Page 106 of An Academy for Liars

The smell of death was a stain on the air.

“Blaine?”

She turned, her eyes—filled with tears—flashed wide with shock. “Lennon? You can’t be here.”

From the bed, a horrible sound: bones shifting and popping. The man gave a congested groan, and when he did the floor groaned too, bowing a little beneath Lennon’s bare feet, the give so slight it was almost imperceptible.

It was a familiar feeling. Months ago, when she’d gotten high, she’d sensed the same thing, had been convinced that the ground itself was breathing. She felt this again now, as she stared at the man, and realized in awe and horror that the floor was moving in time with his rattling breaths.

A shivering rise.

A sharp fall.

The house, the entire campus, was breathing with him.

“Who is he?” said Lennon, staring at the man on the bed.

“This is William,” she said. “Our chancellor and gatekeeper.”

Another one of William’s bones broke with an audible pop. He writhed, and Lennon was surprised he even had the strength to do that, given how gaunt he was.

“So this is what it means to be a gatekeeper,” said Lennon, and all of the pieces slotted neatly into place. Dante’s insistence that she learn to open gates to the past. Eileen’s keen interest in her. Benedict’s keen investment in her education, as if the whole world depended on her ability to raise gates, becausehisdid. The campus needed a gatekeeper, an engine to keep the gates up in perpetuity.

Persuasion was a living power. If Lennon passed out, her elevator gates disappeared. If she lost focus, the tether of her will snapped like a broken thread. Someone, some gatekeeper, had to be alive to keep the gates around the school raised. And here he was—a shell of a man, his bones breaking under the power of his own will—the engine that kept the school running.

Because power like that didn’t come for free. Someone had to suffer for it.

First it was William.

And when he died…her.

“This is why you asked me to run away with you,” said Lennon, turning to Blaine with tears in her eyes. “You knew. You’ve known all along what they wanted me to become. This is where you go every night. Isn’t it? This is what you do? You sit here and you tend this corpse—”

“Don’t call him that.”

“—knowing that I’ll be the next one.”

“I wanted to tell you. I tried even, but…” Blaine’s mouth wavered, and she choked, gagged, when she tried to say more. Lennon realized,horrified, that she’d been tied. It wasn’t that Blaine didn’t want to tell her—it was that shecouldn’t.

Blaine clamped her jaw shut, and stalked across the room. She snatched a pen and a slip of paper from the bedside table and attempted to write, and Lennon watched as her hand tightened, bloodless, around the pen, her fingers spasming, pressing down on the nib so hard it snapped and ink spilled across the page.

But Blaine didn’t give up. Face screwed with pain, she dragged a knuckle through the ink, smearing a single word:run.

Lennon fled downthe hall of memories. The doors blurred on either side of her, and the hallway’s end seemed to shrink farther and farther into the distance the longer she ran until she collapsed, panting. And that was when she saw it, the only door on the hallway left ajar, a glimpse of stairs behind it. She drew it open, slowly, and immediately sensed that this passage wasn’t a gate. The energy on one side of the threshold and the other was the same. When she stepped up into the stairwell, she didn’t feel dizzy the way she did when crossing between places and times.

The stairs were steep and uneven. With every step, Lennon had to pause a moment, to shore up her footing and regain her balance before proceeding. She was grateful when she emerged from the passage into another wide hall on the upper floor of the house. She turned and faced a large wraparound balcony. Dante was standing there, leaning against its railing, a cigarette in his hand.

“How much do you know?” he asked, as Lennon approached.

Lennon, who could barely speak for the tears, just shook her head.

But he nodded, like she’d actually answered. “Who told you?”

“I figured it out myself.”

The ground gave another tremor. The glass panes of the windows shivered in their casing.

“You brought me here to replace him,” Lennon managed to say.

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