Paper Tigers

by Meg Collett

  “Please,” he whispered, “they’re my friends. Don’t make me betray them.”

  I wanted to crawl into a corner and peel back the edges of the world until I found the biggest pit of darkness to hide in forever. I wanted to disappear and never come back because I hurt people. Even standing here, not touching his mind, I was hurting him.

  I remembered once, during a particularly bad day in the white place when I was a little girl, I’d begged the Commander to save me, to take me away, to make the people hidden behind paper masks stop. I’ll be good. I’ll be good, I’d promised. He’d taken my hand and squeezed. Maybe she needs a break, he’d told the doctor. But the doctor hadn’t looked at him. Be a good girl and kill the lamb. Be quick this time, the doctor had told me, or you’ll make it suffer.

  I’d been quick.

  “Who are they?” I asked, my eyes on the rusty floor.

  For a moment, he remained silent, and then, “No.”

  I squeezed my eyes closed to hold back the tears and imagined a tendril of smoke leaking through the air between us. It curled around his head and wove through the strands of his dirty hair. I could make enough darkness in the room to hurt, but not enough to move my body through. Never enough to save myself. I squeezed the tendrils.

  He screamed.

  I counted to five before releasing the darkness. He slumped against the cuffs, his arms stretching from the strain. Sweat covered his face, but he met my eyes.

  “My name is Thad,” he said in a cracked, nearly broken voice. He spoke like he’d told me all this before but I didn’t remember. “I help people like you. I can take you to a safe place. Those girls”—his voice rasped thickly—“will help you too. We can take you from here.”

  The painless girl had already helped me once, but I wasn’t good enough to deserve another.

  “Tell me how they do it,” I said, my cracked, nearly broken voice matching his. “Tell me how they found the switch.”

  The switch I’d never found. All those hours in the white place with the Commander beside me barking orders at the doctors and holding my hand. For all the lambs and all the mercy, I’d never found my switch.

  “You’re a halfling.” Thad spoke the word as though it should mean something to me. As if I was anything more than Zero. “I can help you. Please, just let me help you.”

  I considered my hands, still stained with blood. When I drew my gaze back up to the man in chains, his eyes widened in fear and he shook his head back and forth, his panic building as he realized. He jerked at the cuffs around his wrists.

  “No one can help me. Now, tell me about the girls.”

  F I V E

  Ollie

  “She can’t do that again.”

  Outside Sunny’s room in the medical ward, Hatter stood with his arms wrapped around his middle, his booted foot jigging against the floor. Because of Sunny pointing out his tells, I now noticed the occasional jerk of his head, a motion too quick and slight he didn’t even feel it.

  Because of Sunny, Hatter and I stood out here again, having flashbacks to over a month ago when she was lying inside the same room and we were waiting for her to wake up.

  “I can’t exactly stop her,” I said. I scrubbed the heel of my hands against my eyes. “At least she just injected saliva this time and not a failed batch’s antidote.”

  Thirty hours had passed since the attack, and I hadn’t slept. I’d barely eaten or stood still or breathed since the darkness had become flesh and nearly slit Dean’s throat right before my eyes.

  “Someone has to,” Hatter snapped in a hushed voice we’d perfected in all our time standing outside hospital rooms.

  “You should think about this when you go hunting with Luke every night. Consider how you feel right now and put yourself in her shoes. She goes through this every time you leave.”

  Hatter frowned. “This isn’t the same, and you know it. She’s been different since injecting herself the first time. Something’s changed. I see it in her eyes. She’s … She’s …” He struggled to piece the words together. His arms tightened around himself, and he rocked on his heels.

  “She hasn’t changed. She’s still Sunny.” I glanced at her door and told myself I believed it. “I have a few hours before my next shift. I’m going to get some sleep. You should too.”

  Hatter was already shaking his head. “I can’t. All the doctors left with the other professors and students. Only the nurses stayed, and they’re all sleeping right now. I have to watch Sunny in case something happens.”

