When they got there, the mayor was standing with his blindfold off, his eyes flicking from side to side in alarm. His hair was tousled and his clothes were rumpled, but he had his spine straight, like he was trying to be ready, to not collapse under the weight of the day. Hibiscus and the rest of Assata were milling about, keeping an eye on him but also talking amongst themselves in low agitated whispers.
Bitter felt the tug in her stomach intensify suddenly. She winced, and Aloe took her arm. “What’s wrong?” he asked.
“I think Vengeance is close,” she said. Her words had Assata exploding into action; no one even paused to question her. They formed a blockade around the mayor, not bothering with weapons because they already knew they would be useless against the angels. Hibiscus’s eyes searched the air, looking to see where the angel would come from. Ube’s jaw was tight, and Aloe grabbed hold of Bitter’s hand, giving her a firm look of solidarity. Blessing and Alex were standing shoulder to shoulder, and the air in the atrium was tight with fearful anticipation.
Vengeance materialized in the same spot it had disappeared from the last time, right under the weeping willow. It was back in its full form, all smoke and seven angry eyes with a bloodstained mouth. The willow branches drifted right through it like it was a ghost. Bitter felt the tug in her stomach twist and then dissipate. She was taking a deep breath to step forward and confront this creature she’d made, who had her blood on its mouth and Theron’s on its hands, but Miss Virtue gently stopped her with a hand on her shoulder. Bitter looked up at her.
“What are you doing?” she asked. “I have to handle Vengeance.”
Miss Virtue didn’t even look at her. “Not this time,” she replied, and there was something eerie about her voice. It was layered now, like the words were slipping and rasping against each other. Vengeance swiveled its scaled head in Miss Virtue’s direction, the eggshells along its spine clacking together in rattling succession. As soon as it saw her, the yellow of its eyes flared and it swelled in size, nearly doubling. Bitter gasped and stepped back as the Assata kids scrambled out of the way of the mutating smoke slamming through the air of the atrium. Miss Virtue didn’t even blink. Vengeance let out a low growl, filled with more malevolence than Bitter had ever heard from the angel since she’d called it out of the painting.
“Traitor,” it hissed, and its voice was a thousand knives scraping over taut glass, forcing everyone in the atrium to clap their hands over their ears, collectively wincing as the sound bled into their skulls.
Miss Virtue gave it an empty smile. “It’s good to see you again, sib.”
Bitter’s jaw dropped as she whipped her head between Miss Virtue and Vengeance. They knew each other?
“Do not call me sibling,” Vengeance snarled. “You have lost that privilege.”
The principal shrugged. “What we call a thing does not change what it is.”
“I’m sorry,” Bitter interrupted. “Miss Virtue? What’s happening?”
“Virtue?” The angel reared its scaly head in contempt, bringing its size back down. “That is the name you chose?”
“You call yourself Vengeance,” Miss Virtue replied. “It’s hardly subtle.”
“I am here hunting. Your only task was to watch the gates, and you have failed woefully at that.”
Nothing about their conversation was making any sense to Bitter. She looked up at Miss Virtue. “Watch the gates?” she asked. “What’s it talking about?”
Miss Virtue didn’t take her eyes off Vengeance. “I was watching the gates. You changed the timelines, veiled things from me.”
Vengeance growled and its smoke rippled. “Because we knew your allegiance had shifted!”
“Wait,” Bitter interrupted again. “Aren’t we the gates?”
Vengeance glanced at her. “Yes, child. The gates have always been gates. It was important to collect them in one place, for when the time would come.”
Aloe edged closer to Bitter. “What are they talking about?” he asked.
Bitter barely heard him. She was staring at Miss Virtue, flashes of memory burning across her mind. The social worker. The pattern of rescue. Eucalyptus. It all coalesced into a sharp picture that cut across her heart. “You were collecting us?” Everything Vengeance had been saying to Miss Virtue was falling into place, making a terrible sense. “You … you knew this would happen? That they would come through our work?”
Miss Virtue sighed impatiently. Her shirt was slightly wrinkled, but she still managed to look immaculate, a sliver too perfect. “It was hardly a hobby, Bitter.”
Bitter was still struggling to reconcile the implications, the long arm they had, the way they reached into her life, her own past. “But that would mean you been working with the angels this whole time?”
Time seemed impossible to process in that moment. How long had Eucalyptus been open? Had that been its function all along? If this was true, then Miss Virtue had been giving them a safe place not because she cared, not because she was protecting them, but because they were going to be useful. As if they were tools, not people. And from the way Vengeance spoke about people, Bitter already knew that to be true. It had all been a lie, every brick in every wall of the school had been a lie from the beginning.
Bitter took a gasping step away from Miss Virtue, betrayal flowering in her chest like a wildfire. She felt Aloe grab her hand, his palm cool and textured against hers, a new anchor as she spun adrift. “How could you?” she asked, her voice splintering. “You told us we were safe.”
The rest of the Eucalyptus kids were staring at Miss Virtue with mirrored expressions of hurt and shock glassed into their eyes. Alex was clenching her hands so tightly that her knuckles jutted out against her skin, and Blessing had wrapped her arms around herself, her mouth trembling. Miss Virtue had collected all of them, gathered them together under the roof of a lie, and made them love her. Aloe wiped a furious tear off his face, and the Assata kids looked on, unconsciously huddling closer to Miss Bilphena. Sunflower had joined them, small glittered lights twinkling off her black agbada.
A few feet away, the mayor was standing with his back pressed to the wall, frozen, his eyes dilated in terror. He was still keeping his spine straight, his shoulders back, but he looked like a toy, a doll propped up to the side for the time being. Blood washed down one side of his face in a faint drying river from the cut on his head.
“I used to work with them,” Miss Virtue admitted slowly, taking in the faces of her students as if it had just occurred to her that they would be upset at the news. “And then I stopped.”
Vengeance made a rotten and rattling sound in the back of its throat. “Traitor,” it spat. “You lie to the child even in the truths you tell.”
“Why did you stop?” Grief was coarse in Bitter’s throat, but she was still hoping that there was a fragment in there she could salvage, something she could understand. If she could just understand, maybe she wouldn’t lose Eucalyptus. Maybe this whole life wouldn’t turn out to be a lie, like every other home before it.
Miss Virtue’s eyes softened, the gray going from a battling steel to a soft rain cloud. “I met all of you,” she said, emotion thickening her voice. “And you were not gates, you were entire little worlds. You were more important than the use they had planned for you. They don’t understand humans, they never have. I thought—” She shook her head and bit her lip, slicing a sharp look in Vengeance’s direction. “I thought I had more time before they would come. They gave me no warning.”