He wasn’t meant to get close. He wasn’t allowed to know her. But no one had ever said anything about discussing her roommate. “The sort of astral projection Dawoud is attempting is similar to pushing at a revolving door,” he explained. “The carriage won’t turn if something else is pushing on the other side.”
Discomfort crept into Lane’s eyes. “What does that mean?”
“It means she can’t get out, because something else is trying to get in. That’s why her notebook is flooded with a dead language. The words aren’t coming from her.” He rapped a knuckle against the glass. “You should take her to the Sanctum.”
She rose again to her toes, peering out the window and into the wood. “Why there?”
He shrugged. “Some people think the stones act as a locus of supernatural energy.”
Her cypress stare locked on him. “And what do you think?”
“I think it’s dirty and it reeks of weed. But if Dawoud is looking for answers, it’s worth a try.”
He knew by the crinkle in her nose that she was trying to puzzle out whether or not she should trust him.No, he wanted to tell her.Definitely not.He wanted to tell her that she should stay far away from him. She should stop bringing him coffees. She should stop showing up early to class. She should, at all costs, avoid being caught alone with him.
He’d never tell her any of that. This close, the nearness of her sank into him like teeth. That preternatural pain whittled at his bones. Understanding lit like a wick. He’d take it, he realized. He’d break the rules. He’d welcome this slow, impossible unraveling over the alternative.
Over never knowing her at all.
Flexing his fingers, he slid his hands into his pockets. He hoped she hadn’t noticed how they shook. As nonchalantly as he knew how, he said, “I can help you with your classes, if you’d like.”
Delaney hadn’t always been able to hear a hum in the silence. When she first lost her hearing, and for a long time afterward, all she heard was that shrill ringing in her ears. Sometimes, later on, when she was tired or unfocused—when she hovered right on that liminal cusp between sleep and waking—the shrill vibrato of tinnitus would take shape. The sound would become the hum, the hum a word. A murmur. A sigh. By then she was too old for games. The cuts on her knees had faded to scars. She’d stopped whispering her secrets to the dark.
I’m dreaming, she’d tell herself, and shut her eyes.Only dreaming.
She wasn’t dreaming now. She was wide awake. Standing in the wood, a late-afternoon sun falling sideways through the trees. In front of her was a house.
A sanctum.
It was, as a whole, a fairly unassuming structure. The mismatched gray stonework was set with fretted windows and capped in a steeply dormered roof. It looked like the love child of a modest chapel and Baba Yaga’s hut—as though it couldn’t decide whether it wanted to signal a call to worship or sprout a pair of chicken legs and take off through the wood.
Moreover, it was speaking to her.
The hum in her head sang through the whole of her body here, coursing through her in a river of noise. She hung back on the foot-trodden path and watched the darkness pour out through the yawning maw of the open front door. It bubbled forth like champagne, frothing at the lip, drunk and savage and beckoning. She didn’t want to go inside.
She hadn’t wanted to come at all, but Delaney had been custom-built into someone agreeable, and she hadn’t managed to talk Adya and Mackenzie out of dragging her along, once she’d put the idea in their heads.
Inside, she found Adya seated on the buckled hardwood of the anterior narthex, sinking into the pleated knit of her sweater. The light of a nearby banker’s lamp caught in the cerulean waves of her hijab, winked in the revolving faces of her pendant. A few feet away, Mackenzie sat at a white bifold table, lazily flicking through a deck of tarot cards.
“You should tell him you’ll do it,” Mackenzie said, without looking up.
Delaney paused in her examination of a rusted cart, stacked high with well-worn copies of waterlogged paperbacks and naked hardcovers. A laminated sign clung precariously to the side:DON’T BE AN ASSHOLE. IF YOU TAKE A BOOK, LEAVE A BOOK.
“Tell who I’ll do what?”
“Price.” Mackenzie gathered up the loose cards into her deck and began shuffling. “Tell him you’ll study with him.”
Delaney set a coverless copy ofThe Catcher in the Ryeback among its peers. She hadn’t told either of them about Colton’s offer. She’d done her best not to think about it at all—about how close they’d stood, their toes nearly touching. The deep well of his stare. The tremor in his hands.
“Don’t look at me like that, honey.” Mackenzie flipped the foiled cards one after the other, setting them in front of her in a cursoryclick, click, click. The drowning man. The high priestess. The lovers. “It’s not like I read your diary. I can’t help seeing these things. It’s like a sneeze. It comes out of nowhere.”
“It’s invasive,” Adya said, without taking her eyes off the pendant. “You’re like an invasive plant. Also, you’re talking too much.”
“It doesn’t matter if I’m talking or not. You can’t justwilla psychic block away. It has to work its way out.”
“Like a splinter,” Adya mused.
“Sure.” Mackenzie scooped up her cards. “Like a splinter.” Shuffling the deck, she ran her thumbnail along the top in a sullen inspection. “I looked up that phrase you wrote in your notebook, by the way.Non omnis moriar? It’s from the poet Horace. It means ‘I shall not wholly die.’?”
