Ellory’s breath rattled out of her lungs in hitching pants. Through the hammering rain, she thought she heard a giggle, but when she whirled around, there was no one there. The path she had walked to get here had grown darker, unfamiliar, like an elongated black tongue. Trees twisted in the gale, branches splayed like the limbs of a broken puppet. Lightning snapped across a sky the dark purple of a fresh bruise.
Perhaps the laughter was only in her mind, her subconscious processing what she was so slow to accept.
Impossible or not, she was lost.
The storm had somehow swallowed her whole.
2
Ellory had worked a double shift the day the letter arrived. She might not have opened it at all if it hadn’t been for Aunt Carol, who was the kind of gossip who sat in her lawn chair on the fire escape to watch the neighbors in the Hummer-sized cement block her building called a courtyard. Ellory had spent four hours at Midtown Comics being talked down to about Marvel by people who considered “Do you likeBlade?” to be a form of flirting—the same people who sputtered when she fixed them with a dead-eyed stare and a “Why? Because I’m Black?” Then she’d spent another four hours at the Queens Public Library at Astoria, reshelving books from the endless supply of carts and trying not to get caught reading between the stacks.
Most of the mail that she got were bills or advertisements—for government candidates, colleges she couldn’t afford to attend, and preapproved credit cards—and she kept them in a chaotic pile on her night table until she was in the mood to open them all at once. But when she got home that day, Carol was in the kitchen, sitting in front of a battlefield of torn envelopes and crumpled letters. Theholiday popcorn tin they’d repurposed into a piggy bank was open in the center of the table, and Carol was carefully counting out money for each bill: Rent. Electricity. Wi-Fi. Hospital. She would take an envelope of cash to the bank to deposit into her savings account, then cut checks by the end of each month. It was the only way she could guarantee she wouldn’t waste it all in a debit card swipe and end up short.
As soon as Ellory stepped into the kitchen, her shoes neatly discarded by the door and her jacket tossed over the half-empty barrel wedged into their narrow hallway, Aunt Carol looked up at her with a grin. “You got an envelope. A thick one.”
“And it didn’t fall open when you left it on the shelf over the kettle?”
“I have no idea what you’re talking about,” Carol sniffed. “But no, it didn’t.”
Ellory was tossed a brown envelope—as thick as described—that was still damp from the steam of the kettle. The return address was a sticker with an unfamiliar logo, the lettersWandUin ink-black sans serif with forest-green ivy curled around the letters. Beneath, a scroll-like banner read, FOUNDED IN 1954. Her name was written neatly in the direct center of the envelope, ELLORY JESSICA MORGAN, as if they’d wanted to make sure there was no mistake about which Ellory Morgan they were writing to. Her aunt’s eyes bored into her forehead as Ellory sank down in the chair across from hers and fiddled with the seal.
Dear Miss Morgan,
We are reaching out to invite you to a four-year academic opportunity at Warren University in Hartford, Connecticut. Please find all informational materials enclosed.
As your academic records are three years old, we ask only that you sit for our free attendance exam at one of these hopefully convenient times. Should you pass, tuition, room, and board will be fully covered by the Godwin Scholarship in the amount of…
When she saw the numbers listed across from what that money would be covering, her hands started to shake. She read the letter twice before she managed to release her death grip on the paper and hand it over to Carol. She hadn’t even applied to Warren University in her hopeful initial round, three years prior. Columbia and Cornell were in New York, Princeton closer, in New Jersey;thosehad been her reach schools, and she’d lost her place in Princeton after her deferral year.
Since then, each time she brought up the idea of going to community college, Aunt Carol looked like Ellory had slapped her.
“You want me to tell your parents that they entrusted you to my care so you could end upat a community college?” she’d said, her hand over her heart like a scandalized Puritan. Ellory’s well-worn arguments that there was nothing wrong with community college, that it would give her the same degree with less debt, and that Carol’s reaction was both elitistandclassist had just made her aunt even more outraged. Community college was, in Carol’s eyes, a curse capable of staining their bloodline for generations to come.
Ellory googled WARREN UNIVERSITY while Carol read the letter, soon landing on the Wikipedia page. As she’d known, it was an Ivy League, a member of the Ancient Nine, the last added and the last built. The list of notable alumni included ten congressmen, six diplomats, twenty actors, and one serial killer serving a lifesentence in CSP-C. Their admissions process involved a terrifyingly high rejection rate, fleshed out by active outreach to marginalized and underrepresented communities and a robust financial aid program. And they wanted her. Not to apply, but to attend on a full-ride scholarship.
When she met Carol’s gaze over her phone, she saw her own awe reflected at her. But there had also been a dawning hope, a fire not yet lit but flecked with embers. If this was real…if this was legal…it would be her second chance. Her almost-lost shot.
Her new beginning.
Bullshit. In three weeks, Ellory had made an enemy or two, cried in a third-floor bathroom after a lecture so confusing that it had made her question her grasp of the English language, and gotten troublingly addicted to the particular swirl of syrups and espresso in a Powers That Bean iced vanilla latte. Now she was hyperventilating in a hungry tempest, her sense of time and direction slipping through her shaking fingers.
If this was her beginning, she was going to hate the ending.
The rain formed a cage that blocked light and sound from the streets around her. Ellory fished her phone out of her wet bag to send Tai a text and let her GPS guide her back to her residence hall, only to find that it had no service—a feat she had not believed possible in the United States in this day and age. Two minutes later, when the tiny text remained the same, she turned around. A blue umbrella, its long rib jutting away from the canopy like an axe handle, skidded across the path and disappeared into the trees. Rain dripped from her shrunken hair and down the sides of her face. She shivered, her hoodie and T-shirt clinging to her clammy skin.
Wind giggled through the leaves. A strange scent hit her nose, making it wrinkle…and it wasn’t petrichor like she expected. Shesmelled inert dust and rotting wood and stale air, as if she were not outside but inside a tomb long abandoned.
Ellory stepped forward but didn’t sink into the gray water below the sidewalk. The ground beneath her fumbling feet was even, steady. She hadjustbeen on the side of the road, but she looked now and found nothing but gray-brown concrete spread forward and back, trees to one side and a darkness too complete to pierce on the other. The giggling returned, high and clear, as if to prove that this was nothing as mundane as the wind. Beneath that, she could make out a low metallic trill, like the vibration of a buzzing bee.
Hallucinations, delusions, paralogia…the sudden onset of all that seemed more likely than the testimony of her own senses. And yet…
And yet this had happened to her before.
As a child, her parents had let her go to the corner shop alone, money in hand for candy and scratch tickets. Halfway there, she got lost despite the shop being straight downhill. Her landmarks—the lavender house with the two dogs in the front yard, the cactus attempting to grow into a worn telephone pole, the stop sign that someone had drawn a curse word on—disappeared, leaving her on an endless dim street framed by thick foliage and twisted tree trunks. A doctor bird wove through the leaves above her, iridescent green wings a blur on either side of its round body, its long black tails stabbing the air like needles.
Just when Ellory was ready to sit on the sidewalk and wait to be found, she heard a familiar voice. “Mi closed,” said Miss Claudette, the elderly woman who owned it. She stood at the end of the lane, right in the center of the road, her hair wrapped in a bronze scarf. Although it was a hot, windless day, the trees seemed to inch toward Claudette, waving back and forth in time with Ellory’s breathing,closer and closer every time. Even the doctor bird had disappeared. “Gwaan home.”
“Zeen.” But her stomach twisted with the sense that something wasoff. “Yuh good, miss?”
