They went to Cipher, one of those clubs where everyone wears black and people queue for hours only to be turned away at the door. As it was, neither Lennon nor Dante had packed anything black but they bypassed the line and got in anyway. Lennon wondered if this was a trick of persuasion, wherein Dante had pulled a few psychic strings. But if so, it was an extraordinarily convincing act of manipulation, because the bouncer—a Bulgarian man who clocked in at nearly seven feet tall and was built like a linebacker—smiled at them from behind his darkly tinted sunglasses and ushered them in.

“Don’t talk to anyone. Don’t touch anything. Don’t look in mirrors,” said Dante, as if she were a handsy and rambunctious child entering an expensive shop full of fragile items to be broken.

“Why did we come here?” Lennon inquired, half shouting over the music. Dante didn’t look like he was in the mood for a party tonight. He seemed…tense, leveling that thousand-yard stare of his with particular malice, as if he could kill with it.

“Like I said earlier, I have an errand to run,” he said, vague as ever.

“What kind of errand?”

Dante’s gaze raked, back and forth, across the club. He was looking for someone. “Do you always ask this many questions or are you just making a point to be particularly annoying because you know I’m not currently in a position to send you back?”

They stopped short in a hallway that was mostly empty except for a couple copulating discreetly in the dark. There was a door there, some sort of private room.

“Don’t talk to anyone,” said Dante. “And stay out of the way.”

He opened the door. The room behind it was small and dim. The air turbid with cigarette smoke. The walls padded. There was one woman there, petite with a mawkish smile. She appeared to be in her late fifties and was dressed like a librarian—fuzzy cardigan sweater, buttoned up to the throat, loose slacks, and ballet flats. There was something about her poise that reminded Lennon of the vice-chancellor, Eileen. She realized, a little startled, that this woman was likely a persuasionist.

“Always a pleasure,” she said to Dante, ignoring Lennon entirely. The ensuing exchange was shorter than Lennon had expected it would be. Short enough that she wondered why this hadn’t happened over the phone.

“Two point five,” was all Dante said, flatly.

The woman maintained her placid smile. “One seven,” she said. Her accent was British.

Whatever was exchanged next wasn’t communicated in words. But Lennon saw, in the set of the woman’s expression, and in Dante’s, that some sort of psychic contention was occurring in the lapsing silence. It was all very brief and it concluded with the woman standing—she was so short that Lennon loomed over her—and extended her hand to Dante. He took it, a firm fast shake, and gestured for Lennon to follow him out into the hall. The woman slipped out behind them without acknowledgment and disappeared into the crowd.

“What the hell was that?” Lennon demanded, shaken, though she didn’t know exactly why.

Dante slipped his hands into his pockets, looked up at the ceiling as though he expected to find a tactful answer to her question in the rafters. “It’s a donor system. No different from any other college.”

“I don’t understand.”

“At some schools, if you donate a library, you’ll get a box seat at the stadium and an admissions guarantee for your kids, among a number of other perks. At Drayton, a sizable donation could be rewarded with a cabinet seat or a congressional hearing, a sympathetic judge, a ceasefire.”

“That’s unethical.”

“Everything pertaining to politics and business is. I mean, think about it: Presidential candidates use psychological conditioning in their campaign ads. Companies test commercials with focus groups and track the pupil dilation of their subjects to see how effective they are. Food corporations put addictive chemicals into their products to create cravings. Record labels engineer earworms. We’re not doing anything that hasn’t been done before—we’re just doing it more effectively and with tact.”

“And that makes it better?”

“I don’t care to examine what we do through the lens of morality,” said Dante, and something about the way he said it made Lennon believe this was less than true.

“What was it that she wanted?” Lennon asked.

“What most people do,” said Dante, “power, in whatever form it comes in.”

Just then, a man shoulder-checked Lennon so hard, she lurched off-balance. The ceramic pig Dante had given her—a kind of talisman, the equivalent of Dumbo’s crow feather—fell from her pocket and bounced across the floor, disappearing into a forest of platform boots and legs sheathed in fishnet. Lennon dropped to her knees to retrieve it, but the pig was lost in the chaos.

When Lennon surfaced again, she’d ventured farther than she’d realized, and the crowds had thickened considerably. In the distance—and only because Dante was one of the tallest people in the club—Lennon could just barely make out the sharp cut of his profile.

She didn’t know how the stampede began, exactly. But she was aware of something triggering within her—a sharp surge of adrenaline, not unlike a sense of doom, as if the entire world was collapsing beneath her feet. She wasn’t the only one who felt it; all around her people froze, screamed, and began to run. The urge to flee felt forced upon her. It was a crushing and terrible pressure, but also a familiar one. This was the way she’d felt when under the force of Benedict’s will, and Lennon realized then that she and all of the people around her were being persuaded to stampede.

A crush of bodies surged between her and Dante, and Lennon, stumbling over her own loafers, was swept away from him. Someone stepped on her foot. She caught an elbow to the nose and cried out in pain. Another man—tall and broad-shouldered, dressed in a fishnet tank top—moved as if to help her, reaching out a hand, but he too was swept away in the chaos. The music kept playing, but the shouts and yelling, the screams for air, very nearly drowned it out. Someone shoved her forward, but there was no space to fall, her ribs crushed inward, as if tamped down under a boot. She stumbled over something soft, a person, a body on the floor. Time slowed and the air, heavy with the scent of sweat, warmed and thinned. She couldn’t breathe it. A black shade came down over her eyes, lit with so many silver stars.

