The connecting corridor struggled against the raging storm. The air outside was the kind that cut straight through anything left uncovered. Glinda's right hand, slender as it was, wore a wristwatch reading eight in the evening. One hour had passed since her arrival at Stern Academy. Her military-style boots struck the floor with purpose, her heartbeat drumming harder than a war drum in full swing.
Her mood darkened further at the sight of several Reichswacht lounging at a guard post. Every instinct from her years as an officer screamed at her to dress them down on the spot, but she held it back. She reminded herself, again, that Glinda Meier was now a police Kommissar, not a Luftwaffe Oberstleutnant. (Luftwaffe: Imperial Air Force; Oberstleutnant: Lieutenant Colonel)"
Heil—"
"Move!"
The two Reichswacht guarding the isolation room nearly jumped out of their skins. Before they could finish their salute, they scrambled to pull open the heavy iron door, revealing a slightly lean young man seated with his hands cuffed behind a table. Glinda stepped in with the kind of authority that needed no words, one sharp look was enough to tell both guards to shut the door behind her.
The elegant police woman drew two slow, deep breaths, then asked, "Are you the one called Cross?"
The young man gave a single nod, his gaze unmoved. Eyes like a dead man's, locked onto the pair of light brown ones across from him.
"What were you doing when they detained you?"
Cross responded with a gesture of writing.
"What were you writing?"
This time the young man gave a simple sequence. Three gestures, clear enough to tell Glinda, "I — cannot — speak," before miming the act of uncapping a pen and writing in a notebook.
Glinda could already tell this would take a while, the young man across from her was mute. Even so, she had no intention of cutting it short. She unzipped her jacket and took out a medium-sized notebook and a pen, sliding both across the table. While she waited for the young gardener to finish, she pulled up a chair and sat with her back against it, arms folded on the backrest, chin resting on top.
The ventilation was terrible. The air inside was a complete reversal of the cold outside, thick and warm and closing in. Within minutes Glinda was fanning her face with her palm. And yet the young man across from her showed no sign of feeling any of it. No sweat, skin still clean and pale, and something about his presence that she couldn't quite name.
Cross slid the notebook back across the table. Glinda read it immediately. A lengthy account that read: "This morning I observed someone picking foxglove from the garden. The storehouse door handle had a smear of soil that hadn't been there before, and my garden shears were missing. I am certain there was a fresh scent inside the storehouse, like expensive perfume."
Glinda turned to the next page, where the account continued: "Several hours later I crossed paths with a blue-uniformed student, pale and visibly nauseous, rushing toward the male dormitory."
She set the notebook back down in front of Cross and asked, "Is this your answer?"
Cross did not respond. Only that vacant stare, aimed directly at Glinda's eyes. After a moment, it drifted left, toward the small ventilation duct on the wall. Shortly after, the room's single bulb dimmed and died for a beat.
"What is the meaning of that?" she wondered, keeping her eyes on Cross as he remained fixed on the ventilation duct.
Then, without warning, a small folded note appeared directly in front of her. The slightly lean young man gestured toward the ventilation duct and then to his own ear, meaning, as far as Glinda could read it, that someone was listening in on the interrogation.
"According to what those dogs gathered, you were seen rushing back to the storehouse carrying a large sack," Glinda continued, opening the note as she spoke, masking the paper's rustle so it wouldn't carry to whoever was listening.
"A shapeshifting creature has infiltrated this academy."
She crumpled the note and slipped it into her inner jacket pocket, rising from the chair.
"I'll have you moved somewhere more suitable."
The heavy iron door groaned as she hammered it three times, letting the cold flood back in. It groaned again as she stepped out. Muffled but audible, Cross heard her instruct the guards to prepare a more suitable room before the steel door swung shut with a short, hollow ring. Cross was alone again, cuffed, the medium-sized dark blue notebook still lying open on the table in front of him.
The bulb died again, then flickered as though something were playing with it. From the same ventilation duct, a dark shadow wreathed in black smoke edged toward the opening. It stopped the moment it met Cross's gaze, which had already found it, tracking its every move as though the young gardener had already issued his warning without a word. Moments later, lightning split the air with a force that shook the lungs, and the shadow was gone, swallowed whole by the strike.
