AS SOON AS THE matron was gone, the other girls swarmed—the dainty, nameless one at the front of the pack. She raked her eyes up and down Sumi’s uniformed body, then sniffed.
“I don’t see why we should get saddled with another new fish,” she said. “We’re still not finished educating the old one.”
“Don’t be mean,” said Emily.
“Why shouldn’t she?” asked Sumi, with what sounded like genuine confusion. “I can tell by the sound of her voice that she’s good at it.”
The others turned to stare at her. Cora sighed.
“Sumi, why are you here?”
“Antsy can find anything,” said Sumi. “She told you so, remember? Well, you went away, and so she knew what she needed to find was you. And when she did, we all talked it over and decided I should be the one to come and get you, since I’m the only one who knows I get to go home when all this is over.”
“But you went to Virtue, not Wickedness,” said Cora.
Sumi waved a hand, whisking her objections away. “I told them I went to Prism, and Kade’s told me enough about that shitbox of a bad cocktail party that I was able to make my case. I’m a Wicked girl now, my admission papers say so.”
“Wait, you know each other?” asked Emily. “How do you know each other?”
“We went to school together until the mermaid got scared and ran away from the whispers in the dark,” said Sumi, sympathy in her tone.
The nameless girl stepped forward, expression suddenly furious. “You can’t be here and tell lies! Rules are for everyone!” She raised her hand like she was going to slap someone, and hesitated when she couldn’t decide quite who.
Sumi didn’t so much move as suddenly had moved, flowing seamlessly from her position near the door to one directly in front of the other girl, her fingers wrapped tight around her wrist. “Why do you get to decide that?” she asked, tone remarkably reasonable. “What’s your name?”
“I’m,” said the girl, and her mouth moved, and nothing came out, not a sound, not a whisper, not a hiss. Just a sudden, profound silence, like something had been sliced neatly from the world and tucked aside, where it wouldn’t bother anyone. She struggled against Sumi’s grip. “Let me go.”
“I don’t want to,” said Sumi. “None of this matters. You know that, right? I fought a woman who wanted to have my bones hollowed out so she could store spices inside them, who wanted to make a whole world over in her image, and that mattered more than this, because things made the right kind of nonsense there. I buried my past under a tree with cookies for leaves, and my friends buried me in a garden of bones, and both times I got back up and kept on going, but it wasn’t as hard as it is here. I only just got here, but I can already tell this place is … it’s small. It’s hard and it’s small and it’s mean. It knows what’s true for you isn’t always true for me, and it doesn’t care, because it wants to make us all have the same kind of truth and believe in it the same kind of way. It’s a bad place. It thinks it’s helping and it isn’t. So I guess what I wonder is why you’re trying to make it even smaller than it already is. They don’t like you either. You’re not standing outside the cage looking in; you’re right in here with us. Why are you like this?”
“Because I’m not like you,” snarled the dainty girl, twisting free of Sumi’s grasp. “Let me guess. You went to a magical world of rainbows and pixies and talking horses, and you had adventures and you saved a kingdom, or maybe a whole bunch of kingdoms, and everybody loved you, because you were a hero. You were made to be loved. You were perfect. And then you fell through another door and wound up back with your family, the people who actually cared about you, who didn’t just think of you as a magical arm to swing a prophesized sword around, and you didn’t know how to love them anymore. You didn’t know how to be a person anymore. That’s why they sent you here. So you could remember how to be a person.”
“Is that why your family sent you here?” asked Sumi.
“Sent me?” asked the dainty girl, disbelievingly. “No one sent me. This old lady dressed like a circus clown tried to talk me into going to her school, and I would have had to be stupid not to realize she was talking about a place where everyone was going to wallow, forever, in how sad it was that their doors went and closed, even though that was the best thing that could have happened to them. I told her no, and Headmaster Whitethorn showed up the next day. He said I could come here and forget. He said I could be free. So yeah, this place is mean, but it’s mean because it has to be. If someone doesn’t want to wake up, you have to shake them.”
She stuck her nose in the air, like she thought it would somehow make her taller, and stalked out of the room. After a moment’s apologetic pause, Rowena followed her. The sound of the door closing behind them was very loud.
Sumi shook her head, looking after them. “That’s a girl with a whole lot of angry where her heart’s supposed to be.” Then she turned back to Cora. “I’m very mad at you, you know. But you need hugs more than you need yelling at, so: hugs?”
Arguing with Sumi was like trying to fight the wind: frustrating, endless, and ultimately pointless. Cora wrapped the smaller girl into a hug, and asked, “Are you the only one here?”
“Of course, silly,” said Sumi. “Confection wants me to come home, so this is almost safe for me, or safe as anything gets. Everyone else is back at school, waiting for me to bring you safely back.”
“I’m not coming back,” said Cora.
Sumi pulled back and stepped away, looking at her with wounded confusion. “But we miss you! You have to come back.”
“The Drowned Gods still whisper to me in the night,” said Cora. “I have to stay here if I want to be free of them. I can’t come back to school.”
