“Viv,” said Reed, looking pale, “is it— I mean, how did you—Holyshit.”
They stood in an unfamiliar basement, mildewed and cold, the overhead piping exposed like a nerve. The poured concrete had been painted a bright, blinding white, but everything else was all primary colors, from the scattering of blocks atop an alphabet rug to the bookshelf stacked with piles of board books. A large wooden cross hung on the northernmost wall, pitted in rot.
Her panic was a palpable thing. It pulsed in her grasp, as though she’d tugged her heart clear out of her chest and now held it in the cradle of her palm.
“Vivienne,”repeated Reed, this time with urgency. “Is it dying?”
Baffled, she followed his gaze. There, in her hands, she cupped something brittle and quivering and very much alive, although only just. Not her heart at all, but the sparrow from her nightmare. Her pulse gave a violent kick, and she nearly dropped the impossible creature outright. Its wing jutted out at an odd angle, as though it had smashed itself into a window.
“How did you do that?” asked Reed. “One minute you were thrashing around the room and the next—”
They peered down at the bird, watching it struggle to breathe, both of them pondering the impossibility of what she’d done. She’d been locked away inside herself, and she’d drawn something out.
“We should get a box,” Reed finally said. “Something to put it in.”
She held still as he searched the clutter for something serviceable, doing what she could to string together the scattered beads of her memory. The last thing she recalled with any amount of clarity was Thomas, etched in white and swinging blind. She remembered sounds, too—the smack of a blow landing. The sickening crunch of a fist meeting bone. Reed’s voice over it all:That’s enough, Sadowski. She said make it look realistic; she didn’t tell you to kill him.
“Here.” Reed was in front of her again, and this time he held a wooden puzzle box. He’d stuffed the inside with tissue, making a sorry sort of bed. “Put it in.”
She did, lowering the bird as gingerly as she could. They watched it lie on its side, its chest rising and falling in wretched heaves.
“You almost killed one of the pledges last night,” said Reed. His tone was matter-of-fact, without accusation. Shame sawed through her regardless. “His name is Adrian Faber. He’s a freshman at the technical institute. Or he was, before you broke him. Not that you care.”
Another memory surfaced—Thomas staggering into a nymphean sculpture, a crimson bloom widening at his temple. A boy in a black balaclava dropping to his knees, his hands clasped over his ears. The ruined tatters of her scream clinging to the silence.
Had she broken Thomas, too?
Had she left his mind torn, his belly full of worms?
She couldn’t remember.
In its box, the little bird continued to gasp for air.
“It doesn’t matter who gets hurt, right,” said Reed, “as long as you get what you want in the end?”
She blinked and saw Thomas struggling to rise, one eye pinched shut in the electric dark.
When she didn’t answer, Reed sighed. “We should go upstairs and see Grayson. He’ll want to know you’re lucid.”
He tucked the box under one arm, herding her toward the door with the other. She allowed herself to be led, feeling oddly unsteady as they made their way down a hall painted in faded murals and up a concrete flight of stairs, emerging at last into the carpeted hush of a sanctuary.
“Welcome to headquarters,” he said. “This is where the pledges meet.”
Sunlight bled through the soaring ambulatory windows, illuminating the saints in shades of martyr red and apostolic blue. The air in the transept hung lifeless, thick with dust that glimmered gold wherever light managed to breach the broad wooden buttresses.
The stark contrast in shadows made it difficult to parse out the people in the pews. There was a half dozen of them, at least. They lounged idly about, murmuring among themselves, their features nondescript in the haze. In the front row, a thickset boy with a choppy mullet and visibly bruised jaw was being fawned over by a girl all in fishnets—fishnet leggings, fishnet top, a pair of garish fishnet gloves. At the sight of Vivienne hovering, both of them lurched to their feet.
“I wondered when you’d get the guts to show your face,” snarled the boy. “Your boyfriend almost broke my jaw.”
“Relax, Sadowski,” said Reed. “It was four on one. He didn’t stand a chance.”
Another blink, and there was Thomas again, blood running down his chin in a crimson trickle.
He’d been lucid. He’d beenlucid.
Hadn’t he?
She couldn’t remember.
