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Octavia detaches her arm herself. She yanks the first stitch out with her teeth, then pulls out the rest with a seam ripper she keeps in the front pocket of her dress. As she works, she listens to the sounds of the old house: the way it creaks and whines as it settles; the trembling of the windows in the wind, and the lashing of rain against the windowpanes; the high-pitched giggling and the stomp of feet running up and down the hall just outside the door.
The girl is older now and harder to scare, but she still loves her dolls and stuffed animals, which works to Octavia's advantage. She keeps a whole pile of them in the corner of her bedroom, just next to the window. In the shadow of an October evening, early nightfall turned darker still by the storm, the toys themselves start to take on an eerie appearance of their own. Their glassy eyes pick up reflections from intermittent spikes of lightning, their set, painted smiles poorly matched with their unblinking, deadened stares. Octavia sets herself between a fat orange bear and a stuffed rabbit, half-hidden between their round, soft bodies, and listens to the girl and her little friend, and carefully undoes her own stitches, and waits.
She likes children's bedrooms most in moments like these: the waiting, the quiet—the anticipation that curls in her gut. Her own tense, taut nerves seem like the trigger to the fear that is to come, her own feelings and that of the children themselves twining and intermingling, until, in the aftermath of their screams, they face the heady come-down of a strong adrenaline rush, and she gets all the euphoric high of it. The power of it. Anticipation tastes sweeter still on overcast nights like this one: the bedroom shadowy and dark, lit only by a sliver of light from the hall, and the view of the city's edge, outside the window, darker still. The storm clouds have obliterated the twinkling stars and the thin crescent moon. Deep crashes of thunder shake the windowpanes, and intermittent gusts of wind throw the rain about in wild bursts. Maybe the little girl and her little friend are not yet uneasy, despite furor just outside. Octavia can hear them still, laughing again in the hall.
But they will be. Thy will be frightened yet.
She picks apart the last stitch and holds her arm gently in her lap.
Just in time—the bedroom door bangs open without warning, and the overhead light flicks on. Octavia keeps her eyes wide and watching. She watches as the girl jumps up onto her bed, her companion, a less familiar face, climbing up after her, and listens with one ear as they discuss some minor gossip from their school. Uninteresting stuff. She prefers the disjointed melody of the storm. There's an art to it, though, to scaring, a rhythm to it that the best monsters, ghouls, and creatures just instinctively know, and that the rest have to learn. A way of feeling out, with your own slithery, slimy, crawling, senses, when the humans are poised just perfectly on that tantalizing edge of fear.
He's got a point about it—she remembers Clarke explaining, after a particularly boring lecture on exactly this topic, as she lounged back against the lockers. The gnarled branch-like horns she's decided to wear all the time scratched idly against the rusted metal. There is a certain feel to it. Another sense, where you know it's time.
Octavia had slammed her locker shut and rolled her eyes. But she remembers the moment now, Queen Clarke and the way she flicked that white-eyed dead gaze at her, more than she remembers the lecture itself, and now another tight twist, like gears grinding, wracks at the center of her gut.
One of the girls is doing a particularly hilarious impression of, Octavia thinks, one of their teachers. She recognizes the type. They're both laughing so hard that they can barely breathe, and in that moment, the height of their laughter, the same second that a crack of lightning breaks through the thickness of the clouds, she asks:
Who has taken my arm?
The girls stop laughing at exactly the same moment. They freeze. The lightning is followed by a brutal crash of thunder, and she sees them both glance toward the window and then at each other again, as if both wondering the same thing: was it only the storm? Only their ears playing tricks on them amid the confusing noise of the storm?
They don't ask the question aloud, which is disappointing.
She waits for them to start talking again, a new unease between them, then tries again, louder:
WHO has taken my arm?
She's no good at this escalation thing. Some monsters spend all night on a proper scaring. Ghosts are best at that. But she's just never had it in her; she wants the payoff right away, the rush of a good dose of utter, all-encompassing, panicked fright. Her voice, at least, is getting better. Though it's naturally fairly low and even, Kane has advised her that she should try a higher register for scaring, as it matches better with her overall look.
