Page 113 of An Academy for Liars

Down the hall, the clash of footsteps.

Dante pushed to his feet. “Lennon, get us out.Now.”

Lennon tossed out a hand and called an elevator. It appeared in the wall, its battered doors dragging only halfway open, so that Dante had to pry them apart just to get her through. They stumbled into the cabin just as Alec breached the office.

Lennon slumped to the floor, still laughing, and the cabin fell with her.

Lennon’s laughter haddied to a soft tickle at the back of her throat by the time the cabin slowed to a stop in the foyer of Logos House. Her intended destination had been somewhere—anywhere—beyond Drayton’s campus, but she didn’t have the stores to get them that far. She and Dante stepped cautiously out of the cabin and edged into the living room, where Lennon was shocked to see not only her housemates, but the better part of the student body crowded there, the room so tightly packed that there was barely enough space to stand. The kitchen and foyer were crowded too. As was the stairway, students sitting huddled together on the steps.

Blaine and Sawyer stepped forward to hug her, a fierce embrace. Upon pulling away, Lennon took in the surrounding crowd, saw the bleeding noses, the broken bones, the faces blank with shell shock, and the glazed eyes with burst blood vessels, the whites gone red. She noticed that toppled bookshelves barricaded both the front and back doors of the house, students standing guard by them, a few watching the windows too through the slits between drawn curtains. The houselooked like the scene of a war, and that, Lennon realized, was exactly what this had become.

“Why did you fight?” Lennon’s voice sounded distant, to her own ears. A thing apart from herself. “Why would you all risk it just to help me?”

Blaine looked genuinely surprised, and then hurt. “I mean…we’re your friends.”

All of this time, Lennon had thought she was alone. Betrayed and abandoned. Rejected and loathed by the greater student body, but she saw now that this wasn’t true.

“So you all did this just to help me?”

Sawyer nodded. “To help each other. It’s no more than what you would’ve done for us.”

Lennon wanted to believe that was true. But she wasn’t sure anymore. When she’d first come to Drayton, she had been desperate and afraid. Even then she had known her own darkness, had seen it leering at her in the mirrors, but she’d rejected it. Or tried to. And was successful until the night she’d put the knife through Ian’s hand, since then the violence she’d harbored within her had been cast outward to devastating effect.

And it wasn’t just Ian crushed in the elevator, or even Benedict dead at his desk. It was all of her other, smaller crimes. It was Carly’s eyes filling with tears as she ripped memories from her mind. It was straddling Eileen on the floor of her office, bludgeoning her with glee. She told herself that Eileen, at least, had deserved this. But the truth was, Lennon wasn’t sure she would’ve been able to stop herself if she hadn’t. The vice-chancellor—for all her hypocrisy—had read her right: Lennon had a rage in her. A darkness that she couldn’t control.

And yet, as she looked at the faces around her, drawn with fear, hanging on her every word—she felt something stir to life within her,like a flame struck alight. A bright desire to protect them all, these people who had stood by her when she couldn’t even stand up for herself, her friends who’d risked everything to defend her, knowing it was an impossible fight. How could she turn her back on them now, when they needed her most?

Lennon began to wonder if this was destined in some way. The night she’d first received the call from Drayton, she had wanted to die. But maybe it wasn’t a want at all—maybe it was prophesy. It made sense that if she could travel through time, she could see through it too, sense what was coming down the line. Maybe Lennon had known, deep down, that it would end this way. Until this moment, death had been the thing she’d seen in the mirror, something to escape and run away from. Now, though, she wondered if it was mercy. If perhaps this was a way for her to atone for the person she’d become.

Dante now looked to Lennon and spoke as though he’d been reading her thoughts. Perhaps he had. “If you raise the gates on your own, without Eileen’s interference, you can use the school itself as leverage and put an end to all of this violence. You can protect them if you can keep the gates up. No one could hurt you after that. You’d have the whole school as your leverage against Eileen and the rest of the faculty. You could tie their hands.”

“You know I’m not strong enough.”

“You are with my help,” he said. “We need to get you to the chancellor before he dies and the gates fall. You have to be in the room when it happens. If we miss our window to act, the gates could fall entirely and expose Drayton to the world. There is no margin of error. We have to time it perfectly.”

“And we don’t have long,” said Blaine softly. “William is dying. If things are as bad as they seem, then he only has hours left.”

“Can you call another elevator to the chancellor’s mansion?” Emerson asked. Of everyone in the room she seemed the most pensive.

“She shouldn’t,” said Dante. “She needs to save her strength for the gate. She’s already expended too much energy. We can’t risk getting into that room only for her to start seizing.”

“But we can’t risk going on foot either,” said Emerson. “If we just march up to the chancellor’s front door, we’ll be obliterated by the faculty.”

“Those aren’t our only two options,” said Kieran. “There’s a network of tunnels beneath the school. We can take them straight under the chancellor’s house.”

“How the hell do you know that?” Lennon asked.

He shrugged. “I have my ways. I’ll show you. I can get you anywhere.”

So they went down to the basement of the house, where a few students shoved aside a large shelf to reveal a child-sized iron door. It looked like something you’d find in a bank vault. And it was so tarnished that when Dante cranked the handle, rusty flakes scattered across the floor.

A sulfurous and moldy stink wafted from the dark of the tunnel. Blaine gagged. “Jesus Christ, it smells like a fucking sewer.”

Dante, Emerson, Kieran, Sawyer, and Blaine all climbed down the ladder and into the tunnel. Lennon was the last to descend, struggling on account of her broken collarbone, the pain white-hot and constant, sharpening whenever she attempted to move her arm. In the end, Kieran and Dante had to hold her, lowering her down into the tunnel as gently as they could.

Under the glow of the flashlights, Lennon could see an oily layer of scum across the surface of the waist-deep water, and the ceiling wasso low that Dante couldn’t stand at full height. The floor of the tunnel was slippery with scum and whatever else coated the bottom, so that several times Lennon slipped and had to catch herself on the wall to keep from going under.

“You don’t think there’s, like…snakes or alligators in this water, do you?” Sawyer asked.

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