I wrench the door open faster than Bloody Mary can shout boo. If a teacher sees me now, at least I can plead innocence and say I tracked the scream. I'm back at the staircase, then halfway down it when footsteps that aren't mine duplicate my own. I stop dead. Someone slams into me from behind, and we go down together in a tangle of panicked limbs. It's a miracle I don't scream. The person behind me spits sacrilegious curses. Then their voice jumps back up to a range I recognize.
"You!" gasps Exie. She shoves me away. "Get off me!"
I skid down several steps on my tailbone before catching myself. My legs shake as I scramble up again. "You're the one who ran into me."
"Keep going before the teachers find us!"
Teachers, not hall monitors. She's noticed it, too.
Of course she has. She's the one who duped Mrs. Hardwork into showing her this upper floor, then snuck back to investigate the rooms there. Exie secret-stairwell Quinnell is just as delinquent as I am if we actually tally up our respective infractions. She just masks it better.
She shoves me again. "Go! You'll get us both caught!"
"Don't push me if you don't have a light!"
She swears in reply. I'll take that as my victory. I face the darkness again, glad I didn't trip on the screamer while thundering down here like a one-woman herd of elephants. I'll admit it, I panicked. I resume my descent at a baby elephant's pace instead. We're almost at the bottom—by my absolutely unfounded estimate—when my foot lands on something soft. I leap back and crash into Exie. She swears again. My father would scrub my mouth with soap and horsetail for that one.
"Light," I say.
Exie fumbles in the darkness. Her shove from before might have my ass looking like plum stains for a week or two, but I can forgive the bruises if she brought fire-making implements with her. A strike on the wall confirms it. The match flares to life. Exie lights a stub of candle in a portable holder, then lifts it. Her eyes widen like she's seen a ghost.
I spin around.
Colson is sprawled on the staircase below me. He's motionless, limbs askew and eyes fixed on the ceiling above us. Fixed, but empty. I stepped on his face. He didn't make a sound. I drop to the stairs and press a shaky hand to his neck where his pulse should be. Only my own heartbeat throbs against my fingertips. There's no sign of injury on him—no blood, no weapons, no maimed limbs or missing appendages. He's just gone.
"Des!" gasps Exie. "They're coming! Go, go, down, run!"
In that moment, in her candle's frantic light, I see something else. Perched on Colson's chest is a paper dove. Or at least, I think it's a dove. Exie propels me over the body and down the stairs before I can get a better glimpse of it. She snuffs her candle as we flee. Hushed voices gather at the top of the staircase, where I mentally curse myself for leaving the door open. We need to get out of here.
I'm dearly glad now that I eschewed shoes for this nocturnal recon. Exie did, too. Both our steps fall silent as we forge back down the stairway like fugitives through a midnight swamp. My brain keeps telling me I've stepped on another body. The feeling is branded on my consciousness; the stairs remain firm, cold, and stone beneath my feet all the way to the lower doorway. My heart trips in my chest. This door had a secret mechanism on the other side. I fumble for its handle. It has none. My hands judder over the wood like spiders as the voices descend towards us, footsteps echoing, the march of soldiers approaching the gallows on which we now stand.
"Just push," hisses Exie.
I press a shoulder to the door and shove fiercely. It gives way—it's just heavy. We tumble through. I have the presence of mind to grab the door handle and ease it shut behind us before it slams. We're a long way from the nearest statue. Exie takes off along the wall instead, and I follow close behind her, glad I wore night camouflage. We reach the crossroads together and practically dive around the corner. Not a moment too soon. Behind us, hushed voices spill from the staircase into the hall outside.
Exie taps my shoulder. The lobby lies behind us, but we're closer to a pew set against the wall. Exie drops to the ground and scuttles underneath it. I copy her. There we lurk, me with numbing hands and fraught attempts to subdue my own breathing. No teachers come around the corner. I can't hear their voices anymore. Not through the pew's wood, and not over the runaway gallop of my own heartbeat. All I can see of Exie is her silhouette against the moonlit hall. Corpse-still. She's good at this.
After what could be a minute or an hour, she shifts. My whole chest clenches as she shimmies out from under the pew and rises to a crouch. Another eon, and she relaxes. She beckons to me. I attempt to replicate her crab-scuttle and fail; my hand slips, and I crack my elbow on the wall instead. Exie shoots me a look. I salvage what's left of my dignity and join her as she finally stands.
"They're gone," she whispers.
"Are you sure?"
"Do you want to check?"
I'm not taking a direct challenge like that without checking. Exie hisses as I push past her and return to the corner. A peek around it confirms the hallway is empty.
I draw back again. "They're gone."
"Is anyone else awake?"
I check again. There's no sign of other students. I can't believe nobody heard that scream.
"I bet the door blocked it," whispers Exie. "Maybe that's why all the doors in this place are built like siege gates."
I stare at her. Since finding my hideout upon arrival here, I have contemplated many reasons why a cathedral-turned-remedial-academy might have heavy wooden doors. "To block the screams of dying students" wasn't on the list. I can see Exie's face in the moonlight now, though, and she's dead serious. Or as serious as someone can look when they're zombie-pale, eyes wide and jaw clenched in residual terror. I wonder if I look the same.
