Page 115 of An Academy for Liars

The three of them rushed inside, Lennon first, then Blaine, Dante coming from behind. Lennon had expected a team of doctors andnurses to be in the room, but it was just Dr. Nave from the infirmary. Lennon managed to wrestle him into submission with her will, capitalizing on the element of surprise and knocking him out before he could launch a counterattack.

As Lennon subdued Nave, Blaine locked the door and Dante dragged furniture—an armchair, a table, a few detached oxygen tanks—in front of it as a makeshift barricade. It wasn’t enough to keep anyone out for long. Whatever happened next would have to happen quickly.

Dante turned to Blaine. “It’s time.”

Blaine’s chin quivered. She went to William’s bedside. He lay, gaunt and waxen, in a nest of pillows. His mouth was wrenched ajar, and the floor and walls of that horrid house trembled with his death rattles. If the bed wasn’t nailed down, it probably would’ve skittered across the floor like the rest of the articles of that room, the side tables and the armchair by the fire, humming in place, sliding. A Holter monitor measured the rhythm of his heart, which was both sluggish and erratic, like water glugging from a bottle with a narrow mouth. The long breaks between each beat, the sputtering palpitations.

Blaine took him by the hand. The floor shuddered.

Lennon wondered, then, about the nature of what Blaine shared with William. The bond between them was a palpable thing, not unlike love. Nor was it one-sided. It became clear to Lennon in that moment that William could sense and feel in his own way. And as Blaine held his hand for the last time, tears slicking her cheeks, she wondered if he knew he was going to die.

If he was relieved to be set free.

“We’re running out of time,” said Dante, a gentle urging, and for a moment Lennon thought that Blaine had lost her resolve. She saw the conflict in the way her brows drew together, the way her eyesscanned back and forth across the floor, searching for the answer to an impossible question.

Dante turned to Lennon. “I would ask you if you’re ready, but I think we’re out of time. Either you do this now or you don’t do it at all. On your mark?”

Lennon nodded and looked to Blaine. “Let’s go.”

Blaine nodded back and shifted her hand to William’s heart, and Lennon knew at once what she was going to do. It was a cruel lesson that Dante had taught them, months ago, demonstrating on a rat that had cancer, a way to manipulate the mind into creating a lethal arrythmia.

An ordinary persuasionist would have the power to fight back against an attack like that one, to regain control of their own mind and body, defend themselves. But William—lying comatose in his bed—was as helpless as a newborn child.

When Blaine seized his beating heart, he didn’t struggle.

The heart monitor shrieked, and the room gave a shake so violent that a crack tore the floor open. Lennon flinched back, but Dante steadied her, taking her by both hands, rubbing his thumbs in circles in the middle of her palms the way he used to when she was falling asleep at night. “I’m going to be with you through every step of this, all right? You just have to listen to me. Can you do that?”

Lennon nodded.

“Good. Now I want you to focus on grounding yourself.”

“That’s a difficult feat when I’m just trying to stay standing.”

“Try for me.”

She did, centering herself with deep breaths, even as the floor swayed beneath her feet and sheets of plaster rained down from the ceiling. If the rafters gave, they’d be crushed beneath the rubble. But she tried not to think about that, or about anything apart from Dante’s voice.

“Now I want you to call your elevator, a cabin that can move through time. Then, when the gate is present, channel your energy into stretching it larger, to encompass the campus.”

“I’m not strong enough for that.”

“I’ve got you. You’re going to take what you need from me.”

Lennon realized, with a start, that this was his plan all along. He had never intended for her to become like William, or for Eileen to seize control of her mind and body. It was always him who was going to absorb the risk. It was Dante who had planned to make the sacrifice, in the hopes that they would both be freed by it. “No—”

“It’s going to be okay,” he said. “I promise you that. Just call the elevator.”

Lennon did as he asked. It wasn’t easy work, what with the ground rolling beneath her feet, the wound at her side still bleeding, her broken collarbone and twisted wrist. She’d expended so much energy calling the elevator in the midst of Nadine’s attack, but she had Dante to draw from now, which she did, readily. She could feel his will channeling into her body, a kind of transfusion, filling her stores. He was stronger than she’d given him credit for. And she saw that he had been saving up for her, holding back in anticipation of this moment, waiting to give her everything.

An elevator branded itself into the wall of the bedroom with the warped ring of its bell.

But before its doors parted open, the floor shuddered, and then seemed to drop beneath Lennon’s feet with a scream and a feeling of free fall as the campus plunged through time itself. Blaine cried out, and it wasn’t just her that was screaming. The house gave a horrible groan, as if its walls were about to give way.

“Open the doors. Center yourself,” Dante yelled above the bedlam, spitting blood as he spoke. He was barely on his feet now, Lennonhaving taken so much from him. And she could see in his eyes—the whites gone red, the pupils shrunken to pinpoints—that he didn’t have much left to give her. “Keep opening them. As wide as you can. Give it everything you have. Everything that I have too. Just take what you need from me.”

Lennon tried. She tried as hard as she ever had. As the campus fell through space and time, she gritted her teeth—jaw locked, a molar at the back cracking with a burst of pain so intense she almost fell to her knees.

As William’s gate came down, the doors of Lennon’s own elevator dragged open, wider and wider, retracting into the walls of the cabin, and then the cabin itself stretched wider and taller, until it consumed the entirety of the wall, and then beyond it, opening onto the green, and then stretching farther still.

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