Angela stared at Jack, eyes wide and horrified. “I never thought about it,” she said. “I saw … I saw people fall. The rainbows were slippery. Even with the right shoes, you could fall through if you slowed down too much.”
“Someone disposed of those bodies,” said Jack. “Ashes to ashes, right? If we call Loriel’s parents, if we tell them what happened, that’s it, we’re done. Anyone who’s under eighteen gets taken home by their loving parents. Half of you will be on antipsychotic drugs you don’t need before the end of the year, but hey, at least you’ll have someone to remind you to eat while you’re busy contemplating the walls. The rest of us will be out on the streets. No high school degrees, no way of coping with this world, which doesn’t want us back.”
“At least you have prospects,” said Christopher, giving his bone another spin. “How many colleges you been accepted to?”
“Every one that I’ve applied to, but they’re all assuming I’ll graduate before I come knocking,” said Jack. “And of course, I’ve Jill to consider. I can’t go running out into the world without making provisions for my sister.”
“I can take care of myself,” said Jill.
“You won’t have to,” said Eleanor. She walked wearily into the room, looked toward Jack and Kade, and said, “Make her go away, darlings. Put her someplace where I’ll never find her, not if I look for a thousand years. We’ll have a memorial service. We’ll honor her as best we can. But I can’t endanger us all because of one lost life. I almost wish I could. I would feel less like a monster, and more like the child who danced with foxes under the slow October moon. I simply cannot bring myself to do it.”
“Of course,” said Jack, and started to stand.
Angela was on her feet first. “She killed her, and now you’re going to let her have the body?” she shrilled, pointing at Jack. Her face was a mask of outrage. “She’s a murderess! Loriel knew it, I know it, and I can’t believe that you don’t know it!”
“Points for knowing the feminine form of ‘murderer,’ although I’m a little insulted that you feel the need to put a lacy bow on the crime before you can believe I committed it,” said Jack. “What would I do with a pair of eyes, Angela? I don’t care about the visual sciences. I’m sure there were some fascinating adaptations to her cones and rods, but I don’t have the facilities or equipment here to study them. If I were going to kill her for her eyes, I would have done it in ten years, after I was nicely established as the head of research and development for a biotech firm big enough to make murder charges just go away. Killing her now benefits me not at all.”
“Can we stop pointing fingers at each other and deal with this? Please?” Kade stood. “We already have one body on our hands. I don’t want any more.”
“I can help,” said Nancy. The others turned toward her. She reddened slightly, but pushed on, saying, “I can make sure nothing is done that’s not respectful toward the dead. The flesh they leave behind when they depart doesn’t bother me.”
“You’re a creepy girl,” said Christopher approvingly. He stood, tucking his bone into his pocket. “I’ll help as well. The Skeleton Girl would never forgive me if I didn’t.”
“I won’t,” said Jill. “It would ruin my dress.”
“Thank you, all of you,” said Eleanor. “Classes have been canceled for the rest of the morning. We’ll see you after lunch, once you’ve had time to put yourselves together again.”
“Bad choice of words,” said Jack—but she looked thoughtful, almost pensive, as she turned her face away and led Kade and Nancy out of the room. Christopher brought up the rear, his bone sticking out of his back pocket like an upthrust middle finger. The door swung closed behind him.
Together, they walked out to the porch. Loriel was still on the lawn, covered by a sheet, and for a moment, all Nancy could think was that if this didn’t stop soon, they were going to run out of bedclothes. Nancy, Christopher, and Jack kept walking. Kade stopped.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “I can’t. I just … I can’t. This was never my job.” Because he’d been a princess in Prism, before they’d learned that he was really a prince; because unlike the rest of them, he had never been responsible for tending to the dead. He’d killed people, sure. That was what had earned him the title of Goblin Prince. But his part in their deaths had ended on the blade of his sword.
“It’s all right,” said Nancy gently, looking back over her shoulder at him. “The dead are much more understanding than the living. Let us take care of her. You keep watch.”
