An Academy for Liars, page 39
“I’ve got you. You’re going to take what you need from me.”
Lennon realized, with a start, that this was his plan all along. He had never intended for her to become like William, or for Eileen to seize control of her mind and body. It was always him who was going to absorb the risk. It was Dante who had planned to make the sacrifice, in the hopes that they would both be freed by it. “No—”
“It’s going to be okay,” he said. “I promise you that. Just call the elevator.”
Lennon did as he asked. It wasn’t easy work, what with the ground rolling beneath her feet, the wound at her side still bleeding, her broken collarbone and twisted wrist. She’d expended so much energy calling the elevator in the midst of Nadine’s attack, but she had Dante to draw from now, which she did, readily. She could feel his will channeling into her body, a kind of transfusion, filling her stores. He was stronger than she’d given him credit for. And she saw that he had been saving up for her, holding back in anticipation of this moment, waiting to give her everything.
An elevator branded itself into the wall of the bedroom with the warped ring of its bell.
But before its doors parted open, the floor shuddered, and then seemed to drop beneath Lennon’s feet with a scream and a feeling of free fall as the campus plunged through time itself. Blaine cried out, and it wasn’t just her that was screaming. The house gave a horrible groan, as if its walls were about to give way.
“Open the doors. Center yourself,” Dante yelled above the bedlam, spitting blood as he spoke. He was barely on his feet now, Lennon having taken so much from him. And she could see in his eyes—the whites gone red, the pupils shrunken to pinpoints—that he didn’t have much left to give her. “Keep opening them. As wide as you can. Give it everything you have. Everything that I have too. Just take what you need from me.”
Lennon tried. She tried as hard as she ever had. As the campus fell through space and time, she gritted her teeth—jaw locked, a molar at the back cracking with a burst of pain so intense she almost fell to her knees.
As William’s gate came down, the doors of Lennon’s own elevator dragged open, wider and wider, retracting into the walls of the cabin, and then the cabin itself stretched wider and taller, until it consumed the entirety of the wall, and then beyond it, opening onto the green, and then stretching farther still.
The gate she opened ripped a hole in the fabric of reality. It was a great and terrible gash, a gate opened in grief and panic and fear. A maw that had consumed the campus whole and swallowed it down through time itself. And as it did, Lennon felt something terrible open within herself. She could hear her own bones breaking, but she felt no pain.
Dante sank to the floor beside Lennon, screaming, his mouth open so wide she feared he’d broken his jaw. He was weeping blood, and she could see it pooling in his ears too, slicking down both sides of his straining neck, painting over his tattoos with red. He was giving all of himself, and even still, Lennon demanded and took more of him.
When the gate fully encompassed the school, she could feel it. Lennon could account for every brick and cobblestone. The grasping roots of the live oaks, the rats that scuttled through the underbrush, the students and the faculty cowering out on the lawn, she could see through their eyes as if through a pair of lenses. She was a part of them all.
And she knew then that her work was done.
With a brutal jolt that broke every window in every building on the campus, the gates firmed, and the free fall stopped. They had done it. The gate had been raised.
“You did it,” said Blaine, she was on the floor beside her. “You stopped it. You raised the gate.”
Lennon smiled, stunned that she’d actually done it. She turned to Dante, laughing in total disbelief, and saw him lying on the floor, curled fetal. There was blood, so much blood leaking from his mouth, forming a dark puddle on the ground beneath his head. Both of his hands were broken and his legs skewed at sickening angles.
She dropped to her knees at the sight of him and had to crawl across the floor to his side.
The house was already threatening to give, cracks racing up its walls, plates of plaster shattering on impact with the floor. It wouldn’t remain standing for long. If they didn’t get out soon, they would die there under the rubble.
