Chapter 5

The next day, I woke up to bright yellow sunlight pouring in through my massive window. I sat up in surprise. It hadn’t even felt like I was asleep. It was like the daylight had snuck in between blinks.

A piece of paper slipped under my door, sliding against the carpet pile like a small exhale. I got out of the little bed and picked it up. When I unfolded the thick cream-colored note, I found it hand-scrawled in ink.

Dear students,

The tour of the school will begin at 9:00 am in front of the dining hall. Eating isn’t a necessity, but many students find it to be a good opportunity to socialize. It is your choice if you choose to partake. Dress warm.

Ephraim

I found the same clothes from the day before, perfectly clean and pressed in the wardrobe. The dining hall was right across the center of campus from where the Iudex dorms were, which was handy. While a group formed on the grass, other students milled about, heading toward the other buildings or huddling in groups. Their collective gaze floating over the trembling herd of newbies, attention barely catching before slipping away.

As I approached the group, an odd, labored shuffle came up fast behind me, and just as I began to turn, something collided with me, shoving me into the throng of waiting students.

“Ready yet?” came a hoarse voice.

The person before us was so hunched and mangled they transcended any classic human identifiers. Their back was dramatically arched, as if their spine had doubled in size inside the skin. It threw their arms forward, which dangled unnaturally toward the center of their chest. Instead of regular limbs, they had scaly raptor arms tipped with hooked talons that clicked with impatience.

One brave student spoke up.

“I’m sorry, but what are—I mean, who are . . .”

“Human,” the creature croaked, face splitting in a wicked smile. “Female, even.”

No one dared to react.

“Follow,” she hissed, peering at us through oily strands of hair.

No one said anything, and she turned neck first and began walking away. The movement was rough and distinctly inhuman. Hesitation seeped around me in such a high concentration I was shocked it didn’t waft off us like steam.

We walked into the center of the campus, then stopped by the statue that stood proudly at the center of everything. I hadn’t looked at it the night before, but I recognized it as a headless angel, with bare bony wings that matched the emblem embroidered on my sweater.

The groundskeeper jerkily pointed to each of the four dorms crowded around the grass. At the head of the formation was the massive cathedral looming over campus.

Once we’d had an eyeful, she turned around and waved us toward the other buildings. The second largest building was up closer to the front gates of the school, which were locked. It was yet another brand of architecture. This one was mostly brutalist glass, with sleek angles and open common spaces.

Corporeality Hall was engraved on the front of the building, and the groundskeeper trundled up next to the placard and smacked it, claws clicking against the stone.

“Classes.”

We all nodded, and she turned onto a path that wound away from Corporeality Hall toward a tall stone turret with a domed roof.

“Hey, what’s up with that?” someone called, jerking everyone to a stop.

Leaning up onto my toes, I noticed something dark peeking up over the crowd. We all shuffled forward until we were circling a juvenile tree ensconced in a heavy black cage.

“Is the tree being punished for something?” someone asked, earning a few chuckles from the group.

Looking closer, I noticed the surrounding grass was littered with random objects. Plastic flowers and nubby, melted candles. A crushed soda can had fallen just outside the bars of the cage. Someone extended their arm to touch it, but with surprising speed, the groundskeeper was in front of them, smacking their hand away.

“No touching!”

The student recoiled. “What the hell is this?”

The groundskeeper smiled. “No. Touching.”

She ushered us away from the caged tree toward the round building, and once we went up the stairs and inside, we realized it was a library.

Books lined every inch of the curved walls, most only accessible on iron catwalks and massive rolling ladders. Even small nooks held books hardly pinky sized. And in the center of the ground floor was a shallow pool, whose teal light cut through the warm golden air. A tabletop encircled the pool, crowded with chairs, some of which held upperclassmen already hard at work.

The group immediately gravitated to the pool, leaning over the wooden tabletop to peer into the crystalline water. Following suit, I found an odd array of creatures, most of which didn’t ring familiar.

Sure, fish zipped around in lightning bolt hues of purple and lemon yellow, but there were also hard-shelled creatures whose armored bodies were being toted around by pencil-thin legs and other creatures that could have been a lobster’s more nefarious cousin.

The more I looked, the more I realized the odd creatures weren’t just hidden in the pool. Out of the mirage of books, creatures made their presence known in small intentional movements. A massive tortoise slowly pulled himself across the floor past us, a handful of books balanced on his shell. He passed a book cart that held a huge brown-and-violet praying mantis, who seemed just as aware of our presence as we were it.

“Is this the new batch?” someone called, and the tallest man I’d ever seen stepped from the mirage of books.

