“Is it really?” he asks. “The guilt, Jade—it’s so much—it’s like there’s this debt I’ll never pay back—”
I bring my sunglasses back across my eyes because no matter how much I hide, I can’t hide all of it. Not in light this bright with the sleepless hours stacking up and up. “You did the world a favor,” I say. I keep it as even as I can, but the boat still shifts on the waves.
“I killed him. It’s unforgivable.”
I stand up all at once. Stand close to the edge, so my toes curl over it. I won’t fall. “He’s the one that’s unforgivable. All of them. You’re paying their debts.”
Then I hear the way I said it: paying, not paid.
“No,” says Mack, hearing it, too. “I can’t.”
I say, “We already are.”
He breathes out so much guilt I can see it hazing the air. “I won’t kill again,” he says.
I reach out my hands—my spotless too-clean hands—and take his. He stands with me. We tower over the ocean. Everything looks flat and imaginary.
I say, “St Andrew’s is yours now.”
He says, “I know.”
I say, “Would you let boys like them take it back again?”
“No,” he says. Not even a heartbeat of hesitation.
“Would you let them do what they did to that girl?”
“No,” he says. “But killing—”
“Mack!” I grab his hands and make him look at me. Everything is tangled: I hate him and I love him. He’s noble and he’s ruthless. He’s brave and weak. “They deserve it. Duncan and Duffy and Connor and Banks. Their time is up.”
His face goes almost still. “They said that,” he murmurs.
“Who?”
“The girls in the masks. They said, ‘Their time is up. Your time is here.’”
“It is,” I say, coaxing and final. “We’re killing them because they need to be killed. It isn’t over until they’re dead.”
He breathes in deep and sighs. “Sometimes it feels like …”
He pauses. The wind whips up and lashes my dress close around my legs.
He says, “Like everything’s already been decided.”
I wrap my arms around him. “Maybe it has.”
He says, “Like it had to be me all along.”
I say, “It could never be anyone else.”
The wind rushes the words fast out to sea, but I know he hears them anyway.
Succession
St Andrew’s is ours now. I know it before I even walk through the door. The air feels different. The parking lot stretches broader and the school’s shadow clings deeper. The flowers I hate shrink into themselves more than they did a week ago. Drooping guilty away from the stone.
I pull into my spot and cross the lane to the sidewalk, past a police car idling too close. The shadows shift and I look up—
—and birds bury the roof, all across every span. Little dark birds, lined up and looking down at all the beautiful vain St Andrew’s Preppers pulling into the lot.
Waiting. Chirping secrets back and forth. Watching with bead-shiny eyes.
“It’s like—it’s not natural,” Lilia says. I look away from the birds and see her right in front of me, leaning weak against the wall.
“It’s just birds,” I say.
“It’s too much,” she says. She wears a long dress that hangs from her shoulders. Shapeless and colorless.
She brings one hand to her mouth and lights a Parliament. She says, “I’m leaving.”
Above us the roof rubs its thousand wings together.
Lilia says, “Rehab.”
It’s a lie. Not quite a lie, because she’ll go.
But it’s not why she’s leaving. She’s leaving because she can. Because she’s free to melt away, now that Duncan is dead.
I say, “For what?”
She blinks like she’s never thought about it. “Oh,” she says. “You know.”
We watch each other for a rustling feathered moment. The old queen and the new.
Then she darts forward and locks me into a strange sharp hug. She is bones and smoke. She is lighter than air. She won’t come back to St Andrew’s.
I pull away.
But just before I do, she breathes two words into my ear, whispered-nothing but bursting with all the ruffling conquest of the birds looking down at us—
thank you.
Marked
Duncan was never king at all.
St Andrew’s has swallowed him down into the crypt they’d find if they dug up the dark wood floors. James Duncan, last week the boasting pride of the school, king and captain, Dartmouth-bound, leading his pack through halls that parted for him—
—this week a ruin. The rumors swirl around the empty space where he used to stand and reign. No one says it out loud, but everyone whispers it: the jealous greasy-haired boys who hover at the edge of the commons, the mousy girls who couldn’t look him in the eye, the baby-bird freshmen who couldn’t look away.
Last week was silence. This week the truth seeps out in whispers.
Next week will be a scream, gutted and gutting.
I stand in Lilia’s place in front of the Virgin Mary. When Piper comes in and sees me her sword-hand slides to the ready.
I smile.
My hand comes up the way it did last week when they walked in and found me standing exactly in this spot and Piper said—
who the fuck is that, and who does she think she is?—
—and the same as last week, I spin my crucifix.
Piper nods her fencer’s nod. I’ve won this bout and she knows it.
She stands right-hand ready the same way she did for Lilia. She’ll play friendly for now. Keep her friends close, if she had any, and her enemies closer, and her rivals where she can see them every second.
Today there are three boys instead of four. Duffy and Banks and Mack. They walk in together. I can almost see the blood flung across them and hear the weight of these ten days dragging behind. Scraping and clanging against the floor so loud that every single St Andrew’s Prepper turns and stares.
They’re marked. The hunters and the hunted. Culled down already and everyone knows they’re not safe. Everyone’s eyes say it, even if their lips don’t: who’s next?
I can feel the whole building sighing wicked and content. The buried secrets are spilling up at last. This has always been a place for knives sheathed in flesh and bone—
a place for traitors and killers—
a place for tyranny and anarchy—
—and now, finally, its true colors are bleeding through the sky-blue flags with their white-X badges.
The golden fuckboys on the walls smile harder. The sepia prints behind the glass sweat poison.
I love it. I rule it.
At lunch Mack sits in the king’s place. It’s never been anyone’s other than his. I sit next to him and my heart almost bursts with pride for him—for us. He reaches for my hand at exactly the instant I reach for his. The rest of them lock into place around us, circled tight against the stares and the whispers. Circled tight against who’s next.
But carefully apart because most of all, we’re scared of the rest of us.