An Academy for Liars

Chapter 53

Dante wanted to take his car back to Drayton for the semester, so they decided to drive down the coast instead of opting to travel via elevator. Lennon packed what little she’d acquired during her time with Dante. A few books he’d given her—novels mostly—a handful of particularly beautiful shells she’d plucked from the beach, and a few items of clothing.

It was a long and solemn drive down the coast. Halfway to Drayton, Lennon fell asleep, and she woke to rain on the windshield and the wrought-iron gate swinging open to them. The campus—behind the sheets of pelting rain—looked small and toylike. The little people darting through the downpour, hollow miniatures made from wax or wood, empty of thought or will, just dolls animated with the stuff of spirit. Objects to be moved and persuaded, at will.

“Stay in Logos and keep a low profile if you can,” said Dante. “People are still edgy after what happened to Ian.”

Lennon nodded and they both got out of the car and went their separate ways. She was relieved to make it across the mostly empty campus and all the way to Logos without being stopped or even noticed. She stepped through the front door to the familiar aroma of must and books and cigarette smoke. The hallway was a mess of shattered glass, half of the contents of the curio cabinet strewn across the floor. The chandelier dangling overhead was still swinging, casting strange and watery reflections across the wall.

There were students, a lot of them, huddled in the parlor. Their conversation died into stone silence at the sight of Lennon standing in the foyer.

For a breathless moment, she wondered if they could see her for what she was. Ian’s killer. Benedict’s. A violent person, perpetually teetering on the brink of her own ruin and everyone else’s.

But then Sawyer broke forward and Kieran and Emerson after him, the three of them seizing Lennon in a hug so fast and fierce that it knocked the air out of her lungs. Blaine, surprisingly, was the last to approach. She had always been slim, but there was something frail and decrepit about her now. Her collarbones protruded painfully; her eyes retracted into the deep hollows of her sockets. When Lennon dropped her bags and embraced her, Blaine flinched.

“Why did they bring you back here?” Blaine asked. She was the first to pull away.

Tears came to Lennon’s eyes, and she blubbered a bit about being sorry and how shitty she was for failing to keep in touch, about how she had regrets over what had happened with Ian and that if they all hated her now, she would understand and accept it.

“No one hates you,” said Sawyer.

“I mean, I’m pretty sure Nadine does,” said Kieran. “I think she actually wants to murder you. I heard her—”

“Ian was a violent prick, whether Nadine wants to admit it or not,” said Blaine, cutting him short. Her voice was thin and strained. It seemed like, in the span of that summer, she’d wasted away. Lennon wanted to ask her if she was okay, but it didn’t feel like the time, what with the crowd of her other housemates surrounding them. “But Kieran is right, Lennon. I’m not sure that it’s safe for you—”

Just then, another quake. The ground rattled with a violence. A window cracked and shattered, glass blasting across the living room. Everyone rushed for the doors, separating Lennon from Blaine as the quake grew more severe. A sheet of plaster fell from the ceiling and crashed in front of her, followed by a thorough pelting of bricks. A rafter upstairs crashed down through a wall and tore a gash in the floorboards. More students fled into the halls and out of the building, and by the time Lennon had shouldered past them and out onto the lawn, there was no sign of Blaine anywhere.

The ground gave another violent roll that brought Lennon to her knees. She looked in horror as one of the largest oaks in the square canted sharply to the left, uprooted with a roar as the ground rippled beneath it, and fell. And when it did, Lennon saw her: a flash of blonde hair streaking on the wind as Blaine dashed, stumbling, falling, crawling on her hands and knees as the earth rolled beneath her, toward the chancellor’s mansion.

By the time that Lennon reached its doors, Blaine had disappeared through them and the rolling quakes had waned to a series of shivering tremors. The moment Lennon opened the door and stepped past the threshold, her vision went blurry at the edges and she felt weightless and woozy, like the softest wind would be enough to carry her away.

Her faculties returned to her quickly, though, as she stepped into a warm bath of candlelight and soft jazz music. Overhead was a crystal chandelier, shivering with the aftershocks of the quake.

To her left was a dining room. To her right, a small, dark den. Both rooms were empty, but from beyond the dining room Lennon could hear people talking in grave and hushed tones. One of the voices was familiar. It belonged to Dante, and she thought she heard him say: “She needs more time.”

Despite the pull that Lennon felt toward the dining room, to Dante, Lennon decided to go right to avoid being seen. The den had greenish carpet on the floor and heavy drapes drawn over the windows. It was mostly empty, apart from the tightly packed bookshelves that lined the walls, the books themselves filmed with dust. Behind a polished desk was a door. It was narrow and limned with light that shone so brightly it was hard to look at it without the backs of her eyes aching a little bit.