It was like someone had taken a regular tall person and stretched them on a candy hook. He towered over us, spindly arms long enough to touch the bottom of the second-floor catwalk wrapping around the room. His handlebar mustache was so dense I was surprised the sheer weight of it didn’t snap his pencil neck in half.

The groundskeeper grunted.

“Well,” he said, patting the wall of books next to him lovingly. “What do you make of it?”

“A pool seems like an odd choice,” someone called from the back. “I mean, won’t the books get ruined?”

He smiled, approaching an upperclassman, who was pretending we weren’t there. He picked up a book from the top of her pile and plopped it in the water, making the fish dart in every direction. When he scooped it back out, the water beaded off the cover, not even catching on the surface, much less absorbing.

“Here,” he offered to the nearest wide-eyed student, “bone dry. You can even try tearing it up, you won’t be able to. The books are indestructible, lucky for me.”

He winked at us as the student took the book from his hand and tried to tear it apart, but they had no luck. They even narrowed their attack to a single page, but the paper refused to rip.

With a huff of annoyance, the upperclassman got to her feet, snatched the book out of the student’s hand, and stomped toward the exit, frustration finally winning out.

“Tough crowd,” he muttered, clearing his throat. “Anyway, I am at your disposal for all of your literary or archival needs.”

“Archive of what?” someone asked.

He smiled again, slicing his face in half. “Everyone.”

“You have a record of everyone?”

“Every soul who has lived and died has their own tome in the archive beneath your feet.”

“Even us?”

“Yes,” he said hesitantly, “but I wouldn’t suggest trying to find it yourself. Bad things happen to those who can’t let go.”

We left the library and circled the border of the grounds. There were a few more outbuildings, but the groundskeeper didn’t stop, so they didn’t feel very important.

Students ran their hands along the heavy metal fence but were quickly scolded.

“What’s out there that’s so bad?” someone asked.

The groundskeeper didn’t even look, only bothering to mumble something that sounded vaguely like “monsters.”

I stared into the dark trees on the other side of the high fence. Even though it was a sunny day on the campus, the woods beyond remained shadowed. The closer we stepped to the metal bars, the colder the air seemed to grow. And, as if on cue, a rustling came from the other side, like something large was trying to go unnoticed.

We made our way toward the other side of campus, weaving through the footpaths, seemingly at random. A few of the other students giggled as we passed the hedge maze, but the joviality quickly dissipated when we approached a massive arena and heard screams from inside.

Someone behind me asked, “What’s that?”

The groundskeeper grinned coolly. “Learning.”

If anyone wanted her to elaborate, she didn’t give them the opportunity before continuing on to the cathedral. Everyone exchanged nervous glances before following her.

The cathedral was familiar enough that she didn’t bother mentioning it as we circled the building to get to the dining hall.

“Questions?” she asked gruffly, finally coming to a stop.

The group was silent.

I was tempted to ask her about the mice, but I was afraid to aim her full wrath in my direction.

“Good. Tour over,” the groundskeeper called over her shoulder, not even stopping as she disappeared between two of the dorm buildings.

“Hungry?” asked a voice behind me.

When I turned, I found Arlie still lingering nearby.

“No.”

“Me neither. Let’s eat something.”

She turned without waiting for me to respond, and we walked into the dining hall.

For a place that seemed to vacillate curiously between modern and ancient, this was the oddest building I’d seen. The closest area wasn’t exceptionally different from a regular restaurant, with wooden booths lining the walls. But the building seemed to stretch far beyond what it appeared from the outside.

The roof disappeared halfway through, and nature crept inside. Vining plants climbed the exposed brick walls, glistening with plump berries, which people picked off and added to mismatched plates and bowls.

From the large holes in the roof came branches of different trees, reaching inside like long arms and offering their fruit. But they weren’t just offering it to the students that milled below them, since the space wasn’t only occupied by humans.

As the regular building ended, something akin to a barn took shape and stretched on so far back I wasn’t sure I could see the end. Some creatures that walked around read as normal to me. Skittish chickens and goats that nudged through thighs to get to the sprigs of wild grass that grew up through the floorboards. But there were also animals my brain didn’t have a name for.

Waddling through the crowd were plump, waist-high birds with large rounded beaks. They might have seemed threatening had they moved with any degree of urgency. Next to me was an even larger bird, which looked like a towering, fuzzy teardrop. The crowning jewel was a elephantine creature with massive scraping horns and thick brown fur.

