Chapter 210: Feathers and Bones

Richard's heart suddenly sank.

The girl had skipped class to hide in an abandoned shed at the deepest end of the campus, doing something alone with a pair of tweezers...

His mind instinctively jumped to the worst possible conclusion.

He circled to the back wall of the shed. A small ventilation window sat there, its oiled paper covering split by several tears.

Bending down, Richard peered through the longest tear.

A piece of linen was draped across a wooden table in the middle of the room.

A few items were lined up in neat, meticulous rows across the cloth:

A scalpel, a pair of tweezers, three glass bottles, a spool of copper wire, and a small brush.

And a dead bird.

The carcass lay dead center on the linen, already stripped down to a bare skeleton and a few scattered tufts of feathers.

The girl sat upright at the table, her sleeves rolled up past her elbows.

Her hair was pinned up, exposing a stretch of remarkably pale neck.

Holding the bird's sternum with her left hand, she used the tweezers in her right to carefully tease a tiny rib free from the residual scraps of flesh.

The tension that had gripped Richard slowly began to ease.

Inside this shed, Lillian was doing the exact opposite of what he had feared.

She was taking a shattered carcass and piecing it back together, bone by bone, into the shape it had held in life.

Richard stood outside the tear for a moment before circling back to the front door.

He raised his hand and rapped his knuckles once against the doorframe.

The faint sounds from inside abruptly stopped.

"...Who is it?"

The girl's voice filtered through the wood, trembling slightly.

"It's me, Richard."

The door cracked open.

Lillian stood behind it, her body blocking the view of the room.

She had hurriedly unrolled her shirt sleeves, though a few faint traces of chemical solution still stained her fingers.

"Can I come in?"

Lillian's lips parted.

"...It doesn't look nice inside."

"I already saw," Richard admitted. "The oiled paper on the back window is torn."

The girl's eyelashes fluttered.

She kept her head lowered in hesitation for a moment before finally stepping aside to leave half the doorway clear.

"Come in."

Richard stepped inside and pulled the door shut behind him, leaving it unlocked.

It was warmer in the shed than out in the cold.

The lamplight illuminated the linen cloth and the half-dismantled bird with stark clarity.

The girl didn't speak. She simply looked at him.

Her grayish-blue eyes held a quiet dejection—the look of someone waiting for a verdict.

"Is it a wren?" he asked.

"I haven't seen any wrens on the path outside the shed. The closest habitat would be the woods to the west."

"...You know about these things?"

Lillian looked at Richard in disbelief.

She had rehearsed scenes of being questioned and looked at with disgust countless times, but she had never anticipated someone actually discussing the subject with her.

"I found it near the edge of the woods yesterday," Lillian said, her voice still very soft.

"It flew into something and broke its neck, but the body was still fairly intact."

Stepping up to the table, Richard noticed a detail.

The workspace went beyond ordinary cleanliness and neatness.

Everything was arranged in strict order. The scalpel and tweezers lay parallel to each other, the distance between their handles precisely the width of two fingers—not a millimeter off.

The glass bottles were positioned in an isosceles triangle, the threads of their caps aligned uniformly to face Lillian's side of the table.

Richard made a mental note of it, casually keeping the conversation going.

"Did you prepare the tools and solutions yourself?"

"Three parts naphtha, one part limewater," the girl answered quickly, a hint of shyness in her voice.

"For birds with a lot of fat, you have to dilute it with distilled water, or the skin turns yellow."

"How long have you been doing this?" Richard asked.

"...A few years now. Since middle school."

He looked around the shed.

In the corner sat a large wooden chest. From where he stood, he could see several rows of glass jars lined up neatly inside.

The top row held birds.

A sparrow, a tit, one that looked like a bullfinch, and a small bird he couldn't name whose wing bones were longer than its body.

Every skeleton held a different pose.

Some had their wings spread in flight; others were curled up asleep.

It wasn't just birds—various small animals filled the rows below.

Richard crouched in front of the chest, scanning them row by row.

A field mouse gnawing, a shrew climbing, a hedgehog curled into a ball, a frog leaping, a serpent slithering, a mole digging...

The animals were all frozen forever in their most vivid moments of life.

"Did you find all of these?" he asked.

"They were all already dead," Lillian answered quickly, terrified he would misunderstand.

"I don't kill them. I only pick up the ones that are already dead.

"By the roadside, in the woods, washed up on the riverbank... I find the most in winter. Birds freeze to death and drop from the trees."

Richard offered no judgment.

He glanced at the chest again, his eyes resting on the top row.

There was a tit up there posed differently from all the other specimens.

The others were flying, jumping, gnawing, or climbing.

That tit, however, stood on a dead twig, its head tilted slightly to one side as if listening to something.

Lillian's gaze followed his line of sight.

"...That was the first one. I found it frozen to death on my windowsill the winter I was twelve."