“We have to go,” she said, attempting to lift him up. But with his broken legs, it was a near-impossible feat and she didn’t have the strength to drag him. In fact, she could barely walk herself. After several false tries, her own legs gave out. They both crumpled to the floor. “Blaine, don’t just stand there. Help me lift him. Please—”
“Lennon, stop,” said Dante, his voice so weak it scared her. “Look at me.”
“Don’t you do this.”
“Look at me, Lennon.”
She looked at him. Really looked. She took in his broken body. The fear in his eyes, the bloody tears collecting in the corners of them.
“I’ve got to go now, and you’ve got to let me.”
Lennon shook her head. “You’re not going anywhere.”
“Hey,” said Dante, pressing his knuckles against her cheek despite the pain. “Come on, now—”
“You can’t. I won’t leave you.”
“You have no choice.” His voice weakened, his words garbled by blood. There was so much of it, slicking his neck and staining his shirt. “Let me go. I’m ready.”
“No. You can’t just leave.”
His pupils swelled to subsume his irises, then shrank down to pinpoints. He gazed just past Lennon’s shoulder, and she realized, in horror, that his vision was going.
“Dante, stay here—”
His eyes came back into focus, homing in on Lennon’s. He looked so terribly afraid. “You have…to save the school. Keep the gates up. Make yourself…indispensable—” His voice broke on a cry of pain. When he spoke again it was through gritted teeth. “The school is your leverage now. Use it to buy your freedom. Your mind. Take the chancellorship if you have to.” His eyes fell shut.
Lennon seized him by the shoulder, as if to shake him awake. “Dante!”
Dante opened his eyes, gazed at Blaine. “It’s time. The house won’t hold.”
Blaine looked between Dante and Lennon, then nodded and reached for the latter.
“No,” said Lennon, shaking her head. “Blaine, help him, please—”
A rafter on the other side of the room groaned overhead. Blaine caught Lennon by the arm and pulled her back just as a support beam fell between her and Dante. The chancellor’s house—this cursed pocket of the universe that William had kept alive—was collapsing.
“Let me go,” she shrieked, striking Blaine’s chest and shoulders, even lashing out with her will, a series of sad attacks that Blaine easily deflected. She kept dragging her away, one-handed even as Lennon kicked and struggled, begged to be set free.
Plates of plaster flaked off the ceiling and a rain of bricks came down as Blaine dragged Lennon—thrashing and pleading—down the hall of memories and away from the bedroom. Through the clouds of dust, the falling detritus, Lennon caught a final glimpse of Dante. Somehow—despite his broken legs, despite the pain—he was on his knees, his head tipped back, palms up, a smile on his face.
She saw a flash of gold behind him.
Then the doorway collapsed to rubble.
Blaine dragged Lennon through the den as its walls fell around them, through the wreckage of the shattered chandelier, and out onto the front porch. They lunged for the green.
And the house imploded behind them.
Days later, Lennon opened her crusted eyes and took in the empty infirmary ward. The wind eddied in through the broken window. The day was bright, and the sky was a glassy blue. Lennon slipped out of her cot, tested her own legs gingerly. When she was certain she could stand, she left the infirmary, barefoot and wearing nothing but shorts and a hospital gown. Two nurses tried to stop her on her way out of the doors. She brought them to heel with half a thought.
The campus was in ruins. There were fallen trees and great gashes in the ground. Shattered glass littered the walkways, and a few of the buildings were only partially standing. Logos House had very nearly fallen in the worst of the quakes, and it wasn’t the only building that had suffered significant damage. As Lennon approached Irvine Hall, she saw that the better part of its east wing had fallen to rubble.
“I want to start by saying this isn’t a negotiation,” said Lennon as she entered Eileen’s office. It was the first time she’d spoken since Dante’s disappearance, and her voice sounded hoarse and strange, like it didn’t even belong to her.
She looked toward Eileen, battered and bruised from the attack, seated behind her desk. Lennon knew that her standing at the school had changed, but she didn’t grasp the full scope of her new power until that very moment, as Eileen gazed at her, startled and…afraid. Eileen, the most powerful persuasionist on campus, was afraid of her. “I’m going to talk and you’re going to listen, and after you’re done listening, you’ll do what I say.”
