Trapped

As I was climbing the stairs to Opal's room, it occurred to me that plastic surgery was the stock and trade of Mother Tzekich's group, the Ring of Knives. Backstreet beautification. Was Opal a Ring of Knives customer? Or more than a customer? No one in the faculty lounge knew anything about Opal's life before she arrived in Feliss… so perhaps it wasn't mere chance that delivered Rosalind to our door. Perhaps some prior association had convinced Mother Tzekich that Opal could be trusted to keep her daughter safe. After all, there were plenty of schools like ours in the world, and a woman as shrewd as Knife-Hand Liz wouldn't pick one out of a hat. She'd want somebody in place to keep an eye on the girl; didn't that make sense?

Or was I inventing complications when we had enough real trouble to handle?

With such thoughts filling my mind, I knocked on the chancellor's door.

Opal answered the knock within seconds… and as always, she was turned out ready to meet royalty. Her silver hair hung loosely below her shoulders, but she was clad in an impeccable gown of subdued red suede. She must have kept the dress beside her bed, an outfit she could shimmy into without wasting time on buttons or hooks, so she could quickly and chicly present herself to whoever came calling at one-thirty in the morning. Perhaps in her youth, she'd belonged to some crack military unit that had to be ready at an instant's notice; or perhaps I was really letting my imagination run away with me.

When she saw who was calling, Opal raised an eyebrow. "Crisis?"

"Crisis."

"Serious?"

"Severe."

"Inside."

Opal beckoned us into her sitting room. It was a spacious place, decorated with the sort of bric-a-brac that accumulates in the chancellor's quarters of a school two centuries old: gifts from parents and grateful students. Jungle masks that were taller than me shared wall space with an ermine-covered cricket bat and several painted portraits where both subjects and artists had long ago faded from memory. On one table, five music boxes were stacked atop each other in diminishing order by size; the housemaids kept them free of dust, but no one bothered to polish the tarnished little plaques that told what tunes the boxes played. Another table held an assortment of plaster figurines, all of them kittens or puppies or chubby-cheeked children in dirndls and lederhosen. These trinkets were "the artistic heritage of the academy" passed from one chancellor to the next, like some pox nobody could cure. Opal sometimes talked about throwing everything out… but she never did. It seemed inevitable the next chancellor would inherit the same regrettable collection, plus whatever new "riches" would arrive during Opal's administration.

Annah and I sat ourselves on a "genuine-Inuit" couch upholstered in scratchy caribou hide. Our Esteemed Chancellor took a seat opposite us on a faux-Chippendale chair painted white with green vines twining up its legs and around its frame. She said nothing-Opal seldom wasted words-but she cocked her head to show she was ready to listen. Since Annah showed no sign of speaking, I took the lead. "Rosalind Tzekich is dead. In her room. Almost certainly murdered."

Opal's expression didn't change, but she shifted her gaze and murmured, "That's what 'expendable' means." When I stared at her in surprise, she focused back on me. "Sorry. Where I come from, that's a type of prayer for the dead."

She fell silent again. I waited a few seconds, then said, "There's more bad news. I think the killer used an OldTech bioweapon-the kind we should report to Spark Royal."

Opal looked up sharply. "Are you sure?"

I described what I'd seen: the white curds clogging the girl's airways. I also told about the Caryatid's sort of a prophecy kind of thing, and the ghostly harp music that led me to Rosalind in the first place. Annah verified that Rosalind had been in perfect health at dinner, and that none of the other girls on the floor showed any signs of sickness… which argued against a natural disease, if any such argument was necessary.

Opal nodded as she listened, asking no questions, taking it all in. When I finished, she remained silent for several more heartbeats; then she settled back into her chair, lifting her gaze to a window that looked out on darkness. "So," she said, "here it is."

"Here what is?" I asked.

She didn't answer. Instead she rose and walked to the window, as if expecting to see something outside… but instead of looking down at the campus four floors below, her eyes were turned to the sky. "I'd hoped they were wrong," she said, facing the stars, "but of course they weren't. It sure is a bitch living in a universe where so many species are smarter than you."