Dutch's Arc

Chapter 5 of 6

Dutch slipped out past curfew with the earrings humming soft against her neck. The whispers pulled her through the iron gate of the old cemetery, where fog clung low between leaning headstones and the dark shape of a stone mausoleum marked the path toward the older wing. She kept to the wet grass to muffle her steps. Halfway across, she saw the purple-tipped vines curling around a wrought iron gazebo in the mist. She had seen those same leaves outside her dorm. Outside the dining hall. Outside the pool chamber. Plants did not walk. Someone had been waking them, sending them after her scent. Her stomach went cold. A silhouette stepped onto the gazebo platform. Hooded. Holding something small that glinted — a glass vial, the kind used to carry a cutting. The figure was steering the vines. Dutch did not run. She crouched, pulled a loose stone from the path, and threw it hard into a cluster of headstones behind the gazebo. The crash echoed. The hooded figure turned toward the sound. Dutch moved the other way, fast and low, cutting between graves until the fog swallowed her. When she reached the older wing's side door, her hands were shaking but her route was clean. She had lost them. But she also knew, now, that someone at the academy was hunting her trail on purpose — and the vine would wake again tomorrow. She slipped inside before the whispers in her ears changed pitch, urging her down.