The Death Without an Answer

He didn't remember leaving the bathroom.

There was a gap, a seam in time, and on the other side of it he was in the corridor with his back against the wall, hands clawing at his own throat, gasping like a swimmer who'd come up from too deep. The red lamp burned steady overhead. A pair of freshmen went by with their eyes fixed on the floor. One of them glanced at him and looked away so quickly it was almost a flinch.

Help. Someone. Anyone.

Pike had refused him. Karl wouldn't speak to him. Ronald would run if he came near. That left only the people who actually understood what was happening, the ones with the silver collars and the keys, the ones who had stood in that same bathroom and said the Hand has come. They had called him a Hand. They had known. If anyone could stop it, it was them.

The thought of going to them filled him with a revulsion so total it made his teeth ache.

He went anyway.

The Student Council quarters occupied the east side of the main hall, a suite of dark paneled rooms behind a heavy door that no regular student ever approached. He crossed the courtyard at a run, through a freezing rain that had begun to fall again, his cloak flapping at his heels. The gravel crunched under his boots. Every window he passed stared at him like a blind eye. When he looked back once, over his shoulder, the courtyard was empty.

But his shadow, stretched along the wet stone, was a good deal longer than it should have been, and it was not moving quite in time.

He hammered on the door with both fists.

For a long moment, nothing. He pounded again, and the wood shook in its frame. "Silas! Silas Ward! Please! It's Cassian Hale! I need—"

The door opened.

Tessa Quill stood in the gap. She was in her shirtsleeves, collar open, a pen in one hand and a ledger tucked under her arm, the way someone looks when she's been interrupted at work. Warm lamplight and the smell of beeswax and wood smoke rolled out around her. She had been crying not long ago. The skin around her eyes was swollen and raw.

"Yes?" she said.

He stared at her. His mouth worked. "Tessa. I need to talk to Silas. It's—it's about the Hand. It's about Albert. I know what happened, I was there, something came after—"

"I'm sorry." Her tone was polite, cool, perfectly empty. "Can I help you, freshman? Do you have a pass?"

"I'm Cassian."

Not a flicker. Not the faintest narrowing of her eyes. She looked at him the way you look at a stranger on a bus, waiting for him to either state his business or move on.

"Cassian Hale," he said, and heard his voice crack. "Room 104. I'm the new kid. You've seen me. Silas has seen me, he wrote my name in his book. He wrote my name."

Tessa turned her head. "Silas? Do we have a Hale on the list?"

"No," Silas's voice came from somewhere deep in the room, mild and absent. He did not look up. Cassian could see him through the open door, sitting at a long table with his platinum head bent over a stack of papers, brass pen scratching. "I don't recognize the name."

"I'm sorry," Tessa said, to Cassian. "You've got the wrong door."

She closed it.

The latch clicked. And in the silence that followed, Cassian heard, behind the wood, the low, easy murmur of her voice saying something to Silas, and Silas's soft laugh, and the scratch of the pen starting again.

He stood on the step in the rain.

They don't know who I am.

It couldn't be true. He'd stood in front of Silas Ward in the cafeteria a month ago. Silas had watched him with those pale eyes. Had written him down. Had smiled.

But the more Cassian turned it over, the less sure he was. It wasn't that Tessa was lying. It was that when she looked at him, there had been nothing there, no spark of recognition, no cold calculation. It was as if a word had been rubbed out of the page and the paper smoothed over.

It said my name. It took Albert. Nobody ever says Albert's name again.

He remembered the empty bed. The scrubbed corner. The way the whole school had closed over Albert like water over a dropped stone.

It's erasing me.

He put both hands over his mouth and made a sound he would not have recognized as his own.

The bell rang.

It was the seventh, and it rang from the chapel tower in the rain-wet dusk, and for the first time since he had come to Blackthorne, Cassian wasn't afraid of the sound. He was beyond fear. He stood listening to it as one listens to a clock in a sickroom, counting the strokes. One. Two.

Three.

He turned and ran.

He ran across the courtyard in the almost-dark and the rain, toward the dormitory, toward Room 104, because there was nowhere else to go and a stubborn animal part of him wanted a wall at his back. Four. The lamps along the colonnade went out one by one as he passed, each darkening a half second after his shadow touched it. Five. He burst through the door of the dormitory and plunged into the hallway, into the long gray tunnel with its dead lamps and its forty closed doors.

Six.

The corridor was colder than he had ever felt it.

Room 104 was ahead. Thirty feet. Twenty. He could see the door, slightly ajar, a thread of faint light showing in the gap.

Seven.

The final stroke rolled over the building and died, and the silence that followed was absolute.

He stopped running.

He couldn't have said why. His legs simply stopped, his boots skidding on the stone, and he stood in the middle of the hallway with his chest heaving and sweat freezing on his skin. The door of Room 104 was ten feet away. He could hear someone inside, one of them, saying something in a low voice. Karl. He could hear the creak of bedsprings.

"Karl," Cassian said. "Karl, open the door."

The voice in the room paused.

"Karl, it's me. It's Hale."

The voice resumed. Soft. Even. A little singsong. He realized with a creeping coldness that Karl was saying the Lord's Prayer, over and over, with his teeth clenched and the words running together, and that he had not stopped when Cassian spoke. He wasn't pretending not to hear. He couldn't hear.

The door swung inward an inch more, as if blown by a draft.

Through the gap he saw the room. The five beds in a row. Ronald with his back to the door. Karl, kneeling by the bed with his forehead against the iron frame. And by the window, Leo, sitting upright with his hands resting on his knees, looking straight at the door.

At him.

Their eyes met.

Leo was the only one who could see him. He had always been the one who watched. His lips parted. Cassian saw him begin to speak. He saw him begin to rise, and one hand reach out.

Then the cold closed over the back of his neck.

It was a gentle touch. That surprised him. He had expected claws. It was only a cold, damp, patient pressure, laid against the nape of his neck as a mother lays a hand on a sleeping child's brow, and it spread slowly from there down the length of his spine. Behind him the breath rose in a swelling tide. A hundred lungs filling at once.

He didn't turn.

He couldn't. His body would not obey him. He stood with his boots rooted to the stone, staring at Leo through the narrow gap in the door, and Leo stared back, white-faced, and slowly shook his head. Don't.

Don't look.

He looked.

He turned his head, one slow degree at a time, and there it was, bowed over him, towering, its wrapped head almost resting against his own. The cloth moved. He saw a fold peel back, as slowly as a wound opening, and behind it...

He saw the face.

He could never have described it. Even in that last instant there was no part of his mind that could take it in. It was not terrible, exactly. It was known. It was Albert, and it was Karl, and an old man with a thousand wrinkles, and a small girl, and a woman whose mouth was open as if she were about to speak. A thousand faces folded together like the pages of a book, every one of them turned towards him with an expression of terrible, endless, patient welcome.

And among them, near the center, was one he recognized because he had seen it in a mirror every morning of his life.

All the sound in the world went out.

The rain stopped. The wind stopped. The breathing of the crowd, the hymn, the thud of his own heart. He could still see Leo's mouth moving, he could see Leo's hand outstretched, but the world was a painting of itself and none of it made a noise. In the silence he thought, with great clarity, of his mother's voice on the phone. Where's my boy? He thought of Daniel's hand holding hers. He thought, At least she's out.

He did not think of anything after that.

Cassian Hale died in the hallway of the Boys' Dormitory at Blackthorne Academy, a few feet from the door of Room 104, without understanding what had happened to him.

THE END. If you don’t want to die like this, turn back to Chapter 13 and choose again.