  I sucked in a breath, shocked. I hadn’t heard this bit of news. “The doctors left too?”

  “As fast as the gates would open. Everyone’s calling it a ghost. It’s freaking out the students.”

  “No,” I growled. “The Barrow hunters are calling her a ghost because they have a fucked-up sense of humor.”

  “Can’t argue that.”

  “I’ll talk to Eve and Haze.” I inclined my head toward Sunny’s room. “Get some sleep, though. We need you on the fence today.”

  I walked away from Hatter and out of the ward by pretending Sunny wasn’t in the room behind the door. I told myself she was tucked safely away in her lab, with the only threat being Nyny’s habit of starting small fires. This Sunny—the one who injected saliva and threw herself into a fight—terrified me. A voice whispered in my head that she’d changed. That I knew exactly what Hatter was talking about. But if I focused hard enough, I could pretend that into oblivion too.

  I took the stone steps two at a time, winding my way upstairs to the school’s ground level. Eve and Haze would be in the cafeteria, organizing what few professors and guards remained into some semblance of a watch. Half the professors were gone, and parents were already arriving to rip their kids out of school. The hunters—the real hunters who’d been outside these walls fighting in the war—remained. None of them had left. It wasn’t much, but it was something.

  The Commander sends his condolences. The young girl’s voice slithered through my mind. Her voice, like her eyes, had been an empty void, as if moving through the shadows had eaten at her soul until there was nothing there to leave a spark in her gaze. The girl was lost, and no matter what the Barrow hunters called her, I would still call her a girl. Behind that lifeless stare was a real person. When my silver knuckles cracked against her temple and she blinked up at me, something had finally flickered to life in her gaze.

  It had looked a lot like terror. And right before she’d shuttered into the night and disappeared, the girl had looked around like she hadn’t known where she was.

  That was enough for me. She needed help, and frankly, I couldn’t fault her for trying to kill Dean. The task had a permanent spot on my to-do list.

  As for the fact that when I thought of her I also thought of another young girl, I forced it to the back of my mind. When I blinked, I saw dirt pinging off closed eyelids and felt the weight of a shovel in my hands. I thought of the Tabers and of Max. Zero was one girl I could save. That was a fact. She wasn’t a ghost.

  In the cafeteria, I found Haze and Eve. They ran on whiskey and cigarettes and loud rock music instead of sleep. Frankly, it was annoying. I hadn’t seen Eve take a break yet, and I was ready to collapse on my feet.

  The swinging doors slapped shut behind me as I strode into the room. “We need to talk,” I said, interrupting Eve’s conversation with Mr. Abbot and Mr. Clint.

  She stared at me blankly. Neither she or Haze knew my secret, but when she looked at me like that, sometimes I wondered if she hadn’t guessed it. She said, “Okay.”

  “Actually,” Mr. Abbot said, pushing his glasses up his nose, “we do too. Is it true you radioed for the supply trucks to stop coming in from town?”

  “I did. It’s too dangerous. We can go into town and get our own supplies, but we’re not risking innocent lives by having supplies driven in.”

  “But we need food! We need medical supplies, and we need ammo!” Spittle flew from Mr. Abbot’s mouth.

&n
bsp; “She has a point,” Mr. Clint said in a calm, even tone, which was more than I could manage as I geared up for yet another fight over logistics with Mr. Abbot. “We can’t afford to assign a group of hunters to bring in the trucks. There aren’t enough hunters.”

  Mr. Abbot ignored the logic. “But she’s a first-year! She has no—”

  I held up my hand. “Technically, I’m a third-year, and I’ve killed more ’swangs than you have.”

  “You have no idea what it takes to protect this school. You can’t just swoop in here and expect adults and trained hunters to follow the whims of a teenager!”

  “Seems to me,” I said, stepping forward until our chests were almost touching, “that my whims have saved your ass a few times.”

  His face grew red, and his mouth twisted around words that would surely result in his unconsciousness once my fist found his ugly jaw. But Mr. Clint pulled us apart. He shot me a pained look before taking Mr. Abbot’s shoulder and steering him away to have a quieter conversation outside the cafeteria.

