Page 117 of An Academy for Liars

She saw a flash of gold behind him.

Then the doorway collapsed to rubble.

Blaine dragged Lennon through the den as its walls fell around them, through the wreckage of the shattered chandelier, and out onto the front porch. They lunged for the green.

And the house imploded behind them.

Days later, Lennonopened her crusted eyes and took in the empty infirmary ward. The wind eddied in through the broken window. The day was bright, and the sky was a glassy blue. Lennon slipped out of her cot, tested her own legs gingerly. When she was certain she could stand, she left the infirmary, barefoot and wearing nothing but shorts and a hospital gown. Two nurses tried to stop her on her way out of the doors. She brought them to heel with half a thought.

The campus was in ruins. There were fallen trees and great gashes in the ground. Shattered glass littered the walkways, and a few of the buildings were only partially standing. Logos House had very nearly fallen in the worst of the quakes, and it wasn’t the only building that had suffered significant damage. As Lennon approached Irvine Hall, she saw that the better part of its east wing had fallen to rubble.

“I want to start by saying this isn’t a negotiation,” said Lennon as she entered Eileen’s office. It was the first time she’d spoken sinceDante’s disappearance, and her voice sounded hoarse and strange, like it didn’t even belong to her.

She looked toward Eileen, battered and bruised from the attack, seated behind her desk. Lennon knew that her standing at the school had changed, but she didn’t grasp the full scope of her new power until that very moment, as Eileen gazed at her, startled and…afraid. Eileen, the most powerful persuasionist on campus, was afraid of her. “I’m going to talk and you’re going to listen, and after you’re done listening, you’ll do what I say.”

“You don’t have to be this way,” said Eileen, haltingly. “I don’t intend to cause any trouble, and I can still be useful to you, to this school.”

“You’ve done enough,” said Lennon. “Here’s what’s going to happen next. You are going to relinquish the role of vice-chancellor, and if you refuse, I’ll lower the walls of this campus so fast you won’t even have the chance to beg me to stop.”

Eileen went very quiet and very pale.

“I’m going to send you back to your home in Charleston, where you will remain until your son turns eighteen, at which point I’ll send you to a remote location, a cabin in northern Wyoming, where you will remain for the rest of your natural life.”

“No—”

“You will never harm your son, or practice persuasion against him or anyone else. When you walk through the doors of that elevator”—as Lennon said this, it appeared in the wall behind her—“your life, as you’ve known it, will end, and you’re lucky that’s all I’m taking after what you’ve done.”

In truth, it wasn’t out of mercy that Lennon left Eileen’s memories of Drayton largely intact. It was to maximize her suffering, so that shewould know, for the rest of her miserable life, exactly what was taken from her. So that she, like Lennon, would be forced to live with her grief.

Eileen’s eyes filled with tears. “Lennon, please, let’s just talk—”

Lennon lashed out with her will, and Eileen cut a cry of pain. Sparing no cruelty, Lennon ripped Eileen from her chair and made her crawl through the parted doors of the elevator, with spinal fluid leaking from her nose.

“You can’t keep it forever,” said Eileen, slumped against the back wall of the cabin.

“I can try,” she said, and closed the doors.

Eileen would never step foot on Drayton’s campus again.

It was the same with most of the faculty. Lennon was ruthless. She deposed Alec next, stripping his tenure, and threatening to lower the gates when he refused to go. That made it easy. The other professors—groveling and eager to prove their new loyalty—were quick to turn against him. In fact, Lennon didn’t even have to expend the energy necessary to expel him from the college. They eagerly did it for her.

All of the jockeying and politicking made Lennon sick. But it had its uses too. Because Lennon found that in those early days, the faculty did the dirty work on her behalf. They turned on one another with relish, forming a kind of witch hunt in their haste to secure their own positions at the school. After a few months, only a small handful of the former faculty remained, and Lennon replaced those who’d left with a selection of alumni she knew she could trust. Emerson, who she named vice-chancellor, and Blaine, who she tenured. She gave Sawyer the library. Against her better judgment, she extended a professorship to Kieran as well, but he refused, preferring to brave the world beyond Drayton’s gates.

With all of the positions filled and the campus restored to somesemblance of normalcy, Lennon retired to Dante’s house on the water, where she remained for the next few weeks, alone, with the exception of Gregory, who Lennon had found in the bushes outside of Irvine Hall just a few days after raising the gates.

Since her friends were distracted by their new roles at Drayton, Gregory became her primary companion. And Lennon took the liberty of withdrawing from the school completely.

She shunned all contact but kept a channel open via a permanent elevator, connecting Dante’s home to the campus, allowing her power to flow through so that the gates would hold firm. But she herself refused to visit. The only reason she knew she’d been officially named chancellor was because a letter was mailed to her along with her diploma, informing her she’d been appointed to her new role by unanimous vote of the board.

Lennon burned the whole thing—the letter, envelope, diploma, and all.

Summer passed in a blur of heat and grief. Before Lennon knew it, the end of fall was approaching, and it was December again. In the weeks leading up to Christmas, Lennon fielded phone calls from her family and made excuses about school and stress and heaps of paperwork to account for her absence over Christmas. The idea of celebrating anything—while mired down by her grief—made her feel sick. So she spent that holiday alone, curled up in the living room, watching horror movies. She was half-asleep when the doorbell rang. She answered to discover Blaine, Sawyer, Emerson, and Kieran huddled together on her doorstep, clutching big foil catering trays of mashed potatoes and sliced honey ham, glazed dinner rolls and store-bought pies.

“You didn’t have to do this,” said Lennon as they shuffled inside.

“We kind of did, though,” said Kieran, setting two large bottles ofchampagne on the countertop. “Blaine thought you might kill yours—”

Sawyer elbowed him in the ribs. “We didn’t want you to be alone over Christmas.”

---