"Did you hear that?" the friend asks this time, very tentatively, as her eyes flick across the room. Octavia holds herself very still. The girl purses her lips and almost lies, then admits at the last moment:
"Yeah."
Then she adds, "But I'm sure it's nothing."
Their conversation is tense and stilted now, no laughter in it. Octavia's fingers twitch at her severed arm. She can feel it even when it isn't attached, can move it too, though that took a little work to master. Slowly, she takes a deep breath in, trying to feel the moment growing, trying to become it—a real, grown monster has complete control over the scene. When she speaks again, she builds herself up toward shrieking:
One of you—
The girls stop again, and she can feel the way their lungs stop, and their hearts stutter.
Has—
"I definitely heard that!" the friend whispers urgently, and the girl who is growing up now shoves at her and tells her to be quiet—
MY ARM!
On the last word, Octavia throws her arm directly into the center of the room, so that it lands palm up on the floor just shy of the bed. She's lucky that the lights flicker at just that moment, highlighting the blue undertones of her skin, adding to the dramatic effect of this, the height of her scare. The children shriek and claw at each other. After only a few seconds, the girl starts calling for her mom. Tripping over each other and their own feet, half-falling off the bed, they rush toward the door still screaming.
Octavia, breathing in the richness of their fear, smiles to herself and stands up, and crosses the room to retrieve her arm from the floor.
Damn good job.
She picks up her arm and slips it into her pocket to resew later, because she has to be gone by the time the children and the mother return.
Before she leaves, she grabs a yellow raincoat and matching hat from a curly-haired brown bear, so she is not soaked through to the stuffing by the time she reaches the town dump. She slips through a hole in the fence, dusts off her knees, and pulls the hat off her head. The rain has lessened now to only a faint, gauzy drizzle, and the worst of the lightning and the thunder have receded. She takes her time now, listening to the raindrops pattering on warped metal, pock-marking piles of rotting mush, breathing deeply of the refreshing smell of wet garbage, which rises up all around her in putrid, stinking piles. So much nicer than the sick-sweet smell of human homes.
Eventually, she reaches one of the tallest, oldest, most solid mountains of refuse. Sunken into the side is the entrance to the dorms. Instead of immediately climbing in, she sits for a moment outside the old front-loading washing machine, pulls out a needle and thread from her dress pocket, and neatly reattaches her arm. Good as new.
The washing machine opens with a comforting, familiar creak, the metallic inside echoing beneath her feet when she jumps inside. She pauses for just a moment to ditch the coat and hat. If she shows up to the party dressed like a stupid stuffed bear, she'll get hell.
Music pulses and vibrates all the way down the hall, a raucous cacophony of violent strings with a strong bass beat, like Raven and Monty's musical tastes were grotesquely combined in some deranged scientist's lab—which might not be far from the truth. The epicenter of the racket is clearly her own room, at the far end of the corridor. If any of her neighbors were actually in their rooms, instead of out scaring, or at the party itself, she might expect complaints. But an eerie stillness permeates the dorm, slick beneath the echo of music, a chill ghost-feeling pricking at her arms as she passes door after door after door. Each one is much the same as the last, a thick metal with a single grate-like window at the top, through which one can peer from the outside but cannot look in, and yet each is unique in its own way as well, decorated according to the occupants' personal style.
Her own door has a whiteboard on it, with an anatomically correct drawing of a ghoul taking up the center and a scrawled message from Jasper, nearly illegible, up at the top. Squashed in at the bottom is in invitation, in Raven's slanting, block-lettered hand: PRE-HALLOWEEN PARTY 10/29 9PM ALL WELCOME BRING FOOD.
Octavia rolls her eyes. Werewolves don't have the reputation they should have for eating everything in sight.
She pushes open the door with her shoulder, expecting the strong weight of it to stick against the concrete floor, and then quietly closes it again behind her. The slow whine of it is nothing beneath the cacophony of sound, and at first, no one seems to notice she's arrived.
She notices her brother, Bellamy, ladling fluorescent green punch into a cracked teacup, and Maya floating serenely nearby, readjusting the string of orange and purple lights she has tacked up around the room. The lights and the card table of punch and snacks, and the busted tape deck that's been pulled out from behind Raven's bed, are the only real attempts at decoration. But then the party was a rather last-minute idea, and of the three of them, only Maya has that ghostly-design touch.