“You don’t have to be this way,” said Eileen, haltingly. “I don’t intend to cause any trouble, and I can still be useful to you, to this school.”
“You’ve done enough,” said Lennon. “Here’s what’s going to happen next. You are going to relinquish the role of vice-chancellor, and if you refuse, I’ll lower the walls of this campus so fast you won’t even have the chance to beg me to stop.”
Eileen went very quiet and very pale.
“I’m going to send you back to your home in Charleston, where you will remain until your son turns eighteen, at which point I’ll send you to a remote location, a cabin in northern Wyoming, where you will remain for the rest of your natural life.”
“No—”
“You will never harm your son, or practice persuasion against him or anyone else. When you walk through the doors of that elevator”—as Lennon said this, it appeared in the wall behind her—“your life, as you’ve known it, will end, and you’re lucky that’s all I’m taking after what you’ve done.”
In truth, it wasn’t out of mercy that Lennon left Eileen’s memories of Drayton largely intact. It was to maximize her suffering, so that she would know, for the rest of her miserable life, exactly what was taken from her. So that she, like Lennon, would be forced to live with her grief.
Eileen’s eyes filled with tears. “Lennon, please, let’s just talk—”
Lennon lashed out with her will, and Eileen cut a cry of pain. Sparing no cruelty, Lennon ripped Eileen from her chair and made her crawl through the parted doors of the elevator, with spinal fluid leaking from her nose.
“You can’t keep it forever,” said Eileen, slumped against the back wall of the cabin.
“I can try,” she said, and closed the doors.
Eileen would never step foot on Drayton’s campus again.
It was the same with most of the faculty. Lennon was ruthless. She deposed Alec next, stripping his tenure, and threatening to lower the gates when he refused to go. That made it easy. The other professors—groveling and eager to prove their new loyalty—were quick to turn against him. In fact, Lennon didn’t even have to expend the energy necessary to expel him from the college. They eagerly did it for her.
All of the jockeying and politicking made Lennon sick. But it had its uses too. Because Lennon found that in those early days, the faculty did the dirty work on her behalf. They turned on one another with relish, forming a kind of witch hunt in their haste to secure their own positions at the school. After a few months, only a small handful of the former faculty remained, and Lennon replaced those who’d left with a selection of alumni she knew she could trust. Emerson, who she named vice-chancellor, and Blaine, who she tenured. She gave Sawyer the library. Against her better judgment, she extended a professorship to Kieran as well, but he refused, preferring to brave the world beyond Drayton’s gates.
With all of the positions filled and the campus restored to some semblance of normalcy, Lennon retired to Dante’s house on the water, where she remained for the next few weeks, alone, with the exception of Gregory, who Lennon had found in the bushes outside of Irvine Hall just a few days after raising the gates.
Since her friends were distracted by their new roles at Drayton, Gregory became her primary companion. And Lennon took the liberty of withdrawing from the school completely.
She shunned all contact but kept a channel open via a permanent elevator, connecting Dante’s home to the campus, allowing her power to flow through so that the gates would hold firm. But she herself refused to visit. The only reason she knew she’d been officially named chancellor was because a letter was mailed to her along with her diploma, informing her she’d been appointed to her new role by unanimous vote of the board.
Lennon burned the whole thing—the letter, envelope, diploma, and all.
Summer passed in a blur of heat and grief. Before Lennon knew it, the end of fall was approaching, and it was December again. In the weeks leading up to Christmas, Lennon fielded phone calls from her family and made excuses about school and stress and heaps of paperwork to account for her absence over Christmas. The idea of celebrating anything—while mired down by her grief—made her feel sick. So she spent that holiday alone, curled up in the living room, watching horror movies. She was half-asleep when the doorbell rang. She answered to discover Blaine, Sawyer, Emerson, and Kieran huddled together on her doorstep, clutching big foil catering trays of mashed potatoes and sliced honey ham, glazed dinner rolls and store-bought pies.