  “This school has some real peaches,” Eve drawled, watching them disappear through the cafeteria’s swinging door.

  I rolled my eyes at her. “The doctors left too.”

  The humor dancing in her eyes vanished. She knew what this meant for us. “The nurses?”

  “They stayed. And we’ll have Sunny once she wakes up.”

  Haze signed something to Eve, making her snort with laughter.

  “What did he say?” I asked.

  “He said nurses have bigger balls than doctors anyway.”

  Haze’s ruined mouth twitched, and I couldn’t help returning his grin. “Tell me something I don’t know,” I told him. My smile fell away as I focused on Eve. “You have to stop calling the girl a ghost. You’re freaking everyone out.”

  “The girl?” Eve lifted a pierced brow. “It’s a girl?”

  I bit my tongue. These people—especially the Barrow hunters who always lived two inches from death—wouldn’t understand my sympathy for the girl. Hell, I couldn’t even understand why I always sympathized with the monsters that tried to kill me. First it was the Manananggal over winter break, and now this girl. But she needed help.

  “Yes,” I said instead. “She is. Now please stop calling her scary names.”

  “Whatever you say, boss.”

  I narrowed my eyes at Eve, unsure if she was being sarcastic. I could never tell with her. For now, I decided to drop it. “I’m going to get some shut-eye until my next shift.”

  Eve checked the crinkled pages fanned out on the cafeteria table. Scribbles and coffee stains covered them. Her red-painted nail slid down one page before stopping and tapping on a scratchy name—mine. “You’re on at eight in the morning. Off at twelve.”

  “Put me down for a double.”

  She lifted her head. “You’ve pulled two doubles already.”

  I blinked at her. “The guards need help. We also have to organize a group of hunters to sneak into town for supplies. The ward is low. But we can do that tomorrow. You two should get some sleep as well. The students will wake up soon, and they’ll need to eat breakfast in here without seeing your fucked-up face,” I said, leveling a gaze on Haze.

  If they could use vague humor, so could I.

  Haze froze. Eve’s pierced brow danced in the light as her gaze shifted between me and Haze. After a long second, Haze’s shoulders started to roll, the scars atop his mouth flexing and pulling as he laughed in his silent manner. He signed to Eve, and she choked.

  “What did he say?”

  “Ah.” Bloody Eve, Barrow hunter baroness, might have been blushing. “I shouldn’t repeat it, but it involved his mouth and some of your body parts.”

  “I’ll be sure to tell Luke how you feel.”

  “Better not. We need all the hunters we can get, and even Haze has his uses.” Eve collected her schedules. Beside her, Haze waggled his eyebrows at me. I flipped him off, but it only made his shoulders rock harder with laughter.

  “I’m going to sleep.”

  I was halfway across the cafeteria and fantasizing about how good my face would feel buried in a pillow when Eve called to me, “Hey, Ollie.”

  Pausing, I turned around. “What?”

  She shot a glance at Haze, who inclined his head to me. “Just give them some time.”

  I frowned. “Who?”

  “Everyone here. They’ll see you for what you are soon enough.”

  Haze signed to Eve, his hands flashing through the air and the muscles along his forearms dancing from the effort. Eve nodded. “Haze said a true leader always shines through the grime and dirt. When their fear settles, they’ll understand what you are, and they’ll follow you for life.”

  I could do nothing but nod at the tattooed, leather-clad Barrow hunters. They’d always seemed to stand on the other side of the fence from me, another name for enemy. But maybe I wasn’t so different from the professors who wouldn’t listen to me or the students who were too afraid to hear reason. Like them, I’d let my fear cloud my understanding of the people trying to help me.

  I strode down the university’s main corridor to the entry and slapped my thumb against the reader. It beeped, and I pushed through, ignoring the blast of air pricking my eyes. Everything fuzzed and faded at the corners of my vision, and I had to pry my eyelids open after every blink.