Most of the rest of the group has gathered in the middle of the room and is playing Twister. Octavia tilts her head all the way to the side, trying to comprehend the various twists and curves and shapes of the bodies on the mat. There's Jasper, awkwardly straddling two dots, in a position that would not be a challenge for anyone of a more coherent composition, and Monty, arched up into an upside-down U. The strain of the position is causing his face to turn a particularly acute shade of green, and as Octavia watches, a few withered leaves fall down from between his shoulder blades. Wells is crouched down at the edge of the mat, with his left leg sticking out to hit a yellow dot just underneath Monty's hip. He's dressed down for the occasion but still looks unfairly put together and indecently serene. Octavia envies and pities him both—she'll never look that regal, being so squishy with sawdust, but then she'll never get the flack that Wells does either, for standing up so straight all the time, for being so naturally composed—for passing as human, unless he is smiling and showing off his pointed teeth.
"All right, Murphy's up," Raven announces, from her spot on the sidelines with the Twister wheel. She's got her brace on today and her arm still in its sling. Last full moon was a rough one, as Octavia remembers well enough. She wasn't with Raven on the night itself, but she stuck around for all the long hours of recovery afterward, skipping class to sit on the lower bunk with her, feeding her chunks of rotten meat from a hot broth.
Roommates and family, as Raven says, the only people who are allowed to see you weak. And I only have the one.
Murphy, mostly solid, is positioned at the corner of the board, in the enviable position of standing on two adjacent dots. He looks annoyingly smug today. The expression falters a little when Raven spins the wheel and announces "Left hand, yellow with a mysterious stain"—a direction that will require him to reach under and Monty and twist himself, as the name of the game says, into quite a pretzel shape.
"Good luck with that one," Jasper says, with a smugness of his own. The others are watching expectantly too: Bellamy, leaning his hip against the table as he sips at his foaming, steaming drink; Maya, finally pleased with the arrangement of the lights, letting herself float down again to the ground, and even Clarke, who Octavia notices only belatedly, lounging on the sofa at the other end of the room, one eyebrow quizzically raised as she plays with one of the springs that has poked up through the red velvet upholstery.
Octavia crosses her arms over her chest, waiting, as Murphy puzzles out his next move.
"Just go already!" Monty snaps, shaking with the effort of holding himself up. "There's no good way to do it, just go!"
"All right, all right." Murphy rolls his shoulders back, takes a deep breath—and then slowly, subtly, thins and dissolves, ever less body and ever more mist, until he can shift and flow and disperse across the board. The vague shape of him stretches from the dots at the corner all the way under the arch of Monty's body, to the yellow dot at the center of the game.
"Okay, there is no WAY that's not cheating!" Jasper shouts, throwing up his hands, as the other players grumble and groan.
"First off, that can't possibly count as your hand," Wells adds. Any additional points are cut off, though, by Murphy's misty, wavering voice:
"What do you know about what counts as my hand, Jaha?"
"Ref!" Monty calls. "Ref!"
"No, no way." Jasper shakes his head. The movement is too fast, jolting and uneven; Octavia winces just watching it. "Raven is biased. We need a neutral observer." He catches sight of Octavia, still lingering by the door, and gestures widely toward her. "O! Octavia! What do you think? How unfair is this?"
"It's not unfair—I'm using my natural talents," Murphy argues, and Raven shrugs and adds:
"He does have a point."
"Traitor," Monty grumbles.
"Hey, I just got here," Octavia says, holding up her hands as if to protest her own innocence. "I think you should leave me out of it." Then, as if the thought had only just then occurred, she glances over toward the couch, where Clarke is watching the arguments with an impassive, unreadable expression on her face. "Why don't you ask Clarke? She's never been biased toward anyone."
The words read on their surface as a compliment, come out sharp like an insult, and not even Octavia knows which interpretation is true. Being around Clarke, thinking about her, always gets her feeling all manner of strange things. All she can do is poke at them, prod them, agitate them, and watch for whatever bugs or other skittering creatures might come running out.
