It was dark on the stairs. Simon put a hand to the wall to steady himself, and then snatched it back.
"Oh, disgusting!"
"Yes, most of the subterranean surfaces are coated in black slime," said Catarina, in a matter-of-fact tone. "Watch yourself."
"Thank you. Thanks for that warning."
"You're welcome," said Catarina, a hint of a laugh in her voice. For the first time, it occurred to Simon that Catarina might actually be nice. "You said--if you ever do become a Shadowhunter. Are you thinking about leaving?"
"Now that I've touched the slime, I am," Simon muttered. "No. I don't know what I want, except that I don't want to give up yet."
He almost reconsidered when Catarina led him to his room. It was much darker than the last room, though laid out in the same way. The wooden bedposts of the two narrow beds looked decayed, and in the corners of the room the black slime had grown almost viscous, turning into tiny black slime waterfalls.
"I don't remember hell all that well," Simon said. "But I think I recall it was nicer than this."
Catarina laughed, then shocked Simon by leaning in and giving him a peck on the cheek. "Good luck, Daylighter," she told him, laughing at his expression. "And whatever you do, don't use the bathrooms on this floor. Not on any floor, obviously, but especially on this one!"
Simon did not ask her to explain, because he was terrified. He sat down on his new bed, and then stood hastily back up at the resulting long creak and cloud of dust. Hey, at least this time he didn't have a roommate--he was king of this claustrophobic, slimy domain. He set his mind to unpacking. The wardrobe in this room was actually clean and empty, which was a definite improvement. Simon might go live in the wardrobe with his funny T-shirts.
He was long finished unpacking by the time George sauntered in, dragging his suitcase behind him and bearing his broken racket on his shoulder like a sword. "Hey, man."
"Hey," Simon said cautiously. "Er, what--what are you doing here?"
George dumped his suitcase and his racket on the slimy floor, and threw himself down on the bed. He stretched luxuriously, ignoring the ominous creak of the bed beneath him.
"The thing is, the advanced course is actually pretty hard," George said, as Simon started to smile. "And you may have heard: Lovelaces are quitters."
*
Simon was even more relieved to have George the next day, so they could sit together rather than at one of the tables of thirteen-year-old mundanes, who were all giving them the side-eye when they were not whispering brokenly about their phones.
The day brightened further when Beatriz plopped down at their new table as well.
"I'm not going to drop out of advanced training to follow you around like Curlytop here," Beatriz announced, "but we can still be friends, right?"
She pulled George's hair affectionately.
"Be careful," George said in a tired, humble voice. "I did not sleep in our small, slimy room. There is, I believe, a creature living in our walls. I hear it. Scuttling. I have to admit, I may not have made the brightest decision in following Simon. It's possible I'm not that bright. It's possible that looks are all I have."
"Actually . . . even though I'm not willing to follow you into boring classes and the endless disrespect of my classmates . . . I think it was a very cool thing you did, Simon," said Beatriz.
She smiled, teeth flashing white against her brown skin, and her smile was warm and admiring,--about the nicest thing Simon had seen all day.
"You're right, our morals are sound even though our walls are infested. And we'll still have some interesting classes, Si," George said. "Plus, don't worry, we still get sent on missions to fight demons and rogue Downworlders."
Simon choked on his soup. "I was not worrying about that. Are any of our teachers at all worried that sending out people with no superpowers to fight demons might prove just a teeny bit, not to put too fine a point on it, fatal?"
"They have to face trials of courage before they must face Ascension," said Beatriz. "Better for them to drop out because they are scared, or even because a demon ate their leg, than to have them try to Ascend without being suitable, and die in the attempt."
"That's a cool, cheerful, and normal thing to say," Simon said. "Shadowhunters are great at saying normal things."
"Well, I'm looking forward to the missions," said George. "And tomorrow a Shadowhunter is coming in to give a guest lecture on the lesser utilized weapons. I hope there'll be a practical demonstration."
"Not in a classroom," said Beatriz. "Think of what one heavy-duty crossbow could do to the walls."
