Текст книги "Welcome to Shadowhunter Academy"

Автор книги: Cassandra Clare

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“You had your dagger,” added Scarsbury casually, and walked away, leaving Simon to call after him.

“My—my bear-killing dagger? Do you really think me killing bears with a dagger is a plausible scenario? What information do you have about bears in these woods? I think it’s your responsibility as an educator to tell me if there are bears in the woods.”

“See you at javelin practice bright and early, Lewis,” said Scarsbury, and marched on without looking back.

“Are there bears in the woods?” Simon repeated to himself. “It’s a simple question. Why are Shadowhunters so bad at simple questions?”

*    *    *

The days passed in a blur of horrible violent activity. If it wasn’t javelin practice, Simon was getting thrown around a room (George was very apologetic later, but that did not help). If it wasn’t dagger work, it was more swordplay and humiliating defeat before the blades of tiny, evil trainee Shadowhunters. If it wasn’t swordplay, it was the obstacle course, and Simon refused to speak of the obstacle course. Julie and Jon were growing noticeably cool at mealtimes, and a few comments about mundies were passed.

At last Simon staggered wearily to the next exercise in futility and sharp objects, and Scarsbury placed a bow in his hands.

“I want everyone to try to hit the targets,” said Scarsbury. “And, Lewis, I want you to try not to hit any of the other trainees.”

Simon felt the weight of the bow in his hands. It had a nice balance, he thought, easy to lift and manipulate. He nocked the arrow, and felt the tautness of the string, ready to release, primed to let it fly along the path Simon wanted.

He drew his arm back, and it was that easy: bull’s-eye. He fired once more, and then again, arrows flying to find their targets, and his arms burned and his heart pounded with something like joy. He was glad to be able to feel his muscles working and his heart thumping. He was so glad to be alive again, and able to feel every moment of this.

Simon lowered his bow to find everybody staring at him.

“Can you do that again?” asked Scarsbury.

He’d learned to shoot arrows in summer camp, but standing here holding a bow, he remembered something else. He remembered breathing, his heart beating, Shadowhunters watching him. He’d still been human then, a mundane they all despised, but he’d killed a demon. He remembered: He’d seen something had to be done, and he’d done it.

A guy not so different from who he was now.

Simon felt a smile spread across his face, hurting his cheeks. “Yeah. I think I can.”

Julie and Jon were both much more friendly over dinner than they had been for the last few days. Simon told them about killing the demon, what he remembered, and Jon offered to teach him some swordplay tricks.

“I would really love to hear more about your adventures,” said Julie. “Whatever you can remember. Especially if they involve Jace Herondale. Do you know how he got that sexy scar on his throat?”

“Ah,” said Simon. “Actually . . . yes. Actually . . . that was me.”

Everybody stared at him.

“I might have bitten him. A tiny bit. It was more like a nibble, really.”

“Was he delicious?” asked Julie, after a thoughtful pause. “He looks like he would be delicious.”

“Um,” said Simon. “He’s not a juice box.”

Beatriz nodded earnestly. Both the girls seemed very interested in this discussion. Too interested. Their eyes were glazed.

“Did you maybe climb on top of him slowly and then lower your head to his tender, pulsing throat?” Beatriz said. “Could you feel the heat radiating off his body and into yours?”

“Did you lick his throat before you bit him?” Julie asked. “Oh, and did you get a chance to feel his biceps?” She shrugged. “I’m just curious about, you know, vampire techniques.”

“I imagine Simon was both gentle and commanding during his special moment with Jace,” said Beatriz dreamily. “I mean, it was special, wasn’t it?”

“No!” said Simon. “I can’t stress that enough. I’ve bitten several Shadowhunters. I bit Isabelle Lightwood and Alec Lightwood; biting Jace was not a tender and unique moment!”

“You bit Isabelle and Alec Lightwood?!” asked Julie, who was starting to sound freaked-out. “What did the Lightwoods ever do to you?”

“Wow,” said George. “I imagined the demon realms were fearsome and terrifying, but seems like it was pretty much nonstop nom nom nom.”

“That is not how it was!” Simon said.

“Can we stop talking about this?” Jon demanded, his voice sharp. “I’m sure you all did what you had to do, but the idea of Shadowhunters being prey for a Downworlder is disgusting.”

Simon did not love the way Jon said “Downworlder,” as if the words “Downworlder” and “disgusting” were more or less the same thing. But maybe it was natural for Jon to be disturbed. Simon could remember being disturbed about it himself. Simon hadn’t wanted to make his friends into his prey, either.

