The stones weren’t gray anymore. They weren’t red anymore, either. They were brown, the dark, rich, somehow carnal brown that comes only when blood is allowed to dry on some ordinary surface. The source of the blood wasn’t immediately clear; it took a few seconds of staring after Jack for Christopher to realize that what he’d taken for an oddly shaped rock was actually a man’s booted foot. He stopped running.

Jack didn’t stop. Jack slammed the gate out of her way, almost slipping on the cobblestones, and raced along the path until she reached the raised garden bed concealing the body attached to that foot. She dropped to her knees there, scrabbling for something the rest of them couldn’t see, her face twisting into an expression of anguished disbelief. Then she began to wail.

Christopher winced. Jack had always been so self-assured, so mature; even when she’d first arrived at the school, she’d carried herself like she was much older than her actual years, like she was just waiting for the calendar to catch up with the woman she already knew herself to be. That girl was gone. In her place was a wailing, keening child, tears streaking her cheeks and snot running down her upper lip as she struggled to gather the hidden man’s bulk in her arms.

Sumi trotted after Jack, not stopping until she was close enough to look down and see what Jack was clinging to so tightly, what she was trying so hard to pull into her arms. A flicker of sympathetic pain crossed her face, replaced almost instantly by her customary air of unconcern.

“Is it harder to resurrect someone who doesn’t have a head?” she asked—and if she pitched her voice so it would carry to Christopher and warn him of the situation, Jack didn’t seem to notice. “It seems like it would be harder.”

Jack bent forward until she was folded nearly double, wails dwindling to an almost-inaudible weeping. Christopher took a deep breath and stepped through the gate, walking along the bloody path until he could see what was going on.

He immediately wished he hadn’t.

Dr. Bleak’s body was massive: it filled most of the space between two garden beds. He hadn’t gone down without a fight: deep gashes marked his arms, and his chest looked like it had been sliced nearly in two. Most of the stump of his neck was hidden by Jack, who was kneeling where his head should have been, her folded arms resting on his chest as she sobbed into her hands. There was blood in her hair. For once in her life, she didn’t seem to notice, or care.