“You said they steal your students sometimes. That when you’re not fast enough, or when the children are having a harder time adapting to life in this reality, that sometimes Whitethorn gets there first.” She sat up straight, giving Eleanor a challenging look. “You said it was where students go when they want to believe that everything that happened on the other side of the door was just a dream, or a delusion, and not a real thing at all. Please. I want to wash the Moors off my skin. I want to drain the Drowned Gods out of my soul. I can’t do either of those things here, where I’m expected to dwell and dwell and dwell on what happened. Please. You have to let me go.”
Eleanor was silent for a moment, eyes wide and frightened. Finally, she asked, “Have you discussed this with the others?”
Cora didn’t need to ask who Eleanor meant by “the others.” They had been viewed as a unit by the rest of the student body since their return from the Moors—a third trip through a door that hadn’t been meant for most of them. The first had been to the Halls of the Dead, and the second to Confection, where they’d arranged for Sumi’s resurrection. Sumi sulked sometimes, because Confection was her door, and so she was only looked at with the awe afforded to someone who had died and come back again, and not with the awe that was directed at her fellow travelers.
But still, they were a unit now, a posse, a gang in the teen-movie sense of the word, friends bonded by common adventure and experience. Cora, Kade, Christopher, and Sumi. And now here, in this office, Cora was alone.
She shook her head. “No,” she said miserably. “The Moors don’t want any of them, even though they all have hooks the Drowned Gods could use if they wanted to try.” Sumi had been dead. Christopher loved the dead. Kade had no door to go back through, even if he’d wanted to; Prism had rejected him completely. He could have given himself over to the Moors, and the Drowned Gods could have taken his loyalties without a fight. But they had chosen Cora. The Moors had chosen Cora.
She understood some things about the Moors, in a half-formed way that was almost impossible for her to articulate. She understood that they were a single organism, a great factory whose purpose was transformation, and they made all they owned over in their own image.
The Moors made monsters. Cora was already a mermaid. She didn’t want to wake up one day as something worse.
Cora shuddered. “I haven’t discussed this with them. Please. I can’t live like this. I need to forget. I need the Drowned Gods to let me go.”
The tension in the room was like a sheet of glass, thick but fragile, easily shattered and capable of becoming a weapon when it did. Eleanor took a breath, opening her mouth, and Cora tensed against the hammerblow that was about to land.
Someone knocked at the door.
Eleanor froze. Cora did the same. Then, as if cued, they turned in uneasy unison to look toward the source of the sound. “Yes?” called Eleanor, voice surprisingly steady, as if she hadn’t been in the middle of an emotionally charged conversation about Cora’s entire future.
The door creaked open and a girl poked around the edge. Her face was too thin, too narrow, and too pointed, seemingly made entirely of angles and bruises waiting for the chance to happen. Her hair was a wild mop of carroty curls, too orange to fit any modern definition of “attractive,” too bright to be overlooked in a crowd. Her eyes were equally bright, hazel trending toward yellow; she looked like the consequence of some misguided wizard deciding that the fox kits in his backyard would be happier as human children, without taking their desires into account in the slightest. She looked roughly Cora’s age, somewhere in her late teens, in that timeless, breathless pause between childhood and adulthood, when anything was possible, when anything could happen.
“I lost my roommate again, but I found your missing keys.” Antoinette held up something so crusted with mud that it looked more like a clod of dirt than anything as useful as keys. If Cora squinted, however, she could see the curve of a keyring, the angle of a filthy, rotted rabbit’s foot, now half-skeletal from its time spent in the ground.
Eleanor startled in her seat, sitting up straighter, eyes brightening. “I lost those twenty years ago,” she said. “However did you…？”
“I can find anything,” said Antoinette, looking briefly, completely peaceful as she put the keys down on the table nearest the door. “I found your keys, and see, there’s my roommate. And I wouldn’t have had an excuse to knock and find her if I hadn’t already found them, so it all makes sense if you put it in a line.”
“We know, dear,” said Eleanor. “But Cora and I are in the middle of something important right now, so if you don’t mind…”
“Oh.” Antoinette blinked. “All right. I’ll see you in class, Cora.” She slipped out of the room, closing the door again behind herself.
Cora returned her attention to Eleanor. The tension in the room was broken now: they were just two people, a teacher and a student, having a long-overdue conversation about that student’s future. Cora knew how to navigate those conversations, had been in them time and time again, when she’d wanted to be a lifeguard and the swim coach had come to argue her case to the park administrator who’d wanted to claim her size would be a liability; when she’d wanted to try out for the spring musical, and the drama teacher had tried to gently imply that she might be better off behind the scenes. Being a fat child meant knowing how to be your own best advocate, and Cora advocated very well indeed.
“Whitethorn is…” Eleanor trailed off. “It’s different. It’s very different. I haven’t been there in years, and I view it as a personal failing every time I lose a student to them. I never thought that you would be at risk.”
“Miss West, please.” Cora shook her head. “I can’t go back to the Trenches as I am now. The Drowned Gods have too much of a hold on me, and if they followed me…” She shuddered. If they followed her into those warm, sunlit waters, she would be bringing a doom far greater than the Serpent down on the heads of those who had never done anything but show her kindness and welcome her home.
By saving Jack’s future, she had sacrificed her own. The rainbows dancing over her skin were proof enough of that.
Eleanor took a sharp breath. “We can’t be sure that the Whitethorn Institute would be able to sunder you from the Drowned Gods, even if they were to try,” she said. “Divinity is a terrible thing, and we try to avoid offending it when we can.”
“We have to do something. I can’t sleep, I can’t eat, even swimming hurts me. Please.” Cora looked Eleanor in the eye. “I’ve already tried to kill myself once. If they keep whispering to me, I’m going to try again, and this time, I’m going to succeed.”
Eleanor was silent for a long moment before she said, in a small voice, “That was a low, mean thing to say, Cora. I thought better of you.”
“The truth isn’t always kind,” said Cora. “Please. You’re the only one who can help me. You have to help me. Please.”
Eleanor looked at her, and she looked at Eleanor, and neither one of them said anything at all.