Pierre emerged from the carriage like smoke—sleek, caramel-skinned, his checked trousers crisp against the mud. At twenty-six, he carried himself with the languid menace of a wolf who'd learned to walk upright. His hair, black and oiled, spilled down his back, catching the asylum's torchlight in serpentine gleams. The Headmaster's smile tightened.
"Last I saw you, boy, you were stealing communion wine."
"And you were shorter," Pierre replied, his baritone honeyed. His hunter's eyes flicked to the orphans' faces pressed against the dormitory glass. "But the fields grow as they will, no?"
The Headmaster led him south, away from St. Agatha's—the fox and the sacrament rot—to a stone building reeking of beeswax and iron. His office was a reliquary of power: mahogany walls, a decapitated lamb's head mounted above a miniature Big Ben (its pendulum stilled at 3:07—St. Agatha's curfew hour), and a portrait of the Virgin Mary whose gaze followed visitors, her gaze sharp and unending.
Pierre's right-hand man—a slab-faced brute with knuckles like rivets—lit his cigar. The flame trembled. Pierre remarked.
"The Bible forbids drunkenness," nodding toward the gin bottle on the desk.
"And yet Christ turned water to wine," the Headmaster replied, pouring two fingers of gin, the liquid catching the lamb's glassy stare. "To abstain would be... sacrilege."
Pierre laughed, exhaling smoke that coiled into a halo. "Build a church, Father. I'll be your first apostate."
The Headmaster rose, his heavy footsteps sending a slight tremor through the room. He nudged the Virgin's portrait aside to reveal a steel safe hidden behind it. Three spins of the dial—click—and the door yawned open. Inside: six thousand dollars in greasy bundles, leather ledger, and a gold cross pendant crusted with sapphires (stolen from a bishop's corpse in 1893).
The Headmaster slid a file across the desk.
Pierre flipped through the black-and-white portraits of the children—each stamped with a blue X and more tragic than the last, 1–159 Numbers, deceased each stamped with a red X.
Child 112: Sarah Louis, 12. "This one."
The Headmaster didn't glance up. "Impossible," he said flatly. "Your sponsorship barely covers rat poison."
Pierre leaned forward, cigar ash dusting the edges of the ledger. "A tip, then. There's an unclaimed girl—Colonel Voss's bastard. Shot last month for treason. The Crown wants her... comfortable. Apply for guardianship, and you'll have their favor."
The Headmaster's lips twisted, as though considering the offer.
"Foxes don't thank hares for scraps."
Pierre didn't blink. "My brother's a sergeant. He'll vouch."
The Headmaster traced the Virgin's frame, where a hairline crack split her cheek, as though seeking some kind of solace in the broken image. Finally, he spoke, his voice edged with reluctant acquiescence.
"Stay a week," he said. "I'll send a crow to verify."
The Candy Angel's Requiem:
Sister Ava led Pierre to the guest wing, her habit cinched tight to accentuate hips that had birthed no prayers. The Headmaster chose her not for piety, but for the way her lashes caught candlelight like gilded spider legs—distractions for men who mistook hunger for lust.
For fourteen days, Pierre played cherub. His pockets spilled caramels wrapped in waxed paper, taffies glistening like molten lava. The orphans flocked, tongues staining red and green, their teeth cracking sweet rot. Child 112—tiny, flaxen-haired—received double shares.
"He'll adopt her," they whispered. "Take her to Paris. Put her in silk."
Lila watched from the hallway, her face a blade of snow. When Pierre cornered her in the scullery, his breath reeked of burnt sugar and clove.
"No candy, little saint?" he teased.
She didn't flinch. "Man shall not live by bread alone."
His thumb brushed her wrist. "But sweets are miracles, no? A taste of Eden."
"Eden had a serpent."
The crow returned on the thirteenth night, its left wing ragged. The Headmaster slit the message from its collar: two words in cipher. Voss confirmed.
At dawn, Pierre selected Child 112. Her departure was agony dressed as hope. She clutched a burlap sack—one moth-eaten dress, a stolen thimble—and let Pierre lift her into the crimson carriage. His hands lingered.
"Won't you wave goodbye, Princess?"
She did—palm trembling. The children pressed their starved faces to the grille, their hymns decaying into silence as the carriage vanished. Jealousy curdled into rage. Three girls clawed each other's braids bloody by dusk.
Lila knelt in the chapel, scraping her tongue with lye.
Blessed Mother, let her survive him.
But the Virgin's hollow gaze offered no absolution.
Shadows and Constellations:
The moon hung low that night, a scythe blade slicing through the asylum's veil of mist. Lila floated through the girls' ward like smoke, her bare feet silent on the chill stone—until she froze. Child 09 slipped from the boys' dormitory, his shadow pooling darker than the others.
Impossible, she thought. He's never stirred before matins.
She followed, fox-quiet, as he wove through the courtyard. He circled the dry fountain once, twice, three times—a ritual of paranoia—before crouching beneath the sisters' dormitory window. Lila watched, still as a statue, as he palmed a key from his sleeve. The lock clicked.
Black iron, she noted. Stolen from Sister Evangeline's belt.
His boots vanished into the hallway's throat. Lila did not follow. Instead, she retreated to the northern field, where the stars bled through the asylum's veil of coal-smog. A stolen watch—platinum, engraved To Elise, With Devotion—ticked against her ribs. 3:15 AM. Thirty minutes before the Headmaster's hound would howl itself hoarse, as if hell's gates yawned open nightly at 3:45 AM.
She lay back in the thistle-choked grass. Above her, Cassiopeia stretched her jewelled limbs, indifferent to the rot below.
"Why chain yourself to a tomb," she whispered to the cosmos, "when oceans salt the earth?"
A branch snapped. She rolled sideways—
But it was only the wind.