Today had gone pretty well. Simon didn’t want to ruin it. He decided he was in a good enough mood to let it go.

Simon felt better about the Academy until that night, when he woke from a doze to a deluge of memory.

The memories hit like that sometimes, not in sharp tiny jabs but in an insistent and terrible cascade. He had thought of his former roommate before. He’d known he’d had a friend, a roommate, named Jordan, and that Jordan had been killed. But he hadn’t recalled the feelings of it—the way Jordan had taken him in when his mother had barred her door, talking about Maia with Jordan, hearing Clary laugh that Jordan was cute, talking to Jordan, patient and kind and always seeing Simon as more than a job, more than a vampire. He remembered seeing Jordan and Jace snarl at each other and then play video games like idiots, and Jordan finding him sleeping in a garage, and Jordan looking at Maia with such regret.

And he remembered holding Jordan’s Praetor Lupus pendant in his hands, in Idris, after Jordan was dead. Simon had held that pendant again since then, once he had regained some of his memories, feeling the weight of it and wondering what the Latin motto meant.

He had known Jordan was his roommate, and known he was one of the many casualties of the war.

He had never truly felt the weight of it, until now.

The sheer weight of memory made him feel as if stones were being piled on his chest, crushing him. Simon couldn’t breathe. He erupted from his sheets, swinging his legs over the side of the bed, his feet hitting the stone floor with a shock of cold.

“Wuzz—wuzzit?” mumbled George. “Did the possum come back?”

“Jordan’s dead,” Simon said bleakly, and put his face in his hands.

There was a silence.

George did not ask him who Jordan had been, or why he suddenly cared. Simon would not have known how to explain the tangle of grief and guilt in his chest: how he hated himself for forgetting Jordan, even though he could not have helped it, how this was like finding out Jordan was dead for the first time and like having a scarred-over wound reopened, both at once. There was a bitter taste in Simon’s mouth, like old, old blood.

George reached out and put a hand on Simon’s shoulder. He kept it there, grip firm, hand warm and steady, something to anchor Simon in the cold, dark night of memory.

“I’m sorry,” he whispered. Simon was sorry too.

*    *    *

At dinner the next day, it was soup again. It had been soup for every meal for many days now. Simon did not remember a life before soup, and he despaired of ever achieving a life after soup. Simon wondered if the Shadowhunters had runes to protect against scurvy.

Their usual group was clustered around their usual table, chatting, when Jon said: “I wish we were being taught about demons by someone with less of an agenda, if you know what I mean.”

“Uh,” said Simon, who mostly sat through their classes on demons through the ages in deep relief that he was not being asked to move. “Don’t we all have the same . . . demon-hunting . . . agenda?”

“You know what I mean,” Jon said. “We’ve got to be taught about the past crimes of warlocks as well. We have to fight the Downworlders, too. It’s naive to pretend they’re all tame.”

“The Downworlders,” Simon repeated. The soup turned to ashes in his mouth, which was actually an improvement. “Like vampires?”

“No!” said Julie hastily. “Vampires are great. They have, you know, class. Compared to the other Downworlders. But if you’re talking about creatures like werewolves, Simon, you must see they’re not exactly our kind of people. If you can call them people at all.”

She said “werewolves” and Simon could not help but think of Jordan, flinching as if he’d been struck and unable to keep his mouth shut a moment longer.

Simon pushed his bowl of soup away and shoved his chair back.

“Don’t tell me about what I must, Julie,” he said coldly. “I must inform you there are werewolves worth a hundred of your and Jon’s Shadowhunter asses. I must say that I am sick to the teeth of you insulting mundanes and telling me I’m your special pet exception, as if I want to be the pet of people who bully kids younger and weaker than they are. And I must tell you, you’d better hope this Academy works out and mundanes like me Ascend, because from all I can see of you, the next generation of Shadowhunters is going to be nothing without us.”

He looked toward George, the way he looked to George to share jokes in class and over meals, to see if George agreed with him at all.

George was staring at his plate.

“Come on, man,” he muttered. “Don’t—don’t do this. They’ll make you move rooms. Just sit down, and everybody can apologize, and we can go on as we were.”

Simon took a deep breath, absorbed the disappointment, and said: “I don’t want things to go on as they were. I want things to change.”

He turned away from the table, from all of them, marched over to where the dean and Scarsbury were sitting, and announced at the top of his voice: “Dean Penhallow, I want to be placed in the stream for mundanes.”