  I checked in one last time with the guards along the fence and inside the watch towers before walking to the hunters’ barracks. There were no shadows or even a hint of darkness beneath the massive floodlights beaming down from the fence and the school’s roof. If the girl returned in the last few hours of darkness before the dawn, then she’d be hard pressed to find a spot of darkness to materialize in.

  Every light inside the barracks was on, but most of the small rooms were empty. The few guards not on watch slept behind locked doors. I crept by, keeping my footsteps silent on the worn wooden floors. I thought Luke might have locked his door as he slept, but the knob turned beneath my hand. When I slipped inside, I found him sitting on the edge of his bed, sharpening his knives.

  He kept his attention on the blade in his hand as he slid the whetstone over it. “How’s Sunny?”

  “Still out of it.” I kicked off my boots and peeled off my layers of clothes, dumping them on the floor next to the door. “Nyny must have thought we were tranquilizing an elephant. It’s a wonder Sunny isn’t dead. She’s been asleep for over a day.”

  The metal hiss of Luke’s knife paused. “Ollie—”

  “Don’t.” I took a deep breath and lifted my attention from the floor. He was watching me. “She’s fine. That’s all that matters.”

  But my arms still ached from being wrapped around my best friend’s throat. I knew better after my time at Fear University, but I still believed there were things that should never happen. Restraining Sunny as she thrashed beneath my grip was one of those things. Thinking she might kill me was the worst of all the worst things.

  I told myself she was fine because I couldn’t allow myself to consider she wasn’t for too long. Best friends should never kill each other.

  Luke sat his knives and stone back inside his bedside table. Once upon a time, he might have crossed over to me and pulled me into a hug. Run his fingers through my hair. Whispered comforting words against my ear before distracting me with kisses along the tender skin of my neck. The thoughts sent shudders down my spine.

  Luke remained on the bed, and the only thing crossing the space between us were our weary gazes. “I can sleep on the floor tonight if you need me to.”

  My heart squeezed painfully. Some nights, my nightmares were so bad that having Luke in the same room as me was unbearable. To keep me from wandering around outside in the cold, he’d taken to sleeping on the floor, in the farthest corner from me. I’d told him it worked, but we both knew I spent all night shivering beneath piles of blankets, thinking of Max’s hands on me.

  “I’m okay,” I said.

  “I know
the nightmares are worse when you haven’t slept in a while. It’s not a problem.”

  The hollowness in his voice reminded me too much of the girl’s when she’d whispered those empty words in Dean’s ear. I forced my feet to move, one step in front of the other, until I stood beside the bed. I sat, leaving a deliberate few inches between our bodies. Luke went rigid, barely breathing.

  I laid the back of my hand on my thigh. My fingertips trembled. Luke’s eyes moved from my offered hand to my face, his questioning gaze unbearable. “I’m okay,” I repeated.

  Slowly, like he expected me to flinch, he took my hand. I breathed through the contact to keep from getting lightheaded, and when visions of the secret cabin in Barrow flashed back through my mind, I forced my head onto his shoulder and blinked away the black spots in my vision. I was okay. I would be okay.

  “I miss you,” I said.

  Luke hadn’t moved except to take my hand, but at my words, he turned his head and angled his face into my hair. He inhaled, pulling in my scent, and when his lips pressed against my head, I squeezed my eyes shut. “Do you still want to be with me?” I whispered.

  His grip tightened around my fingers. “I couldn’t walk away from you if I tried,” he said into my hair, the words tumbling through the strands and his breath causing the fine hairs along my temples to tickle my skin. “You’re still my monster, and I’m still the darkness shielding you. I’ll always love you, Ollie. You could burn the entire world to ash and I would still love you.”

  My time in Barrow closed in on me, turning my bones to lava and my skin to prickles of ice. The pain—a phantom reminder—laced through my blood, and I wanted to cry. For a while, I’d convinced myself that love was pain. Max had loved me. The raised, pink scars on my chest were proof of his love.

  He’d tried to carve out my heart, and he’d almost succeeded.