“Deal.” I didn’t want to let Zehra go. I wanted to cling to this dark-haired ball of fury and hope forever. I wanted to follow her down the peninsula to her RV and drive as far from this fucking school as we could get. But she was right – the guys needed me here, and it was dangerous for all of us if they discovered her. We had to say goodbye.
Zehra took a phone from her pocket, but then frowned at it. “It would be nice to find some way to communicate that doesn’t involve you having to walk all the way out here. I forgot that you’re not allowed phones.”
“Whoa,” Quinn peered over her shoulder as she swiped the screen. “They’ve changed a lot since we last had them.”
“If we could find where Ms. West keeps the ones she confiscated, maybe we could take one.” I thought of all the pictures on mine – mostly selfies of Mom and Dante and me – memories I’d brought with me to Derleth to remind me of what I’d lost. It hadn’t even occurred to me to try and steal the phone back.
Zehra took a scrap of paper from her pocket and scribbled a number on the back. “This is my phone number. If you ever manage to steal one of the confiscated ones, you can contact me on this. Otherwise, I’ll be in the entrance of the south tunnel – the one that leads from the forest by the pleasure garden into the god’s cavern – in a week’s time. If you want to see me again, be there.”
“We will.” Ayaz embraced his sister again. Trey grabbed his shoulder and dragged him away. Zehra stood by the cave entrance and watched us until we submitted the crest of the hill. When I looked back one last time, she was gone.
Ayaz walked in a trance, frequently having to stop to re-orient himself. “I can’t believe she’s alive. All these years, I’d convinced myself…”
“Not only that, but she might have a way to save you.” My mind churned with the possibilities. For the first time, we had a direction, a cause. “If what’s been done to you is a scientific process that happened under Ms. West’s knife, then there could be a way to reverse it.”
“I can’t believe it,” Quinn kept saying. “All this time they’d been telling us it was the god who brought us back to be its servants. But really, it was Ms. West.”
Trey walked in silence. I knew what he was thinking – that this tied in perfectly with his theory that the senior Eldritch Club members planned this, even before the fire.
“Do you guys remember anything from after the fire?” I asked. “Any details you can recall might help us find the lab.”
“I remember pain,” Quinn said. “A fuckton of pain.”
“It was the night of the annual alumni dance,” Trey surprised me by speaking up. I waited for him to continue. He didn’t.
“Can you say more? I want to understand.”
“It’s a big event for the school, to celebrate the year coming to a close. We’d eaten in the dining hall, and afterwards the school had organized a dance in the gymnasium for parents and students. The parents went first for one of their private meetings, while we all went back to our rooms to get ready and drink and get high. By 8PM every student was in the gym, hitting the dance floor in their finery – Tillie wore this glittering gown that…” Trey cleared his throat. “We were dancing when I noticed something odd. The parents started leaving – first in pairs and threes, then it seemed as if there was a great exodus. I went to find my dad, but just before I could get to them, both gym doors slammed shut.”
Angry tears burned in the back of my eyes. I couldn’t believe their parents – the very people who were supposed to protect these kids, to love them unconditionally – could have knowingly lured their kids into this trap. Was that how far they would go for more power?
“I remember…” Trey’s eyes flickered. “I remember carrying Tillie across the gym, heading toward the doors. Her sparkly dress caught fire and she screamed and screamed. I couldn’t see anything through the smoke and there was thisscritchingnoise, like rats running across the floor. Smoke burned in my lungs. I couldn’t breathe. My mind went white – I fell into this deep sleep punctured by brutal dreams. The next thing I knew, I woke up screaming, trapped in the dark, buried in a tiny box where the air was growing stale.
“They’d buried us, alive but not alive. I could hear the priest’s voice overhead, the sound of parents and families sobbing. The earth above groaned with the weight of their pain. I banged my fists on the lid, but it wouldn’t budge. For hours I wrestled alone with the dark, screaming and begging for release. The air in my coffin must’ve run out, but I didn’t suffocate. The next thing I remember was the scrape of a spade on wood, the lifting of the weight that bore down on me, a bright rectangle of pale moonlight as the lid was lifted and I peered out of my grave. Quinn helped me up. Everyone was there, climbing out of the ground or helping to dig the others out. We all looked alive, felt alive, but we weren’t. Our burns had healed, our lungs good as new, our minds wrung out of good memories and tender dreams. If there was a lab, they made sure we didn’t remember it.”
Beside me, Quinn shuddered.
There was no talking after that, nothing to say that could lighten the horror of Trey’s story. Ayaz fell in step beside me. His fingers brushed mine, raising the fire along my arm. I entwined my fingers in his, holding his hand all the way back to school.
We emerged in the pleasure garden, finding it empty except for Nancy making out with a guy under the rotunda. I assumed it was Paul but when he turned his head, I realized it was Barclay, another guy from Trey’s lacrosse team. Nancy raised her eyebrows when she saw the four of us, but she didn’t stop us or call out. I guess she figured we all had to keep each other’s secrets.
Trey went in the tunnel first. I followed behind Quinn, my mind racing as the dark closed around me again, the embers of the fire stoked by Ayaz’s touch still flickering inside me. So many things had happened tonight, so many secrets revealed and emotions laid bare. I didn’t know what would happen next, only that all options ahead of us were terrifying – but Ididknow that unless the guys did something awful to me, there was no way I’d be able to inflict my punishment on them. Not anymore.
I also knew that right now, tonight, I was barely holding it together, and I didn’t want to be alone.
As Ayaz emerged from the mirror behind me, I reached out and took his hand, feeling the fire roaring to life inside me. “You doing okay?”
He shook his head. “I don’t fucking know. It’s a lot to wrap my head around.”
“Sure is. Ayaz?”
“Mmmm.”
“Stay with me.”
Chapter Twenty-Nine
I have no idea what the fuck I’m doing.