“I can do that,” said Kade, relieved.
Nancy, Jack, and Christopher made their way to the body. They came from very different traditions. For Nancy, the entire experience of death was revered. For Christopher, the flesh was temporary, but the bones were eternal and deserved to be treated as such. For Jack, death was an inconvenience to be conquered, and a corpse was a Pandora’s box of beautiful possibilities. But all of them shared a love for those who had passed, and as they lifted Loriel from the ground, they did so with gentle, compassionate hands.
“If we take her to the basement, I can mix up something to strip the flesh from her bones,” said Jack. “The skeleton will still appear fresh to any forensics tests, but it’s a start.”
“Once she’s a skeleton, I might be able to find out what happened to her,” said Christopher, sounding almost shy.
There was a pause. Finally, dubiously, Jack said, “I’m sorry, but it sounded like you just confessed to being able to talk to bones. Why have we never heard this before?”
“Because I was there when you said you could raise the dead. I saw how everybody reacted, and I enjoy having a social life at this school,” said Christopher. “It’s not like I can go hang out at the pizza parlor in town if the other kids stop talking to me. And don’t say you and your sister would have talked to me. The two of you don’t talk to anybody.”
“He’s got you there,” called Kade from the porch.
Nancy frowned. “They talked to me.”
“Because Sumi made them, and because you went to a world full of ghosts,” said Christopher. “I guess that was close enough to living in a horror movie that they were cool with you. And they talked to Sumi because she didn’t give them a choice. Sumi was like a small tornado. When she sucked you up, you just tightened your grip and went along for the ride.”
“We keep to ourselves for good reason,” said Jack stiffly, adjusting her grasp on Loriel’s shoulders. “Most of you got unicorns and misty meadows. We got the Moors, and if there was a unicorn out there, it probably ate human flesh. We learned quickly that sharing our experiences with others just drove them away, and most of the social connections at this place are based on those shared experiences. On the doors, and on what happened when we went through them.”
“I went to a country of happy, dancing skeletons who said that one day I’d come back to them and marry their Skeleton Girl,” said Christopher. “So pretty sunshiny, but sort of sunshine by way of Día de los Muertos.”
“Maybe we should have talked to you a long time ago,” said Jack. “Let’s get Loriel to the basement.”
They carried her around the side of the manor, walking until they found the ground-level doors that had once been used by tradesmen delivering coal or food to the house above. Their hands were full, and so Nancy twisted to look over her shoulder as she called, “Kade? We need you.”
“This I can do,” said Kade. He jogged past them and opened the cellar doors, releasing a rush of cool, sepulchral air. He held the doors until the others were through, and then he followed them, closing the doors with a final-sounding clank that left them in near darkness. Nancy had dwelt in the Halls of the Dead, where the lights were never turned above twilight, for fear of hurting sensitive eyes. Christopher had learnt to navigate a world of skeletons, none of whom had eyes anymore, and many of whom had long since forgotten about the squishy living and their need for constant illumination. Jack could see by the light of a single storm. O
nly Kade stumbled, managing not to fall as the group made their way to the base of the stairs.
“Can you hold her up without me for a second?” asked Jack. “I should turn the lights on before one of you buffoons trips and damages something valuable.”
“See, that’s the other reason no one talks to you,” said Christopher. “You’re sort of mean, like, all the time. Even when you don’t have any real reason to be. You could just say ‘please.’”
“Please can you hold her up without me for a second, so that we don’t knock over the jug of acid I was planning to use to dissolve her flesh,” said Jack. “I enjoy having nonskeletal feet. Perhaps you do as well.”
“For now,” said Christopher. He shifted his grip around Loriel’s torso, getting his arms locked. “All right, I think I have her.”
“Excellent. I’ll be right back.” The body seemed to grow heavier in Nancy’s and Christopher’s arms as Jack let go. They heard her moving away, steps light on the concrete floor of the basement. Then, calmly, she said, “You may want to close your eyes.”
