Page 92 of An Academy for Liars

“The future doesn’t yet exist. The past has already happened, so we would know if the campus had been revealed. By that logic, it makes sense to deduce that there’s no place for Drayton to land but the present reality, whatever that is at the time that it falls.”

As Dante said this, the truth came slowly into focus. The precarity of this new reality. “What makes you so sure I can even do this? My elevator cabins are small, and I can only sustain them for so long. But something on the scale of Drayton’s campus? I mean, that would take an impossible amount of stamina, not to mention skill that I don’t possess—”

“You don’t possess ityet. But I can help you,” said Dante. “It’s important to remember that your elevator gates are something more than what they appear to be. They only take the form of an elevator because that’s the easiest way to communicate the concept, a way for you to comprehend and express the ineffable. But the cabin itself, it doesn’t exist as a concrete reality. It can change forms, expand to become something different.”

“Like William’s doors did,” said Lennon, thinking back to one of her first lessons with Benedict. “His gates manifested as a hallway.”

Dante nodded. He had that light in his eyes that he often did when he was lecturing and was particularly riveted by the material. “If you can reach beyond the scope of your own understanding, if you tap into enough power, you can expand the uses of your elevator and change the way they manifest.”

“I can create a gate around the school,” said Lennon, understanding, “just like William did.”

“Exactly.”

Lennon humored the possibility, with some reluctance. But the idea still didn’t sit right with her. She couldn’t imagine herself as the kind of person capable of wielding that much power, with care and competence. She’d struggled to climb to the top of her class, unlike William, who was said to have been a known prodigy. And then there was Ian’s death, a scar on her name forever, a demonstration of her own weakness and volatility and, worse than that, the violence that seemed almost inherent to her. A kind of corrosive chaos within.

Lennon was no hero. And she wasn’t even sure she had the spine to call herself a villain.

She was just a coward. And she was very afraid.

“Something’s bothering you,” said Dante. “What is it?”

“It’s just…it doesn’t add up. If I have the potential to save the school with my power, then why did Eileen seem ready to expel me when she realized that I had it? Surely, she must’ve known that I had the potential to be useful.”

“She did,” said Dante. “But at the time it was just that: potential. Nothing more. To her you weren’t a particularly promising student. You almost killed yourself trying to raise gates through space, and raising them through time is an even greater feat and one that, to be frank, I don’t think she believes you’re capable of. Also, at the time ofthat hearing, Eileen didn’t have a dire need for the talents of a gatekeeper. The quakes hadn’t begun yet.”

“But now that the quakes have begun and she knows that she needs a gatekeeper, she never once asked me to intervene. Why? What are her reservations?”

Dante seemed reluctant to answer at first. “Eileen has never enjoyed sharing the spotlight, and she likes sharing power even less. If you become the person I think you can be—if you save the school and we’re all indebted to you—she’ll be forced to cede some of her power. To Eileen, I think that idea is almost as horrific as the school being exposed entirely. She doesn’t trust you, she doesn’t like you, and I don’t think she’s yet accepted the reality that sheneedsyou. We all do.”

“But what if she’s right to be wary of me? If I begin to tamper with time, you say that the repercussions could be devastating, even deadly. It would be one thing if it was just my life that I was gambling with, but there are others at stake too. Do you really trust me with that after everything that’s happened? After what I did to Ian—”

“That was once and you had your reasons.”

“But what about all the other times I’ve screwed up? All of the times I’ve failed in your class, that I’ve come up short. I put a knife through Ian’s hand months before I killed him and felt so little in the aftermath it scared me. I scare myself. In the mirror, sometimes I can see what I am. I mean, you said it yourself: I’m dangerous. Why would you trust a dangerous person with the fate of the school, or for that matter, the world?”

“The gates will fall eventually. Maybe not this year, maybe not even in your lifetime. But they will fall, and you’re not the only dangerous person in the world, Lennon. What happens when all of theother dangerous people have access to the same power that you do? What will they do with it?”

Lennon swallowed dry, considering. It was a horrifying proposition. Her mind went to those two men in the alley that she and Blaine had encountered that night in Savannah. What would they do with the power of persuasion, if they could wield it?

“You should have told me about all of this months ago,” she said, beginning to process for the first time the hurt and betrayal over everything he’d been keeping from her. All this time she’d believed that the walls between them were slowly lowering, that they were growing closer. But in reality, Dante was just as cagey and distant as he had always been. She wondered what else he was hiding and how it could hurt her.

“I would have told you if the decision had been up to me, but it wasn’t,” he said, and while Lennon wanted to believe him, she wasn’t sure that she could. Even now—as Dante seemingly splayed his cards across the table—she had the distinct impression that there were still some things that he was holding back. “Eileen wanted to keep a lid on things for as long as she could. It was only today that I convinced her to consider this new possibility. She agreed to give you a chance at this, but now it’s your turn to decide what you’ll do with it.”

Lennon paused to consider her possibilities: a reality where the gates fell and Drayton was exposed to the world, or a reality where she did something to stop it. She had come to Drayton looking for a savior, and now she had the chance to become one. And if she did, perhaps it would be some small way to atone for what she’d done to Ian. To cement herself as something more than a killer and a coward. A chance to redeem herself.

Lennon looked to Dante. “When do we begin?”

When it cameto the practice of opening gates to the past, Dante adopted a new pedagogical approach. For one, the majority of their classes took place out on the beach, or if not there, then on the island beyond it. They woke early each morning, well before the sun came up, and began their sessions with meditation, during which time Lennon would lower the walls of her mind and Dante did the same.

“I want you to try to expand your will beyond the confines of your mind. Release any constructs it holds on to—your name, your identity, propriety, even time.”

As he said this, Lennon felt his presence within her, a cold fog settling down over her thoughts. It made her almost sleepy. Immediately, she relaxed, legs going so slack beneath her that she had to put real thought behind the effort of sitting upright.

With Lennon as his only pupil, Dante had the liberty to adopt a more direct approach to the teaching of persuasion. Instead of lecturing, like he usually did, Dante used the force of his will to manuallyinstruct her, imparting what he’d learned over his years of practice, entering her mind to deposit different images and emotions, attempting to relay the ineffable.

It was an intimate way of learning that felt a lot like Dante was holding her by the hand, guiding her through the metaphorical library of his vast knowledge. When Lennon had questions, Dante answered them with the full breadth of his wisdom, pouring into her all at once. He never made her feel cowardly or stupid. He was never harsh or unkind. And yet it hurt—all of it hurt so terribly—the knowledge vast and complicated and filling her up until she felt like the walls of her skull were about to crack from the pressure building from within.

Under Dante’s instruction, Lennon learned how to tune her mind to the quiet frequencies of the past. She learned how time could be manipulated, folded double, and then folded again like pastry dough until it formed the many layers of reality itself. Then he taught her how to work it, how to navigate all these layers of the past and access them through elevators, which could cleanly cut through time like a sharpened knife. But understanding the basic theories was different than putting those theories into practice by calling an elevator to the past, a feat that Lennon continued to struggle with despite her best efforts and Dante’s.

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