Though Emilia had told Mister Zora she was going to help and ran off after Titus to the second floor, she had no idea she was going to help.

  The other students immediately knew where to get all the mops, the tablecloths, and the buckets to fill with clean tap water, but she didn't know where anything was. Cliques formed and the other students split off into groups to listen to Titus telling everyone what to do, where to clean, and when to regroup, she didn’t have a group to fit herself into. She spent the first ten minutes hiding behind the staircase railings, peeking out at Titus as he handed out instructions from atop a dresser in the long hallway—so it wasn’t until literally everyone else left to clean the second floor that she drew in a sharp breath, trying to muster up the courage to walk out in front of him.

  It was pathetic. She knew it. Her heart pounded in her chest from fear as much as exhaustion from having run around the academy the past two days, and… she’d never talked to anyone. Not a single other student. It’d come as no surprise to her if maybe Titus just forgot about her, and he climbing down the dresser when she wobbled out from behind the railings, so she cleared her throat as naturally as she could and made him whirl.

  She found herself shaking slightly as the short-haired boy regarded her with a blank, unabashedly confused expression.

  “Um,” she said, clenching her throat, fidgeting with her claws as she tried to remember the words of the local tongue. “Can I also… um… help with the cleaning? I have… many arms! I can also climb on… walls! So if you need me to clean… the ceiling… I can—”

  “It’s okay,” he said, sending her a soft smile as he glanced past her; her senses told her his friends were waiting for him behind her. “You’ve been helping Miss Sarius and Mister Fabre around the academy, right? You don’t have to do anything if you’re tired. Maybe you can just sit in the pantry? Do you know where that is?”

  Her heart skipped a beat. “I… I don’t… I mean, I want to—”

  “It’s right down the hallway, fifth room to the left,” he said, turning around to point at a door, and then he whispered into her ear as he walked past her, “I keep a few bags of secret snacks from Miss Sarius in the super top shelf. You can have them while you wait and rest there. When we’re all done and it’s time for dinner, I’ll come by and get you!”

  He didn’t wait for her to respond. His friends were calling his name, so he sprinted over to catch up with them while her lips were still half-parted, one of her hands still half-outstretched—for all the inhuman speed and strength she possessed, she hadn’t been quick enough to grab his shoulder and stop him in place, after all.

  She tried to clear her head. She walked ten metres forward. Room on the left, doorknob near her neck. She pushed the door open and scanned the rather spacious pantry—it was more just a windowed bedroom turned into a pantry filled with shelves and storage boxes—but she immediately found her favourite spot: in the cold top corner of the room right next to the door, far from the window where sunlight would hit her skin when daybreak arrived.

  So she crawled up, bumped into a few jars of something sweet, something salty, and then started webbing up the corner by pulling hardened blood threads from her nails.

  She made her little web. She curled up in a ball and hugged her knees, facing the corner. The other students were starting to light up the gas lanterns outside, and though they weren’t very hot, every bit of warmth on her skin made her feel sick to the bone. She didn’t like the heat. She didn’t like the ‘light’. Her instincts told her to get as far away as possible from them, but… this was the best she could do.

  In the corner of the pantry, she chewed her nails and sucked on her own threads.

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  Her blood was ‘warm’, and it was the only warm thing she could tolerate. She didn’t like cooked food. She’d rather chew on her own blood threads than eat ‘eggs’ or ‘toast’ or whatever the teachers were cooking downstairs.

  She liked her little cold corner in the pantry.

  She liked the silence.

  She liked being wrapped by her threads.

  She liked… chewing on blood… and biting flesh off her claws.

  She liked blood.

  She liked her own flesh.

  flesh, not any ‘eggs’ or ‘toast’. She liked flesh.

  She liked blood and bug flesh, but maybe human flesh would also be–

  “Emilia? We’re done with the cleaning. You can come down and eat dinner with Miss Sarius and Mister Fabre now—”

  Her moth antennae tingled and formed an ‘image’ of the room in her mind, and it showed there was a fleshy, ‘red’ bruise right underneath her. A human. Behind her. Under her. A hand was tapping her shoulder, wrapped in her sticky threads, so she whirled and snarled and dropped from the corner of the pantry in the same motion—her razor-sharp teeth bit into the human’s ear on her way down, tearing it off his head in one go.

  She landed on all six limbs, hunched down, teeth gnashing on the boy’s ear. She swallowed. She grinned. It was so, tasty. The boy himself groaned as he stumbled back, out of the door, and just as she was about to pounce at him to finish the rest of her meal—

  Lots of people started screaming. Hurting her ears. Making her wince. Her whole body tensed as her antennae showed more ‘red’ bruises out through the door, crowding around the hallway, and all of them were supporting the boy she’d… torn… into…

  Her human eye blinked, but her moth eye didn’t. It had a mind of its own. Her two black arms jutting out her back had their own desires. Half her body lurched forward at the children, but the other half of her——jerked back, throwing herself onto the table before the window.

  Her back smashed against the glass, nearly shattering it, and the children screamed even harder. Someone slammed the door shut. She heard locks being clicked on from the outside. Still, the hunger in her didn’t abate. Half of her still wanted to rip through the door and feast on the pulsing red bruises outside, so before she could lose herself, she jammed her claws into the table and window frame and slammed her head against the glass once more.

  The hunger was still there. She slammed her head into the glass once more.

  She was still hungry.

  The children were still screaming outside, calling for the teachers.

  “What’s going on here?”

  “Mister Fabre! It’s… it’s Emilia!”

  “What about her?”

  “Titus just went in to call her down for dinner, but then she went crazy! Her eyes went red and she ripped off his ear!”

  “What?”

  “She ate his ear! I saw it! We all saw it! She’s—”

  “Dinner’s ready, so go downstairs. Titus, go to Miss Sarius and have her stop the bleeding. You’re only missing half of your ear, so Mister Tadius can probably do something about it once we get him back from the garden.”

  “But—”

  “Now.”

  “...”

  She banged her head against the glass until she felt warmth trickling down her face, and now that she could lick her own blood, she wasn’t as hungry anymore.

  She felt like… crying.

  And there wasn’t much she could do to stop herself.

  Something painful and ‘red’ flared inside her. She broke down into choked, ugly sobs as bitterness bubbled up and overflowed in her chest—whatever hunger she felt she’d been suppressing quite well the past three weeks first surfaced this morning, when she’d snuck off to the western foyer to chew on a few chunks of moth meat just to make herself a bit stronger, but now the hunger was fully awakened with Titus’ ear in her stomach.

  She hadn’t wanted this.

  She’d wanted to control herself, so why did she go and curl herself in the corner of the pantry. The So many dried foods in this one room, and she just had to go and take a bite out of a classmate? What was she thinking?

  If she had any chance whatsoever at making a single classmate her friend, she’d just ruined it.

  She couldn’t see outside the window. She could feel the cold of the walls outside, she could hear the winds whistling, and she could guess how far it was from the second floor to the cafeteria roof below, and then from there on, her moth senses detected nothing but vast, empty space—but if she banged her head against the window one more time, she was sure she could break it.

  She could leave.

  If she was just going to hurt other people by being around them, then maybe it was better if she—

  “Emilia.”

  She whirled and snarled again, hunger gripping her mind in an iron-clad claw, and she tore into Mister Zora’s hand.