Chapter 12
DEZ’S BOOTS CRUNCH IN THE snow as she walks with Rafe back from the bottom of the ski lift after the coupling ritual.
The twinkling stars all around them, the artificial moon floating on a river of fake clouds—it is beautiful, and strange knowing that a team of filmmaking techs created it, building the reality the rest of them actually live with, day after darkened day.
Dez has never seen Acheron in actual daylight. She wonders if she ever will. For now, she can only guess at what the school looks like without the special effects.
“I can’t believe I just skied,” she says. “Did you have to leap off a mountain when you matched with your mentor?”
Rafe looks into the distance as he walks. “The coupling ritual is different each time.”
“Really? What was yours like?” she asks, glancing at Rafe’s muscled shoulders, his Roman nose, wondering what it’s going to be like to work closely together all term.
He sighs, looking skyward, breathing steam. Tiny snowflakes fall and catch in his long lashes. “Whatever doesn’t kill you, right?”
Dez thinks of Mo and closes her eyes. “Unless it’s your sister.”
“Your brother’s going to be alright.”
“How do you know?” She feels guilty that for half an hour, during the adrenaline rush of the coupling ceremony, Dez hadn’t been consumed with thoughts of Mo.
“I don’t. Not for certain.”
“I need to see him. I need to talk to him—”
“When the time is right,” Rafe says. “For now, you’ve got to lie low.”
Lie low? She’s hiding. And not just from the police. Without her phone to stay in touch, Dez feels like she’s hiding from her family, too.
“If you’re going to be mentoring me, I hope you’ve got some deeper wisdom to offer than ‘lie low.’”
“Well, for three hours every morning after film theory,” Rafe says, “you’re going to find out.” He looks toward her, his gaze tracing her features, pausing for a moment on her lips.
Self-conscious, Dez looks away, even as she wonders … is he attracted to her?
No, she remembers Esmeralda flirting with him at the bar last night, at lunch today. Not to mention every chance Rafe takes to mock Dez, to make her feel like she doesn’t fit in here and probably never will.
“Can I ask how we were paired together?” she says.
“I selected you,” Rafe says simply, still gazing at her.
This surprises Dez. He’s given her every reason to think he looks down on her. What makes him think they’d work well together? And when exactly did he select her? Before or after she arrived at the school?
“Did all the other last-years go out and recruit their first-year protégés from their hometowns, like you did?”
“The other first-years received a letter in the mail.”
“Then why did you come all the way—”
“Most questions are dumb questions,” Rafe says as they reach the tri and start across it toward the towering, gray-bricked faux-Gothic Goliath. “So, try not to ask them. I’ll teach you how to survive here. The rest is up to you.”
Dez rolls her eyes. “Was your mentor this inspiring?”
Rafe stops walking, turns to face her, his expression suddenly grave. “I didn’t require inspiration,” he says. “I wanted to learn.” His voice, so low and intense, sends a chill through Dez more profound than the cold.
He thinks Dez doesn’t want to learn? Because he found her at her lowest?
Or because her heart is in the hospital with Mo?
Or because she’s a woman? Or he’s formed some opinion about her watching Glimpse?
Or he’s an oblivious narcissist incapable of seeing anyone outside his own reflection?
It doesn’t matter. Dez may never know. Point is, Rafe underestimates her, but Dez is used to that.
She’s used to coming out of nowhere when it counts.
It doesn’t explain why he chose to work with her. Unless his main criteria in a protégé was finding someone to torture.
All that matters to Dez is that Rafe actually mentors her. Cut the condescending master act and simply show her the ropes.
He knows things she needs to know, possesses skills she needs to possess. She isn’t here to fuck around on mountain slopes. She’s here to make important art.
“Show me the Vault,” she says. “Show me where we make the movies.”
“First admit you’re glad we’re stuck together.” He turns toward her, leaning close and dropping his voice.
Dez holds her breath and meets his eyes. In the soft glow of a streetlamp, Dez can’t avoid his expression, warm and perversely intimate. He raises a shapely left eyebrow.
She pulls away, trying not to let him see her recover after so much eye contact. Jesus. She’s never been attracted to a sadist before, but apparently there’s a first for everything.
Tomorrow, she’ll get a grip on her arousal for this man. Tomorrow, she’ll do better at so many things.
A high-pitched whistle pierces the air. Dez starts, looking toward it, across the tri, then up into the sky where something darker than the night trundles toward the ground.
“What is that?” Dez says.
A second later, it hits the snow, making a sound like a plane crashing into a house.
“Oh my god,” she gasps.
They’re maybe a hundred feet away from whatever just fell from the sky. The crash roars in her ears.
She takes a few steps toward it before Rafe’s arms hold her back.
“Dez. Don’t go over there.”
“What?” She stares at him in disbelief. “Why not? Someone could be hurt.” She keeps moving toward whatever crashed, dragging Rafe with her.
“Please,” he says, “you don’t know what’s going on.”
“And you do?”
By then, headlights flash in the distance—a black truck driving onto the tri. Dez sees uniformed workers exiting the cab, hurrying toward something on the ground. Her heart rises in her throat, making it hard to breathe. Someone was hurt.
“Let me go,” she tells Rafe.
“Go back to the Towers until we know what happened. Until we know it’s safe.”
A PA system crackles in the external speakers around the tri. “All first-years,” Dr. Moriah says, sounding prerecorded, “report immediately to your residence halls.”
Rafe looks at Dez and lifts a shoulder as if this proves his point.
“Why don’t you have to go? Why don’t you even seem worried?” Dez asks. The sound the crash made was horrifying, bone-chilling, but Rafe seems more concerned with Dez staying away from whatever happened than he does with the thing itself.
“I am worried.” He holds her gaze. “But you shouldn’t go running toward trouble here. Not if you can help it.”
Dez swallows. “Rafe. Do you know what that sound was?”
He steps close, his hand on her shoulder, speaking into her ear in a soft voice that somehow stills her. “Go back to the Towers, Dez. I’ll find you as soon as I can.”