Everyone turns at once toward Clarke, as if on cue, and with the spotlight neatly shifted, Octavia ducks away from the doorway and toward the punch.
She can feel Clarke's gaze at her back, like an unseen pair of unblinking eyes, peering out at her from the underbrush.
In the long moment that follows, silent and tense, Octavia pulls the last potato chip from the bag sitting open on the table, and bites into it with a single, too-loud crunch. Then she rolls up the empty bag and eats that too.
"Three-way tie," Clarke declares. "Murphy is disqualified for cheating." She narrows her eyes at him as he solidifies again, and promptly falls on his ass on the ground. He glares up at her from his undignified heap, and a moment later, Monty finally loses his balance, and falls gracelessly on top of him. "I think we should play truth or dare instead," Clarke adds. "At least none of us have unfair advantages or disadvantages at that."
A few low grumbles follow, and a couple of half-hearted arguments, but most of the time, where Clarke leads the others tend to follow. Octavia shrugs. She helps Wells roll up the Twister mat, and then takes a spot on the newly cleared space on the floor, right between Raven and Bellamy. Truth or dare, she thinks, is a terrible idea. She's sitting directly across from Clarke, and no matter where she turns or where she looks, she still feels that same deep-forest gaze, following her. Makes her think of loops and mazes of trails criss-crossing each other in the heart of the woods, of twigs that snap underfoot, of the deep hooting of owls, and of other sounds, barely heard, that may not be anything at all. Of glimmers barely discerned, shining in the dark.
"So who goes first?" Wells asks, and to Octavia's right, Bellamy shrugs and says:
"Monty, truth or dare?"
“Dare.”
Bellamy thinks for a moment, or pretends to, the fingers of his mismatched hands steepled beneath his chin. “I dare you,” he says, “to do an impression of Professor Kane.”
A classic request, but still Octavia sits back, pleased. Monty is good at impressions, and not only because of his natural talents toward camouflage. He clears his throat as he stands up, pretends to be uncertain, then draws himself up very tall and begins: “CLASS!” His normally soft voice as harsh as a slap in the face, making the rest of them jump. He paces in front of them with his hands behind his back, leaning forward with his nose sticking out over the thick moss of his feet, growing bigger at certain words and then smaller again. Unlike Kane, when Monty grows, his skin scales over with bark, and new flurries of leaves sprout from his branches.
“You probably think that you are MONSTERS. But you are BARELY MONSTERS!! Half of you struggle to scare the pants off an EIGHT-YEAR-OLD. You think you’re ready for HALLOWEEN?” He looms into Jasper’s face, so close that Jasper almost turns cross-eyed, and the sea-green decaying tinge of his skin purples and reddens with the effort of holding back laughter. “Do you think this is FUNNY?” Monty yells. “That it is almost HALLOWEEN and I am staring at the most incompetent, blundering, inept group of creatures this side of a GROUP OF CUDDLY TEDDY-BEARS!”
“Hey.” Octavia glares at him. “I am way scarier than a teddy bear.”
At that, Monty abruptly shrinks back to his normal size again, smiling apologetically and shrugging while the others laugh and shake. “Oh, way scarier,” he agrees. “Those cuddly bears have nothing on you.”
“Damn right.”
Monty sits down cross-legged on the floor again, glancing around the circle with a narrowed gaze. Finally, he sets his sights on Clarke.
“Truth or dare.”
“Truth.”
Octavia’s eyebrows rise, and she notices a few other surprised looks among the group. Clarke is usually a dare kind of girl. But her expression is cool and deathly serene as always, and gives nothing away.
“Okay.” Monty seems caught off guard too, but he recovers as he glances around the circle. “Truth. How do you feel about Raven dating your ex-boyfriend?”
A few murmured, exaggerated ooohs and aaahs follow the question, and Raven herself sits up a little straighter, where she’s still curled up against Murphy’s side. His arm is around her shoulder, fingertips tracing patterns against her arm. And his face, the expression on his face as he watches Clarke and she stares right past him, makes it seem suddenly not so strange at all that they were a thing.