She walked over, crouched down, and gently tapped the glass jar with her finger.

"Its head was tilted just like that when it died. I didn't change it."

"The ones after that—you changed their poses."

"Mm."

"Why?"

"Because they didn't look pretty when they died."

Lillian lowered her head.

"Birds that freeze to death curl up, their claws clenched tight.

"A hedgehog run over by a car is flattened out, and a drowned field mouse is soaked through—it looks only half the size it was when it was alive."

She looked up at Richard.

"So I change them back."

Richard crouched across from her.

"And after you change them back?"

"Then they stay here forever."

Lillian gazed down at the neatly arranged glass jars.

"They won't rot, they won't fall apart, and they won't be blown away by the wind."

She reached out and pushed the lid of the chest higher, letting more light spill inside.

"I come over to see them a lot. I sit for a while and make sure they're still here."

"When you first came here," Lillian asked suddenly, turning the question on him, "why was it?"

Richard had originally meant to invent a casual excuse.

But Lillian had already laid everything in the room bare for him to see.

"I was looking for a place where no one would think to look for me," he said, the truth slipping out before he could stop it.

Lillian raised her eyes.

"I have a room on the third floor of the library."

"But someone knows that room is mine."

Richard didn't say who that "someone" was.

And Lillian didn't ask.

She pulled the linen cloth on the table toward herself, clearing an empty space on the right side of the desk.

"Then you can use this table, as long as you don't mind sitting across from someone stripping bones."

Richard looked at the cleared space.

The desk wasn't large; holding two people's things would be a little tight, but it was enough.

"I don't mind at all."

He sat down across from her.

Lillian picked her tweezers back up.

She hesitated, clearly debating whether to keep working with Richard watching.

In the end, the tip of the tweezers reached into the wren's chest cavity, clamping onto a section of rib that hadn't been detached yet.

Her movements were slightly slower than before, likely because of the extra pair of eyes watching.

Richard pulled scratch paper and a pencil from his bag, spreading them out on his side of the desk.

He lowered his head and began setting pencil to paper.

The shed fell quiet, the flame of the kerosene lamp flickering every so often.

The sound of tweezers clinking against bone was very faint, like someone ringing a tiny bell.

About twenty minutes later, Lillian dropped the wren's final rib into the bottle of clean water.

She flexed her fingers, wiped the tweezers and scalpel clean, and placed them back into her tin biscuit box.

The spot where each tool was returned was precise to the millimeter.

"That's all for today. The rest has to wait until the bones have soaked long enough before I can continue."

Richard looked up from his scratch paper.

"How many times a week do you come here?"

"It depends. When I have a specimen to process, I come every day. When I don't, two or three times a week."

She placed the glass bottle into a separate small compartment beside the wooden chest.

"I come more often in the winter. More things die in winter."

Richard stood up and pushed his chair back under the desk.

"What about the key?"

Lillian fished a small brass key from her shirt pocket, letting it catch the lamplight.

"The door can be locked from the inside. To lock it from the outside, you need this."

She thought for a moment.

"If you get here first, don't lock the door. When I arrive and see it unlocked, I'll know you're inside.

"If I get here first, I'll lock it from the inside. Just knock."

"Let's set a rhythm for the knock," she added. "So I don't think it's someone else."

"Two short, one long," Richard said.

Lillian nodded and tucked the key back into her pocket.

"Mm."

Richard stood on his side of the table, looking across at Lillian.

He raised his hand and pressed the Silver Ring against his chest through his shirt.

The dimmed lighthouse flickered, its flame leaping just a tiny bit higher.

Lillian's eyes widened.

The light hadn't gone out; someone had simply shielded it.

Richard pulled that wisp of aura back in.

He didn't explain what the ring was, where it came from, or why he wore it.

He simply let the girl know he was alright.

Once they finished packing up, they walked out of the shed one after the other.

The cold outside air rushed in, causing the kerosene lamp's flame to lurch sharply.

The sky had turned completely dark, the boxwood hedges in the garden blurring into indistinct shadows.

At the entrance to the garden, the path split in two.

The left led toward the main gate; the right led toward the side gate.

At the fork, Lillian paused.

"Richard."

"Mm?"

She stood in the twilight, her grayish-blue eyes looking very pale beneath the last fading light of day.

"Just now... thank you for letting me know you're alright."

Richard slipped his hands into his coat pockets.

"You didn't ask what it was, either."

Lillian smiled, her smile just as pale and quiet as her eyes.

"I'm not stupid. I know what I should ask and what I shouldn't."

"See you next week."

"See you next week."

The girl turned and walked down the right-hand path.

Richard stood at the fork, watching her walk away for a moment.

After a dozen steps, her silhouette was completely swallowed by the shadows of the boxwood hedges.

Richard turned and walked to the left.