The garden existed behind the main building in the way that things exist when no one has decided what to do with them yet. Not cultivated exactly. Not abandoned either. Stone paths between hedges that had grown past their intended shape, iron benches placed at intervals that suggested someone had once cared about the view and had since stopped. The light came through the branches grey and sourceless, making the shadows between the hedges look deeper than they were.
Solandre had needed air.
That was the only reason he had come out here. The hall had reached a density of noise and body heat that had stopped being manageable sometime in the last twenty minutes, and the corner near the emergency exit had lost its utility once Silvestre had left. He had simply walked toward the nearest door that opened onto outside and kept walking.
The garden was quiet.
He walked without a destination, following the first path that presented itself, hands in his pockets. The noise of the hall faded behind him by degrees, replaced by the silence of an outdoor space at night, the distant sound of the city beyond the academy walls, the faint hum of the barrier's maintenance systems that he had learned to hear only when everything else was quiet enough.
Then he smelled it.
He stopped.
Not immediately. The mind did not want to name it immediately. It reached for alternatives first, the way it did when the correct identification was one it would prefer not to make. Iron. Something metallic. Something warm in a way that metal alone was not warm.
He knew what it was.
He took one step forward and then another, following the path around a hedge that had grown wide enough to obscure the section beyond it, and the smell intensified with each step in a way that made the back of his throat tighten.
His thoughts went strange.
Not confused exactly. More the quality of thinking through something that resisted being thought through, ideas that formed and dissolved before they could complete themselves, the sensation of reaching for a word and finding the space where it should be empty. He noticed it the way he noticed everything, from a slight distance, with the part of himself that observed and catalogued even when the rest of him had no capacity for it.
He kept walking.
The path opened into a wider section of garden, a circular clearing where four paths met around a stone feature that had once been a fountain and was now dry. The light came down here without obstruction, clear enough to see by, clear enough to see everything.
He saw everything.
Seven of them.
He counted without meaning to. The part of him that catalogued did not stop for circumstances. Seven bodies across an area of perhaps fifteen meters, arranged by no arrangement at all, placed with the complete indifference of something that had not been thinking about placement. They were not intact. That was the first thing his mind reached for and the first thing it could not process. The human body had a shape the mind recognised instantly and relied on for orientation, and what was in front of him no longer had that shape in any consistent way.
The grass was black with it.
He stood at the edge of the clearing and did not move.
The smell was everywhere now, saturating the air in a way that left no room for anything else, metallic and warm and wrong in a way that had nothing to do with the temperature of the night. It reached somewhere behind his eyes and pressed.
And then it reached somewhere else.
Paris. October. The boulevard outside the residence. The cobblestones. The warmth through the sole of his shoe that he had not understood until he understood it.
His hands were shaking.
He looked at them. A fine, constant tremor he had never felt before in his hands, had never expected to feel, had always assumed his hands would not do because he was the kind of person whose hands did not do this.
He pulled at his own hair.
Both hands. Without thinking. Fingers gripping at the white strands near his temples with a force that registered distantly as pain and did not matter.
He had not checked if they were alive.
The thought arrived late and landed badly. He had been standing here for some amount of time he could not calculate and he had not moved toward them, had not checked, had done nothing except stand at the edge of the clearing and shake. He was not prepared for this. Solandre Sanislas, who had known since he was twelve that the world was exactly what it was and had never since been surprised by its capacity for cruelty, was standing in a garden behind a building full of people and he was not prepared for what was in front of him.
Blood did this to him.
It had always done this to him. Not the idea of it, not the abstraction of violence or loss, not the intellectual understanding that bodies were fragile and the world was not careful with them. The thing itself. The colour. The smell. The particular quality of its abundance when it was present in quantities that left no room for pretending it was something else. It reached past every wall he had constructed and found something underneath that the walls had never quite managed to cover.
He forced himself forward.
One step. Then another. The grass was wet under his shoes.
He reached the nearest body and crouched beside it with the deliberateness of someone performing an action that every part of them was resisting. His hands had stopped shaking, not because the tremor had passed but because he had found the part of himself that could function through the shaking, the small cold center that had never entirely warmed.
He reached out.
And then he saw her.
It was not her body he recognised first. It was the hair. Deep crimson, the specific shade of it, unmistakable even in the grey light, even matted and dark at the ends. The hair he had known since they were children. The hair that had been pinned back imperfectly this morning in the dormitory corridor, a few strands loose at the temples.
Her head was not attached to her body.
He understood this before he was ready to understand it. The mind presented the information with the same flat efficiency it presented everything and he received it the same way, with the small cold center, and then the small cold center failed.
He was on his knees.
He did not remember going to his knees. He was on the wet grass and his mouth was open and the sound that came out of it was not a sound he had made before, not something he had known he was capable of making, something that started in his chest and came up through his throat with a force that should have carried across the entire garden and reached every person inside the building behind him.
No sound came out.
He could feel his throat working. He could feel the air moving through it. But the clearing absorbed everything, held it, gave nothing back, as though the space itself had been sealed and he was alone inside it with what was in front of him.
He screamed without making a sound.
He pulled at his hair again, both hands, harder than before, and the pain was real and it did not matter, and he screamed again into the sealed silence and Sera's hair lay in the wet black grass and the light above let itself down without comment on any of it.
He had tried so hard not to have people to lose.
He had been so careful.
He stayed on his knees for a long time.
The clearing did not change.
The silence held.
He did not move.