"The saints ought to come down and involve themselves in this. I need to know how hard the followers of the goddess will push back."
Tonight at Stern Academy would not be a quiet one. The storm battered everything standing upright, the orchestrator of a student's murder was somewhere on the grounds, and the unease had begun to settle in, the creeping suspicion that anyone could be next. A stage that had trapped its players into improvising while the director forced a rewrite mid-performance. Chaos, nerves, and panic on every side, but also something else, something steadier, holding the reins.
Cross, however, felt the stage still lacked something. It needed decoration. He had just the thing, a small envelope of marigold seeds, harvested earlier that day.
***
"What comes next?"
Glinda was going through the investigative data Hilumy had handed her a while ago. It wasn't entirely reliable, having not been gathered by her own people, but she figured there was at least something in it worth following.
"Is there anything else you need, Frau Kommissar?" Hilumy came in carrying several additional files. "I can also have a telephone set up in the room in case you need it at any point."
"Yes, that would help," Glinda replied, shrugging off her leather jacket. "And thank you for sharing the room."
A single room and it's this spacious? That was Glinda's first thought after spending a few minutes inside Hilumy's quarters. She hung the dark brown leather jacket near the door. It had caught some of the rain and was slightly damp, so she asked to borrow a towel.
"Shall I bring you a change of clothes?" Hilumy offered.
"No, thank you. I have to keep wearing this. Technically I'm still in the vicinity of a crime scene."
"I'll add more wood to the fireplace then."
Glinda arranged the files and notebooks neatly on the low table and settled close to the fireplace to warm up. Her M1911 lay within reach on her left, while her right hand worked steadily through page after page of documents.
"So the person who died in front of the storehouse poisoned the victim found behind the rubbish area. Is that what the hand irritation was pointing to?"
Her light brown eyes settled on documentary photographs of students drilling in swordsmanship and archery.
"Frau Astrea!"
"Yes?" Hilumy answered, still turning the firewood over in the hearth.
"Are students and instructors permitted to carry their weapons freely?"
"No. They may only carry them during practical classes. Outside of that, everything is stored in locked rooms under strict supervision."
Consistent with her hypothesis, there was a third party involved. She began piecing the fragments together. Glinda had also received confirmation from the school's medical staff that foxglove was indeed toxic and caused skin irritation on direct contact. That made it clear the perpetrator had picked several of the flowers and then rubbed their hands with soil once the irritation set in. They had likely gone to the storehouse afterward to relock the door after failing to find the prunning scissors earlier. Glinda suspected they hadn't managed it because a patrolling guard had come through, forcing them to leave in a hurry.
"That explains it," she murmured, crossing out several documents and setting them aside.
She now understood the sequence of events. What remained was identifying who had orchestrated this inside the most prestigious academy in the country. Her instincts told her it was near impossible for a place this tightly secured to be breached without someone on the inside. Like a light cutting through fog, her mind suddenly circled back to the foxglove.
"A wolf in sheep's clothing?"
"That's an interesting phrase," Hilumy responded, catching Glinda's murmur while laying out her uniform for the next morning. "Do you know about floriography?"
"I have a friend who's obsessed with philosophy."
Hilumy brewed chamomile tea in a pot beside the bed and set out two cups.
"That flower isn't an honest one," Hilumy continued, carrying a prepared tea set on a tray. "Striking enough to draw attention, to make you stop and look."
"Uh-huh?"
The burning wood in the fireplace crackled softly, pushing back the quiet that had settled between the two women. Hilumy poured the chamomile into both cups and handed one to Glinda.
"So your point is that the flower carries a philosophical meaning about someone we take to be loyal, but who turns out to be a deceiver?" Glinda blew the thin curl of steam rising from her cup and took a sip. "And the situation right now does feel rather like that."
"I also recall that chamomile is closely associated with patience. Sometimes the meaning is extended to include calm and endurance."
Glinda set all the documents from her lap back onto the low table in front of them. She found herself genuinely drawn to the topic being raised by the bespectacled woman now sitting in casual clothes in the chair to her left.
