Chapter 6
INSIDE THE JET, IT’S DARK and sleek, with four black captain’s chairs flanking a black aisle. There’s a bar. Glass ceiling panels showing off the stars. And … no cockpit. Only windows all the way to the plane’s nose.
Dez has never been in the same vicinity as a private jet, but she’d always assumed they still needed pilots. Is this a stunt, where whatever Rafe’s been scheming gets revealed? Has this all been a ruse to sell her something? She’s not buying.
“Grab a seat,” Rafe tells her, pulling the door to the gangway closed.
Dez takes to the front corner chair, sinking into leather so plush she can’t help sighing. There’s soft lighting overhead, and on a black glass console in front of her, she finds bottled water, two crystal goblets, and colorful candies in a jar.
She feels her phone buzz in her pocket and hurries to pick up. It can only be her mom this late at night. There must be news about Mo.
But when Dez sees the name on her screen, her heart skips.
Asher?
Why would he call so late, in the middle of the night?
And out of the blue, on a day she almost texted him?
Her finger slides to answer, but this is crazy.
She can’t talk to him right now. She bites her lip, dying to know what he wants, fearing how awkward the conversation would be with Rafe five feet away.
Rafe takes the seat across from Dez and smiles at her, dazzling and unexpected. She smells something on him that she hadn’t noticed last night but that now smells familiar, jogging her memory back to their meeting. Petrichor? Fresh rain on the earth. Such a rare scent in Death Valley.
“Ready?” he asks.
Dez lifts her finger off her screen.
“Where’s the pilot?” she asks.
The call, she sees, goes to voicemail.
“Don’t need one,” Rafe says, using his foot to spin his chair around. “This plane’s operating system is far beyond human capacity.”
What he’s just said is alarming, but Dez is distracted from fears of AI air navigation by the fact that she can see Asher is leaving a message on her phone right now.
She’ll be able to listen to it as soon as she’s alone.
She’ll be able to call him and tell him …
everything. She puts her phone back in her pocket, feeling like it’s made of solid gold.
“Buckle up,” Rafe says. “Oh wait, you can’t.”
Dez gropes around her chair, finding nothing to strap herself in. “Where are the seat belts?”
“Don’t worry,” Rafe says. “You’ve never had a smoother ride. Other than the full one you just got to Acheron. Which reminds me.” Rafe hands Dez an Acheron-logo fountain pen. “I need you to sign your offer. In the acceptance letter I gave you.”
Dez pulls out her acceptance letter and reads, at the bottom of the page:
By accepting this offer, I accept the generosity of Acheron, and its requirements therein, whatever Acheron determines that generosity and those requirements to be.
Under this sentence, there’s a place for her to sign and write the date.
She has no idea what she’s getting herself into with this acceptance, but at this point, what other choice does she have?
She signs the offer quickly, places it in Rafe’s outstretched hand, and grips leather hand-sewn armrests as she feels the plane begin to stir to life beneath her and taxi down the landing strip.
She thought there’d be more time to settle in, to say a prayer.
She raises the black leather shade on her window and gazes out into the dark night. She can barely see the plane’s wings.
Rafe folds his hands over his lap. “You look worried. I’ll let you in on a secret. This plane—we call it an Igi, the Sumerian word for ‘eye’—it’s designed to be effectively invisible.”
“What? Why?”
“Because what we do is no one else’s business.”
“Not even air traffic controllers?”
“Especially them,” Rafe says. “Look, it’s very simple. Did your taxi driver think he was dropping you off at an abandoned hangar?”
“Yes. It seemed like he did.”
“To the untrained eye it would look like that. But you saw it, didn’t you, Dez? Because you have the eye.”
Dez swallows as her hand finds its way inside her pants pocket. The eye is still there. There are so many things wrong with her life at the moment.
“This plane’s near-invisibility is a special effect that our tech team at Acheron figured out how to make work in the real world.”
“That’s absurd.”
“And patented. One of the ways we can afford so many of the luxuries you’ll soon experience on campus.”
Dez’s stomach flips as the plane lifts off the tarmac, into the sky.
“So the plane just knows where we’re going?” she says.
“It knows what I tell it to know.”