Octavia’s never really understood that herself.
“I think,” Clarke answers slowly, “that they look cute together.” She says it with a straight face, but as always, because she cannot help it, the words sound arch—an inscrutable tickling sensation underneath them, like the feeling of being watched by something just behind one’s back.
“And whoever said Murphy was my boyfriend?” she adds, which makes Murphy crack a smile.
Octavia is considering this, what they were, and what Clarke is, and that sense she still has of being unaccountably and surreptitiously seen, when Clarke asks her: “Truth or dare?”
She looks up sharply. Though she means to say truth, she hears herself say, “Dare,” instead. Clarke seems pleased.
“I dare you to kiss someone in the circle.”
Bellamy rolls his eyes. “Really, Clarke? Are we ninety years old?”
“Mmm, yes, Mr. Do-an-Impression-of-Our-Teacher, your point is well taken.” She shoots her answer back at him, then stares at Octavia again, waiting.
It would be easy to pick Monty, or even Jasper—Maya would understand, a quick peck on the lips between old friends—she’s watching Octavia, too, unblinking and simply waiting in her timeless, eternal way, like this is just what she expects. A safe choice. Octavia considers Wells, too, and the impeccable, sharp points of his blood-tinged teeth. Every monster at the Academy has set their sights on Wells at one time or another. She’s had her fantasies like all the rest. And yet—
Yet when she gets up to her knees and shuffles across the concrete floor, she finds herself approaching Clarke.
She knows precisely why she is approaching Clarke.
And a half dozen monsters watch as she pauses, brushes the waves of Clarke’s hair back from her face, frames the moonlit-cold skin of her face with her hands, and leans in. Clarke’s breath festers like the deep earth, rife with worms, covered by rustling piles of damp leaves. She lets Octavia kiss her, after a moment leans up and presses fiercely back, but keeps her hands down so that Octavia can lead them, swaying, grasping; she tells herself she’s here because Clarke is the queen, but that’s not the truth—she’s been having haunting dreams of this for weeks.
When she pulls back, she caches a glimpse of Clarke’s face as humans see it in the forest depths, the pale sheen of bone, the deep, black sockets of her eyes.
Someone, perhaps Raven, is clearing her throat. The shuffle back to her spot on the other side of the circle seems embarrassingly long. Even after, everyone is watching her, not joking or teasing but only waiting, and it takes her a stupidly long moment to remember that it’s her turn.
“Jasper,” she says, curling her fingers in her dress. “Truth or dare?”
“Truth,” he answers.
She can’t think of a single thing to ask him, or at least, nothing fair. Nothing of the sort that people ask in games like these. She’s still thinking of Clarke, wishing she’d climbed into her lap, wishing they were alone, wishing Clarke would whip up a storm for her and she could feel herself briefly powerful, truly immortal, in the calm eye at its center.
So she asks, “What were you like when you were alive?” because the question is like a storm, and the awkward pause that follows like waiting through the eye.
Of course she knows it’s impolite to talk about, or even mention, this ultimate divide between them: that some of them were human once, and turned, and others have been monstrous for as long as they’ve been anything at all. But she’s always wondered about it, if Jasper and Wells and Raven and Maya feel kinship with the people that they set out to scare, if they are haunted by their old selves. And she wonders about the monsters that have always been, if they feel an enviable certainty about themselves. For her own part, she is neither monster-born nor human-turned. She was simply made, once—she has no idea by whom. Whether she was always meant to live as she does. Whether she was merely object once.
Bellamy is the only one who can almost understand: he was sewn together from disparate parts too. He explained to her once, when she was younger and liked to trace the jagged stitches on his arm, so much broader and rougher than her own, that he is none of his pieces and all of them, too. He is this necrotic flesh in the same way she is cloth and thread and stuffing, no more and no less. Just like her, he’s part monster, part human, neither, both. The thought was a comfort to her. Ever since then, she’s called him her brother.
Jasper considers the question for a long time, the only sign that he is thinking at all the way he rubs at his chin, flakes of dead flesh falling off at his fingertips. He seems to be looking, not down at the floor, but all the way into his former life. Despite the time he’s taking, she still expects him to joke.
