silent as a grave.

If there was one thing Savina indulged in often, it was the art of people watching. It was the sort of pastime that could be hidden beneath the presumption of others, such as the airy lilt of her peers murmuring that she was lost in her notions again. Even with the note of derision that sometimes carried upon the laugh that would follow, depending on who voiced it, she remained poised in that statue-state. Stiller than marble, and just as cool. The less eyes upon her the better, and so letting them have their jests at her sake before dismissing her entirely was a necessity.

Many observations of a person could be made without their knowledge, from even the smallest of things—the way they clasped their hands, or the face they made as they chewed, for example.

Griselda Clements—Mrs. Griselda Clements—always gripped her hands as if she meant to rip the skin from her fingers, and was never in short supply of a soured expression, no matter if she was having her lunch, or simply just breathing. Savina attributed these things, and her overall severity, on the fact that her name was Griselda Clements. Her version of mercy came in the form of a firm lash to the hands.

Miss Holloway’s Academy for Girls was not an inherently terrible place. Not unless you made an exception for Mrs. Griselda Clements, and perhaps Celia Whitlock.

Savina made that exception, with ease and consistency. Mrs. Clements worked specifically on Tuesdays and Thursdays, and it was on those days that she was most tempted to fake illness. Though this was an excuse she had to play cautiously—not quite so often as to rouse her father’s suspicions, though she had a hunch of her own that he’d long since caught on, but just often enough to hint at something chronic, which, in fairness, was not an absolute falsity. It was hard to fool a doctor, after all, even when you were his daughter. One of the more unfortunate strokes of luck—of which she had many, swatched across the canvas of her life—was that Celia Whitlock attended the same five days of the week that she herself did. With her burnished gold hair and feline eyes, perhaps Celia would have been a beauty, were it not for the ugliness at the corner of her mouth. There was nothing the gilded veneer of courtesy could do to smooth that unsightly twitch. Savina’s other favorite hobby, naturally, was pointedly staring at it whenever she was forced to endure the displeasure of Celia’s attention.

On the landing before the staircase that led to the main corridor, she was doing exactly that. The late summer sun was at its highest point in the day, and from the tall window at her side, shafts of amber light streamed through the glass in thick stripes. Warm, but of no comparison to the heat growing in her chest; rapid and burning, and rising with the sort of pressure that constricted the lungs. The day had already been far too long, following her rise from bed that morning.

“There you are, Savina,” Celia’s voice was unfortunately melodic, but the way it twisted was much like a knife: sinking into her belly, snaring on the flesh and muscle corded about with serrated edges. It was the way she spoke whenever she was about to say something of particular cruelty, Savina had come to learn. A backhand poorly hidden beneath silky, lilting twitters and feigned care.

Do not glare, she reminded herself, trying to temper the embers already smoldering, sending dark smoke up into the cavity of her skull. Aside from the day being long, an awful tenderness had hung over her heavily the last few days, and she felt like one large bruise. An ugly bloom of burst capillaries and soreness. Put on your pretty smile, and your honeysuckle voice.

Her fingers twitched in agitation at her sides, curling upwards into the hem of her sleeve. There, they held fast to the fabric, and acted as the only barrier between the cut of her long nails and the softness of her palm.

It was Friday, and soon it would be time for their meal break. Luncheon, and then an hour of French, and then she could go back to her father’s apartment. She did not like that there wasn’t a fourth point to add to that list, not because she wanted an extra moment to endure, but because three could not be separated into clean categories. It wasn’t a good sign.

“Hello, Celia.” She said, with a voice that did not sound like it was her own, and certainly not as though it had come from somewhere inside of her body.

There were many things that Savina disliked about Celia, that much was as fair and true as the fact that one needed oxygen to survive.

“Are you well? You look a bit..” Behind Celia trailed her thralls: a round, horse-faced girl named Esther, and then there was Ruth, who was two years Savina’s senior, with a just-slightly crooked nose, and eyes so beady they could put a rat to shame. The worst of them, besides Celia herself, was none other than Myrna Bartley. She laughed like a duck—quacking far too loudly at every remark Celia made, as though she might receive payment for each chortle. She always stood to Celia’s left, with her arms crossed and her wide shoulders stiff.

Savina regarded the little troupe with a brief, unblinking stare. Perhaps there will be rice pudding, she thought, trying to wedge the idea into the scant space between her preemptive annoyance and her desire to disappear entirely.

“Ghastly.”

It did very little.