“What?” Scarsbury exclaimed. “The dregs?”

The dean dropped her spoon into her soup with a noisy splash. “The mundane course, Mr. Scarsbury, if you please! Do not refer to our students in that manner. I’m glad you came to me with this, Simon,” she said after a moment of hesitation. “I understand you may be having difficulties with the course, given your mundane nature, but—”

“It’s not that I’m having difficulty,” said Simon. “It’s that I’d rather not associate with the elite Shadowhunter families. I just don’t think they’re my kind of people.”

His voice rang out against the stone ceiling. There were a lot of young kids staring at him. One was little Marisol, regarding him with a startled, thoughtful expression. Nobody said anything. They just looked.

“Okay, I’ve said all I had to say, I’m feeling bashful, and I’m gonna go now,” Simon said, and fled the room.

He almost walked right into Catarina Loss, who had been watching from the doorway.

“Sorry,” he mumbled.

“Don’t be,” Catarina said. “In fact, I’m going to come with you. I’ll help you pack.”

“What?” Simon asked, hurrying after her. “I actually have to move?”

“Yeah, they put the dregs in the underground level,” Catarina said.

“They put some kids in the dungeons, and nobody has ever pointed out that this is a disgusting system before now?”

“Is it?” asked Catarina. “Do tell me more about the Shadowhunters, and their occasional tendency to be unfair. I will find it fascinating and surprising. Their excuse is that the lower levels are easier to defend, for the kids who cannot fight as well as their fellow students.”

She strode into Simon’s room and looked around for his things.

“I actually haven’t unpacked very much,” Simon said. “I was afraid of the possum in the wardrobe.”

“The what?”

“George and I found it very mysterious too,” Simon told her earnestly, picking up his bag and stuffing in the few things he had left lying out. He wouldn’t want to forget his lady gear.

“Well,” Catarina said. “Whatever about possums. The point I want to make is . . . I may have gotten you wrong, Simon.”

Simon blinked. “Oh?”

Catarina smiled at him. It was astonishing, like a blue sunrise. “I was not looking forward to coming to teach here. Shadowhunters and Downworlders do not get along, and I try to keep myself more separated from the Nephilim even than most others of my kind. But I had a dear friend called Ragnor Fell, who used to live in Idris and taught in the Academy for decades before it was closed. He never had the greatest opinion of Shadowhunters, but he was fond of this place. I—lost him recently, and I knew this place could not operate without teachers. I wanted to do something in memory of him, even though I hated the idea of teaching a pack of arrogant Nephilim brats. But I loved my friend more than I hate Shadowhunters.”

Simon nodded. He thought of his remembrance of Jordan, thought of how it hurt to even look at Isabelle and Clary. Without memory, they were lost. And nobody wanted someone they loved to be lost.

“So I may have been a little cranky about coming,” Catarina admitted. “I may have been a little cranky about you, because—from all I know, you didn’t think much of being a vampire. And now you’re cured, what a miracle, and the Shadowhunters are so quick to pull you into the fold. You truly get to be one of them, what you always wanted. You had the stain of being one of us wiped away.”

“I didn’t . . . ,” Simon said, and swallowed. “I can’t remember it all. So it’s like defending the actions of someone else sometimes.”

“Must be frustrating.”

Simon laughed. “You have no idea. I don’t—I didn’t want to be a vampire, I don’t think. I wouldn’t want to be made one again. Being stuck at age sixteen when all my friends and my family would’ve grown up without me; having the urge to—to hurt people? I didn’t want any of that. But—look, I don’t remember much, but I remember enough. I remember I was a person back then, just as much as I am now. Becoming a Shadowhunter won’t change that, if I ever do become a Shadowhunter. I’ve forgotten enough. I will not forget that.”

He lifted his bag onto his shoulder, and gestured for Catarina to lead the way to his new room. She did, descending down stone steps Simon had figured were to the basement. He had not figured they kept kids in the basement.

It was dark on the stairs. Simon put a hand to the wall to steady himself, and then snatched it back.

“Oh, disgusting!”

“Yes, most of the subterranean surfaces are coated in black slime,” said Catarina, in a matter-of-fact tone. “Watch yourself.”

“Thank you. Thanks for that warning.”

“You’re welcome,” said Catarina, a hint of a laugh in her voice. For the first time, it occurred to Simon that Catarina might actually be nice. “You said—if you ever do become a Shadowhunter. Are you thinking about leaving?”

“Now that I’ve touched the slime, I am,” Simon muttered. “No. I don’t know what I want, except that I don’t want to give up yet.”

