“I just blew off dinner with the hottest person I have ever seen in real life,” Cal fumed, stomping across the room to the door, “so this had better be good.”

“Correction: hottest automaton you’ve ever seen,” Holliday said, closing the door resolutely behind her. “Here,” she said, tossing the pipe to him. “I knew that would get your attention.”

“There are easier ways,” Cal told her hotly. “Like the phone, for example. Or a cordial email! How did you know the combination to the safe—seriously?”

She wandered around the room, glancing into picture frames and picking up random items as if she had been there a million times before. Who knew, maybe she had. “Now you know I’m not messing around.”

“Messing around about what? What do you want from me?”

“It was your mother’s birthday,” Holliday said, leaning casually against the window and crossing her arms. She blew a puff of slushie-blue hair out of her eyes. “Which I got from your laptop, the password to which was your favorite musician, whom you have a poster of above your bed.” She glanced at the Jack Johnson poster and rolled her eyes. “Who is frakking terribad, by the way.”

Frakking? Terribad? “What are you—from the moon?”

“No, the Internets.” She smirked. The space between her nose and lip was pierced, just a little silver stud like a mole. “Which is how I got your phone number. Fal and I share everything, and whenever she tutors someone new, she gives me their number in case something goes wrong. Precautions.”

“You do that?” Cal asked, lifting a brow. He didn’t know what to do with the pipe in his hands, so he tossed it awkwardly onto the bed and prayed an RA didn’t stop by.

“We’re girls. Of course we do that.” Holliday rolled her eyes as if this were the most obvious piece of information. “Anyway, I still haven’t heard from her. She’s gone. Missing. I know she is. And I know they took her.”

“They?” This was getting crazier by the minute. But if he thought it was crazy, why was he still sweating bullets? “Who are they?”

“The spooks who run things around here,” Holliday said, taking out her mobile and touching the screen a few times before showing it to him. On it was a picture, blurry, of two figures running by. They were dressed head to toe in red, capes maybe, their faces hidden and turned away from the camera. “They. Them. The Scarlets.”

“Aren’t they just some academic fraternity?” Cal had heard of them, but in the loosest of terms. Allegedly only the smartest kids from the “best” families were invited to join. He had one of those things going for him, not so much the other.

“If that’s what you think, then they’re doing their job. At first Fal thought you might be one, too, but after meeting you she was convinced you’re clean,” Holliday said. She stepped over to his desk and slumped into the chair, wheeling herself closer to wake up the laptop. Without a hitch, she typed in his password.

Cal grumbled, making a mental note to change it.

“Personally I’m shocked you’re not one of them.”

“Maybe I am,” he said with a snort, “and you just don’t know it.”

The desk chair squeaked as Holliday swiveled to turn and face him. She lifted one slender black brow. “Yeah. I’m not buying it.” She turned back to the computer. “You’re no Scarlet, but your daddy is.”

“My . . . ?” Cal joined her at the desk, leaning onto it and over her shoulder. “What are you talking about?”

But the twist in his guts had turned into something solid, an icy pool that grew and grew, heavier and harder to bear by the second.

Holliday typed furiously, opening a browser and then several new tabs. “That pipe—you were going to frame Fallon with it, right?”

Cal hesitated, which was answer enough for her, apparently.

“That’s what I thought. The administration has been trying to get Fallon and me kicked off campus for the tiniest infractions for two semesters now, and the pipe would have been Fal’s third strike. But you didn’t plant it.” Here she stopped again, tilting her head to the side to stare at him. She had dark eyes, almost black, and a tiny pointed chin. “Why didn’t you plant it?”

Cal shrugged. “My father kept saying Fallon was trouble and that she was hacking into his stuff. That doesn’t mean she should get booted off campus. Hell, she should get a medal for it.”

“He’s right. As far as he’s concerned, she is trouble. So am I. Last year our friend Michelle got weird. Like really weird. We thought maybe she was just going straight-edge or something, but then she stopped talking to us, even looking at us. We’d try to wave at her, right? And it was like we weren’t even there. So . . . we might have gone digging in her email. Not great, I admit, but we were curious.” Her fingers flew across the keyboard, and Cal watched as she brought up the Internet gate for the college archives. “Watch this, okay?”

She started running various searches, some on “Brookline” and “asylum,” others on “the Scarlets” and “society,” then more on “Camford disappearances.” Few results returned. The articles on Brookline were brief, he could tell, and seemed more like cheery blurbs meant to placate worried parents than actual historical documents.

“And now this,” she said, opening a new tab and typing a URL that jogged his memory.

“Didn’t you write something about this on Fallon’s door? About a sub-something?”

“Yeah, this is our subreddit,” Holliday explained, giving him a quick, approving smile. “Good catch. After we busted into Michelle’s email, we couldn’t really stop looking. There’s way more here. This guy?” She pointed to the screen with a chipped black fingernail, showing Cal the handle $4UL. “He’s got news clippings from the last forty years, plus pictures, theories. . . . But none of this stuff is in the college archives, and whenever Fal or I try to hack them, the encryption is ridiculous. We are talking military levels of security, and why?”

Cal couldn’t tell whether she expected an answer or not. Either way, hacking wasn’t exactly his expertise. “Maybe because they stored some of the asylum patient files there for posterity? They might not want people looking at those for privacy reasons. Professor Reyes seemed pretty protective of the files in the basement.”

“I think there’s more. I think there’s way, way more. And we’re going to find out.” Her eyes gleamed, suddenly brighter and less black in the glow of his desk lamp.

“Shouldn’t we be trying to find Fallon?” he asked, pushing off from the desk and ruffling his hair. “That seems like the more pressing issue.”

Holliday stood, too, slinking over to him on her spindly legs and grinning up at him. A little crazy, maybe, but he wasn’t going to mention it.

“We’re not going to find her.” Holliday turned to glance at the pipe abandoned on the bed. “You are.”

“Me?” Cal looked down at his own shirt, as if maybe she had mistaken him for someone else. “What the hell am I supposed to do?”

“You and your dad solid?” she asked.

“Solid? No, not exactly.”

“Well, you’ll just have to fix that when you text him,” Holliday said, rolling her eyes.

This was all moving a little fast. “Text him about what?”

“We have to record your dad admitting he’s involved in the Scarlets, and that it’s not just some innocent academic thing,” she said. She rummaged in her tiny pockets again, coming up with her own phone. “I can hide nearby. You just have to get him to explain how he tried to frame Fallon. Can you do that?”

God, maybe he should’ve taken Devon up on that dinner invite after all. But he was way past that, wasn’t he? He had to know if Roger really was responsible for Devon asking him out. For Micah and Lara breaking up so suddenly. For Fallon falling off the grid . . .

“How does this help Fallon?”

“If we can get him to admit something shady, then we can turn it back on him,” Holliday said, biting her lower lip. It didn’t exactly inspire him with the greatest confidence. “Blackmail the blackmailer, you know?”

Cal sighed and glanced toward the window. “You really think this will work?”

“He’s just a man, Cal,” she said, squaring her frail shoulders. “He’s just your dad, yeah? Don’t forget that. He’s just your father.”