Wilder Girls - Rory Power Page 0,91

softly, “did you do?”

Under my knees the floor is damp, seeping up into my jeans. Headmistress must have tampered with them somehow. But what for?

I hold one of the bottles up to the light. At first I don’t see it, but then…there. Grains of fine black powder, collecting at the bottom.

Reese breaks off as I push past her. Headmistress shies away, but I hook my fingers in the pocket of her slacks and drag her toward me. I’m right, I know I am, and I wish I were surprised, but this is just the same thing over and over. Everything is the same thing over and over.

“Hetty,” Reese says, “what is it?”

Headmistress is struggling away from me, but I wedge my shoulder in against her chest, pin her as flat as I can.

“Check the bullets,” I say to Reese. “You’ll see.”

“I didn’t mean to hurt anybody,” Headmistress pleads. “It was only to help.”

“Oh,” Reese says behind me, and I know without looking what she’s found. Some of the bullets already cracked open, emptied of gunpowder the way the older Gun Shift girls taught us to do. I never knew how we first found out what a little powder could do to a body with the Tox. Nobody would ever tell me when I asked. But I know it’s a slow death, like sleep if sleep lit you up with pain.

“You put it in the water, didn’t you?” I say, leaning so close my spit flecks across Headmistress’s cheek.

She takes my face in her hands before I can back away and looks down at me, her expression soft even as her grip tightens. “You have to listen to me,” she says. “This is the best thing for you right now.”

“Let her go,” Reese says, but Headmistress ignores her.

“They’re on their way, Hetty. Jets off an aircraft carrier.” Her voice drops, hoarse and barely more than a whisper. “You know what they can do.”

I do. It’s not that I heard things when I was living on-base. It’s that I didn’t. And that said more than anything.

I push her hands off me and step back. “Why now? They’ve had a year and a half. What’s changed?”

“There was a contagion on the research team,” Headmistress says, “and then one of you girls broke the quarantine.”

It takes everything I have to stay standing, the guilt pressing down on me, and it’s like drowning except I can’t show it. I can’t let Headmistress know it was us.

“Too great a risk for too small a payoff,” she continues. “They can’t cure this. Maybe if they’d been able to do a broader range of testing—”

“A broader range?” It’s knocking at some memory I can’t quite find, and I shut my eye, filter through the last few days until it comes burning back. Welch, on the pier that day, right before she died. They wanted to test all of us, to experiment on the food, she said, but she wouldn’t let them.

“Welch was on our side,” I say. “Wasn’t she?”

Headmistress frowns. “I’m not sure what constitutes your side, Hetty, but she was adamant that we not subject the whole student body to testing, that it would lead to unnecessary suffering.” She smiles nervously. “Personally, I think it’s clear she was mistaken.”

“She killed herself.” I’m shaking, and Reese presses in closer, lays her hand on the small of my back. “She did that because of your plans.”

“Let’s not forget,” Headmistress says, a flash of annoyance crossing her face, “she was a grown woman capable of critical thinking. She made her own choices. I won’t be held responsible for them.”

She’s right. Welch did choose—she chose us every time she threw out the contaminated supplies, every time she had us lie to Headmistress about it.

And I was wrong. I had her wrong the whole time.

I can’t be here anymore. Every mistake I’ve made, digging us in deeper, and the whole place will be better off without me, even when the jets come.

“Hetty,” Reese says behind me. Out in the hallway I can hear talking, louder and louder as the other girls raid a nearby classroom for desks and benches, anything they can barricade the doors with.

I look back to Headmistress. “How long until the jets?”

“They’ll be here by dark.”

That’s it. A day. That’s all Raxter has left until a squadron of jets blows it off the map. I can hear my father in my head, and he’s telling me to run, as fast and as far as I can.