That was all the warning Simon got before he clattered happily into class the next day, George on his heels, and found Dean Penhallow already there, talking with nervous good cheer. The classroom was very full--both the regular stream and the mundane stream were in attendance.
"--despite her tender years, a Shadowhunter of some renown and noted expertise with less used weapons such as the whip. May I welcome to Shadowhunter Academy our first guest lecturer: Isabelle Lightwood!"
Isabelle turned, sleek black hair flaring around her shoulders and black skirt flaring around her pale legs. She was wearing glittery plum lipstick, so dark it looked almost black. Her eyes did look black, but another small knife of memory pierced Simon, of course at the worst time possible: he remembered the colors of her eyes from close up, very dark brown, like brown velvet, so close to black as to make no difference, but with paler rings of color . . .
He stumbled over to his desk, and folded into his chair with a thump.
*
When the dean left, Isabelle turned and regarded her class with absolute contempt.
"I am not actually here to instruct any of you idiots," she told them, walking up and down the rows of desks. "If you want to use a whip, train with one, and if you lose an ear, don't be a big whiny baby."
Several of the boys nodded, as if hypnotized. Almost all the boys were watching Isabelle as if they were a nest of snakes intent on being charmed. Some of the girls were watching her that way too.
"I am here," Isabelle announced, finishing her prowl of the perimeter and turning to face them all again with snapping eyes, "to determine my relationship."
Simon goggled. She couldn't be talking about him. Could she?
"Do you see that man?" Isabelle asked, pointing at Simon. Apparently she was talking about him. "That's Simon Lewis, and he is my boyfriend. So if any of you think about trying to hurt him because he's a mundie or--may the Angel have mercy on your soul--pursuing him romantically, I will come after you, I will hunt you down, and I will crush you to powder."
"We're just bros," said George hastily.
Beatriz edged her desk away from Simon's.
Isabelle lowered her hand. The flush of excitement was receding from her face as well, as though she had come to say what she had said, and now that she was out of adrenaline she was actually processing what had come out of her mouth.
"I am going to go now," Isabelle announced. "Thank you for your attention. Class dismissed."
She turned and walked out of the room.
"I have to--" Simon began, rising from his desk on legs that felt a little unsteady. "I have to go."
"Yeah, you do," George said.
Simon went out the door, and ran down the stone corridors of the Academy. He knew Isabelle was fast, so he ran, faster than he'd ever run on the training grounds, and he caught up to her in the hall. She stopped in the dim light of the stained-glass window as he called her name.
"Isabelle!"
She stood waiting for him. Her lips parted and gleamed, like plums under a winter frost, ready to be tasted. Simon could see himself running up to her, catching her in his arms, and kissing her mouth, knowing what it had taken for her to do that--his brave, brilliant Isabelle--and carried away in a whirl of love and joy, but he saw it as if through a pane of glass, as if looking into another dimension, one he could see but not quite touch.
Simon felt a hot p
ang of grief through his whole body, not just through his chest, as if he had been struck by lightning. But he had to say it.
"I'm not your boyfriend, Isabelle," he called out.
She went white. Simon was horrified by how badly his words had come out.
"I mean, I can't be your boyfriend, Isabelle," he said. "I'm not him--that guy who was your boyfriend. That guy you want."
He almost said: I wish I could be. He had wished he could be. That was why he had come to the Academy, to learn how to be that guy they all wanted back. He'd wanted to be that way, be an awesome hero like in a game or a movie. He'd been so sure, at first, that was what he wanted.
Except wishing he could be that guy was like wishing to obliterate the guy he was now: the normal, happy guy in a band, who could still love his mother, who did not wake up in the coldest, darkest hour of the night weeping for dead friends.
And he did not know if he could be that guy she wanted, whether he wished it or not.
"You remember everything, and I--I don't remember enough," Simon went on. "I hurt you when I don't mean to, and I thought I could come to the Academy and come back better, but it's not looking good. The whole game has changed. My skill level has decreased and the difficulty level has been jacked up to impossible--"
"Simon," Isabelle interrupted, "you're talking like a nerd."
She said it almost fondly, but it freaked Simon out more. "And I don't know how to be smooth, sexy vampire Simon for you, either!"
