“Hold steady through it,” Professor Marsden said in a perfectly calm voice. “The effect will only be temporary.”
That didn’t look like it was going to help the guy now. He swayed so far with one strangled gulp of air that he slipped right off his seat. He managed to land on his feet, staggering and then doubling over with even more desperate wheezes.
I was already half off my chair, torn between going along with everyone else’s inaction and the concern that was gripping me, when the girl across from Violet knifed over and retched into her sink. Whatever she’d had for lunch came up with a sputter and a splatter. She sucked in a ragged breath, braced herself, and then sat back with a swipe of her hand across her mouth.
It was as if that one response set off a chain reaction. The boy in front of Violet lurched forward to hurl the contents of his own stomach into his sink, coughing and gagging and then spewing more with a horrible groan. He was still hunched over the sink when Violet followed suit, just barely yanking her hair back with one hand before she ejected a flood of vomit into her sink.
My own stomach churned at the noises filling the room and the sour stench congealing in the air. My gaze snapped to the professor, but she was watching all this with a dispassionate expression.
“Don’t forget to record your observations as accurately as possible,” she said over the choked sounds. “And keep an eye on the time so you can report how long the symptoms lasted.”
Was she fucking serious? Violet shuddered and puked again. The boy who’d been wheezing had managed to climb back onto his stool, his breaths evening out, but the guy in front of me had just flung himself toward his sink, all but clawing at his mouth. He sprayed water from the faucet over his face and then gagged and spat, his whole body shaking as if in the grips of a seizure.
The horror of the scene around me clenched my innards so tightly that it took me a moment to break through my shock. Then I was sliding off my stool and marching to the front of the room as fast as my feet would take me.
“What the hell is this?” I demanded, planting myself right in front of Professor Marsden. “Making us sick isn’t a class. You can’t do shit like this to people.”
She considered me without any more hint of concern than she’d had for her other students. “We’re teaching you your limitations and how to recognize the signs that you’ve reached them,” she said smoothly, as if that explanation made the sickening chaos around me any better. “So many of you have gone through life never realizing the damage you could be doing.”
What was that even supposed to mean? “Don’t be ridiculous,” I said. “You’re torturing us.”
“How much do you know about educational processes?” Marsden asked haughtily. “Back to your seat, Miss Corbyn. I’ve heard enough.”
As if I was going to listen to anything she said after what she’d just done. I spun toward the door instead, rushing out and down the stairs, the sickly stink still lingering in my nose and the sounds echoing through my mind.
The thump of my pulse chased one other thought in circles through my mind. I couldn’t just stand there and let this crap happen to people. Whatever hold the school had over them, whatever power the professors might be exerting, there were limits. I’d get out of here, I’d walk the roads until I reached a town or my phone got reception again, and then I was bringing the police out here to treat these jackasses like the psychos they were.
A headache like the one I’d gotten last night cracked through my skull as I burst out the front doors. The pain expanded through my head with each hurried step toward the gates. I gritted my teeth and pushed on.
Maybe it was a coincidence; maybe the school was doing it to me somehow—it didn’t matter. I couldn’t give in. I had to get away from this place and force the assholes who ran it to face what they deserved.
Ignoring the throbbing blaze behind my eyes as well as I could, I gripped the heavy latch on the gate and yanked it down. At least, I meant to yank it down. The metal lever jarred in my hands. I shoved at it again and then stared at it as intently as I could through the haze of pain.
No lock held the latch in place. Nothing should have prevented it from opening. It simply… refused to.
“No,” I muttered. “No, no.” I wrenched at the latch again, slamming my shoulder against the wrought-iron bars at the same time. The metal joints clattered, but the gate didn’t budge. The impact shot up my neck and rattled a fresh burst of pain across my skull.
The headache was starting to mess with my balance. I stumbled backward and found myself tipping over onto my ass. My tailbone twinged as I hit the ground. My fingers dug into the cool grass beneath that gray, ever-clouded sky.
A girl had been walking along the wall. She stopped several feet from me. Her voice reached me as if from an ocean of agony away.
“There’s no point. We come in, but we don’t go out.”
“No,” I mumbled once more, my body swaying backward. As the back of my head hit the grass and my mind dimmed, one final thought rose up.
If no one ever left, then Cade had to still be here, somewhere, one way or another.
Chapter Ten
Trix
I woke up in my bed in the dorms with a vague echo of the headache lingering at my temples. Otherwise, I felt pretty normal physically, but the second my mind slipped back to the events that had brought me to this spot, my stomach clenched up in a ball of horror.
I was literally stuck here in this psycho college that was becoming more like a literal torture chamber by the minute. So were all the other students, I had to assume. And my foster brother had gotten caught up in the whole crazy situation somehow or other…
If the things I’d seen were how they treated the students actually attending classes, how much worse off was Cade? Was he even still alive?
That question made my stomach twist even tighter. I sat up on the bed, swiping my rumpled hair back from my face.
The overhead light was on, the view outside the window dark. It must be evening if not total night now. I’d been out for a while.
Not so long that my roommates had come to bed, though. The only other person in the room was Violet, sitting cross-legged on top of her blanket with her back to me as she wrote in that notebook of hers.
“Hey,” I said, and she turned, glancing down briefly to add one more note. “Are you okay?” I asked.
I meant after the ordeal in Tolerance class, but as soon as I’d said the words, they felt ridiculous. How could anyone be okay here?
She lifted one shoulder in a partial shrug. “Same old, same old.” Her expression was a little less tight than I remembered it being before. Did she appreciate that I’d tried to stand up to Professor Marsden on everyone’s behalf, or did she just pity me for my failure to get anywhere with that cause?
A cool draft trickled through the room. I shivered and reached for my leather jacket, slung on the corner of the bedframe. The worn material that by now was perfectly molded to my body always comforted me, like an extra layer of defensive skin, when I pulled it on.
I’d wondered before why the dean had let me stay on at the school, if maybe he’d meant to prove a point to me. After everything I’d seen, I was starting to think it was the other way around. The staff got off on tormenting the students however they could—and most of my classmates acted more irritated by me than anything else. Had Dean Wainhouse let me stick around just to add an extra layer to their discomfort, like I was nothing more than a new tool in the school’s arsenal?