39. Meter, from the Greek for ‘Measure’ #2
Under a tarp in the back of Eugenia’s golf cart, Briar and Bastian sit hunched over with their knees pressed together, Orpheus and Hadley at their feet.
It feels like any second someone’s going to stop her and demand to see her cargo, like she’s smuggling something far more valuable than three scholars and Briar, but eventually their rattling journey comes to an end and they climb out by the back door of the old mews, converted now into terraced staff houses.
‘Get inside before someone sees,’ Eugenia says, opening the front door for them and chivvying them along with a wave of her arm. ‘Because I’m telling you, the second this goes south, I am betraying you to the highest bidder.’
‘Thanks, Eugenia,’ Briar says, as she shuts the door behind them, then leads them down the dark hall.
Her house is frighteningly neat, and surprisingly cute.
There’s a small, immaculate living room with seashells on the mantel and every cushion perfectly plumped, and a large kitchen-diner that hasn’t been updated since the eighties, retro small appliances to match, a single recipe book open on the counter.
Hadley sits down at the kitchen table and puts her head in her hands.
Eugenia clicks the kettle on and switches on a small lamp, then crosses her arms and sighs.
‘You’re in a lot of trouble,’ she says.
‘Yes.’
‘But it’s obviously not true what they’re saying,’ she says, her eyes flicking to Bastian and then back. ‘That you and your friends . . . have killed someone. Everybody is looking for you.’
‘No,’ Briar says vehemently. ‘It’s not.’
‘Okay.’ She nods. ‘I will go out. Sleep at my girlfriend’s place. Don’t switch on any lights, don’t be stupid.’
‘You have a girlfriend?’ Briar asks, unable to stop themself.
‘My sofa is new,’ Eugenia says. ‘You spill anything on it, I’ll make you pay. Where are the rest of your friends?’
Now that Briar’s had time to think about it, they’re sure that there’s only one place they could possibly be if they’re safe, although it would have taken a feat close to a miracle to get them there unscathed.
‘Sorry, before you go - do you have a landline? And . . . maybe a registry, for all the numbers here?’
She tuts, but shows Briar to the phone and the pristine ring binder beneath it containing every office on campus. Parker, Robert has been crossed out, but when Briar dials the office, someone immediately picks up.
Eugenia is throwing on her jacket when Briar says, ‘Er - maybe just one more favour?’
‘I love Genie’s cart,’ Westby says, once he’s been deposited on the sofa, the curtains firmly closed.
‘And I love . . .’ He trails off, distracted by the feeling of his hand rubbing against the aforementioned brand-new sofa, upholstered in pale linen.
He’s unbelievably high; luckily, it seems to suit him fine.
Briar walks Eugenia to the door.
‘I just have a question, and then I swear I’ll let you go,’ Briar says, so cowed by the look on her face that they almost don’t continue. ‘Um . . . how long have you worked here?’
‘Five years.’
‘And . . . you can’t do the Work now, can you?’
‘No,’ Eugenia says firmly.
‘You’ve checked?’
It’s with great reluctance that Eugenia says, ‘Yes, Briar, I have checked,’ and then slips outside and slams the door in their face.
‘Hey, look at me,’ Tate says, crouching in front of Westby back in the living room. ‘What’s your name?’
‘Crispin,’ says Westby, struggling to focus on Tate and becoming enamoured with one of the cushions instead. ‘Silly name, I think. Textural. Makes me think of . . . salad. Pot-pourri.’
‘Okay. And what’s my name?’
‘Thaddeus Adams.’
‘Thaddeus?’ Briar says, and Tate shrugs.
‘Okay, yes. Good.’ He looks at Briar. ‘He’s off his tits, but I think he got all the puking out of his system in the tower. Somehow . . . I think he’s having a good trip.’
‘How did you get out?’
Tate pushes his glasses back up his nose, looking thoroughly flattened. ‘Slipped out the second the pips went feral. Ten of them tackled Sokolov, it would have been very funny in any other circumstance.’
‘How did you know to come to the cave?’ Briar can finally feel the full force of their anger, now that they’re not in imminent danger. ‘Did Hadley . . . did she tell you what she did?’
‘Yes.’ Tate straightens up. ‘I think she regretted it as soon as she’d done it. She woke us up pretty much immediately after you left, told us where you’d gone. I know that probably doesn’t make you feel any better about it.’
‘No,’ says Briar. ‘Strangely enough, it doesn’t.
What was the plan? Let me kill him, and then let them kill me?
’ It’s been made clear to Briar, many times over, that they’re expendable here.
They just never thought Hadley would stoop so low as to use them as a tool to exact revenge.
Briar had thought they were tentative friends now.
