Page 46

Not improvised in a brawl.

Prepared, in advance, by someone who knew there would be a brawl, in this spot, at this hour—which means the fight itself was arranged, which means Annalise was aimed.

I claw at her wrists.

I get enough breath for exactly four words, and I spend them well.

“Annalise. Would. Look. Up.”

She doesn’t.

“You can go meet her,” she snarls, and bears down harder, and the black spots bloom into black continents. “Go keep my Giselle company, and I’ll finish beating you to death when I get there.”

Whistles are shrilling now, somewhere past the roaring in my ears, the guards finally remembering they have legs.

And I do the math the way I always do it, fast and cold even as the world narrows to a pinhole: stay here, and I either pass out and wake in whatever afterlife they assign to women like me, or I survive to be framed for a fourth corpse before nightfall.

Neither works for me.

So I stop being polite about it. I drive my knee up between her legs—which does precisely as little as you’d expect, anatomy being what it is, but it’s enough of a flinch to loosen the press of those thumbs by a crucial degree.

I gulp half a breath. I haul both knees to my chest, plant my bare feet flat against the soft give of her belly, and I kick, all the coiled spring of a dancer’s legs unloading at once.

She shrieks and goes up and back, peeling off me, and air floods in so sweet and total it nearly blinds me worse than the choking did.

I don’t waste it.

I roll, snap upright into a seated coil, and cartwheel forward off my hands—clearing the spot where I lay, flipping clean to my feet in the single fluid line my body has known since beforethis place ever caged it—precisely as the blade completes its arc through the air I just vacated.

There’s a sound the whole room makes when a body does something a body shouldn’t be able to do—a collective intake, half awe and half terror—and I hear it go up around me as I land, and I understand I’ve just shown them all a card I usually keep face-down.

A choking, half-conscious patient does not roll up into a clean tumbling pass and stick the landing a hairsbreadth ahead of a falling blade. The lunatic act has a seam in it now, and two hundred witnesses just watched it tear.

I’ll pay for that later.

Later is a problem for a girl who isn’t currently being hunted by physics.

I land and spin to face her, breathing hard, and Annalise—furious, humiliated, witless with grief—staggers up and pivots back toward me to reset for round two.

Wrong move.

She steps back into the swing of it, and the whole cafeteria watches the long curved blade catch the light one last time and follow through—clean, silent, obscene—drawing itself across her midsection on the back half of its pendulum.

For a suspended instant nothing happens, the way nothing happens in the held breath between the lightning and the thunder. Then the line it left behind opens.

Her shriek dies in her throat. And the first dark welling of blood begins its slow inevitable journey toward the floor, pooling bright against the institutional grey while two hundred mouths fall open in the same silent O of horror.

My eyes lock on hers, and I watch the shock arrive in her like dye in water.

And I understand, all at once, the thing that’s been itching at the edge of this whole staged afternoon.

“You didn’t set that up,” I say softly, almost to myself, my gaze flicking up to the swaying wire, the rigged and waiting blade, the patient murderous geometry of it.

She didn’t hang that.

She isn’t clever enough, isn’t cold enough, isn’t anything but a grieving animal pointed at me like a loaded gun by a hand neither of us has seen.

Someone built this. Wound the spring and aimed the edge and turned a heartbroken Omega into the trigger, content to lose her in the firing if it meant burying me under one more body.