Two people I recognized from our sorting ceremony were nervously holding up glossy red apples, which it sniffed appreciatively with its trunk. It looked like it was ready to take the fruit from the student’s hand just as someone to our right whistled. The creature turned its head, scooping up both students with the side of a long tusk and dangling them in the air.

The table from which the whistle originated burst into laughter as the two first years flailed in confusion. A volley of shiny plums raining down on their heads from the ceiling cut their amusement short. My eyes followed theirs to a small woman swinging from the thick vines and leaping into rafters.

“You leave those greenies alone!” she hollered, voice slashing through the den.

An interesting woman, she was small with muscular legs and bulky arms. Her wiry gray hair was chopped short but so thick it stuck out around her face in static waves. She had a sack tied around her, and when she leaped, tiny dark berries sloshed out and fell to the floor, where the chickens ran to gobble them up.

As the table mumbled their apologies, the mammoth settled enough for the two new students to push themselves back to the ground.

My eyes were on the woman as she climbed expertly across the ceiling before coming to a stop on top of a large pressing machine. She unclipped the bag from her chest and poured the contents into the large drum before pulling down the press’s long arm.

Below her, students and faculty waited with chipped glasses while a deep red juice percolated into a glass reservoir.

“That bread smells so good I’m going to shit my pants,” Arlie said, wandering toward a wall of revolving shelves.

Heat blustered out from the moving metal, each cavity full of a different baked good. Some were thin slices of soft bread with crispy crusts, others plates of tiny rolls glowing golden with butter. Someone nearby picked up a biscuit and pulled it open, thin layers separating like book pages, before smearing it with jam and clotted cream.

Overwhelmed, I grabbed the nearest plate, only realizing what I had in my hand as I followed Arlie to the next station. It was the end piece of a rich dark bread, the outside crusted in seeds, rough in contrast to the fluffy center.

Next to the bread station was an array of different cheeses and jams. There were no labels, but my brain recognized some by smell. Hard pale cheeses shaved paper thin and wedges of earthy spreadable cheese sat next to tiny jars of jiggly jam and rectangles of quince.

I selected a soft wedge with a thick waxy rind that smelled earthy and mammalian. My eyes went curiously to the mammoth happily chewing on a cluster of flowers in the far corner.

We passed by steamers full of soft-boiled eggs nearly the size of my head.

“Want to split one?” Arlie asked.

I eyed the large, cumbersome bird wandering through the crowd. “I’ll pass.”

“Suit yourself.” She had to use both hands to move the egg from the warming tray to her plate.

I didn’t even realize Arlie was leading us toward a table until she was sliding into one of the booth seats.

“I’m surprised it’s so warm in here, since there’s barely a roof.”

I slid in across from her. “Body heat.”

“Yeah, and big bodies at that.” She picked up a glass saltshaker and brought it down hard on her massive egg, but the shell didn’t budge. “I’m pretty sure some of these animals have been extinct for a while.”

“Seems so.”

Wooden cutlery sat in an old teapot on the table, and I sorted through the mismatched stems until I pulled out a dull knife. Spreading cheese on the corner of my bread, I experienced my first pang of excitement. It wasn’t like hunger, just anticipation of the flavors on my tongue.

I bit in, having to tear hard to break through the crust as the thick cheese stuck to the roof of my mouth. The buttery seeds and yeasty bread managed not to be overpowered by the fragrant cheese, the combination mixing perfectly, warming me from the inside out. But when a familiar silhouette appeared at the end of our booth, any happiness was quickly soiled.

Arlie groaned first. “What do you want?”

Rigel stood over us, a half-eaten apple clutched in his hand as he grinned down at us with amusement.

“I can’t say I’m surprised,” he said, crossing his arms. “Did you two bond over a shared talent of embarrassing yourselves in public?”

Rolling my eyes, I covered my full mouth with my hand. “How long were you sitting over there rehearsing that jab in your head?”

“Not too long. It doesn’t take a particularly discerning mind to make the connection.”

“Maybe you should have run it by a friend first because it was weak.” I redirected my eyes in front of me, hoping he’d walk away with his tail between his legs.

Arlie was still refusing to look at him, probably willing him to go away. Her attention remained on the massive egg, which she’d taken to smashing against the glossy wood table. “Nice shiner. Looking for a matching set?”

The result of my punch from the night before was still prevalent under his eye, and his free hand twitched by his side, as if he were stopping himself from touching it. “I’m satisfied with the experience, but I appreciate the offer.”

“Was that a first for you? Shouldn’t roughhousing be second nature to someone deemed demonic?”

He bit into his apple, taking the time to chew and swallow. “If you think that vengeance is only physical, well . . .” He smiled. “Good for you.”