Dez stares at Rafe, watching the movement of his eyes, how they seem to be watching some invisible arc through the sky. When his gaze shifts slightly left, Dez looks out to see their flight path arc left over her darkened neighborhood—now a thousand feet below.
“Holy shit,” she says under her breath. She’s only flown a few times before, and never in a plane like this.
“It’ll take a beat,” Rafe says, “but you’ll come to appreciate Acheron’s amenities. We’re very well endowed.”
“Maybe you’re overcompensating for something,” Dez says, holding his gaze because he doesn’t intimidate her. Not that much.
“Maybe you need a drink.” He passes his hand over a panel of mirrored glass, which slides back to reveal a bottle-packed, black marbled bar.
Dez reaches in and pulls out a random bottle. Its label reads Pappy Van Winkle. “Is this good?”
“It’ll do,” Rafe says. “Pour me one. We’ll be at Acheron in twenty minutes.”
That seems impossibly fast. Then again, so does the speed of the dark terrain passing beneath them, and the speed of Dez’s changing world. She reassures herself that if this jet can get her to the Rocky Mountains in twenty minutes, it can get her back to her family just as fast.
She pours two glasses and passes one to Rafe. When they clink, he meets her eyes. “To your brother.”
Goose bumps rise on Dez’s arms. “To Mo.”
They drink. It’s smoother than anything she’s ever slid down her throat. And it takes a much-needed edge off.
“When was Acheron founded?” she asks Rafe. She’s been researching film schools for years, and it’s strange that she’s never come across the one she’s about to enroll in.
“Ages ago, though we’ve changed buildings more recently.”
“Film has only existed for about a hundred years.”
Rafe fixes a stare at her. “Actually, Edison invented the kinetoscope in 1889.”
“I know that,” Dez says. “And the first film, Monkeyshines, was made in—”
Rafe cuts her off: “1890. Are you trying to outnerd me, Dez? I’ll let you win, but there are far more fun games we could play. All you need to know is Acheron is the first of its kind, the only of its kind.”
“The first film school was founded in Moscow in 1919,” Dez counters.
Rafe laughs under his breath. “Let’s just say we’ve been flying under the radar.”
“How many students are enrolled?” she asks.
“One hundred. And fifty graduated last term. So, the class you’ll be joining will number fifty, too.”
“Are they also being rounded up, fly by night, in private planes?”
He smiles at her. “I doubt any of them are having this much fun.”
Dez draws her knees up to her chest. Picking at the hole in her maroon Dairy Barn slacks, she realizes something distressing.
“My bags,” she gasps. “I left them on the tarmac—”
“Relax.”
“I don’t have any other clothes!”
“There’s a reason I didn’t remind you to pick up your bags,” Rafe says. “Acheron isn’t like other places. You’ll see.”
“I don’t want to wear my Dairy Barn uniform on my first day of class.”
“I don’t want you to wear it either.”
“My computer—”
“It was a piece of shit, Dez.”
It was. But it was her piece of shit. “All my files are on it.”
“I know,” Rafe says condescendingly. “It’s the only way you know how to work. But laptops aren’t allowed at Acheron. They’re for idiots.”
“What am I supposed to work on?”
Rafe laughs. “When you see your new equipment, you’ll forget laptops ever existed. Besides, every byte on that crappy computer has already been uploaded into the Acheron database.”
“How is that possible?”
“Because we have excellent scouts.”
By now her laptop is hundreds of miles away. She’ll never see it again. Nothing to do now but take another drink and try to take Rafe at his word. “There’s something else I need to know.”
“You’re wondering: why you?”
“Well, yeah.”
He looks like he wants to make a joke, but then he says: “What do you think?”
“Honestly I’m not sure.” She gazes down at the blurry land below. Dez knows they’re flying faster than planes should. And yet she feels no thrust, no turbulence.
“When you’re in the flow,” Rafe says, “with one of your films, don’t you feel you see things others don’t?”
Dez nods. “I guess so.”
“And don’t you want to show others all this”—he gestures, not just out the window and down at the world below, but also up at the sky, then at the two of them—“as only you see it?”
Dez is intrigued. She’s never put it into words before, but she knows she does see things differently from others.
It’s one reason she never quite fit in at school growing up, in a culture where normalcy was currency.
And it’s what drives her to make films, to represent life as she sees it, to make her visions tangible.
