Wake up, Delaney Meyers-Petrov. Someone is watching us.
***
Delaney opened her eyes to find herself staring into a shelf. Only, instead of a dead boy’s face, there was only dust. The air smelled like old paper and binding glue. Books sat in piles around her feet, as if she’d clawed them away one by one, casting them aside. Her heart skipped beats in a too-slow stutter.
“Lane?”
She spun on her heel, a cry eking out of her, and found Mackenzie and Adya standing at the far end of the stack, holding steaming coffees and studying her as though she’d just crawled out of a grave. She felt as if she might have. Her arms were aching, her fingernails scraped to the quick. The blood in her veins felt cold and stiff. Stagnant, like every piece of her had gone asleep when she did, even the parts meant to be involuntary. Mackenzie and Adya’s matching expressions put her immediately on the defensive, though neither of them had said a word.
“What?”
“Oh, nothing,” Mackenzie said as Adya sipped her coffee and remarked, “You’ve destroyed the library.”
She pawed at her eyes. “I was looking for something.”
“That’s patently obvious.” Adya pushed past her and set her coffee on the empty shelf, plucking one of the leather-bound books from the pile. Flipping through it, she asked, “What’s ‘sequestrum’?”
Delaney’s stomach hooked. “What do you mean?”
Adya shoved the book under Delaney’s nose. The words on the page were obscured beneath the black ink of permanent marker, her unmistakable handwriting cramped to the point of illegibility.Sequestrum.She’d written it into the margins. She’d written it into the end notes. She’d scrawled it across the chapter header.
Adya’s dark eyes met hers over the top of the fanned pages. “What does it mean?”
“I don’t know.” Her head felt all full of weevils, her skull packed with a buzzing that wouldn’t abate. “I fell asleep studying Latin.”
“That settles it.” Mackenzie thrust a coffee into Delaney’s hand. “Pack up your stuff. Have some caffeine. We’re getting off campus for the night.”
Delaney glanced again at her feet, at the disorder she’d created. “But—”
“No buts.” Mackenzie waggled a finger in her face, silencing her before she could protest. “Let’s go. Let’s go, let’s go, let’s go.”
***
Thirty minutes and a crowded T ride later, they were expelled into the hellish heat of Kenmore Station. The crowd juxtaposed tired businessmen streaming in with the weekend crowd streaming out. They rode up the escalator in a crowd of commuters, all packed together like sardines, and then departed into the nipping wind of Beacon Street. She let herself be carried down the road toward Lansdowne, the middle chain in a human link—Adya chattering in Arabic on the phone with her mother and Mackenzie furiously engaged in a flip-off contest with a man who’d wolf-whistled at her a half block back.
The bar was no less crowded than the street, but at least it was warm. Bodies thronged together in a sweaty mess, and the amplified sting of a guitar shivered through the dizzying tumult. Already, Delaney felt the press of encroaching dark, the creep of shadow. With the remnants of her dream still clinging to her, the blackened corners took on a malevolent rigor.
It left her feeling unsteady and a little sick, her stomach cramping the way it used to when she was small and impulsive, chocolate-drunk on Halloween candy in her parents’ kitchen pantry. She followed Mackenzie and Adya’s lead, taking her seat at a bar top table and doing her best to follow the unraveling threads of conversation.
After ordering a plate of spinach and artichoke dip, they divvied up and split a pitcher of seltzer water between them. Delaney swirled her straw through her glass until the ice sloshed over the side, wondering if she was somehow doomed to perpetually feel half-asleep. One foot stuck in reality, the other in dreaming.
Maybe she was coming down with something.
“Heard you got Price fired,” Mackenzie said, catching Delaney’s eye.
Panic punched through the haze of her thoughts. “Where did you hear that?”
“The two of you are the campus scandal,” Adya said, poking at the still-steaming dip in its skillet. “Some girl in the library asked me if you’re being kicked out of the program.”
Delaney groaned, burying her head in her hands. “Great. That’s great.”
“What happened in Chicago, anyway?”
Delaney picked up her head to answer and was hit with a rush of blood to the head.
In front of her stood a mirror Delaney. Hair wild, eyes wild, framed in lipstick-kissed glass and slow-blinking in surprise. She was alone. She was cold. She was in an unfamiliar bathroom, filled with unfamiliar sounds. Adya and Mackenzie were nowhere to be seen.
Her vision felt strange, like she’d put on a pair of 3D glasses and the room had suddenly gone fuzzy with light. Distant bass pumped through the cracked tile underfoot, moving through the graffiti-splashed lavatory in a feeble pulse. She had a vague memory of elbowing her way through a crush of bodies, the floor beneath her beer-slick and sticking.