He almost reconsidered when Catarina led him to his room. It was much darker than the last room, though laid out in the same way. The wooden bedposts of the two narrow beds looked decayed, and in the corners of the room the black slime had grown almost viscous, turning into tiny black slime waterfalls.

“I don’t remember hell all that well,” Simon said. “But I think I recall it was nicer than this.”

Catarina laughed, then shocked Simon by leaning in and giving him a peck on the cheek. “Good luck, Daylighter,” she told him, laughing at his expression. “And whatever you do, don’t use the bathrooms on this floor. Not on any floor, obviously, but especially on this one!”

Simon did not ask her to explain, because he was terrified. He sat down on his new bed, and then stood hastily back up at the resulting long creak and cloud of dust. Hey, at least this time he didn’t have a roommate—he was king of this claustrophobic, slimy domain. He set his mind to unpacking. The wardrobe in this room was actually clean and empty, which was a definite improvement. Simon might go live in the wardrobe with his funny T-shirts.

He was long finished unpacking by the time George sauntered in, dragging his suitcase behind him and bearing his broken racket on his shoulder like a sword. “Hey, man.”

“Hey,” Simon said cautiously. “Er, what—what are you doing here?”

George dumped his suitcase and his racket on the slimy floor, and threw himself down on the bed. He stretched luxuriously, ignoring the ominous creak of the bed beneath him.

“The thing is, the advanced course is actually pretty hard,” George said, as Simon started to smile. “And you may have heard: Lovelaces are quitters.”

*    *    *

Simon was even more relieved to have George the next day, so they could sit together rather than at one of the tables of thirteen-year-old mundanes, who were all giving them the side-eye when they were not whispering brokenly about their phones.

The day brightened further when Beatriz plopped down at their new table as well.

“I’m not going to drop out of advanced training to follow you around like Curlytop here,” Beatriz announced, “but we can still be friends, right?”

She pulled George’s hair affectionately.

“Be careful,” George said in a tired, humble voice. “I did not sleep in our small, slimy room. There is, I believe, a creature living in our walls. I hear it. Scuttling. I have to admit, I may not have made the brightest decision in following Simon. It’s possible I’m not that bright. It’s possible that looks are all I have.”

“Actually . . . even though I’m not willing to follow you into boring classes and the endless disrespect of my classmates . . . I think it was a very cool thing you did, Simon,” said Beatriz.

She smiled, teeth flashing white against her brown skin, and her smile was warm and admiring,—about the nicest thing Simon had seen all day.

“You’re right, our morals are sound even though our walls are infested. And we’ll still have some interesting classes, Si,” George said. “Plus, don’t worry, we still get sent on missions to fight demons and rogue Downworlders.”

Simon choked on his soup. “I was not worrying about that. Are any of our teachers at all worried that sending out people with no superpowers to fight demons might prove just a teeny bit, not to put too fine a point on it, fatal?”

“They have to face trials of courage before they must face Ascension,” said Beatriz. “Better for them to drop out because they are scared, or even because a demon ate their leg, than to have them try to Ascend without being suitable, and die in the attempt.”

“That’s a cool, cheerful, and normal thing to say,” Simon said. “Shadowhunters are great at saying normal things.”

“Well, I’m looking forward to the missions,” said George. “And tomorrow a Shadowhunter is coming in to give a guest lecture on the lesser utilized weapons. I hope there’ll be a practical demonstration.”

“Not in a classroom,” said Beatriz. “Think of what one heavy-duty crossbow could do to the walls.”

That was all the warning Simon got before he clattered happily into class the next day, George on his heels, and found Dean Penhallow already there, talking with nervous good cheer. The classroom was very full—both the regular stream and the mundane stream were in attendance.

“—despite her tender years, a Shadowhunter of some renown and noted expertise with less used weapons such as the whip. May I welcome to Shadowhunter Academy our first guest lecturer: Isabelle Lightwood!”

Isabelle turned, sleek black hair flaring around her shoulders and black skirt flaring around her pale legs. She was wearing glittery plum lipstick, so dark it looked almost black. Her eyes did look black, but another small knife of memory pierced Simon, of course at the worst time possible: he remembered the colors of her eyes from close up, very dark brown, like brown velvet, so close to black as to make no difference, but with paler rings of color . . .

He stumbled over to his desk, and folded into his chair with a thump.

*    *    *

When the dean left, Isabelle turned and regarded her class with absolute contempt.

