Page 108 of An Academy for Liars

But all that escaped her was a tangled whimper.

“I know,” said Dante. “It’s going to take a lot out of you. More than you have to give. You saw William. I know that you know. And I’m sorrythat I didn’t warn you…” He cut himself short. “This isn’t what I wanted for you. Everything I’ve done so far has been to try to spare you from this. I know you won’t believe that right now, but it’s the truth.”

Dante stood up, began to pace the narrow aisle between desks, staring at his own feet. “I’m not a good person, Lennon. I’m not a moral one. But I am loyal. I know that you probably don’t believe that in this moment—why would you, coming fresh off a betrayal like this one? But for some time now, I’ve harbored the belief that you could master your own abilities. And by that, I mean I believe you’re stronger than William. Strong enough to take on this task without being consumed by it. That’s what I trained you for. That’s what I hope for you. And I still believe you can do it.”

The door opened. Eileen’s secretary ducked her head inside. “The vice-chancellor wants a word.”

The door shut again.

“Hold on to your hatred; it’ll serve you better than sadness,” he said, and was gone.

After a few moments, the feeling began to return to Lennon’s hands and feet, so that she could move them a little, though she wasn’t strong enough to break her bonds. She needed help, but who could she turn to? Blaine and Dante had betrayed her. The rest of her friends and housemates likely didn’t even know where she was. If she wanted to escape, she would have to save herself.

Lennon shut her eyes. She felt her will leave her own limp body like a bleed and spill through the classroom and then beyond it, trickling through the long corridors of Irvine Hall and down to the ground floor, then across campus to the labs in Wharton. From there, it wasn’t long until she found her mark: the storage room where all of the rats were kept. She entered their minds like a parasite, overcoming them one by one.

Blood bubbled from her left nostril. Filled the seam between her lips.

She kept pushing further into their minds, leaving her own body to enter theirs.

Her vision split and fractured like the multifocused eye of a fly, a shard of each rat’s perspective held within her mind. She drew them all to the fronts of their respective cages, pressed their little pink paws flush to the glass, and then—with a knot of guilt in her stomach—forced them forward. Cages rocked and shifted, tipping off shelves, splitting open as they hit the floor.

A few of the rats snapped free of her will and fled, but Lennon—bleeding profusely now, from her mind and from her nose—corralled them back, reestablishing control as she herded the horde through the doors of the lab.

A tech shrieked and fled at the sight of them.

It was no easy feat to control such a large herd of rats, and despite Lennon’s best efforts, they began to scatter. By the time Lennon called them up to the second floor of Irvine Hall, where she was being held, the last of the horde had dispersed, with the exception of just one rat.

Gregory.

Lennon—defeated, bleeding, slumped in her chair—only noticed him when his teeth pinched her skin as he gnawed at her binds. He was bigger than he had been the last time she’d seen him; his teeth were white and long, and he made quick work of the thin binds that bound her wrists together. She cried, seeing her little friend, who had come all this way to help her, and not because she’d forced him to, but because she’d asked—more pleaded, really. She’d made her need known, and he had come to help her.

Gregory gnawed the bindings thin enough for Lennon to pull the rope apart and snap it.

From there, she managed to untie the binds at her ankles, working as quickly as she could, her fingers still stone numb and clumsy from the suppression. When she was done, she scooped up Gregory and tucked him carefully into the front pocket of her hoodie.

Still too weak to call an elevator—the suppression warping her mind and making her weak—Lennon resolved to escape across campus on foot. With all the elevators in Irvine Hall heavily guarded—and Eileen’s secretary permanently posted behind her desk—Lennon determined that her best chance at escape was the elevator in Logos House. If she was careful and lucky, she could slip in unnoticed, hide in her room or one of the storage closets along the hall, and then, when the coast was clear, take the elevator to one of the locations it accessed in Savannah and then make her way from there.

She didn’t think much of what she would do once she left the campus. Where she would run, or who would help her. In the moment, all she thought about was herself, and Gregory squirming in her pocket.

Irvine Hall was mostly empty that evening, and Lennon made it down to the first floor without being seen, ducking into empty classrooms when she heard footsteps ringing through the hall behind her. She moved quickly, knowing it likely wouldn’t be long before they realized she’d escaped. Or maybe they knew already, the person who held her suppressed having realized that the tether had been cut. She braced for an alarm—the toll of a chapel bell—ringing through campus to alert everyone that a fugitive was on the loose. But there was nothing. At least, not until she emerged from Irvine Hall, through a side door that allowed her to avoid the lobby, where she would’ve surely been spotted by the secretary.

She hid in the bushes as two professors, Dr. Lund and Eileen, approached.

“How did she wriggle out of your hold?” Eileen demanded;Lennon had never seen her so unkempt. Big patches of red on her cheeks, hair hanging loose and damp about her shoulders, as if she’d been interrupted halfway through a shower.

“I don’t know,” said Dr. Lund, and he too seemed frantic. “Ask Dante. He was the last to see her.”

They disappeared through the doors of Irvine Hall, and Lennon, crouching in the bushes, waited a full ten seconds before she sprang to her feet and ran. She was almost halfway across campus when the church bell began to toll, though it wasn’t the top of any hour and it rang longer and louder than it ever had before.

Lennon kept running. She’d almost made it to the middle of the square, ducking behind trees and hiding in bushes, successfully keeping out of view, when she first spotted Alec a few hundred yards away. Panicked, she enclosed herself in a nearby telephone booth, covered in ivy.

She clamped a hand over her mouth, tried to muffle her ragged breaths.

A shadow slid past the fogged glass of the phone booth, broken to fractures by the gaps in the ivy. Then it doubled back, stalled by the door. Lennon, pressing herself against the wall of the phone booth, held her breath.

The door opened. Alec stood in it and clucked his tongue with mock sympathy. “Oh, Lennon. I’d hoped it wouldn’t come to this.”

Lennon could feel him entering her mind as he said this. Under the force of Alec’s formidable will, she was helpless.

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