Page 84 of An Academy for Liars

It was either her life or Ian’s.

Lennon threw out a hand, mashed theDoor Closebutton.

The doors clamped shut on Ian with the sickening crunch of breaking bones. He cut a dry and withering cry, his rib cage crushed between the elevator doors. The two of them locked eyes for just a moment, and Ian stretched out his hand, as though he wanted her to take it, pull him out from between the clamped doors. She thought for a moment he was going to beg, or apologize, even. But all he did was point at her and say: “You’re nothing.”

Lennon nodded. To herself, then to him.

And the cabin plunged into free fall, tearing Ian in two.

Lennon woke inthe infirmary with Ian’s blood matted into her hairline and Dante sitting in a chair beside her bed, his forearms braced on his knees. The memories of what had occurred in the clock tower flooded back to her. She remembered Ian’s torso, crudely severed from his legs, the tangle of intestines at his ravaged waist, the way that he’d slipped, twitching, to the floor and how he’d struggled there for a few excruciating moments before passing, the elevator lights dying when he did, and how they’d fallen together for some time in the darkness, before the cabin had slowed to a stop in the upper hallway of Logos House. It had been Emerson who’d found her, staggering over the viscera of Ian’s remains, slick with his blood and numb with shock. Her memories had faded into nothing after that, and how she had come to be in this bed, with Dante keeping vigil at her side, was a mystery to her.

“I’m sorry,” she said, and began to cry.

“Hush,” said Dante, not unkindly, and he took her hand and held it between both of his. She could’ve sworn the moths tattooed on thebacks of his hands beat their wings. “Tell me honestly, was it an accident? If you lie, I’ll know, and so will they.”

“He attacked me,” said Lennon. “And I…I made the doors close on him, then I sent the cabin down while he was still trapped between them. I don’t know why I did that. Why did I do that?”

“Listen to me,” said Dante, lowering his voice now, “I’m going to get you out, but you should know that the position you’re in right now is dangerous.” He nodded to the doors of the infirmary, and Lennon saw that there were two people posted outside, men she didn’t know.

“We’ll have to be quick,” said Dante, talking now to himself more than to her. “They’ll be looking for you. Not just them but anyone else on the campus who got the same memo I did. All the faculty, admin, even the custodial staff. Word will be spreading through the student body as well, by way of Ian’s friends. I can momentarily wipe clean the minds of anyone who sees you, but I can’t hold them all forever, or make them all forget what they know to be true. So you’ll have to raise a gate quickly. There’s no time to waste.”

“I can’t call another elevator.”

“Lennon—”

“I won’t. It’s too dangerous.”

Dante contemplated this. Spoke after a long beat. “You know the parking lot where I dropped you off at the start of this semester? Can you reach it on your own?”

“Yes…but what about them?” She nodded to the men at the door. Somehow, they seemed oblivious to her and Dante, as though the former was still asleep, and the latter wasn’t there at all. And Lennon found herself wondering if Dante had cast an illusion, drawn some sort of shroud of obscurity around the both of them, to hide the fact that they were talking.

“I’ll handle them. Now hurry up. We’re running out of time.”

Lennon got out of bed. Dante lent her a jacket, which she slipped on over her hospital gown, and—barefoot—she tiptoed toward the doors of the infirmary. To her shock, the men parted to make way for her, and as Lennon moved past them, she saw that their eyes had rolled back into their sockets, showing only the whites. Their mouths had fallen open, and their lips were slick with spit. They looked familiar in the way that a relative does, lying in a casket at a funeral, their faces waxy and drawn.

As Lennon moved past them and through the halls of the infirmary, and outside into the school grounds, the gazes of almost everyone slid over her slick as oil. Those who did register her—the administrative assistant in the lobby of the infirmary, the custodian sweeping the corridor—paused only briefly before casting away with a violence, as though she were an abomination, too terrible to be looked at. Such was the power of Dante’s illusion.

There was only one person who seemed unaffected by the illusion Dante had cast: Alec Becker. He strode through the campus at a rapid pace, toward Lennon. She froze there in the middle of the breezeway and raised the walls of her mind, which felt about as flimsy as soggy cardboard in the wake of Alec, a man who could bring her and half the campus to heel with a passing thought. He was the only person at Drayton, apart from perhaps Eileen, whose power could rival that of Dante’s. But to her surprise, Alec didn’t register her. His gaze slid over her as he brisked past, heading—Lennon noted—toward the infirmary she’d just left. Where she and Dante had parted.

The moment Alec disappeared from her periphery, Lennon broke into a run. Upon reaching the faculty parking lot, she paced through the assortment of vehicles—rust-eaten pickup trucks, sleek electric sports cars, an Airstream camper bus—until she found Dante’s Audi. The door unlocked of its own accord as she approached. She slippedinto the passenger side and sank low, flattening herself against the leather seat to avoid being seen.

Dante appeared minutes later with a bleeding nose and the deranged and exhilarated air of someone who had successfully robbed a bank. He slammed the door shut behind him and didn’t bother to buckle his seat belt before fitting the key into the ignition and peeling backward out of the parking lot. They turned out onto the road, and the trees smeared past the windows in a blur. Lennon—pinned to her seat and weeping silently—could not help but think that this was all too easy, and that someone, or something, had decided to let them go.

The sun hadset by the time they arrived at Dante’s home, on a ragged stretch of the South Carolina coastline. It was a ranch with a low-slung roof, half-overgrown with ivy and great flowering tangles of honeysuckle, flocked by wasps. The living room looked like an extension of Dante’s office back at Drayton. There was a well-worn leather couch, sagging a bit in the middle. On the edge of the coffee table was a metal ashtray fashioned into the shape of a large fly. The eastern wall of the living room had a run of floor-to-ceiling windows that looked out onto the black and glistening waters of the ocean. Unlike Dante’s townhome in Drayton, this place had a decidedly lived-in quality. It smelled like him, felt like him in a way that immediately put Lennon at ease.

Dante showed her into the guest room. It was quaint, with a queen-sized bed bracketed by two barrel nightstands and French doors that opened out onto a small, private patio. From that patio led a narrow path that threaded through the marsh and down to the beach.

“I’ll give you some time to wash up,” said Dante, and he set a stack of folded towels on the bathroom countertop. “Holler if you need anything.”

Alone, Lennon took a long shower in the adjoining bathroom, relishing the steam and the heat of the water, scrubbing herself clean and raw. She climbed into bed and fell asleep to the gentle rush and draw of the ocean, the sound of waves storming the ragged scrap of beach beyond the dunes. In her dreams, there were dead things in the water—limbs and viscera drained of blood; bones picked almost clean by crabs and the other things that scuttled and lurked in the dark of the ocean, waiting to subsume the corpses.

She woke up screaming, with Dante by her side, her hand held firmly in his.

“You lied to me,” she said to him, her voice thick both with sleep and the tears she was holding back. “All those months ago, you said I wouldn’t have to hurt anyone. You lied. Why did you lie to me?”

“I thought I’d lose you if I didn’t,” said Dante. “And even back then I knew a talent like yours was too great to waste.”

“But you knew I’d hurt people?”

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