We stand there like a pair of dressmaker's dummies until I realize staying here is probably a stupid move when someone in this school just went to glory. Exie startles when I move.
"Somewhere safer?" I whisper.
"I got a room alone."
No roommate? That's got to be a perfect-student perk. We won't be waking anybody, and I can hide under an empty bed if someone comes around tonight to prey on other students. We skulk across the lobby together and shadow the walls to a room at the far end of the dorm wing. Two doors from mine. Exie checks over her shoulder before she cracks the door—she left it unlocked—and ushers me inside. She locks it behind us both.
I sink down on the spare bed as my legs betray me. Exie remains by the door. In the fainter moonlight here, my eyes adjust enough to see she's listening for any mark of danger on the other side. Minutes elapse in silence. When no danger presents itself, Exie peels away and fetches a chair from a nearby corner. I squint to identify its contours. That's stolen from a carrel desk—though when and how she managed it without a teacher noticing is beyond me.
Exie wedges the chair-back beneath the door handle with the ease of someone who has done this before. Only then does she re-light her candle. That's got to be her own candleholder. I haven't seen a portable fire-device anywhere around this school, which is likely for the better. But that means Exie either found hers somewhere covert and made off with it, or brought it with her specifically. I don't know anyone who includes a candleholder on their boarding-school packing list. Not before now, anyway.
She's got matches in her pockets, too. I shoot a glance at the match-holder on the wall beside her room's lamp, but it's empty. She's pocketed the lot of them.
Carrying a light now, Exie checks her barricade again, then the lock, then reaches beside the door and draws something across from the wall to the door handle. It's a piece of thread. She strings a tiny bell onto it, then fixes it to the handle. A tripwire. If anyone sneaks into her room while she's sleeping, that will wake her. Alarm secured, she checks over her belongings next. She's got a lock on her suitcase, and almost none of her stuff is unpacked. More stolen items litter the room. Two napkins from the dining hall lie folded on Exie's bedside table. There's another extra chair by the window, and a godforsaken fire poker in the corner by the door. I'm almost certain that comes from the student common room. She's also got books. Lots of books. Those probably aren't stolen, though if she's researching Melliford Academy from within its own walls, maybe there's benefit in being clandestine.
Exie finishes her appraisal and blows out the candle again. The room plunges back into gothic darkness. Exie sets the candleholder on her bedside table, then crawls to the back of her bed, pulls up her knees, and hugs them. Silence falls. I'm still shaking. Harder than before, even, though the full breadth of emotion I should probably be feeling still evades me. I rub my feet in an attempt to warm them, or to banish the memory of stepping on a body. It was still warm. Soft. It felt exactly like you'd imagine stepping on a body would, which sounds stupid, but the rest of my descriptive vocabulary seems to be malfunctioning at the moment. Exie has begun to rock slightly.
"I told you," she whispers, breaking the silence.
I stare at her for a long moment. My brain is foggy, slow on the uptake as I realize the words are directed at me. "Told me what?"
"That's what happens to students here. I told you. This isn't a school."
"You never said it wasn't a school."
"Have you ever met a school that killed its students?"
"Did they kill him?"
"He was dead, wasn't he?"
I shake my head in an attempt to clear it. "He... yeah. But do you actually know it was them?" It sounds stoneheaded even as I utter it, but I press on. "I mean. He could have just tripped on the stairs, couldn't he?"
Exie hugs her knees again and goes back to rocking.
"Also, how did he find the door?" I say.
No answer. I battle the fog, and frown as that question embeds itself in the clearer part of my mind. "How did he find the door?"
"How did you?"
"Spied on the headmaster. How did you?"
"I tested them."
"You—what?"
Exie gives a teary laugh. It's a bit hysterical. She's not okay right now. "On my first night here. There are no teachers' quarters on the first floor, so it had to be the second."
"So you knew?"
"Knew what?"
"About the staircase."
"Yes."
"Then why—" I shake my head again. "In class. Why did you—"
Exie lifts a hand with a near-inaudible jingle. She's holding something. I squint in the darkness, and catch my breath as ambient moon-glow picks out a key dangling from her fingers.
"You stole a key to her office?"
"No. I replicated it."
"How on God's green earth—"
"I saw where she put hers. Mrs. Hardwick, when she brought me there. I had her pick out books for me, and got a wax impression while she was distracted. It's just a copying project after that. I brought blanks and a file."
"You brought blank keys and a metal file with you to this school."
"I already told you why I'm here."
"You're trying to figure out what's going on."
I can see that clearly now. She hasn't just been building an image that will endear her to our teachers. She's been using it to access secret floors and offices. Testing doors at night to find hidden passageways. Studying books she's likely not supposed to have. And doing all this while stocking her room with kit more befitting of student warfare than the goody-goody student aspirations she's been feigning since we both arrived.
I have so many questions. One among them, though, cannibalizes all the rest.
"Exie..." I begin, and try to gauge her response to my probing in the darkness. It's useless, so I commit myself and finish, "Why?"
Like this chapter if you want to know what Exie's here for!
Comment your hypotheses 👀