Threadbare frost moon lit the attic. Lila's split lip bled psalm-shaped droplets onto the floorboards as she cataloged her failures. The hairpin—too bright. The candle—too smoky. The Virgin—too watchful. They'd left their marks: the Headmaster's cane stripe on her thigh, the rat-bite scabs on her ankles, the silence where Elise's voice once flickered.
"Your contrition lacks… vigor," the Headmaster had sneered at dawn prayers, his boot grinding her knuckles into the chapel steps. She'd counted the grooves in the stone, naming them: Porte Saint-Denis. Rue de Rivoli. Pont Marie.
A floorboard creaked. Lila stilled, the shard's edge kissing her wrist—not to cut, but to catch the light. Shadows pooled. Something skittered. Not rats. Not this high.
The attic door groaned.
"Child."
Sister Margot's reek preceded her: gin and sacramental wine. The nun's milky eye rolled like a marble in the dark. "Thou shalt not steal," she slurred, swaying.
"I've nothing to steal, Sister."
A gasp. Sister Margot lurched, clutching her chignon. "My pins! You hellspawn, you—"
Later, they'd find Sister Margot weeping at the foot of the stairs. "Evil Child," she'd babble. "Beget Mother's broken waist."
Razor-wire cold. The Headmaster's cane cracked Lila's spine against the holy water font.
"You mutilated a bride of Christ."
Copper filled her mouth. "Sister Margot tripped, sir."
His thumb pressed her trachea. "Liar."
She'd prepared for this. Let her gaze blur, her limbs slacken. Played corpse. When he hauled her up, she vomited strategically onto his polished shoes.
Disgust breaks focus. Another lesson from the girls who'd vanished.
Rebreathed slops earned her three days in the ice cellar. She carved Elise's cipher into the frost: A D H 73.
The H glowed faintly. Not house. Not holy water.
Haren.
Dutch for whisper.
Three weeks later, Lila lay corpse-still as Matron inventoried her bruises.
"You'll never wed, acting this way. No decent man wants—"
"—a troublesome girl"
At midnight, she tested the shard on the Virgin's left eye. Cobalt glass wept into her palm. The right eye took longer—stained lead, not soldered—but yielded. Blind now, Mary's sockets wept moonlit salt.
The dormitory lock conceded to a dulled hairpin.
Progress:
Flame (tallow, shielded by cupped hands).
Silence (wool-stuffed shoes).
Vision (Mary blinded, God's gaze averted).
The tunnel exhaled its wet breath. Moss clung to her ankles. Elise, if you're here…
But it wasn't Elise who answered.
In the coal shed, Lila unearthed Elise's final cipher—not a postcard, but a matchbox wrapped in Psalms. Inside lay seven teeth, each inscribed—Rouen. Lyon. Marseille.
Port cities.
The last tooth bore a crow's feather and a word blotted by coal dust:
Haren.
Lila pressed herself into the coal-shed shadows, the matchbox buried beneath her heel. Haren. The word hummed in her jaw—Dutch syllables ashy on her tongue. Whisper. But whose? Elise's? Her mother's? The girls whose teeth now clattered in this tin coffin?
Most dangerous places are safest when salted with ghosts, the pockmarked boy, 823, had once muttered before they scrubbed his mouth with lye.
Slab. Slab.
The Headmaster's cane struck flagstones, each blow reverberating through rotted floorboards. Lila counted the coal-dusted cobwebs above. Thirty-seven. Thirty-eight. Her own breath stifled to match his footsteps' rhythm.
The door shrieked.
He stood framed in the threshold, his bad leg dragging a requiem growl. Moonlight caught the grooved handle of his cane—a reliquary of Bull Run shrapnel, they said—and his eyes, twin embers in a lard-white face.
"Fleabit te pulvis," he rasped, quoting Job's boils. Dust shall bite you. He always spoke Latin before doling punishments, as if God required ceremonial throat-clearing.
Lila willed her pulse to quiet. The glass shard wedged between ceiling beams sawed into her palms, her weight suspended by raw grip. Blood-soaked rags lashed her hands—stolen linen strips boiled in salt to clot wounds.
Not a drop, she'd chanted while binding them. Not a drop.
He paced, cane tip probing the coal mounds she'd disturbed and re-smoothed. The matchbox's outline lingered beneath a half-scoop of grit—close enough to tease, far enough to seem forgotten.
His gaze snagged on it.
"Clever child."
A whetstone laugh. He knelt, joints cracking like kindling, sleeve brushing the mound. Lila's arms trembled. Fall, she prayed. Crumble. Cave in.
He unearthed the matchbox.
Her lungs burned. Count. Count. Seven teeth rattled sickly as he pried it open. Rouen. Lyon. Marseille. His thumb traced the crow's feather, its quill barbed as a harpy's claw.
Haren.
Haren.
Haren.
The coal-dusted word smeared under his scrutiny.
"Vermin think themselves architects," he hissed—to the dark, to God, to the phantom he imagined hunched behind a barrel.
For five minutes, he waited. Let the rat twitch. Let a cough betray. But Lila had swallowed even her breath, her ribs fused iron.
The shard's edge kissed bone now, pain a catechism she recited silently: Splinter. Spine. River. Run.
He left without extinguishing the lantern—a petty lure.
She counted two hundred more breaths before unclenching.
Her body crashed down in a blasphemy of clattering coal. Blood sheeted her palms anew, but the rags held. No drops. No trail. The shard, slick and scarlet, skittered into shadows.
She relit the lantern.
Elise's cipher: Teeth from seven girls. Port cities. A feather pointing northeast.
Crows nest where ships drown, her mother used to say, stitching a stuffed rabbit's button eye.
Footsteps echoed in the hall.
Lila smeared coal dust over the matchbox, erasing her fingerprints, and tucked it into his usual stash—beneath the crate of forged baptismal records.
Let him find it tomorrow and doubt his own wrath.
Haren.
In the attic, she licked salt from her wounds and reshaped the word.
Not whisper.
Harbor.