To bridge the gap between herself and the wide world.
But surely there are hundreds, thousands of other filmmakers with portfolios just as good as hers? Why did Acheron’s scouts pick her?
Rafe reaches up and touches the mirrored glass over his head. A screen comes to life before Dez’s eyes. A moment later, her film, Glimpse, begins to play.
It starts with Dez on a packed and sunny pier in Ventura, pursuing Asher through the crowd.
Dez studies his shoulders, his gait, the flashes of his lovely profile.
When she finally catches up to him, she taps him on the shoulder.
He turns to her … and his face is a mirror, reflecting Dez back to herself.
It’s only three minutes long, but when it’s over, Dez feels dazed and exposed. She can’t help wondering what Rafe thinks of her work.
“You’ll have to check your imposter syndrome at the door,” Rafe says, “or you won’t make it at Acheron.”
“And if I can’t?”
“I don’t think the Dairy Barn is going anywhere.”
Dez decides then that no matter what happens at Acheron, she’ll make it work. She’s going to be a filmmaker.
“What’s with the mirror on the guy’s face at the end?” Rafe says.
“It was intuitive. But I guess what I meant was … sometimes the thing we’re chasing is the thing we can’t reach inside ourselves.”
He looks at her. The irritating push-pull of their rapport flickers into the Pull category whenever their gazes are locked. After a while, she makes herself look away. She sips her drink.
“Is he your boyfriend?”
“Stranger I cast off the street,” Dez says, but she’s thinking about her golden phone, the voicemail Asher left for her a little while ago. “I never saw him again.”
When she looks back at Rafe, he’s narrowing his eyes. It’s very smooth, but Dez thinks she feels the jet descending.
“Except when you were editing your movie, right?” Rafe says. “You must have seen a lot of him then.”
“Sure, I mean, I’ve got his face and voice and mannerisms memorized, but I don’t know him.”
“Funny how that happens,” Rafe says, and they stare at each other long enough for Dez’s cheeks to warm.
Out the window, a bolt of light illuminates the sky, and a sudden jolt rattles the jet, making it nosedive. Dez screams, but her terror ends as quickly as it began. The plane levels out, resuming its easy glide.
Dez loosens her crazed grip on the armrests, feeling gaslit by Rafe’s unperturbed expression. “What was that?”
“That was the barbelo. Another of Acheron’s special effects.”
Willing her heart rate to slow, she tries to make her voice sound as cool as his. “Another ancient Sumerian name?”
“It’s a Gnostic word that means ‘the supreme limit.’ We just crossed it. Which means … we’re here.”
Dez leans over her window and looks out. Snowcapped mountains in moonlight. Craggy peaks of astonishing heights. She’s never seen anything so beautiful. And then, as if carved into the center of the tallest peak—a castle.
A castle in the sky.
“We call the main building Goliath,” Rafe says. “Those Gothic towers are where student housing is. And the long wing in the center is the Vault. That’s where we do our work.”
Dez presses her face to the glass, trying to take it all in. Goliath. The Towers. The Vault.
“See the lawn behind Goliath?” Rafe points at a large, moonlit triangular expanse. “Our version of a quad, but we call it a tri. Beyond it are the classrooms and the dining hall. And in front of it …”
In front of the castle stretches a vast topiary labyrinth.
“What’s that?”
“Our labyrinth was designed by an illustrious landscaper … whose name is impossible to pronounce.”
Dez thinks she sees a shadow moving within the maze. Probably just some grad student out for a drunken stroll. She points at the shadow. “Is someone in there?”
“I hope not,” Rafe says. “I’ve heard of first-years wandering in who never make it out.”
“You’re insufferable. Do you know that?”
“I think the word you’re reaching for is irresistible.”
And he is that too. And he knows it. And it’s maddening.
His lips pull up at the corners. “Don’t go falling for me.”
“Don’t worry.”
“Cuz I’ve got one foot out the door at Acheron.”
“What’s next? Going for your doctorate in narcissism?”
He laughs and lowers his chin, and as he does, the jet swoops down toward the mountain. Almost in time with the movement of his eyes.
“Welcome to your new playground, Desdemona,” he says. “And the site of your further corruption. Welcome to Acheron.”