It was early October, the afternoons twilit, when she finally cracked under Mackenzie’s incessant pressure.
“You have to ask Price about the wall.” Her floormate lay sprawled like a starfish across her quilt, picking the polish from her nails. “Every day you don’t, Adya suffers.”
“Adya is fine,” Adya said, her features lit blue by her laptop. “I haven’t had another block in weeks. Whatever was there, it’s gone now.”
“Because he’s dead,” Mackenzie countered. “Probably rotting in a ditch somewhere. And we could be the only ones who saw. We need to be putting one hundred percent of our focus into this.”
Adya shut her laptop. “We don’t even know if what I saw was real.”
“Exactly.” Delaney nudged Mackenzie’s feet off the edge of her bed. “Plus, I sort of feel like we should be putting our focus into crossing between worlds. We only have a week left until trial runs.”
She didn’t tell them she’d been back to the Sanctum, and often. Sometimes, it was empty, and she’d while away the breaks between classes basking in the bliss of total silence. More often than not, Nate Schiller was there, hood up and earbuds in, air-drumming along to a song she couldn’t hear.
“This is a meditative space,” he’d announced the first time she returned, toting a brown paper bag of half-stale pastries. “If you’re going to make it your hangout spot, you need to respect the house rules. First, share your snacks. Second, maintain complete and total silence.”
“Way ahead of you,” she’d said, and set a pumpkin muffin on the pallet table between them.
Away from the dorms and the cafés and the classrooms, she finally felt free to click off her implant. There was an unspoken fellowship in their mutual solitude, an easy quiet she’d rarely found with anyone else. She read. Nate listened to music. They didn’t speak. Several times, she’d considered mining Nate for more information about the wall, but to do so felt like a breach of trust—a breaking of the unspoken covenant they shared.
And so, she left it alone.
“Hello?” Mackenzie snapped her fingers in front of her face and Delaney became belatedly aware of the fact that she hadn’t absorbed a word either of her friends had said. “We have a moral responsibility here, Laney,” she insisted. “Ask Price about the wall.”
***
Dusk found Delaney curled into the deep cushions of Colton’s family room couch, the moon pressed up against the glass. Colton sat just opposite her, his long legs sprawled across the couch, their limbs all but tangled. She’d spent a better part of the night pretending not to notice.
“Adya and I went to the Sanctum a few weeks ago.” She peered over the top of her borrowed notes, too acutely aware of the phantom brush of his foot against her thigh. “Your name was on the wall.”
Colton didn’t look up from his book. “That checks,” he said, “since I put it there.”
The crinkle of his turning page rustled all through the chilly grandeur of the house. Before she could think better of it, she said, “I wrote my name next to yours.”
The fathomless dark of Colton’s stare flicked to hers. “Yeah?”
“Does that mean anything to you?”
A muscle worked in his jaw. “I don’t know,” he said slowly. “Should it?”
Too late, she realized how she’d sounded. Like an underclassman with a crush. Pining and lovesick, carving their initials into the trunk of a tree. Penciling his name into her notebook. Fire ignited in her cheeks.
“It’s just that Nate said the wall is some sort of dead pool,” she rushed to say. “It’s an infinitely creepy thought, and I wasn’t sure if there was a real reason you all wrote your names up there. Maybe some sort of brotherhood thing?” She was veering dangerously close to babbling, and she wished desperately for the ability to scrub this conversation from both of their brains.
Across the couch, Colton had gone still. “Nate Schiller?”
“Yeah. Do you know him?”
“We used to be friends,” he said. Then, “You shouldn’t talk to him.”
She withdrew her legs, swinging them onto the floor. “Why not?”
“For one,” he said, mirroring her movements, “the guy is two bad theories away from becoming a Flat Earther. He thinks everything is a conspiracy.”
“So you’re saying he’s wrong,” Delaney pressed. “You’re not all placing bets on who might turn up dead?”
Colton dug the heel of his hand into his eye. “I’m saying I don’t think you should spend time with him.”
Propelled by a burst of indignation, Delaney pushed herself off the couch. Colton followed, towering over her beneath the incandescent lights of the parlor.
