“You were given a singular expectation,” he said. “You haven’t even tried to meet it. Need I remind you how very short your leash is, Mr. Price?”
“I guess maybe you do.”
Off in the dark, his odious haunt hissed out a brittle laugh. For once, the sound served to revive instead of dismay him. Warmed him instead of leaving him cold. In that instant, he saw himself as something of modern-day Abraham, poised to drive a knife through little, weeping Isaac in order to gratify his god. The broken echo of the creature’s laughter clung to the air. It reminded him that he was the sort of man who did whatever it took—who made the difficult decisions when the moment called for them.
This was, he presumed, just such a moment.
He permitted himself a single, sympathetic smile. “You carry yourself like a prince, but you’re only a puppet. A wooden boy, desperate to convince everyone you’re real. You and I know the truth, don’t we? You can’t do a damned thing without someone pulling your strings.”
Price propped his shoulder against the serrated metal of a blood-red unit. “Is there a point to this speech, or do you plan to talk until the entire freshman class arrives?”
“Charming as ever.” The Apostle rerolled the folder and shoved it back into his pocket. To the east, the first fingers of daylight clawed at the horizon. “I won’t command you,” he said. “You’re a smart boy. And you’re going to make this next decision all on your own. Cut ties with the Meyers-Petrov girl, or I’ll see to it that when she dies, it’s your hands around her throat.”
Delaney was not going to make it through the tear in the sky.
She was going to drop out.
She was going to pack up her things.
She was going to go home and turn off her phone and sleep for a year.
Everyone else had gone and returned, one after the other, stepping through with trepidation and coming back bright-eyed and trembling, the blood gone out of their faces.
And then there was Delaney, lingering on the outskirts. Too afraid to walk home alone. Terrified of a skateboard. Paralyzed by the dark. She had nothing to show except for mediocre grades and a pair of ears that didn’t work.
The last of the freshmen, she stood in the open unit of Ronson’s and wished for the ability to turn herself invisible. She felt like a peasant in the story of the emperor’s clothes—like everyone else saw something extravagant where all she saw was naked sky. In front of her, the garage was empty—devoid of all but air.
To her left, Whitehall watched her over the top of a clipboard. He looked as disheveled as usual in his oversized tweed and Coke-bottle glasses, the twirl of his mustache off-center.
Gently, he said, “There’s no pressure here, Ms. Meyers-Petrov. There’s no right or wrong answer. Just begin by telling me what you see.”
But that was the problem. She didn’t seeanything.
When she remained firmly planted, Whitehall sighed. “You know,” he said, “my wife used to be something of a folklorist. She was enthralled by the stories of people going missing at Clava Cairns, in Inverness—maidens snatched away in the night by the folk, newborn babes ripped from their cradles and swapped with changelings. Do you know what my dear friend Devan and I found when we visited Inverness?”
“What?”
“Sky clear enough to see clean through to the other side. A curtain, shifting in the light. Possibility, that maybe all the stories we’d been told as children were true. We found the same at the standing stones of England’s Devil’s Arrows, the Megaliths in Montana. All of them built on ley lines, all of them stretched thin as paper.
“If the average person stepped inside one of these units, they’d feel a chill. The faint whisper of an impossible breeze. The hairs would rise along the back of their neck, and they’d take their leave without ever understanding that they stood on the very precipice of another world. But you? You are no average person. And there are other ways to see. Perhaps you might try telling me what you hear, instead.”
She glanced over at him, startled. “What I hear?”
“Yes.” His eyes were bright behind his lenses. “In the silence.”
Tentatively, she reached up and switched off her implant. The brassy tone of tinnitus chimed through her, the sound like a struck bell. And there, beneath it, was the faint shudder of something else. Something quiet.
She shut her eyes and the hum in her head swelled to a crescendo. It whittled through her in a foghorn scream. Slowly—impossibly—the sounds took shape, rising and falling in the wordless susurration of a thousand unknowable voices. As if the energy that snapped and sputtered along the ley lines was trying to speak to her, low and imploring.
She clicked her implant back on. “I hear it,” she said, her eyes still closed.
“Good.” Whitehall sounded pleased. “And what, precisely, is it you hear?”
“A hum.”
“Very good. Now, open your eyes. Take another look.”
She obeyed. Where there’d previously been nothing, there was now a faint sliver of gossamer. It reminded her of laundry hung to dry, diaphanous sheets swelling on a summer breeze. The hum in her head spilled out of her in a trill, dragging down her bones like she was a fiddle and the door was a bow, fiberglass edging pulled taut along her spine.