“I am not actually here to instruct any of you idiots,” she told them, walking up and down the rows of desks. “If you want to use a whip, train with one, and if you lose an ear, don’t be a big whiny baby.”

Several of the boys nodded, as if hypnotized. Almost all the boys were watching Isabelle as if they were a nest of snakes intent on being charmed. Some of the girls were watching her that way too.

“I am here,” Isabelle announced, finishing her prowl of the perimeter and turning to face them all again with snapping eyes, “to determine my relationship.”

Simon goggled. She couldn’t be talking about him. Could she?

“Do you see that man?” Isabelle asked, pointing at Simon. Apparently she was talking about him. “That’s Simon Lewis, and he is my boyfriend. So if any of you think about trying to hurt him because he’s a mundie or—may the Angel have mercy on your soul—pursuing him romantically, I will come after you, I will hunt you down, and I will crush you to powder.”

“We’re just bros,” said George hastily.

Beatriz edged her desk away from Simon’s.

Isabelle lowered her hand. The flush of excitement was receding from her face as well, as though she had come to say what she had said, and now that she was out of adrenaline she was actually processing what had come out of her mouth.

“I am going to go now,” Isabelle announced. “Thank you for your attention. Class dismissed.”

She turned and walked out of the room.

“I have to—” Simon began, rising from his desk on legs that felt a little unsteady. “I have to go.”

“Yeah, you do,” George said.

Simon went out the door, and ran down the stone corridors of the Academy. He knew Isabelle was fast, so he ran, faster than he’d ever run on the training grounds, and he caught up to her in the hall. She stopped in the dim light of the stained-glass window as he called her name.

“Isabelle!”

She stood waiting for him. Her lips parted and gleamed, like plums under a winter frost, ready to be tasted. Simon could see himself running up to her, catching her in his arms, and kissing her mouth, knowing what it had taken for her to do that—his brave, brilliant Isabelle—and carried away in a whirl of love and joy, but he saw it as if through a pane of glass, as if looking into another dimension, one he could see but not quite touch.

Simon felt a hot pang of grief through his whole body, not just through his chest, as if he had been struck by lightning. But he had to say it.

“I’m not your boyfriend, Isabelle,” he called out.

She went white. Simon was horrified by how badly his words had come out.

“I mean, I can’t be your boyfriend, Isabelle,” he said. “I’m not him—that guy who was your boyfriend. That guy you want.”

He almost said: I wish I could be. He had wished he could be. That was why he had come to the Academy, to learn how to be that guy they all wanted back. He’d wanted to be that way, be an awesome hero like in a game or a movie. He’d been so sure, at first, that was what he wanted.

Except wishing he could be that guy was like wishing to obliterate the guy he was now: the normal, happy guy in a band, who could still love his mother, who did not wake up in the coldest, darkest hour of the night weeping for dead friends.

And he did not know if he could be that guy she wanted, whether he wished it or not.

“You remember everything, and I—I don’t remember enough,” Simon went on. “I hurt you when I don’t mean to, and I thought I could come to the Academy and come back better, but it’s not looking good. The whole game has changed. My skill level has decreased and the difficulty level has been jacked up to impossible—”

“Simon,” Isabelle interrupted, “you’re talking like a nerd.”

She said it almost fondly, but it freaked Simon out more. “And I don’t know how to be smooth, sexy vampire Simon for you, either!”

Isabelle’s perfect mouth curved, like a dark half-moon in her pale face. “You were never that smooth, Simon.”

“Oh,” said Simon. “Oh, thank God. I know you’ve had a lot of boyfriends. I remember there was a faerie, and”—another flash of memory, this time most unwelcome—“a . . . Lord Montgomery? You dated a member of the nobility? How am I ever going to compete with that?”

Isabelle still looked fond, but it was diluted with a good deal of impatience. “You’re Lord Montgomery, Simon!”

“I don’t understand,” said Simon. “When you’re made a vampire, are you also given a title?”

Maybe that made sense. Vampires were aristocratic.

Isabelle put her fingers up to touch her brow. It was a gesture that seemed like disdainful weariness, like Isabelle was tired of all this, but Simon saw the way her eyes closed, as if she could not look at him when she spoke. “It was just a joke between you and me, Simon.”

Simon was tired of all this: of knowing pieces of her so well and others not at all, of knowing he was not what she wanted.

“No,” he said. “It was a joke between you and him.”

“You are him, Simon!”

