“Alice,” Yael says quietly.
“No,” Dez says. It’s dark outside, but in the moonlight, this person’s hair is long and dark, whereas Alice’s shoulder-length, strawberry-blond hair is always worn in plaited pigtails. Someone else died out there, but Dez is sure it’s not Yael’s protégé.
She turns from the window and catches her roommate wiping away a tear.
“Yael?”
“I’m fine. I should have known,” Yael says, and falls into Dez’s arms.
“Should have known what?”
Dez isn’t sure what to do. She helps Yael over to the bed. Until now, Yael has treated Alice carelessly. Now she’s jumping to bizarre conclusions. And sobbing. They sit down together, and Yael throws her head on Dez’s lap.
“Hey. Yael. It’s okay.” Now Dez is lying. Nothing about this is okay.
“I was a terrible mentor.”
“We don’t know that it’s Alice.”
“Iknow,” Yael says, trancelike, tracing circles with her finger on the couch. “I’m so tired, Dez. I’m so tired of this fight.”
“Fight?”
Simon appears in Yael’s doorway, fresh from the shower. He clocks the two of them on Yael’s bed, their unlikely position. His brows shoot up.
“What did I miss?” he says.
Yael starts crying again, and Dez makes eyes toward the window for Simon. He glances out and seizes in shock.
Yael lifts her head off Dez’s lap. “What’s happening now?”
“Maintenance is out there,” Simon says hollowly. “They’ve covered something with a white sheet.”
“It’s Alice,” Yael says.
Simon’s face falls. “What?”
“She couldn’t handle the pressure,” Yael says. “This is Charles all over again.”
“We don’t know that!” Dez says.
But someone died out there. And Dez wonders how Acheron’s director is going to explain it this time.
“Da Vinci said the eye is the window to the soul,” Zarlengo says in the lecture hall that morning. “And isn’t that what each of you is really trying to capture in your films? Some semblance of soul?”
As if it never happened. As if two hours earlier, the maintenance crew hadn’t peeled a corpse off a topiary hedge.
Alice Quinn is absent, which strikes fear into Dez, but she still doesn’t think it was Alice’s braid in the snow. Everyone else in the lecture hall looks as haunted as Dez feels. Even Paul Rowan isn’t bothering to take notes.
How can Zarlengo be so unfazed when two people on campus have lost their lives in as many weeks? Dez tries to remember what the administration said about Charles Costello—that he hadn’t advanced with the rest of his class. He hadn’t become a last-year.
And Alice was only a first-year. Who hadn’t yet finished her first film. Dez shivers. She wonders if the director would act this way if Rafe turned up dead in the snow? Somehow, she doesn’t think itwould be the same. Somehow, she senses that only certain students are disposable at Acheron.
The lecture hall door opens, and Moriah slips in, haunting the aisles with her cobra wrapped around her.
Zarlengo presses the button on his PowerPoint remote to reveal another slide. It’s another da Vinci sketch of an eye. Dez stares at the image. Does he not realize it’s insane to expect the class to sit here and be lectured at after what happened?
She raises her hand. She can’t stand it anymore.