Finally, he runs his hand up the back of his neck, through his short hair—a gesture that makes him look painfully human, and living still—and says, “I think I was a lot like I am now. Very chill. Very cool. Daydreamed a lot. Life of the party, obviously.”
A few of them giggle at that (life), and he smiles faintly, because he wanted them to. It’s true that Jasper is one of the most fun monsters she knows. But there’s an undercurrent of sadness to him, sometimes, and she feels it now: how his smile fades, and his eye flick and jump back and forth, like he’s reading something far off, in a past life none of them can see. “Just a kid, I guess,” he says. “Wondering if there were monsters under my bed.”
From her spot on the top bunk, Octavia watches her brother and Wells argue about who will lead. Monty’s turned the music up again, perfect for dancing, perfect for not thinking. Raven and Murphy sway in each other’s arms, heedless of the beat, while Jasper turns Maya around and around, until her skirt twirls out in a pale blur around her, and she seems to float even farther, even more weightlessly, off the ground.
“Coming down?” a voice asks suddenly, just below her, and Octavia jumps.
“No, I’m staying up here, thanks.”
Clarke shakes her head, climbing up the last two steps of the ladder and sitting down next to Octavia on the bed. Their legs press together, their feet swinging side by side over the edge. “I mean from the rush. The post-scare let down.”
“Oh.” She shrugs. “Yeah, I guess so.”
If Octavia could blush, she thinks, she would, from the way Clarke bumps her arm against Octavia’s arm, from the way she sits so close, though there is plenty of room on the mattress. For once, she is not wearing her horns. She looks under-dressed without them, Octavia thinks, like maybe, if one doesn’t look at her too closely, one could almost imagine she is human.
“You know I was alive once,” she says, without warning, and Octavia feels another shiver run through her.
She must be crashing harder than she thought. “No you weren’t,” she answers. “Forest monsters aren’t human.”
“Necromancers are.”
She considers pushing Clarke off the bed. Necromancer. Sure. A myth even among monsters—and what would a powerful witch such as that need with the Academy? The lessons, the tests, the cracked and stained pages of their books, Kane clicking around against the wooden floor as he lectures, and flies buzzing through the auditorium in the languid early evening. Why bother? Why bother at all, if she really could…?
(One time and only once, they went out scaring together, caught some hikers out in the woods at the edge of town. Made their compasses turn them in useless circles, shook their tents all night, crawled inside and jumped on their sleeping bags. In the bleary dawn, Octavia muddied herself and lay in the leaves as bait. She watched, unblinking, Clarke in her long dress and her horns and her crown of crooked branches, like knobby skeleton bones, gliding along the forest floor, sneaking up behind one of the hikers and grabbing him by the arms. Are you the devil? he asked her, voice shaking and stuttered. She nosed right up against his ear and whispered, I am death.)
“Bullshit,” Octavia says, without force. And then, “Why don’t you use it? I would.” She lifts up her chin. “Nothing scares the humans more than… than that. You’d get them every time.”
“Because it’s not just a scare,” Clarke answers. Octavia follows her gaze down to the dance floor at the center of the room. Jasper spins Maya around once more, then dips her low, so fast and sudden that she starts to giggle with the rush. The sound is that of wind chimes in the faintest breeze. When he lifts her to her feet again, she kisses him, and he looks so happy that Octavia can almost imagine him starting to float, too.
“You can bring someone back,” Clarke adds. “But they’re never the same.”
She turns to Octavia again, and this time manages a gentle smile. “I guess I got tired of the responsibility. Anyway.” She holds out her hand. “Do you want to dance?”
Octavia slips her hand into Clarke’s. The comforting coolness of her skin and the squeeze of her palm makes Octavia think of the woods again, and the glimmers of gold in the air at dawn, and how small they were beneath the trembling bare branches of the trees and the fading blue arch of the sky. How they walked home together shoulder to shoulder, with the faintest rush of leaves kicked up by their feet the only sound in the vast stillness.
“Sure,” she says. “Sleep when you’re dead, right? Like the humans say?”
“Dance when you’re undead,” Clarke answers, and leads the way down the ladder again.