Ceri rolled her eyes. She needed friends her own age who weren’t such know-it-alls. She looked across the room at where Ana was laying down.
“Hold on,” she said.
She crossed the room to Ana. A few people whispered—she guessed the word had gotten out that she was missing.
“Ana?”
“Oh, you’re okay! Thank goodness. Where’s Leo?”
Ceri shook her head. “I—do you want to hear the story? I’m telling it now.”
“Okay,” said Ana, following her back to the circle.
“I ran out into the courtyard. The rain was pouring so hard that it hurt. It’s like it was raining sideways. I got to the spot where Leo should have been. I could just see the scorch marks on the ground. But he wasn’t there.”
“What do you mean, ‘wasn’t there’?” asked Idris.
“I mean he wasn’t there. Alive or not. No Leo. No nothing.”
This last part wasn’t strictly true. There was something there, something tucked into the waistband of Ceri’s skirt. Something she had hidden when she’d dried her clothes.
Leo’s journal.
If Ceri mentioned it right now, they’d make her hand it over. They’d go through it together, or they’d take turns reading out loud from it or something equally mortifying.
And Ceri needed to know what was in it first. She’d hand it over to them, but not before checking for…well, she wasn’t sure what.
She knew what she’d write if she kept a journal.
It was the reason she didn’t.
“Perhaps it was some kind of magic?” asked Keir.
“I don’t understand,” said Alison. “That’s not how magic works, not to my understanding of it anyway. When we were trapped in the vine’s world, our bodies were still in this one. We know it because we found Aras’s body.”
“That was one kind of magic,” said Keir. “But we’ve seen others. What was that book you found when you found the secret passage?”
“Secret passage?” said the Dean and Ana at almost the same time.
Alison explained about the passage between the library and Idris’s closet.
“The book was something about portals and doorways, but it wasn’t a real book. I think it was just a joke by whoever made the passage. I don’t think portals are real. Are they, Idris?”
“Not to my knowledge, although I wouldn’t be surprised, to be honest. It would have to be extremely powerful magic though, to move objects through the physical realm.”
“You think he went somewhere?” asked Ceri.
Ceri hadn’t thought he was dead initially, but once she’d retold the story, she couldn’t really see how he could have survived such a thing.
“Lightning doesn’t disintegrate,” said Professor Marin. “If it happened as you said, his body should still be there. He mayhave even survived it. The strike in the lab was nowhere near as strong, but this doesn’t sound like ordinary lightning either.”
“The strike in the lab?” asked Dean Whittaker.
This time, no one answered him.
“It’s not there,” said Ceri. “I’m certain.”
“Could he have run somewhere in the dark?” asked Rinka.