When Lennon took hold of the doorknob, it was strangely warm. She turned it, dragged the door open—it was heavier than it looked, much heavier, as if something was attempting to suction it shut on the other side. She managed to slip through the crack and into a hall that was impossibly, dizzyingly long. For a moment, Lennon thought it must be some fun house trick, but as her eyes adjusted to the light she saw that it wasn’t.

The hallway—long and lined with countless doors on either side—ended with another door, this one backlit, just like the one she’d entered through. The other doors along the hall were distinctly different. One looked like the door of a bank vault, another was graffitied and chipped, and a third was just a bloodstained bedsheet, nailed to a threshold and billowing in a breeze Lennon couldn’t feel.

Lennon opened the door nearest her—it was short and brown and unassuming, but it opened out to an expanse of the coastline, the stink of the marsh, salt grass rolling with the breeze. In the distance, two figures—a boy and a man, featureless under the bright glare of the sun—dragged a crab trap from the water.

It was the same with every door on the hall. One opened to the parlor of Logos House, where a handful of logicians that Lennon didn’t know sat drinking tea. Lennon brushed past the bloodied curtain to see a pregnant woman, laboring alone on a narrow, wooden cot.

It was a hallway of memories, she realized, each of the doors opening out onto a different place or point in time, a feat of persuasion so complex that it took her breath away. Lennon walked until she reached the door at the hall’s end. She showed herself inside and was stunned to see Blaine bent over the bedside of an emaciated man, her lips at his brow, his broken hand held loosely in hers. A thrumming energy emanated from the man in nauseating waves that made Lennon’s head pound and her vision blur in and out of focus. There were so many pipes and tubes and machines affixed to him. He seemed less man than machine.

The smell of death was a stain on the air.

“Blaine?”

She turned, her eyes—filled with tears—flashed wide with shock. “Lennon? You can’t be here.”

From the bed, a horrible sound: bones shifting and popping. The man gave a congested groan, and when he did the floor groaned too, bowing a little beneath Lennon’s bare feet, the give so slight it was almost imperceptible.

It was a familiar feeling. Months ago, when she’d gotten high, she’d sensed the same thing, had been convinced that the ground itself was breathing. She felt this again now, as she stared at the man, and realized in awe and horror that the floor was moving in time with his rattling breaths.

A shivering rise.

A sharp fall.

The house, the entire campus, was breathing with him.

“Who is he?” said Lennon, staring at the man on the bed.

“This is William,” she said. “Our chancellor and gatekeeper.”

Another one of William’s bones broke with an audible pop. He writhed, and Lennon was surprised he even had the strength to do that, given how gaunt he was.

“So this is what it means to be a gatekeeper,” said Lennon, and all of the pieces slotted neatly into place. Dante’s insistence that she learn to open gates to the past. Eileen’s keen interest in her. Benedict’s keen investment in her education, as if the whole world depended on her ability to raise gates, because his did. The campus needed a gatekeeper, an engine to keep the gates up in perpetuity.

Persuasion was a living power. If Lennon passed out, her elevator gates disappeared. If she lost focus, the tether of her will snapped like a broken thread. Someone, some gatekeeper, had to be alive to keep the gates around the school raised. And here he was—a shell of a man, his bones breaking under the power of his own will—the engine that kept the school running.

Because power like that didn’t come for free. Someone had to suffer for it.

First it was William.

And when he died…her.

“This is why you asked me to run away with you,” said Lennon, turning to Blaine with tears in her eyes. “You knew. You’ve known all along what they wanted me to become. This is where you go every night. Isn’t it? This is what you do? You sit here and you tend this corpse—”

“Don’t call him that.”

“—knowing that I’ll be the next one.”

“I wanted to tell you. I tried even, but…” Blaine’s mouth wavered, and she choked, gagged, when she tried to say more. Lennon realized, horrified, that she’d been tied. It wasn’t that Blaine didn’t want to tell her—it was that she couldn’t .

Blaine clamped her jaw shut, and stalked across the room. She snatched a pen and a slip of paper from the bedside table and attempted to write, and Lennon watched as her hand tightened, bloodless, around the pen, her fingers spasming, pressing down on the nib so hard it snapped and ink spilled across the page.

But Blaine didn’t give up. Face screwed with pain, she dragged a knuckle through the ink, smearing a single word: run.