It was several hours later when she stepped into the dorm room, a matron behind her and her eyes pointed at the floor, so she wouldn’t have to look at any of the people in the room. She was back in her uniform, her hair perfectly combed and pulled back in a neat French twist that wouldn’t have looked out of place in a senior portrait.
“Please remind Miss Miller of how we do things around here,” said the matron. “I trust you can be gentle with her.” She stepped out of the room without waiting for an answer, closing the door as she went.
Sumi, seated cross-legged on her bed, didn’t move.
Emily gasped. “Cora, your hair…”
“I know. Pretty, isn’t it?” Cora lifted her head, smiling like a shark’s fin cutting through still water. There were no rainbows left on her skin. They had all flowed into her hair, which was still blue-green, but now gleamed nacre-iridescent and impossible.
“You’ve been gone for three days,” said Sumi. Her voice was flat. “They only kept me for one.”
“It didn’t feel like three days to me,” said Cora. “I was dreaming for most of it.”
Sumi nodded as if this made perfect sense. “Did they feed you?”
The nameless girl scoffed from her place on the other side of the room. “Of course they fed her. This is a school, not a prison.”
“No,” snapped Emily. The nameless girl flinched, looking startled. “For you it’s a school, because you want to be here. The rules are different for people who enrolled voluntarily. They’re not afraid you’re going to run. This is a prison. You’re just lucky enough not to be able to see the bars.”
“I enrolled voluntarily,” said Cora. “But no, they didn’t feed me.”
“Not like you needed it,” said the nameless girl, forcing the sneer back onto her face like she thought no one would have noticed when it disappeared.
“I bet you’d fit under the bathroom sink,” said Emily pleasantly. “You wouldn’t have a month ago, but now? You look like you’re just the right size.”
The nameless girl paled, clapping a hand over her mouth like she was going to be sick. Then she bolted from the room, presumably heading for the bathroom. Rowena lowered her book and gave Emily a reproachful look.
“That wasn’t kind,” she said.
“She isn’t kind,” said Emily. “It’s not my fault if she can’t take what she dishes out.”
Cora started laughing.
Rowena looked at her with disgust. “No food for three days, rainbows in her hair, and now she’s laughing? She’s dangerous.”
“She can hear you,” said Emily.
“Maybe.” Rowena leaned back against her pillows. “If she starts screaming for no reason, you’ll have to get rid of her. I need my sleep.”
“You’re a monster,” snapped Emily.
“That’s why I’m here,” said Rowena, and went back to her book.
“Why did they keep you for three days?” asked Sumi.
Cora kept laughing.
“They wouldn’t have hurt her, would they?” asked Emily, a nervous edge in her voice. “They’re not supposed to hurt us.”
“Everything about this place is hurting us,” said Stephanie.
Cora choked on her laughter and stopped, falling silent. A single tear ran down her cheek. Like her hair, it was full of rainbows. “I enrolled here voluntarily, but we have to leave,” she said.
Sumi threw her hands up. “Thank the Baker! Now how do we get out of here?”
The door opened. The door closed. The nameless girl leaned against it, putting one more barrier between them and the outside world, and said, “You don’t.”
“Why don’t you go stuff yourself in a hole?” Emily never took her eyes off Cora. “Sumi, you can’t help her plan an escape attempt. She’ll just get us all hurt.”
Rowena slid off the bed, skirting the little knot of damaged, damaging girls to stand next to the nameless girl. “I’m going to get a matron,” she said.
Surprisingly, it was the nameless girl who said, “No, you’re not.”
Rowena turned to stare at her. The nameless girl shook her head.
“The matrons can’t help. If you go to get one now, we’ll all be in trouble.” The nameless girl moved so that she was standing almost nose-to-nose with Cora. Taking a deep breath, she said, “Be ready to grab Rowena.”
“But—”
“Do it.” She looked Cora dead in the eye, and said, “My name is—”
The sound that came out of her mouth wasn’t nothingness, wasn’t blankness. It was static loud enough to drown out the world. It was the howling of the limitless void between universes, and when it was over, Cora blinked, expression going thoughtful as she took a step backward.
“Oh,” she said.
“It was my own fault,” said the nameless girl. “I thought I could handle it.”
“We all make mistakes,” said Cora. She turned to Emily, and a flicker of regret crossed her face. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to frighten you all.”
“I still don’t get why they held you for three days,” said Stephanie. “Sumi’s the one who hit Regan, and she came back days ago. Why didn’t you?”
“I yelled at the headmaster,” said Cora.
Everything was silent for a long beat, before Sumi said, “Listen. I was dead once. It hurt. It wasn’t anything, and it hurt anyway, because death doesn’t need to be something to hurt. And then I went to a whole bunch of different places, pulled apart like taffy, and that didn’t hurt until I was together again. It hurts now when I dream. I fought in a war and I won and I lived, and I buried my parents and I broke my brother’s heart and I lived, and I died because a scared child wanted to go home, and I didn’t blame her, because I might have done the same thing if I’d been in her petticoats. She was trying to be clever the only way she knew how.”
Emily looked at her blankly. “Why does that matter?”
“Because the people here think they’re helping us. They think they’re heroes and we’re monsters, and because they believe it all the way down to the base of them, they can do almost anything and feel like they’re doing the right thing.” Sumi rubbed her wrist, almost idly. “They can lock someone in a white room where the light never goes off and say it’s because they can’t have any more illusions. They can not feed you but give you lots of water and no toilet, and say it’s because the real world doesn’t always meet your needs. They can do a lot of things. This isn’t a good place. Even if you’re here because you want to be, this isn’t a good place. This place hurts people. It makes them crawl into their own hearts to be safe, and then it turns those hearts against them.”
There was so much more she could have said, like the way the war was still echoing in her ears, the way she could hear the screams of the wounded and the weeping of the captured. She could have told them about the wisps she wasn’t sure were memories, the little fragments of the Halls of the Dead, her voice hollow and stolen from her mouth, her hands motionless by her intangible sides. Most of all, she could have told them about Sumiko, poor shade, discarded self, who was stirring more and more, because Sumi had been the necessary armor to survive Confection, and Sumiko was the necessary armor to survive the Whitethorn Institute.