“You didn’t have to do this,” said Lennon as they shuffled inside.
“We kind of did, though,” said Kieran, setting two large bottles of champagne on the countertop. “Blaine thought you might kill yours—”
Sawyer elbowed him in the ribs. “We didn’t want you to be alone over Christmas.”
They ate dinner on the floor of the living room by the TV light, gathered around the coffee table, pouring glasses of lukewarm champagne into overlarge wineglasses, downing one after the other. It was the first good night that Lennon had had since Dante’s death. The conversation flowed well—thanks to the food and champagne—and for the first time in a very long time Lennon felt almost normal. More like herself than she had since William’s death.
Over heaping plates, Lennon listened as Blaine, Sawyer, and Emerson spoke of the campus and all they were doing to improve it. More services for students. More regulations on persuasion. Better placement and support for graduates.
As vice-chancellor, Emerson had been presiding over future admissions, and had been combing through information of prospective candidates of the school, a shadowy process that involved a network of alumni casting out their psychic nets to harvest the best candidates. It sounded like exhausting work, but Emerson seemed to enjoy it. Lennon could tell she was happy; they all were.
And she resented them for it.
They had new lives and beginnings, but what did she have to show for her sacrifice? An empty house haunted by the ghost of the man who gave it to her? Gregory and grief, her newest and closest companions, now that everyone else had left her behind to start their new and promising lives?
Blaine reached across the coffee table to squeeze her hand, and it was only then that Lennon realized she was crying. “There is life beyond him,” she said, in a soft voice. “You do know that, right?”
Lennon flinched. “I know that you want me to believe that. I know that I’d be happier if I could.”
There was a long and awkward silence, the first one of the night. Sawyer, Emerson, and Blaine all exchanged long looks across the coffee table, as if some unspoken fear had just been confirmed. Sensing the awkwardness, Kieran got up to grab another bottle of champagne from the fridge, which was probably the smartest thing anyone could’ve done in the moment.
“Don’t do that,” said Lennon.
Blaine sipped foam off the top of a fresh glass of champagne. “Do what?”
“The theatrical concern,” said Lennon. “You know I can’t stand it.”
“It’s not theatrical,” said Sawyer, waving Kieran off when he tried to top him up. “It’s been months, Lennon. We’re worried about you. You can’t just hide away from the world forever.”
“He’s gone,” said Blaine, trying to be gentle. “You have to accept it at some point. It’ll hurt at first, but I promise you’ll be better for it.”
“They never found a body,” said Lennon, and there was a long silence.
Only Emerson was brave enough to respond. “That’s because there wasn’t a body to find. The building imploded. What matter they were able to salvage from the wreckage—”
“You weren’t there,” Lennon snapped. “He was bleeding all over the floor. DNA isn’t enough. I need something more than that before I’m willing to believe he’s really gone.”
No one challenged her.
That night they all slept together in the guest bedroom. Blaine, Sawyer, and Lennon all squeezed together on the bed. Kieran and Emerson insisted on sleeping on the carpet—in a nest of pillows and comforters—despite Lennon’s assurances that there were other, more comfortable beds in the house. They said their good nights—drunk and pleasantly stuffed from dinner—and cut the lights. But long after the others fell asleep, Lennon remained awake, listening to Kieran’s soft snores, and the gentle hush of the ocean. She thought of Dante in those final moments before the house imploded, an image she usually tried to cast out of her mind because it simply hurt too much to hold it there. But tonight, she allowed herself this painful indulgence, turning over that last memory she had of him, kneeling on the floor, palms up in surrender, smiling. She remembered too the flash of gold she’d seen behind him, a split moment before the wall collapsed. A warped bell ringing. Elevator doors gaping open.