There was a small cough from the side. Sumi and Cora both turned. Emily was standing there, a faint, almost hopeful smile on her still only half-familiar face, like she thought she might see someone she recognized, like she wasn’t entirely sure.
“Do you really think your door’s still there?” she asked.
“I know it is,” said Sumi. “I’ve met my daughter, and she hasn’t been born yet, and that means Nonsense is going to take me home when it’s ready for me.”
“The matrons…” Emily grimaced. “They want us to say things we know were weren’t, and things we know weren’t were. They say it’s how we break our dependence on delusion. I asked once how it could be a delusion when every one of them knows it really happened, when we were recruited to attend here because of where we went, and they said … they said…”
She stopped, throat moving soundlessly. Stephanie stepped up next to her, sighed, and said, “They said it didn’t matter what we thought the truth was; when the truth isn’t something you can see, it’s malleable, and because we’re still legally children, our parents get to decide what’s true for us. They get to say they want their ‘real’ kids back, the ones they wanted, and not the ones they ended up with.”
“Minnie and Cora aren’t the only ones who chose to come here—and you, I guess, Sumiko—but there aren’t many of them,” said Emily, getting herself back under control.
“Minnie?” Sumi cocked her head.
“That’s not really her name,” said Stephanie. “We don’t know much about the world she went to, but we know it had to do with rats, and something about being there stole her real name, so she can say it, but no one hears it. If you knew it, and you said it with her in the room, no one would hear you, either.”
That was a terrifying, fascinating thought. “There’s not a lot of magic that can make it through the doors and keep hurting you once you’re here,” said Sumi, glancing to Cora. “Not having a name sounds like it would be really difficult. How could anyone tell you when your pizza was ready?”
“That’s why we call her ‘Minnie,’ but only when she’s not in the room,” said Stephanie. “Anything people call her to her face starts getting the silence stuck to it. Someone really wanted her to be forgotten.”
“We need to get to breakfast,” said Emily. “It’s your first day, and they won’t be happy if we’re late. I just wanted to ask about your door and thank Cora.”
“Thank me? For what?”
“People don’t stand up for each other around here. It’s not safe.”
“If we wanted safe, we wouldn’t have gone through the door in the first place,” said Sumi. She loosened the tie on her uniform and flashed the other girls a winsome smile. “Let’s go. Maybe we’ll get ice cream sundaes for our breakfast.”
They did not get ice cream for breakfast.
Cora got her expected eggs and turkey bacon. Emily got real bacon and sliced strawberries, which she looked at with clear and obvious revulsion. Sumi, who had received a bowl of oatmeal, began stealing them one by one, hiding them in her own beige breakfast. Stephanie received an actual omelet, oozing with cheese, which she pushed away untouched.
“Look,” she whispered, nodding to a table on the other side of the room. “They let her out.”
Cora glanced in the direction Stephanie indicated. Her glance became a stare as she realized what she was looking at.
Regan was back at the table where she’d eaten breakfast every day since Cora’s enrollment in the school. Her head was bowed and her shoulders were slumped, but she was there, not locked away in solitary or hidden in some cavern of punishment. There wasn’t a single piece of vegetable matter on her plate. It was all bacon, ham, and cheese, worked into a complicated scramble that would probably taste more like butter and grease than anything else.
No one was talking to her. No one was even looking at her.
“Man,” said Stephanie admiringly. “She almost pulled it off, too.”
“Pulled what off?” asked Sumi blankly.
“Regan almost graduated this morning,” said Cora.
“If she’d been able to keep her cool a little longer, she’d be out of here,” said Stephanie. “She would have gone home with everyone thinking she was better, and no one would have known otherwise until the day they woke up and she wasn’t in her bed anymore. If she’d just stayed calm a little while longer—”
“I heard a rumor that we were going to be allowed to play cricket when the weather turns,” said Emily abruptly, voice loud and bright. “Do you think it might be true?”
Sumi blinked, and was about to ask why cricket mattered, when the matron behind her said, in a cool voice, “Spending time on rumors is a waste of yourself and others. Have more pride, Emily.”
“I’m sorry, matron,” said Emily, looking suitably chastened. “I was just excited by the idea of playing an organized sport during physical education. Running laps isn’t as challenging as a good game.”
The matron considered this, expression thoughtful. Cora held her breath. Sometimes thoughtful people weren’t thinking about what you wanted them to be thinking about. Sometimes thoughtful people were thinking about all the ways you could be punished for daring to question what they knew was true.
The matron smiled. Cora exhaled, struggling to keep it from turning into anything that could be interpreted as a huff or a sigh or any number of other forbidden sounds.
“I don’t think cricket would be good for your progress, dear,” said the matron. “Too many of the rules depend on chance. But I’ll talk to the headmaster about finding something more suitable for you to play. Croquet, perhaps. Finish your breakfasts, girls, it’s almost time for class.” She turned and walked away, leaving the table staring silently after her.
“All games have an element of chance,” said Stephanie. “All games. That’s what makes them games and not, I don’t know. Arts and crafts.”
“Dance classes don’t have an element of chance,” said Emily wistfully. “I wouldn’t care about sports if they’d let us have a dance class. I’d take anything. Ballroom, tap, anything.”