"A figure that keeps growing despite being stepped on, cut back, even stripped down. Some give it a meaning nobler than its original reference. Stronger and steadier after being hurt."
Glinda was fully aware that she was being drawn in by the way Hilumy told it. The weight of the investigation, all those accumulated threads, lifted for a moment, replaced by the sharpened skepticism her years as a detective had built into her. Behind Hilumy's manner of speaking, Glinda caught something faint underneath.
"What are you trying to tell me?" Glinda narrowed her eyes, trying to read through the academy director's secretary.
Hilumy set her cup down and answered, "My apologies. I thought you might find the topic interesting."
Glinda gave a small shake of her head and returned to her work, sipping her tea between pages. For a while, Hilumy sat beside her, reading Die Lebensordnung. The room settled into the muffled sound of the storm outside and the quiet rustling of paper.
Glinda continued working through the motivational framework behind the Bloody Triangle murders, particularly the ones at the academy. Eleven other victims had been confirmed by the Reichspolizei Intelligence Division to have ties to a witchcraft cult. In her view, there was every reason to believe the victim at the academy had similar associations.
But one of the two victims here didn't fit that pattern at all. No triangular marking anywhere on the body, and her suspicion about a third party had only grown stronger. She was now fairly certain the victim found in front of the storehouse had been someone's accomplice, then disposed of by the very person they were working for.
"Frau Astrea!" Glinda called out without lifting her eyes from the documents.
"How can I help?"
"Do you agree with our Emperor's ideology?"
Hilumy did not answer and kept reading the scripture.
"That mankind is the finest of all creation," Glinda continued.
Hilumy closed Die Lebensordnung, set it on the table, and refilled both cups. She appeared to sit with the question for a moment, then smiled at Glinda.
"What brings this up all of a sudden, Frau Meier?"
"Every thread of this investigation keeps pulling me toward a rumor circulating among elite state and military figures, that the Ortix Empire is preparing a propaganda campaign to erase all existence tied to sorcery."
"Which gives the impression that our Emperor is a fascist, doesn't it?"
Hilumy's expression carried a faint, sardonic edge as she gave a small shake of her head, clearly not expecting Glinda to open that particular topic.
"Chapter four, verse eight: 'Unto mankind have I entrusted the stewardship of Elysium. Verily, they are the most exalted of all that have been created.' I believe His Majesty interprets that verse rather extremely."
"And too pragmatically to be a proper fascist," Glinda added.
Lightning struck hard enough to rattle the large windowpane. In that brief, violent flash, both Glinda and Hilumy caught the silhouette of something like thorned roots crawling across the glass. Glinda cocked her pistol and moved toward the window at the same moment as Hilumy.
Rain from the storm surged in, flooding the carpet around the window. Glinda looked up just long enough to track the direction the figure had gone, then pulled the window shut.
"Which way, Kommissar?"
"The north building!"
"That's the girls' dormitory!"
Hilumy threw open the door and called out to a guard at the far end of the corridor, ordering them to alert every guard in the academy immediately. She gave a brief description of the thorned root creature as a hostile threat. Glinda was already down the stairs and moving toward the building Hilumy had named, pushing through the pain radiating up from her coccyx with every step.
The storm showed no mercy that night. Trees strained against it, their thick trunks bending under the force of something that could have snapped them clean through. The linden leaves could not hold on, torn away along with the branches that had always kept those golden sheets in their grip.
Along the connecting corridor between buildings, a stream of armed guards converged on the girls' dormitory in a hurry. Several shots rang out from the third floor, followed by the sound of shattering glass. Shortly after, something fell and struck the ground, then vanished into the ornamental flower beds. Students began filing out of the dormitory in groups, guided by guards carrying out the evacuation.
Glinda and several Reichswacht pushed inside and took the stairs up to the third floor. At the corridor, the guards positioned outside one of the rooms directed them in. What met Glinda's light brown eyes stopped her cold. Three bodies, hanging in the bathroom, triangular markings carved into each of their foreheads. Behind the right ear of each one sat a marigold, trimmed down to the base of its petals.
"Protect us, oh Goddess Arasha," Glinda breathed.