They can see how it would have played out: Alistair dead, an outsider at fault.
Easy enough for the board to tie up the few loose ends.
‘Or just let me be sent to fucking prison for murder?’
‘I don’t know. I don’t know what she was thinking.
But she couldn’t go through with it.’ Tate sighs.
‘Look, it’s fucked up. I’m not going to pretend it isn’t, or that I’m not very angry with her.
But . . . when you’ve spent seven years here, you learn to live by a different set of rules.
I think it genuinely rewrites your brain.
Terrible things seem so much more reasonable.
But I’m not saying you have to forgive her. ’
‘Good,’ Briar says. ‘Because after all that, I saved her fucking life. It was . . . it was more than she deserves, after what she did to me.’
Westby winces up at them. ‘Could we take this conversation down a notch, please . . . ? I’m hearing Brahms when I want to be hearing Debussy.’
‘Talk like a normal person,’ says Tate. ‘What happened after we left?’
Briar fills him in, and then they go to the kitchen to find the others.
They are confronted with a sight so bizarre it looks randomly generated: Bastian, Hadley and Orpheus all sitting around Eugenia’s kitchen table in silence, steaming mugs of tea in front of all of them.
‘Hadley,’ Briar says, but when Hadley looks up, the expression on her face is like nothing Briar’s ever seen before. She looks . . . completely hollowed, from the inside out.
‘I fucked up,’ she says quietly. ‘I know.’
This is wholly inadequate. ‘That’s all you have to say?’
‘No. It’s not. Look, I thought I’d . . .
do anything, sacrifice anything, to give Alistair what he deserved.
I thought . . .’ She raises one hand from the table in a meagre, confused gesture, then doesn’t seem to know what to do with it.
‘I just wanted to hurt him, I wanted to do it so badly, I thought it would be worth anything. But I fucked up. You could have died, and that pip, that girl . . .’ Orpheus is weeping again.
Hadley glances at over at him and looks sick to her stomach.
‘Fuck. She didn’t deserve that. Poor kid.
And it’s my . . . If it weren’t for me, she’d . . .’
‘It was Alistair,’ says Tate, but Hadley shakes her head. Briar thinks they recognise that look in her eyes, even if they never expected to see it on her. That small collapse, taking on the burden of doing something irrevocable. She’s thinking: My fault.
Nothing Briar can say will hurt her as much as that crushing weight.
Bastian has been watching this exchange closely; now, with icy precision, he says, ‘Am I to understand that you sent Briar to kill my ex-boyfriend?’
Briar’s eyebrows shoot up. ‘Ex?’
‘Oh my God,’ says Tate. ‘Is this really the time?’
‘What did he do, Hadley?’ Briar asks. ‘I think I have the right to know, if you’re going to wield me like a fucking sub machine gun.’
‘He was a . . . very bad boyfriend.’ Briar won’t let this slide, and Hadley puts her face in her hands again and says, ‘He used to play these games with me, trying to make me feel crazy. Talked shit about me to his friends. Lied, said I’d fucked him, when I hadn’t.
And I think he was Working on me too, sometimes.
He was already too good at it. There are things I did, really .
. . humiliating stuff. I thought I was just a piece of shit, a slut.
That I made terrible choices. That’s what everyone believed, anyway.
But afterwards, I started to wonder. Because it just didn’t sound like me.
And then, just before we broke up . . .’ She clears her throat, then glances at Tate through her fingers.
‘Tate saw what he was doing and stood up for me, and Buck picked a fight, because there’s nothing he loves more than a fight.
He threw a chair through a window. And he told everybody it was Tate, that he’d flown into this, like, violent rage.
And of course everyone here believed him, and they nearly kicked Tate out. ’
‘Wait,’ says Tate. ‘Are you trying to say you sent Briar to kill Buck for me?’
‘No. I don’t know. Partially. It was for everything.’ She scrubs a hand across her eyes and then looks at Orpheus again. ‘I should have just taken my fucking knife and killed him myself.’
Bastian has been listening without reaction. Now, he opens his mouth, then covers by reaching for his tea instead. How much of this version of Alistair is familiar to him? How much had he escaped, by dint of being a boy, of having power - of needing to be kept a secret?
Briar’s anger has cooled. It’s dull, now, where before it’d had teeth. They’d never have done what Hadley did, but it’s not like they’ve never made a bad decision out of anger, in the pursuit of revenge. And she’s miserable. That might be punishment enough.
‘This place is amazing.’ Westby’s voice floats down the hall. ‘Where are you all? It’s amazing! Genie’s house. I want to touch all her stuff. Give me some stuff, and I’ll touch it. Where’s her room?’
‘We’re in here,’ Tate calls back. The voice comes ever closer.