“Did you go to a dancing world?” asked Sumi.
Emily and Stephanie shushed her in unison. It was like being scolded by a choir of very large snakes. Sumi cocked her head and considered them more closely.
Emily was a beautiful girl: anyone with eyes could have seen that. She would have been even lovelier if she’d been allowed to choose her own clothes, dressing in colors that were more flattering to the darkness of her skin, and hair, and eyes than the drab Whitethorn uniforms. She carried herself like a dancer.
Stephanie was an almost perfect contrast, so pale Sumi could see the veins moving beneath her skin like serpentine bruises, dark and harsh and somehow delicate. They all kept their blood under the surface like that, but most of them hid it a little better. Stephanie’s hair was swan’s-down white, cropped close to her head and lying flat as a cap of feathers, like she might peel it off and toss it away at any moment. Even her eyes were pale, gray-blue trending into white, until it seemed they might bleach entirely into nondescription at any moment.
She didn’t move like a dancer. She was frail, fragile, but she moved like a bruiser, like she was constantly challenging the world to a fight, and had no doubt that she’d be the winner when it finally agreed to throw down.
“Don’t stare,” snapped the girl without a name. Sumi glared at her.
“Who do you think you are, the headmaster?” she asked, in a jeering tone.
The headmaster didn’t usually come to breakfast. He was content to leave their daily care to the matrons and instructors and each other; someone must have shown him a bucket of crabs at some point early in his academic career, pointing to the way they would police themselves, pulling down any individual who looked too close to breaking free and escaping. “Leave the crabs in the bucket and they’ll take care of the rest” seemed to be his philosophy where the student body was concerned.
The girl without a name smiled a small, mean smile and leaned a little closer to Rowena, whispering something in her companion’s ear. Rowena giggled, hiding it behind her hand like that would somehow make it less obvious. Cora bristled, and didn’t say anything. None of the matrons were approaching. They seemed to have a sixth sense for the difference between camaraderie and bullying. The first, they squelched as quickly as possible. The second, they all but encouraged. A student body preoccupied with eating itself alive was a student body that wasn’t making trouble for the administration.
“It’s not polite to whisper about people,” said Cora.
“I’m closer to graduation than you are,” said the girl.
“That just makes you a better liar. You still can’t lie and say something’s your name when it’s not,” snapped Cora, and immediately felt bad about it as the girl paled and shrank away. She was a hero. Everyone in the Trenches knew it, even if the people here treated her like a juvenile delinquent who couldn’t be trusted with a pair of safety scissors. Heroes weren’t supposed to be bullies.
But then, she supposed she wasn’t the only hero at the Whitethorn Institute. Most of the children she’d met from the other side of the doors were heroes, in their own specific ways. Maybe heroes could be bullies, if they were scared enough. If they were trapped enough. If the sides weren’t clear.
How could you choose good over evil when no one was really sure what evil was? Under enough pressure, the only good that counted was saving yourself.
Rowena clutched the nameless girl’s shoulder with one hand and glared at Cora, imperious and cold as a queen. “At least she’s trying,” she snapped. “At least she wants to be better. You say you do, but you keep dyeing your hair. You’re going to flunk, and then we’re never going to have to look at your stupid face ever again. Come on,” and her lips moved in soundless static, unreadable. A brief look of despair washed across her face. Whatever private name she’d been using for the girl she now tugged off the cafeteria bench had clearly reached the end of its usefulness: the strange magic surrounding the nameless girl had recognized it, and so it, like everything else, had been washed away.
Cora watched them go before glancing back to Emily and Stephanie, a frown on her face and a question in her eyes. “What happens if you flunk? Regan sabotaged her own graduation, and she’s still here.” Maybe flunking meant the same thing as expulsion. Maybe she could be thrown back to the Drowned Gods if she didn’t try harder.
“We don’t know,” said Stephanie. “No one does.”
Sumi frowned. “Oh,” she said. “That probably means it isn’t good.”
Emily nodded, expression grave. Then she leaned forward, opened her mouth, and said, “But I heard—”
Whatever she’d heard was cut off by the bell ringing to signal the end of breakfast. Cora rose with the others, automatically gathering the detritus of both her meal and Sumi’s, stacking the trays neatly and efficiently. The Logic girls left their dishes strewn willy-nilly across their tables, some of them looking back at the mess with clear agony in their eyes, like leaving things out of place was causing them active pain. The oatmeal girls put their own trays on the busing station, then moved to clean up after the waffle girls, Nonsense children making order out of the chaos left behind by the Logicians.
Sumi twitched like she was going to start scavenging the abandoned waffles. Cora reacted without thinking, clamping her hand around Sumi’s wrist.
“No,” she hissed. “A matron will see you.”
“But—”
“No,” echoed Stephanie. “We’re your dormmates. We’ll teach you the rules.”
Emily was waiting at the door. Sumi only glanced back once as Cora dragged her to the other member of their sudden alliance, and then they were moving into the hall, merging smoothly with the tide of students. By the time the bell rang again, the hallway was empty, and the Whitethorn Institute was at peace.