They tensed, expecting a blazing surgical light. Instead, when she flipped the switch, a soft orange glow bathed the room, revealing metal racks filled with jars and lab equipment, dressers bulging with wispy lace and ribbons, and a stainless-steel autopsy table. There was only one bed.
Nancy made a small sound of dismay as she realized what this meant. “You sleep on the autopsy table?” she asked.
Jack touched the smooth metal with one hand. “Not much call for pillows or blankets in the lab,” she said. “Jill got the canopy beds and the cushions. I learned how to sleep on stone floors. Turns out that sort of thing is hard to unlearn. Sleeping in a real bed is like trying to sleep in a cloud. I’m afraid I’ll sink right through and fall to my death.” She sighed, taking her hand off the autopsy table. “Put her here. I want to look at her before we dissolve her.”
“Is this a creepy perv thing?” asked Christopher, as he and Nancy maneuvered the body through the lab. “I’m not sure I can stay to help if it’s a creepy perv thing.”
“I don’t like corpses in that way unless they’ve been reanimated,” said Jack. “Corpses are incapable of offering informed consent, and are hence no better than vibrators.”
“I wish that didn’t make so much sense,” said Christopher. Together, he and Nancy boosted Loriel up onto the autopsy table. He let go and stepped away. Nancy remained, taking a moment to straighten the body’s limbs and smooth out its hair. There was nothing she could do for the pits that had been Loriel’s eyes—she couldn’t even close them. In the end, she simply folded Loriel’s hands over her chest and backed away.
Jack moved into the position Nancy had vacated. Unlike the other girl, she didn’t shy away from the damage to Loriel’s face. She leaned in close, studying the striations in the flesh, the way it had been torn and opened. Pulling on a pair of rubber gloves, she reached out and carefully rolled Loriel’s head to the side, probing her skull with quick, careful motions. Nancy and Christopher watched closely, but nothing Jack was doing was disrespectful: if anything, she was showing more respect to Loriel now that she was dead than she ever had when the other girl was among the living.
Jack grimaced. “Her skull’s been cracked,” she said. “Someone hit her from behind hard enough to knock her down and disorient her. I can’t say for sure whether it knocked her out. Knocking someone out is harder than most people guess. It was a blitz attack; she didn’t have a chance to defend herself or scream for help before she was down. But it wouldn’t have killed her right away. And there’s quite a lot of blood in her sockets.”
“Jack…” Kade’s voice was low and horrified. “Please tell me you’re not saying what I think you’re saying.”
“Hmm?” Jack looked up. “I’m not psychic, Kade, I don’t even believe that psychics exist. There is no possible way I could read your mind and know what you think I’m saying. I’m simply talking about the manner in which Loriel’s eyes were extracted.”
“You mean removed?” asked Christopher.
“No, I mean extracted,” said Jack. “I’d need to open her skull to be sure, and I don’t have a proper bone saw, which makes that a difficult task, but it appears that her eyes were fully extracted, all the way along the optic nerve. Whoever assaulted her didn’t just pluck them out like grapes. They used some sort of blade to separate the eye from the muscles holding it in place, and once that was done, they—”
“Do you know who did it?” asked Kade.
“No.”
“Then please, stop telling us how it was done. I can’t take it anymore.”
Jack looked at him solemnly, and said, “I haven’t gotten to the important part yet.”
“Then please, get there, before the rest of us throw up on the floor.”
“Based on the damage to the skull and the amount of bleeding, she was alive when her eyes were taken,” said Jack. Silence greeted her proclamation. Even Nancy put a hand over her mouth. “Whoever did this subdued her, removed her eyes, and let the shock kill her. I’m not even sure her death was the goal. Just getting her eyes.”
“Why?” asked Christopher.
Jack hesitated before shaking her head and saying, “I don’t know. Come on. Let’s prepare her for burial.”
