“I won’t change my mind,” Cora had replied, trying not to look at the rainbows dancing over her fingers, poisonous and lovely. “Please.”
Eleanor had sighed then, the sound like bones rattling down in the dark, and signed the paper.
Three days later, the car came for her. She had told no one she was leaving, not even Antoinette, who thought she was simply being transferred to another room at the school; she stood outside, back and shoulders straight, her worldly possessions in two suitcases at her feet, and she did not look back, and she did not cry. For the first time in her life, she was leaving a place she loved because she had chosen to do so, and there was power in that.
The car that would take her to the airport was sleek and black, almost featureless. When she climbed into the back, she found the package containing her new uniform waiting for her. She shied away from it at first, unaccustomed to the idea of wearing clothing selected by someone else, but by the time they pulled up at the terminal, she had the bundle in her lap, ready to change and embark on her new life.
She changed in the airport bathroom. Her ticket, provided by the Whitethorn Institute, placed her in a window seat, and to her immense relief there was no one in the seat next to her. She watched out the window as the land fell away, eyes turned toward the shadow of the wood, and tried to convince herself that she could still see the school, that she wasn’t sneaking away like a coward while her friends waited for her, that she wasn’t running away.
But of course she was. Her eyes drifted shut an hour or so into the flight, and she woke with a jolt when the wheels touched down, jerking her out of her mercifully dreamless sleep. A man was waiting for her at the baggage claim, holding a sign with her name on it, wearing a jacket whose insignia matched the one now stitched above her right breast. Cora went with him willingly, climbing into another black sedan and leaning back against the seat, ready for her new life to begin.
The first thing she noticed as they drove out of the city and approached the Whitethorn Institute was the wall. Not content to circle the school and its associated grounds, it had been expanded, one careful brick and land acquisition at a time, to enclose a full three miles of forest. The trees loomed dark and foreboding above it, their branches locked together as if they sought to make a second wall, this one to bar the birds, the wind, the very sky itself.
Made of thick gray stone, mottled with moss and lichen, the Whitethorn Institute’s wall gave every impression of having grown up out of the bedrock. It was immoveable, unbroken, ten feet high and utterly featureless. There was no razor wire along the top, no floodlights; they weren’t necessary. She could tell just by looking at it that no one had ever successfully escaped from the grounds. She would learn later that the few students who had managed to reach the wall had proven unable to scale it, and even if they had, they would have found themselves in the middle of nowhere, far from any chance of rescue.
The car slid smoothly down the road, paralleling the long gray line of the wall. Cora kept her eyes on the window, tracing every detail of her new landscape. The wall was ominous, but she’d seen worse; it was only a pale echo of the menace contained in the smallest outhouse in the Moors. In the moment, her shoes seemed like a far greater problem than the wall.
They pinched. Everything else was sized perfectly, but the shoes were too tight. It was a simple, monochrome uniform: black shoes, white socks, gray skirt, white shirt with black tie, and over the top of it all, a black jacket with a stylized W and I ringed with a chevron of thorns stitched above her right breast. The insignia should have seemed silly, even childish. Instead, it seemed like a threat. Try to run, and you would bleed; try to get away, and you would be ensnared.
The gates of the institute swung open. The car turned down the driveway, and the Whitethorn Institute swallowed another incoming student alive.
PART II
THE STUDENT BODY
5?A WORLD WITHOUT RAINBOWS
THE FRONT HALL OF the Whitethorn Institute seemed to have been designed by a team of people dedicated to stamping out all hints of imagination. The walls were polished oak; the floor was gray marble, lined with industrial rugs to keep students from slipping. Cora stepped onto that floor, tight new shoes clicking against the stone, and swallowed, her hair suddenly feeling like some huge and unspeakable offense. It was a color that didn’t belong here, had never belonged here, and should have been washed away before she brought it to sully this pristine place.
The conviction that she didn’t belong here was beginning to coil in her chest, tight and heavy as the Serpent. She swallowed, forcing herself to keep breathing through the first stirrings of panic, and walked on, waiting to hear her driver’s footsteps echoing her own.
She heard no such thing. The man who had brought her to the school’s gates, helped her bring her suitcases to the door, was not following. He had retreated back to his car as soon as his duty was done, leaving her to move onward alone. This was her school now. This was her home. She might not belong here yet, but she would. She had to.
She’d signed all of her choices away.
The hall was straight and easy to follow, leading inexorably toward a single conclusion. Cora took a deep breath and kept walking, summoning the courage that had seen her go from drowned girl to mermaid to Drowned Girl, capital letters and all. She had been swept into the Trenches because she needed them, and she had become a hero there because heroism had always been in her, a hard core of sharpened coral as strong as steel tempered in her soul. It was that core she gathered around her now, and used to keep herself moving forward.
The only thing that made her courage shiver and try to shrink away was the cold that filled the hall, gray and unforgiving, inimical to the silver glitter of the depths. There was no glitter here, and every breath was another kind of drowning. Cora shivered, tightening her fingers on the handles of her suitcases, and kept walking. If she stopped moving here, she would never start again.
And she had come of her own free will. If anyone was at fault here, it was her. No one was coming to save her.
This was how she saved herself.
The hallway ended at a tall mahogany door, unmarked, like the person on the other side knew without a doubt that anyone who made it this far would know who they were. Cora stopped, blinking silently, and waited for something to happen. The echoes of her footsteps faded, until all that remained in the hall was an absolute, swallowing silence. The door swung open. The man on the other side regarded her with quiet sympathy, eyes going first to her hair, and then to her waistline, and finally to her face—a progression she knew all too well. Cora bristled, but said nothing.
He was tall, not only in relation to Cora herself, but in relation to the world around him; he made the man who had picked her up at the airport look like he’d been built to a slightly different, considerably more reasonable scale. He was neither old, like Miss Eleanor, nor young, like Cora, but some where in the measureless, interminable middle, where he could have laid claim to almost any age and been believed. A scar ran from the right side of his jaw and down the length of his neck, vanishing into the starched collar of his white button-down shirt. It was the only truly eye-catching thing about him. Terrifying as he was—more through the weight of his presence than through any single aspect of his being—Cora felt as though she could forget him in an instant, as though taking her eyes off of him for a second would be to risk losing track of him forever. There was nothing about him to hang a memory on.