Where the Drowned Girls Go(Wayward Children #7)(37)

Back when she’d been—and even the thought of her name turned to roaring static, making her wince and almost straighten into the path of a camera’s lens—before, she’d been happy enough, if unchallenged and unfulfilled. She’d walked in a world of low expectations, too pretty to be clever, too clever to be kind, a pig-in-the-middle girl with her future mapped out for her by the adults who smiled indulgently whenever she tried to ask a question. She would graduate from high school, go on to college for a nice, safe degree, something that would make her better equipped to be a good wife one day, a good helper for a man who was a little less attractive and a little more clever, and maybe both those things were a matter of opinion, but that didn’t matter. What mattered was that she get good grades, wear the right brands, say the right things, and always, always be on display.

Maybe that was why she’d slipped through a door and into a world where being seen was never the goal, where learning to hide and run and get away were the most important things. She’d found peace on the other side of a doorway that couldn’t possibly exist, and when that peace had been stripped away, she’d run away home with a curse hanging over her head and a tongue that no longer remembered what it was to utter her own name.

At first, that had seemed like the only consequence; at first, she’d thought she might be able to find ways around it, to do work that didn’t require her to have a name. Maybe her enforced anonymity could even be an asset. She could be some billionaire’s secretary, untraceable because she couldn’t ever be named, suited to fulfill their every need.

But then she’d started shrinking. Then she’d started finding coarse brown hairs on her pillow in the morning, stiff and unbending, like the guard hairs on a rat’s back. Then she’d started waking up in the middle of the night with an aching tailbone, wondering whether this was when the tail was going to worm its way through her flesh, extending indelibly behind her, becoming an immutable part of who she was. She didn’t know the full shape of the Rat King’s curse, but she had a feeling, too strong to ignore, that once the tail sprouted, it would be too late for her to ever get her name back. Too late for her to ever be human again.

She crept through the school, silent as a sigh, until she reached the science classroom and slipped inside. The cameras in this room were out, had been since a bad accident in chemistry earlier in the week; their gleaming glass eyes saw nothing, transmitted nothing to the school’s security office. Carefully, she placed a chair on top of the matron’s desk and climbed onto it, straining until her fingertips brushed the paneled ceiling. A shove, a leap, an agonizing pull-up and she was inside, moving through the space between the dropped ceiling and the roof with quick precision. Her back didn’t even come close to brushing the actual rafters. Dust tickled her nose and she breathed it in, relaxing into the safe, familiar scent that lingered in enclosed places.

Maybe it wouldn’t be so bad, to be a rat. Maybe she could be happy. Or maybe it wouldn’t matter. Rats didn’t have names the way people did. Maybe they didn’t care about happiness the way people did, either.

The school was large, but she’d been there for more than a year, and she knew where she needed to go. Inch by inch, she pulled herself along, until she felt warm air coming up through the small holes in the ceiling tiles. She was nowhere near the student dormitories. Carefully, she stopped, wedged her nails into the space at the edge of the nearest tile, and eased it an inch or so away from its frame, peering downward.

The matrons were gathered in a single central room, sitting in silent contemplation of the air. All save for Miss Lennox, who was moving from body to body, shaking them, grasping their hands, trying to get them to react to her.

“Please, Caroline, please,” she moaned, dropping to her knees in front of one matron, a pretty woman about Miss Lennox’s age, with freckled cheeks and the empty stare of a mannequin. “We were supposed to get out of here together, remember? You and me and whatever door was willing to have us, forever, no matter what anyone said. Don’t you remember?”

The freckle-faced matron stirred slightly, the ghost of a frown tugging at her lips, and then was still. Miss Lennox took her hands.

“I don’t know what they did to us, but I know you’re in there,” she said. “I know you can hear me. It’s me, Julia. You can always hear me. Fight, Carrie. Fight, and come back to me.”

“That will be quite enough of that.”

Miss Lennox gasped and jumped to her feet, moving to put her body between the other matron and the voice. The nameless girl squirmed into a new position in the ceiling, careful to keep her weight off the tiles, and scanned for the voice’s owner.

The man in front of the door was familiar: she’d seen him around the school with a mop in his hand and a bucket by his feet, mopping and scrubbing and wiping away the signs that children infested the building, tracking their filth and foolishness everywhere. He was wearing a gray jumpsuit, and had a wide, unremarkable face, easy to overlook, but impossible to forget.

His eyes were sharp as stones. They seemed to see everything. The nameless girl held her breath, lest he should look up and see her.

“You,” breathed Miss Lennox. “I remember … I remember you. You’re Headmaster Whitethorn. You didn’t want us to know that. You wanted us to think you were the janitor. You … you hurt me.”

“I never intended to, and you have my sincere apologies,” said the headmaster. The real headmaster. “You failed to graduate. Something had to be done, and I’ve taken care of you, haven’t I? You’ve had a roof over your head and food in your stomach, which is more than the world outside my walls would have promised you. You’ve helped my work.”