Kade retreated back to the far side of the basement and stayed there as the others got to work. Nancy undressed Loriel, folding each piece of clothing with care before setting it aside. She somehow doubted that these clothes were going to make it into the general supply. They would probably need to be destroyed along with Loriel’s body, just for the sake of safety.
While Nancy worked, Jack and Christopher pulled an old claw-footed bathtub out of a corner of the basement and into the center of the room. Jack uncorked several large glass jugs and poured their greenish, fizzing contents into the tub. Kade watched this with dismay.
“Why does Eleanor let you have that much acid?” he asked. “Why would you want that much acid? You don’t need that much acid.”
“Except that it appears I do, since I have just enough to dissolve a human body, and we have a human body in need of dissolving,” said Jack. “Everything happens for a reason. And Eleanor didn’t ‘let’ me have this much acid. I sort of collected it on my own. For a rainy day.”
“What were you expecting it to rain?” asked Christopher. “Bears?”
“There was always a chance we’d get lucky,” said Jack. She pulled several plastic aprons off a shelf and held them out to the others. “You’re going to want to put one of these on, and a pair of the gloves that go with them. Acid is not a fun exfoliator unless you come from Christopher’s world.”
Wordlessly, Nancy and Christopher donned their plastic aprons, rubber gloves, and goggles. Jack did the same, and together they lowered Loriel into the fizzing green liquid. Kade turned his face away. The smell was surprisingly pleasant, not meaty at all: it smelled like cleaning fluid, faintly citrus, with a minty undertone. The bubbles increased as Loriel disappeared beneath the surface, until the liquid was completely opaque, obscuring her from view. Jack turned away.
“It’ll take about an hour to reduce her to a skeletal state,” she said. “I’ll neutralize the acid and drain it off when she’s done. Christopher, do you think you can handle her from there?”
“She’ll dance for me.” Christopher touched the bone in his pocket. Nancy realized there were small indentations in the surface. Not holes, not quite, and yet it still managed to suggest a flute. The tunes he played on that instrument wouldn’t be audible to the living. That didn’t mean they wouldn’t be real. “All skeletons dance for me. It’s my honor to play for them.”
“All right, clearly the two of you”—Jack gestured to Nancy as she stripped off her gloves—“were meant to be together. If you can’t find your doors, you should get married and breed the next generation of creepy world-traveling children.”
Christopher’s cheeks turned red. Nancy’s didn’t. It was a pleasant chan
ge.
“Maybe we should figure out why people are dying before we start trying to set up a breeding program,” said Kade mildly. “Besides, I met Nancy first. I get asking-out dibs.”
“Sometimes I suspect you learned all your hallmarks of masculinity from a Neanderthal,” said Jack. She removed her apron, hanging it on a nearby hook. “Everyone please take off the gear you borrowed. That stuff is expensive, and I only get to place three orders a year.”
“Do I get a say in this?” asked Nancy, shooting an amused look over at Kade. She didn’t mind flirting. Flirting was safe, flirting was fun; flirting was a way of interacting with her peers without anyone realizing that there was anything strange about her. She could have flirted forever. It was just the things that came after flirting that she had no interest in.
“Maybe later,” said Jack. “Right now, we need to get out of here. The acid will do some off-gassing as it breaks down her tissues, and I don’t want to fill my lungs with Loriel. Besides, I shouldn’t leave Jill alone for too long.” She sounded uneasy.
“I’m sure no one will hurt your sister,” said Nancy. “She can take care of herself.”
“That’s what I’m worried about,” said Jack. “When you spend years with a vampire, all those lessons about ‘don’t bite the other children’ sort of go out the window. If they corner her because they’ve decided I’m guilty, she’s liable to hurt someone just so she can get away. I’d rather not get expelled right after I’ve disposed of a body. Seems like a waste of good acid.”
“All right,” said Nancy, pulling her apron off over her head. “Let’s go.”
Since they were no longer trying to spare their fellow students the sight of Loriel’s body, the foursome walked up the interior stairs, emerging into the deserted hallway. Kade looked in both directions before turning to Jack and asking, “Where would she go?”