Isabelle's perfect mouth curved, like a dark half-moon in her pale face. "You were never that smooth, Simon."
"Oh," said Simon. "Oh, thank God. I know you've had a lot of boyfriends. I remember there was a faerie, and"--another flash of memory, this time most unwelcome--"a . . . Lord Montgomery? You dated a member of the nobility? How am I ever going to compete with that?"
Isabelle still looked fond, but it was diluted with a good deal of impatience. "You're Lord Montgomery, Simon!"
"I don't understand," said Simon. "When you're made a vampire, are you also given a title?"
Maybe that made sense. Vampires were aristocratic.
Isabelle put her fingers up to touch her brow. It was a gesture that seemed like disdainful weariness, like Isabelle was tired of all this, but Simon saw the way her eyes closed, as if she could not look at him when she spoke. "It was just a joke between you and me, Simon."
Simon was tired of all this: of knowing pieces of her so well and others not at all, of knowing he was not what she wanted.
"No," he said. "It was a joke between you and him."
"You are him, Simon!"
"I'm not," Simon told her. "I don't--I don't know how to be, that's what I've been realizing all this time. I thought I could learn to be him, but since I got to the Academy I learned that I can't. I can't experience everything we did over again. I'm never going to be the guy who did all that. I'm going to do different things. I'm going to be a different guy."
"Once you Ascend, you'll get all your memories back!" Isabelle shouted at him.
"If I Ascend, it will be in two years. I'm not going to be the same guy in two years, even if I do get all the memories back, because there will be so many other memories. You're not going to be the same girl. I know you believed in me, Isabelle, I know you believed because you--you cared about him. That means more than I can tell you. But, Isabelle, Isabelle, it isn't fair of me to take advantage of your belief. It isn't fair to keep you waiting for him, when he isn't ever coming back."
Isabelle had her arms crossed, fingers curled into the dark plum velvet of her own jacket as if she was offering herself comfort. "None of this is fair. It isn't fair that part of your life was ripped from you. It's not fair that you were ripped away from me. I'm so angry, Simon."
Simon took a step toward her and took one of her hands, uncurling her fingers from her jacket. He did not take her in his arms but he stood a little distance away from her, their hands linked across the distance. Her trembling mouth sparkled, and so did her eyelashes. He did not know if this was indomitable Isabelle crying, or whether it was sparkly mascara. All he knew was that she shone, like a constellation in the shape of a girl.
"Isabelle," he said. "Isabelle."
She was so much herself, and he had scarcely any idea who he was.
"Do you know why you're here?" she demanded.
He just looked at her. There were so many things that question could mean, and so many ways to answer.
"I mean at the Academy," she said. "Do you know why you want to be a Shadowhunter?"
He hesitated. "I wanted to be that guy again," he said. "That hero that you all remember . . . and this seems like a training school for heroes."
"It's not," Isabelle said flatly. "It's a training school for Shadowhunters. And yeah, I think that's a pretty cool thing, and yeah, I think protecting the world is pretty heroic. But there are cowardly Shadowhunters and evil Shadowhunters and hopeless Shadowhunters. If you're going to get through the Academy, you have to figure out why you want to be a Shadowhunter and what that means to you, Simon. Not just why you want to be special."
He winced, but it was true. "You're right. I don't know. I know that I want to be here. I know I need to be here. Believe me, if you'd seen the bathrooms, you'd know I didn't make this decision lightly."
She gave him a withering look.
"But," he said, "I don't know why. I don't know myself well enough yet. I know what I said to you, at first, and I know what you hoped. That I could turn back into who I was before. I was really wrong and I am really sorry."
"Sorry?" Isabelle demanded. "Do you know what a big deal it was for me to come here, to make a fool of myself in front of all these people? Do you know--of course you don't. You don't want me to believe in you? You don't want me to choose you?"
Isabelle pulled her hands away from him, turned her face away as she had in the garden of the Institute that was her home. This time Simon knew it was absolutely his fault.
She was already leaving as she said:
"Have it your way, Simon Lewis. I won't."
