Page 85 of An Academy for Liars

“Yes,” said Dante. “I had a feeling.”

“I should’ve never been allowed to stay at Drayton. You should’ve extracted my memories like Eileen told you to. If you had, Ian would still be alive.”

Dante merely shrugged. “His life isn’t worth half as much as yours is.”

“He was brilliant.”

“And possessive and unhinged, and he would’ve been a thorn in your side for as long as he was alive to hurt you.” Dante pressed to his feet, dropping her hand. “You did what you needed to do.”

Lennon wanted to believe that was true, but her thoughts keptreturning to Ian, one hand outstretched, in his final moments. If she’d pressed the button to open the doors—or if she’d never pressed the button to close them in the first place—Ian wouldn’t have been torn apart. Deep down, she knew she hadn’t acted solely out of necessity. Ian wasn’t dead by accident or ambivalence. He was dead because shechoseto close the doors of that elevator.

“What happens now? Is anyone going to come for me?”

“Not if you stay here,” said Dante. “Drayton is their domain. This house is mine, and they know that. You’re safe here.”

But Lennon didn’t want to be safe. What she wanted—even after all of this—was to return to Drayton, the only place where she’d ever really belonged. “I want to go back—”

“Lennon—”

“I have to go back. Take me back now. I’ll face the hearing, or Eileen. I’ll do whatever I have to, but I can’t risk expulsion—”

“It’s not safe for you there. You need to be patient.”

“Patient?You don’t understand. At Drayton I’m something. But out here, without it, I’m nobody. Nothing. I won’t go back to that. To being pathetic, to being no one.”

“I do understand,” said Dante. “Better than you know. But this isn’t the end for you—”

“I killed someone.”

“We all make mistakes.”

“But will those mistakes be forgiven? I mean, I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but things don’t normally turn out well for people who look like us when we fucking kill white kids—”

“He wasn’t the kind of white that matters.”

“Jesus Christ,Dante!”

“It’s true, and you know it.”

“Ian was at the top of our class.”

“Until he wasn’t, and remind me, who was it that replaced him? Who was it who put the blade through his hand and secured a bed in Logos?”

Lennon hung her head.

“Look at me.” Dante crouched in front of her. Lennon looked down at him. “At Drayton—and in other places too—some lives are worth more than others. That was the case when the school was founded, and it’s still true now, a century later. It just looks different now.” He straightened, drew away from her. “Ian was a persuasionist of middling talent, from a family of no consequence, who if left to his own devices would’ve died of an overdose before age thirty. As far as I’m concerned, you sped up the inevitable.”

“That’s fucking cruel.”

“Maybe. But it’s true,” said Dante. “He wasn’t your equal. You have a power that comes once every few generations, and you’re going to prove that to them, in time.”

“But what if someone comes for me?”

“They won’t,” said Dante. “I’ll see to that. All you need to do is lie low for a little while, let the dust settle, and then when the time comes, you’ll return to Drayton and continue your studies.” He said this with so much confidence it was like he was writing the future as he spoke it aloud. “And sure, they’ll hate you, but they hate you already. Now they’ll just have a way to justify what they’ve felt all along.”

“So that’s it, then? This is how I get away with murder?”

“This isn’t the first time a student has died on Drayton’s campus at the hands of a peer. It won’t be the last either. You’re not special in that respect, you’re just indispensable and lucky because of it.”

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