There were too many of them on the landing now, all crowded near her like a flock of puffed up pigeons. The glow of the sunlight had lost its charm entirely, and with the way it glinted off of Celia’s ridiculously coiffed hair, it had become far too bright. Her tired eyes burned.

“She always looks as if she’s suffered some great tragedy,” Ruth confirmed in her rodent’s squeak of a voice, and something else entirely began to stir in her chest. It was not something that burned with anger or grew cold with indifference, nor did it idle in despair. It unfurled like a creature waking from a long rest, the way Antigone might stretch out the length of her body with a fresh gleam in her eye post-nap. Savina felt that gleam, too—a glinting thing, razor trimmed, familiar. Sharper in her chest than Celia’s snotty comments could ever be, and Savina could only picture a maw of teeth in the hollow of her thorax. Unhinging its void-mouth like a snake, but with no cunning of venom, and all the brutality of a predator gone hungry for too long.

They shared that in common, this thing and herself: hunger.

Perhaps when she had been made, her skin had simply been stretched too taut over her bones, so much so that nothing could ease the sense of pressure and trepidation, the fright that one wrong step would spell the end of everything that was left. That nothing could ever fill her for fear of bursting. Regardless, that cautious frailty had suddenly evaporated like raindrops on hot cobbles. The entity swelled larger and larger, eclipsing what she thought could have been her very soul—a scratching, writhing sensation that twined around her like thorny vines, tore up her esophagus, clawed at her eyes. It could not, would not, be contained.

She did not know whose voice rang out next. There was nothing to differentiate it from anything else; the landing blurred and the light washed away. The space around her shifted and turned to muddled shades, white-black-grey, with smears of contorting shadow forms lining her peripheral.

“Her own fault if she has, I’m sure.”

The stairwell had always been too narrow for so many girls and their cruelties.

Hushed and humming, the whispering began. Indecipherable static words, prickling along her grey matter. Louder, and louder, and louder still. So high in pitch that it caused her nerves to vibrate and her temples to pulse. Just as swiftly, silence.

Pure and blessed quiet. And as was always the way with the pure and blessed, it did not remain that way for long. A half second of quiet was disemboweled by a scream that ruptured the air like the wail of a wounded animal, echoed by a series of thuds—paced in time with Savina’s own heartbeat, fast but rhythmic. Thud, thud, thud. Another set of threes. Perhaps, if added together, they could make six, and then—and then—

It was not a cracking sound, but more like a gruesome type of crunch. The first bite of a burnt biscuit, but only much worse—though she could still feel it gritting between her teeth, and taste it on her tongue—magnified by a meaty tearing that could only be made by something with flesh. Another shriek, rattling up high from someone to her right. Savina still could not see the world as it was, but she could hear it, and she could feel it; the panic rushing in like a match to dry kindling, terror thinning the air until there was not enough to share.

But she could breathe. Easily, in fact. One breath, and then two—a pause, holding just until it began to pinch—as the shade receded, and the sun grew pleasantly warm against her shoulders once more. A hazy flutter of eyelashes brought the brick walls of the academy back into focus, clarity sharpening until the pieces of the situation slid back into place. Their mending displayed a clearer picture: a body not quite at the foot of the stairs, but close enough to it. Half crumpled like old newspaper, legs and arms askew.

Arm, Savina corrected herself, as there was only one in view. Gnarled it was, twisted at an angle most unnatural, like the feat of a contortionist's act. And through the skin of the forearm, a length of bone sprang up, the jagged end doused in crimson and bits of meat. It popped through Celia’s flesh like an embroidery needle through linen. Although the execution was far less clean, perhaps there was an artfulness to the sight. The girl’s other arm was tucked beneath her, possibly in what had been a failed attempt to brace herself. Her hair had fallen half out of its meticulous style, and from her mouth, an eerie noise of pain gurgled.

 A deeper inhale ushered in the scent of slick iron and salt, Esther’s citrus perfume that did nothing to mask her perpetually reeking breath. Savina stared down from on high at Celia’s crooked body, silhouetted by gleaming gold, and once more, she did not blink. More iron-and-salt crowded her senses; the register of moisture on her cheeks was a dull one. The tears felt perfunctory when directed towards the sight of Celia’s splintered arm.

“Have you all foregone any sense of discipline?” The squawk of Mrs. Clements’s voice bounced through the corridor with force, in that disgruntled hitch that meant your hands were going to be smarting all weekend.