*
Simon was so depressed after Isabelle had gone--after he had driven her away--that he didn't think he'd ever move off his cot bed again. He lay there, listening to George chatter and scrub the walls. He'd removed an impressive amount of the slime.
Simon retreated to where he believed nobody would ever find him. He went and sat in the bathroom. The stone flags were cracked in the bathrooms; there was something dark in one of the toilets. Simon hoped it was just a result of people throwing away the soup.
He had half an hour of peace in the bathroom, alone with the horrible toilets, until George poked his head around the door.
"Hey, buddy," said George. "Do not use these bathrooms. I cannot stress that enough."
"I'm not going to use the bathroom," Simon said drearily. "I'm a mess, but I'm not an idiot. I just wanted to be alone and think depressing thoughts. You want to know a secret?"
George was silent for a moment. "If you want to tell me. You don't have to. We all have secrets."
"I chased away the most amazing girl I have ever met, because I'm too much of a loser to manage being myself. That's my secret: I want to be a hero, but I'm not one. Everybody thinks I'm some amazing warrior who summoned angels and rescued Shadowhunters and saved the world, but it's a joke. I can't even remember what I did. I can't imagine how I did it. I'm no one special, and no one's going to be fooled for long, and I don't even know what I'm doing here. So. You have a secret that can beat that?"
There was a low gurgle from one of the toilets. Simon did not even look toward it. He was not interested in investigating that sound.
"I'm not a Shadowhunter at all," George said in a rush.
Sitting on a bathroom floor was not an ideal way to receive monumental revelations. Simon frowned. "You're not a Lovelace?"
"No, I'm a Lovelace." George's normally lighthearted voice was stern. "But I'm not a Shadowhunter. I'm adopted. The Shadowhunters w
ho came to recruit me didn't even think of that--of people with Shadowhunter blood wanting mundane children, giving them Shadowhunter names and thinking of them as their own. I was always planning to tell the truth, but I figured it would be easier when I got here--less trouble to decide to let me stay than to work out whether they wanted to bring me. And then I met the others, and I started the course, and I figured out I could keep up with them pretty easily. I saw what they thought of mundanes. I figured it wouldn't do any harm to keep the secret and stay in the elite class and be like the rest of the guys, just for a while."
George shoved his hands in his pockets, and stared at the floor.
"But I'd met you, too, and you didn't have any special powers, and you'd already done more than all the rest of them put together. You do things now, like transfer to the mundane class when you didn't have to, and that made me man up and tell the dean I was a mundie and get transferred, too. You did that. The way you are now, okay? So stop talking about what a loser you are, because I wouldn't follow a loser into a slime-covered bedroom or a slime-covered bathroom, and I've followed you into both." George paused and said aggressively: "And I would really like to change the phrasing of that last sentence, because it sounded so bad, but I'm not sure how."
"I'll take it in the spirit it was meant," said Simon. "And I--I'm really glad you told me. I was hoping for a cool mundie roommate from the start."
"Wanna know another secret?" George asked.
Simon was slightly terrified of another revelation, and worried George was a secret agent, but he nodded anyway.
"Everybody in this academy, Shadowhunters and mundanes, people with the Sight and without it, every one of them is looking to be a hero. We are all hoping for it, and trying for it, and soon we will be bleeding for it. You're just like the rest of us, Si. Except there's one thing about you that's different: We all want to be heroes, but you know you can be one. You know in another life, in an alternate universe, however you want to think of it, you were a hero. You can be one again. Maybe not the same hero, but you have it in you to make the right choices, to make the big sacrifices. That's a lot of pressure. But it's a lot more hope than any of the rest of us have. Think about it that way, Simon Lewis, and I think you're pretty lucky."
Simon had not thought about it that way. He'd just kept thinking that a switch was going to be flipped, and he was going to be special again. But Isabelle was right: This could not just be about being special. He remembered seeing the Academy for the first time, how glamorous and impressive it had looked from a distance, and how different it had looked close up. He was starting to think the process of becoming a Shadowhunter was the same way. He was starting to believe it would all be cutting himself with a sword and having his horse run away with him, eating terrible soup and scraping slime off the walls, and figuring out slowly and awkwardly who he really wanted to be, this time around.