“I’m not,” Simon told her. “I don’t—I don’t know how to be, that’s what I’ve been realizing all this time. I thought I could learn to be him, but since I got to the Academy I learned that I can’t. I can’t experience everything we did over again. I’m never going to be the guy who did all that. I’m going to do different things. I’m going to be a different guy.”

“Once you Ascend, you’ll get all your memories back!” Isabelle shouted at him.

“If I Ascend, it will be in two years. I’m not going to be the same guy in two years, even if I do get all the memories back, because there will be so many other memories. You’re not going to be the same girl. I know you believed in me, Isabelle, I know you believed because you—you cared about him. That means more than I can tell you. But, Isabelle, Isabelle, it isn’t fair of me to take advantage of your belief. It isn’t fair to keep you waiting for him, when he isn’t ever coming back.”

Isabelle had her arms crossed, fingers curled into the dark plum velvet of her own jacket as if she was offering herself comfort. “None of this is fair. It isn’t fair that part of your life was ripped from you. It’s not fair that you were ripped away from me. I’m so angry, Simon.”

Simon took a step toward her and took one of her hands, uncurling her fingers from her jacket. He did not take her in his arms but he stood a little distance away from her, their hands linked across the distance. Her trembling mouth sparkled, and so did her eyelashes. He did not know if this was indomitable Isabelle crying, or whether it was sparkly mascara. All he knew was that she shone, like a constellation in the shape of a girl.

“Isabelle,” he said. “Isabelle.”

She was so much herself, and he had scarcely any idea who he was.

“Do you know why you’re here?” she demanded.

He just looked at her. There were so many things that question could mean, and so many ways to answer.

“I mean at the Academy,” she said. “Do you know why you want to be a Shadowhunter?”

He hesitated. “I wanted to be that guy again,” he said. “That hero that you all remember . . . and this seems like a training school for heroes.”

“It’s not,” Isabelle said flatly. “It’s a training school for Shadowhunters. And yeah, I think that’s a pretty cool thing, and yeah, I think protecting the world is pretty heroic. But there are cowardly Shadowhunters and evil Shadowhunters and hopeless Shadowhunters. If you’re going to get through the Academy, you have to figure out why you want to be a Shadowhunter and what that means to you, Simon. Not just why you want to be special.”

He winced, but it was true. “You’re right. I don’t know. I know that I want to be here. I know I need to be here. Believe me, if you’d seen the bathrooms, you’d know I didn’t make this decision lightly.”

She gave him a withering look.

“But,” he said, “I don’t know why. I don’t know myself well enough yet. I know what I said to you, at first, and I know what you hoped. That I could turn back into who I was before. I was really wrong and I am really sorry.”

“Sorry?” Isabelle demanded. “Do you know what a big deal it was for me to come here, to make a fool of myself in front of all these people? Do you know—of course you don’t. You don’t want me to believe in you? You don’t want me to choose you?”

Isabelle pulled her hands away from him, turned her face away as she had in the garden of the Institute that was her home. This time Simon knew it was absolutely his fault.

She was already leaving as she said:

“Have it your way, Simon Lewis. I won’t.”

*    *    *

Simon was so depressed after Isabelle had gone—after he had driven her away—that he didn’t think he’d ever move off his cot bed again. He lay there, listening to George chatter and scrub the walls. He’d removed an impressive amount of the slime.

Simon retreated to where he believed nobody would ever find him. He went and sat in the bathroom. The stone flags were cracked in the bathrooms; there was something dark in one of the toilets. Simon hoped it was just a result of people throwing away the soup.

He had half an hour of peace in the bathroom, alone with the horrible toilets, until George poked his head around the door.

“Hey, buddy,” said George. “Do not use these bathrooms. I cannot stress that enough.”

“I’m not going to use the bathroom,” Simon said drearily. “I’m a mess, but I’m not an idiot. I just wanted to be alone and think depressing thoughts. You want to know a secret?”

George was silent for a moment. “If you want to tell me. You don’t have to. We all have secrets.”

“I chased away the most amazing girl I have ever met, because I’m too much of a loser to manage being myself. That’s my secret: I want to be a hero, but I’m not one. Everybody thinks I’m some amazing warrior who summoned angels and rescued Shadowhunters and saved the world, but it’s a joke. I can’t even remember what I did. I can’t imagine how I did it. I’m no one special, and no one’s going to be fooled for long, and I don’t even know what I’m doing here. So. You have a secret that can beat that?”

There was a low gurgle from one of the toilets. Simon did not even look toward it. He was not interested in investigating that sound.

“I’m not a Shadowhunter at all,” George said in a rush.