Savina could hear the click of her mind, the one that meant something had turned itself back into place; this was a situation that needed to be handled carefully, and most of all, quickly. There was no time to dawdle. Perhaps even less than that. Jerked back to life by whatever conductor pulled her marionette strings, she sniffled with emphasis, and in a warbling voice, called down to her teacher:

“It was Myrna,” The thoughts she tried not to think filtered back into her head. A different scream, not wordless, but scathing. A statement as false as it was hurtful. Damp cheeks pressed to a pillow, and breath moist against the fabric in hot puffs. A letter that sat, unfolded, on a bed just like her own. Savina’s throat went raw and tight, and when she continued to speak, the words were hiccuping and hoarse. Too believable. “She pushed Celia.”

A swaying carriage, she thought, was not so different from a cradle. The clip-clop of hoofbeats was, in a way, a sort of lullaby. Maybe it was simply her own exhaustion catching up to her, but with her head tilted against the window, Savina felt particularly heavy.

Heavy, but no less aware of the way her father glanced at her every few seconds, with a worried crease gouging the space between his brows. If you were to question her, she would tell you that Ambrose Lovett was, arguably, the best man in the world. The unfortunate con of being the best man in the world was that it came with certain prerequisites—such as worrying, possibly a bit too much, about his family. But how could he not?

For all that her opinion held any weight, it was hardly a misplaced concern. Her own red-rimmed gaze sunk down to her lap, where her father’s handkerchief was held loose between her fingers and stained with blood. Lower still to her feet, settling on the shiny black leather of her shoes. She had acquired them just two weeks ago. A present from the man who sat next to her, with his own heaviness pulling at the hem of his coat and the corners of his mouth. Clip-clop. Clip-clop. Savina let them echo in sets of two. Even the silence that stretched between them felt cumbersome, beginning to bow under the weight of the things that were not said, but thought.

“Darling,” Her father ventured, his voice thin at the edges with the affection that meant that he was not trying to upset her, but there was a necessity for this specific conversation.

“I didn’t mean to,” Quick to interject, her own voice was frail, cracking glass that would fall apart with a high shatter if pressed. If there was any one person in existence who she could not lie to, at least not with the same ease and frequency as with others, then it was her father. The shame and remorse that she would feel would drag her under and drink her marrow, as it always did. Her hand, which she had not realized was still shaking until lifting it, dabbed the embellished handkerchief to her nose and cupid’s bow again. Savina had made this kerchief for him as a present, spending hours at candlelight embroidering his initials into the fine cotton. And now she had ruined it, stained it with the evidence of her sickness.

Her stomach rolled with a sickly wave of nausea. There had been no rice pudding, or anything else for that matter, as she had spent the remainder of her afternoon in Griselda Clements’s office, insisting that her version of events was the true one through half-legitimate tears.

A long, too patient exhale echoed in the confined space of the carriage. Clip-clop.

That was only one. Savina did not hear the other.

“I know that you didn’t, Savina.” She was not sure that she believed him, though she’d never considered that her father was anything more than a man who did his best to be honest when the situation demanded it. “You are not a cruel girl.”

All over again, her throat was too hot, and too tight.

“Perhaps we should forgo our trip home this weekend,” That softness remained in his voice, but she knew at once that this was not a perhaps, but a decision already made. “The week has been a stressful one for both of us, and I think some time to rest would do us well.”

Savina shifted uncomfortably, a jerk of her legs as her fingers pinched the fabric to her nose tighter. She thought of her mother then, alone in their cottage, with the tombstone that rested beneath the shade of the big willow. The gargantuan tree had once been their favorite.

It didn’t feel fair. Her heart twinged with the all too familiar sting of sorrow, the eternal ache of mourning. Black leather glimmered in the late glow that filtered into the cabin, too pristine and too nice. Her father was half right: she was maybe, possibly, not always a cruel girl. Arguing with him was not a sport she was skilled at, save countering him with the cunningness he had taught her. That did not stop her from murmuring, whisperish and pitiful:

“But Mama—she needs—”

Her father’s hand twitched.

“She needs her rest just as much. Your mother will understand, Savina. She wants you to be well, as greatly as I do.”

Her lips began to part on another interjection, and then closed again. She wanted to remind him that it had been multiple weeks since they’d last made their weekend visit home, away from the hustle and smog of London. He was not, however, a man who so easily forgot things.

Instead, Savina inclined her head in the scarce hint of a nod. Nothing else was said for the duration of their trip back to the townhome, until they had drawn up to the gate, and had not yet stepped out into the evening.