She brought the egg down one final time, which resulted in an unsatisfying thunk. “Is there something we can do for you?”

“No, I just noticed you were struggling.”

“And you think you’re qualified to help?” I asked.

His eyebrows quirked up in mock surprise. “We just got to the strangest place between two worlds, and you wasted the night socializing?”

“At least some of us had the choice.”

“And yet you chose wrong.” He tsked. “I suppose some minds don’t require an excess of stimulation.”

“I trust that I’ll find things out in time.”

Sighing mockingly, he snatched the egg off Arlie’s plate. Despite his lanky build, his hands were massive, with long spidery fingers that palmed the large egg with ease. He spun it around until the narrow edge faced upwards before bringing the top down hard against the edge of the table. We both jumped as the shell shattered on impact.

He set it back down in front of Arlie’s gobsmacked face but looked at me. “That’s disappointing.”

Then he gave me a small wink and sauntered away into the crowd.

“What a fucking creep,” Arlie grumbled, peeling away the broken shards from the veiny membrane.

I returned my attention to the bread in front of me. “I guess he’s well suited to this place, then.”

“At least the other demons seem like more fun.”

Rowdy was a more accurate description. They seemed to revel in their house’s stereotype more than most. Even as we finished our food and meandered through campus together, the demons were the ones you could always pick out from a distance. In groups, they seemed to pride themselves on being boisterous, as if making themselves known was their right.

“Maybe it is,” Arlie agreed. “We’re all adrift here. I feel like it would be a comfort to lean into an assigned identity like that, even if it’s mostly for show.”

I blinked in surprise. “That was decently insightful.”

“I know right, beauty and brains. What can’t I do?” She grinned. “Anyway, they seem like the best ones to party with, performance or not.”

I laughed. “That’s something, I suppose.”

“Maybe that just doesn’t mean a lot to you. You dipped out pretty early last time.”

“And whose fault was that?”

She gasped in mock outrage. “We’ve been friends for all of five minutes, and I’m already being used as a scapegoat.”

“Don’t be silly,” I said with a grin. “We haven’t been friends nearly that long.”

“What do you need, three to five business days?”

“At the very least.”

“Have it your way.”

I left her in front of the Custos dorm, where she bade me farewell with a “See you around, Tits!”

“Can I unassign myself from this nickname?” I asked as she walked up the stairs.

She winked over her shoulder. “That is a friend privilege, unfortunately.”

When I stepped back into my room, a crackling under my feet made me leap back in surprise. I looked down to find a thick envelope someone had slid under my door.

After my heart slowed, I brought it to my desk, where I sat and kicked off my leather shoes. Opening the manilla envelope, I found two pieces of paper, one a schedule and the other a letter.

I opted to read the letter first, slightly afraid to see whatever the schedule held.

Dear Agnes,

I hope you’re settling in well! Your first week of classes begins tomorrow, and your schedule is enclosed. For the first two years, you’ll share classes with the other houses while you all learn foundational skills. After that, you will have two years of specialized training, followed by a capstone residence in the mortal world.

Once you begin your third year, you will have the option of switching career paths if you feel you are ill-suited to the path assigned to you. But I implore you to consider this decision wholeheartedly.

If you have any problems, feel free to leave a request with the front office, and I will meet with you at the earliest convenience.

Best wishes,

Ephraim, Chancellor

P.S. I must insist that you avoid physical altercations at all cost. What is done here cannot be undone. I should hope this is the only warning you require from now on.

Flinching at the last part, I worried it was directed specifically at me after what I’d done to Rigel. My stomach twisted at the words what is done cannot be undone. What did that mean?

I set the letter down and picked up the schedule.

Monday/Tuesday/Wednesday

10 a.m. – 11 a.m.

Intro to Transparency

Corporeality Hall

Room 202

Monday/Wednesday/Friday

11 a.m. – 1 p.m.

Object Manipulation 101

Corporeality Hall

Room 301

Friday

1 p.m. – 4 p.m.

Interpersonal Exploitation

Cathedral

Room 2*

*Check map for location before every class.

While some classes made sense in theory, I had a hard time imagining them in practice. Whatever they meant, I was about to find out.

That night, as I tried to sleep to make the long empty hours pass faster, the mice made another appearance. They melted through the walls, skittering around my room and sniffing my shoes as their forked tails twitched with interest. Slowly, I reached down, extending a finger toward one. It approached hesitantly, large eyes blinking up at me to gauge my intention. And in its eyes, I saw the same stars swimming in the sky overhead.