announcements. You didn’t get to go home. Why didn’t you get to go home?”
“Because if I’d lied to that many people, I don’t think I would ever have been able to be sure I deserved to go back,” said Regan. “I want to go back. More than anything, I want to go back. I don’t want to be here—I hate it here—but I miss my home.”
Cora frowned. Had she been doing the same thing herself, all this time? What made lying different when she did it? Did denying the Drowned Gods mean she was no longer worthy of the Trenches?
Sumi nodded, quick and tight and understanding. “Your world isn’t Nonsense, is it?”
“Nonsense?”
Cora sighed. “They call it ‘Delusion’ here.”
“Oh,” said Regan. “Um, no. I didn’t go to a Delusional world. I went to a Compulsion world.”
“Logic,” said Sumi, satisfied. “That makes sense. I bet if I cut one of your horses open, they’d have different throats.”
“Please don’t cut any horses open,” said Regan. “I don’t think it’s their throats. I think it’s my ears, because a week after I came back to the house where I grew up, I got to go riding on my old mare again, and I could understand every word she said. She’s not a really good conversationalist—she mostly talks about food and where she itches and how much she wants another apple—but I know what she’s saying, and no one around me does.”
“Ears, brain, what a pain.” Sumi glanced at the camera in the corner of the classroom. Was it her imagination, or was the lens pointed at them? “How did you get here all by yourself? During my orientation, they told me we were never supposed to be all by ourselves.”
“I was supposed to go home today,” said Regan. “They didn’t know what to do with me after they sent my parents away. They already pulled me out of all my classes. So the matron told me to sit here and think about how much I’ve disappointed everyone who was counting on me to get better.”
“Okay,” said Sumi. “Okay. I have to hit you now.”
Regan recoiled. “What?”
Cora blinked. “What?”
“The cameras watch but I bet they don’t listen, I think they don’t have the people to listen, so they can see us, you and me talking, but they don’t know what we’re saying to each other. They won’t blame you if they think I’m the one who started it. I want to talk to you more. If they think you want that, too, they’ll never let us be alone anywhere together, ever again. So I have to hit you now. Okay?”
Regan looked like this was anything but “okay”: like this was, in fact, the worst idea ever voiced in her presence. But she was easily half again Sumi’s size, and there was no question of who would win if they got into a real fight; she wasn’t in any danger. So slowly, reluctantly, she nodded.
“Okay,” she said.
Sumi moved faster than seemed possible, moved with the speed that had carried her across the Candy Cane Fields and seen her the sole survivor of the Battle of Gingerbread Gorge. Her hand lashed out, catching Regan squarely across the face, and if it was more sound than actual impact, it didn’t matter, because Regan toppled over anyway. To the cameras, her surprise would look like pain and fear. Cora danced back, away from the spray of blood from Regan’s nose. Cameras could lie even when they told the exact truth, because cameras couldn’t record everything. Only the surface.
“Find me when you can,” whispered Sumi, and turned, running out of the room as hard and fast as she could. Her shoes were too heavy. They slowed her down. She did the math in her head, measured the temporary delay against the loss over time, and turned her run into an awkward hop, untying the laces of her school shoes and kicking them away, then yanking off her socks, leaving them discarded in the middle of the hall.
The feel of tile against her bare feet was rejuvenating. She laughed with the sheer joy of it all, untying her tie as she ran for the distant shadow of the exit. The buttons on her shirt were next, and then the buttons on her skirt, layer following layer until she was running naked down the middle of the hall, hair streaming behind her, adrenaline and cold tightening her skin, making it feel like her own again.
A matron stepped out of the shadows next to the door, wrapping an arm around Sumi’s middle so tightly that the air was knocked out of the smaller, girl, leaving her gasping, still laughing, drowning gleefully on dry land. She kept laughing as she was hauled away, as she was slung into the plain white room of solitary to think about what she’d done.
They might not be going home, but they weren’t going to stay here. Sumi was sure of it.
Eventually, her laughter burned itself out. It was a sudden blaze, not a sustained bonfire; it could never have lasted. She curled up in a corner of the plain white room, tucking her arm under her head, and fell into an uneasy doze.
But Cora: ah, Cora. Cora had always been a runner, and this time, she didn’t run. She helped Regan back to her chair and stood, placidly silent, until the matrons came and dragged her to a plain white room of her own. Eventually, she fell asleep, and there were no shadows here, no corners for the Drowned Gods to claim and colonize.
She was dreaming of the open sea when a sudden shock of icy water splashed across her face. She sat bolt upright, clutching the thin blanket she’d been given around herself.
The headmaster looked down at her, the empty glass still held in one hand, and shook his head. “You were doing so well, Cora,” he said. “What in the world made you stand by while your friend assaulted another student?”
“She made us late to breakfast,” said Cora. “You always say punctuality is a virtue, and she made us less virtuous. So when Sumi hit her, I didn’t stop her. Instead, I did what you said and turned my back on weakness.”
“And why did you barge into a room where you had no business being, when you were meant to be escorting Miss Onishi to my office?”
“We heard—I mean—” Cora stopped, trapped between her pretense of turning her back on weakness and admitting her sympathy for Regan.
“I see.” The headmaster nodded slightly, seeming to read her thoughts in the same way he had seemed to on her first day. “I hope you understand that I am very disappointed in you.”
Cora bit the inside of her cheek. The headmaster’s disappointment was like a chain around her throat, dragging her down to where the Drowned Gods still waited, singing their poisonous songs. Desperately, she blurted out, “Where is Regan? Where is Sumi?”
“Miss Lewis and Miss Onishi are spending time in quiet contemplation while we review their respective educational plans,” he replied with a cold smile. “They may each require a bit more … specialized help in the future.”
“No!” Cora couldn’t stop herself; she couldn’t stand to pretend anymore. “Can’t you see that you’re hurting people? Don’t you care?”
“Did you forget why you came here, Miss Miller? The singing of the sea in your ears? The rainbows on your skin?” The headmaster grabbed her wrist, turning it so that her palm faced the ceiling. “They’ve faded, but they haunt you still. How could I allow you to leave before they disappear? How could any caring guardian allow their students to continue carrying the weight of such a delusion?”
Cora shook him off. “I’m a student. Not a prisoner. I refuse to trade one monster for another.”
“If we’re monsters, so is Miss West.”
Cora went very still.
The headmaster smiled, almost sympathetically. “We’re sister schools. One can’t exist without the other. Yes, we have our share of involuntary enrollments—but really, how many of the students at your last school were consulted before they were shipped away by parents who no longer understood them? How many of them got to choose? You think of Miss West fondly because she gave you what you wanted to have, she told you what you wanted to hear. We’re as much on your side as she ever was.”
“I came to you voluntarily,” said Cora. “Regan didn’t. You’re not setting her free. You’re hurting her.”
“It’s true that Miss Lewis never had the benefit of choosing her education. But your Miss West never taught you how to fit into this world, either. She let you wallow in regret, knowing that most doors never reappear. Her way, my way, it doesn’t matter. You’re part of this world now, Cora. You’re not going back to your underwater fantasyland. You were a hero, and now that’s done, and you’re a teenage girl again. You need to learn to live with that. Someone has to teach you.”
