Wilder Girls - Rory Power Page 0,82

corridor, and Headmistress comes hurrying into the hall, her head down. I can’t think of any place in that direction where she could keep the canister, but she knows the house better than I do.

“Hey,” Reese says, and she jumps. Stares up at us with wide, nervous eyes.

“Girls. What’s going on?”

Reese explains it all. The sound we heard, the bear, how it broke through. She leaves out Lindsay, leaves out that Gun Shift fell asleep. It doesn’t matter anyway.

Headmistress’s mouth opens and closes, a sore flashing vivid red on her tongue, and finally, she clears her throat. “How did it get through?”

Me, always me, bringing this school crashing down. Reese is angry, and I know she’s thinking about it, about telling Headmistress my half of the truth. I won’t fight it—I’ll deserve it if she does. But she shakes her head. “We don’t know.”

“Okay,” Headmistress says, more to herself than to any of us. “Okay, okay.” And then she looks at me, and she looks at Reese, and disappears into her office.

“Well, shit,” Reese says. “What do we do now?”

CHAPTER 20

What we do is wake everyone up. The house won’t hold on its own, and it’s only a matter of time before the bear breaks through. Too many doors, and the dining room windows, so tall and spreading the whole length of it, but we can at least stay alive as long as possible.

Cat and I go upstairs, march down the hallway room by room, knocking on doors and shaking the littlest girls out of sleep. There’s Julia, there’s Carson, and without prodding they start herding the others into groups and down the stairs. Candles light and girls start trickling into the hall, bleary-eyed and frowning.

Without Welch, though, we need somebody to take charge. Not Reese, but somebody the littlest girls aren’t afraid of. Somebody like Taylor.

I’m not sure exactly which dorm is hers, but I know some of the girls in her year bunk down at the end of the hallway, separated from the others by a few empty rooms. This one used to be Emily and Christine’s, that one Mary’s. I walk past them, try to ignore the rising chatter coming from the main hall as the girls assemble downstairs.

At last, a few doors before Mona’s, there’s a room with a small flicker of light and the rustle of movement inside. I knock, step back, and Taylor wrenches the door open, her hair mussed as she finishes pulling on her shirt. There, set into her chest, a cord of muscle the width of my thumb, running down to disappear past the waist of her jeans. Pale blue and twisting, almost braided, with a pulse to it like it’s alive.

“Seen enough?” Taylor snaps.

I look away quickly. Is that some kind of vein? “Sorry. I didn’t mean to—”

“What is it?”

I clear my throat. “It’s just…we need you down in the hall.” I tell her about the fence, about the bear, and watch her face drain of color.

“Where’s Headmistress?” she asks.

“She went to her office, but I—”

She pushes past me, one of her broad shoulders knocking mine. I can feel my body relaxing as I follow her toward the mezzanine. If she’s in charge, we’ll figure it out. She’ll know what to do.

Down the stairs, past the last few stragglers joining the others in the main hall. I catch Reese’s eye, watch relief sweep across her face as Taylor wades through the crowd. But it’s jumping the gun. Just like Headmistress, Taylor ignores the girls gathering and breaks into a jog as she heads for the office.

“It’s fine,” Cat says, coming to stand next to me. “We’ll handle this ourselves.”

The first and most important thing to do, we decide, is to shore up the front doors. Claire and Ali lead a group to the classrooms to raid them for leftover desks and chairs, anything we can use to build a barricade. Julia and Carson head for the kitchen, looking for tools to pry the dining room tables up from where they’re bolted to the floor. Landry even pitches in, takes some of the younger girls to the dorms to tear the ladders off the bunks.

And me, I’m rooted to the ground, stuck there in the middle of the hall. For a year and a half we’ve been as safe as we could ask for. The fence, regular supplies. Welch and Headmistress to hold us together. A year and a half, and in a week I’ve torn it all apart.

Sarah