Chapter 24
THEY HOLD ALICE QUINN’S MEMORIAL service in the Vault the following day.
Her body was sent back to her family in Minnesota for a funeral, but the Acheron memorial service is required for all students.
Someone ordered a large bouquet of white gerbera daisies.
And someone placed a life-sized, framed photograph of Alice on an easel near the front of the Vault.
But the service seems impersonal and remote.
The picture features Alice smiling tepidly in a ski suit, perched on the mountaintop the first day of the term, just before the coupling ritual.
Dez remembers Alice that day, scrambling like the rest of them to find their place in a sea of middle names.
But she can’t remember Alice’s middle name, and the guilt she feels over this is oppressive.
Why hadn’t Dez been more of a friend to her?
She sits by Simon and Esther, cold and tired, in a state of shock. When she closes her eyes, she can still see the body on the topiary hedge. It doesn’t feel real or right that they’re saying goodbye like this.
Yael approaches the podium wearing a black dress and black veil.
“As all of you know, I’m devastated,” she says in a convincingly wrecked voice.
“I’ll never forget the day I coupled with Alice as my protégé.
I may not always have shown it, but I believed in her.
” She dabs her eyes with a black gloved fingertip. “I was looking forward to—”
She breaks off into a silent sob that makes Dez wonder how much went on between Yael and Alice that Dez didn’t see.
There’s more to Rafe and Dez’s mentorship than the others know. Could the same be true for Yael and Alice? For Simon and Jet? For all the mentors and protégés?
The thought makes Dez’s stomach turn. It’s ridiculous, of course.
“I’m sorry,” Yael whispers, placing her hand on Alice’s cheek in the photograph. “Farewell, little one. May you find the peace you couldn’t have here.”
Dez hangs her head. It hurts to imagine Alice’s family learning of her death while she was away at school. Dez thinks of Moses. She’s been thinking of her family more than usual today. What she wouldn’t give to fold her brother and her mother in her arms right now and tell them she loves them.
“Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil,” Dr. Ezekiel says from the podium next to Yael.
Dez feels like she can’t breathe.
When the service is over, she can’t bear the reception.
She needs air. She moves quickly out of the Vault and steps out onto the empty campus, trying to catch her breath.
She zips her coat and pulls her hood up as she walks through the falling snow on the tri.
Tears slide down her cheeks as she imagines Alice in her final moments.
What was it that finally made her do it?
What did she feel on her way down? Did her life flash before her eyes at the end, and if so, what did she see?
Dez wishes she could go back and do so many things differently, be kinder, more generous, less self-absorbed. Would anything have changed the course of Alice’s life and death?
Dez hears a strange sound coming from above. Something whirring in the wind.
She follows with her eyes.
And sees something … someone falling through the air.
Limbs flailing. Overcoat flapping in the wind.
Not screaming, but—
As the body gets closer, Dez sees a bloody mouth open in abject horror.
She screams as the body smashes into the snow, face up, inches in front of her.
It lands with so much force that a sickening pink mist rises from it.
Horrified, Dez leans forward and gazes into the grisly crater in the snow.
The dead man’s eyes are open, pale and tortured.
His hair is matted across his crushed, misshapen face.
There’s something … wrong about the way he looks.
Not just his shattered limbs and vacant eyes, but his shredded skin, the way it fits him. It’s like it doesn’t fit him.
Like he’s been dead awhile.
“No.”
Bile rises in Dez’s throat as she stumbles away from the mangled corpse, tripping over her feet, falling on her knees in the snow. She looks up at the sky, where she knows he fell from. He didn’t leap from anywhere. Impossible. There are no towers near enough for him to have jumped off of.
So what happened?
It’s like the man fell from nothing.
Is he real? Or is this another twisted special effect, designed to fuck with Dez?
Charles Costella. Alice Quinn. Is any of this real?
She tries to stand but tremors rock her body.
Breathe.
Her lungs don’t listen.
Footsteps sound behind her on the tri. She knows this man is past helping, long past saving. And Dez doesn’t want to be caught and questioned by whoever’s on their way. She staggers back from the body with her hands up, as if to say she didn’t do it.
Several men in hazmat suits and gas masks march in a line out of Goliath. The Maintenance Department.
“Looks like another suicide,” one of them says without surprise or remorse.
Dez observes with disgust how the men in black barely seem to notice her, how robotically they have the procedure down.
Body in the body bag. Cordon off the area. Make it look like nothing happened.
But it did happen. Dez saw it.
And it wasn’t a suicide. She just doesn’t know what it was.