Lennon squeezed her eyes shut. Sucked in a breath of sour air, trying to steal what little oxygen there was left to breathe. She was surprised to discover the room within herself, her bedroom safehold. Its furnishings were all the same. There was rain beating outside the window. The ceiling fan cycled slowly above her bed. She could hear, from downstairs, the clattering of pots and pans. Perhaps her mother was making dinner.

Standing in front of her closet was a boy she recognized. He was the boy with the moth. He looked older now, and less forgiving. “Force them back.”

It was the first time Lennon had ever heard him speak.

“I can’t. There’s too many of them.”

“Force them back,” said the boy again, and his words—while uttered in the voice of a child—had all the weight and gravitas of a man. There was something, Lennon realized now, that was familiar about him. Though she could not place it. “Get them out of here. Now.”

The light in her ceiling fan flickered. Its blades began to whir faster. The pull chains clattering together. Outside the window, rain turned to hail. It cracked the windowpanes.

“Do it,” said the boy. “Now. Before you can’t.”

The windows of the bedroom blew out. Lennon ducked, closing her eyes against the flying glass, and when she opened them again, she felt the force of her will expanding outward, until she occupied all of the people in her vicinity. The ravers and the DJ, the security guards dispersed throughout the crowd. She tasted their emotions and scented their pain. She was present in their minds and organs. She felt her will extend and animate their limbs. She was the air in their lungs and the adrenaline spiking through their veins. She was the voice of their mother, telling them to slow down and look both ways before crossing the street. She was in the quiet between heartbeats and the underground river of their unconscious thoughts. She was, in those sacred moments, everything to all of them.

She felt like a god.

Led by the guiding hand of Lennon’s will, the crowds cleared, streaming toward the nearest exits like water swirling down the drain, until the only people that remained were Lennon and Dante. Her knees buckled with relief at the sight of him, and she began to break toward him, when something seized her.

It was an abomination. There was no other word with which to describe it. It was less than human—or maybe more—or perhaps it was something entirely unto itself. A thing that had abandoned its humanness and become…what? Lennon didn’t know. The thing was almost ineffable. A thin and wretched mouth, lips just apart, a dark razor slit between them. The arms and legs were…long and heavy and jointed where they shouldn’t have been, as if they were drawn from memory by someone who’d only seen a human being once in passing. But all of these components were…wrong. Scrambled somehow. When she met its eyes, her ears filled with the sound of static. She felt the need to vomit, but nothing came up.

Under the flashing strobes the creature moved like something not of this world. The only thing that Lennon could liken it to was the speed and sharp precision of a spider racing up a wall.

“Get back,” said Dante, and Lennon saw, with horror, that he was bleeding badly from the mouth. His teeth were slick red, more blood running through the cracks between them when he spoke.

The last of the crowd fled the club. None of them registered the abomination standing in their midst but the crowds parted cleanly around it nonetheless, dragged aside by the force of the thing’s will. It cast its gaze on Lennon.

Her heart seized in her chest. It wasn’t fear. It was worse. Something anatomical, something wrong, like her brain had forgotten how to make her heart pump blood. Like something vital had been severed within her—an artery or a nerve. Her heart skipped one beat. Two. She keeled over, her knees soft beneath her, grappling for her chest. The third beat was a painful palpitation. The next was normal. Then her heart skipped another.

The thing wearing her face grinned. Its expression melted. Its face became someone else’s. A boy she didn’t know.

Dante yelled from across the club. “Call an elevator, now!”

Lennon tried, but her efforts were useless in the face of such power. From inside her head, a horrible voice, at once strange and familiar, leering: Dante.

Her heart strained painfully in her chest. She grasped at the hard bone of her own sternum, helpless. Her legs remained weak and soft beneath her.

Dante cried out again, she could hear his voice above the thing that was chanting his name. “Don’t let him into your head. Raise your walls. Fight it.”

Lennon felt a pull, a sharp kick within herself, as though someone had caught her soul by the hand and dragged her roughly forward, out of the cage of her body.

All at once she found herself in a room, concrete floors, concrete walls, a burnished aluminum toilet burbling in the corner, a small sink set into its top. Some type of prison cell. Overhead, the fluorescents flickered, and a light bulb blew out with a spray of sparks. A brown moth fluttered at the slit of the window of the cell door, throwing itself senselessly against the cloudy glass.

“Stay here.” The voice, familiar, seemed to come from everywhere. Dante’s.

“Where am I?” she called out into the empty cell. She staggered to the door, stood up on her tiptoes so she could catch a glimpse through the slit window, but the glass was so smudged and dirty she couldn’t make out anything more than the flickering light of fluorescents.

“You’re safe. I have to go. Stay here.”

The concrete floor of the room shuddered. A fissure raced up the wall, but it held fast. Lennon edged toward the hard metal cot bolted to the far wall and sat down, curled fetal, her knees tucked tight to her chest, and stuck her fingers in her ears against the sound of a rising scream.

And then, all at once, Dante was back, coming in through the door of the cell. He extended a hand, and when their fingers met, the walls of the cell dropped around her, falling backward as weightless as playing cards, and Lennon found herself back in the club, Dante’s hand tight around her wrist, dragging her along behind him down a dark and empty hall. They cut left, then right, through a doorway and into an empty bathroom.

He shoved her, roughly, into a stall. Lennon, gasping for air, caught herself on the steel toilet pump, and braced there, panting. “What the fuck is that thing?”

“Listen to me,” said Dante. “I need you to raise a gate and get out of here. Now.”

“I—I can’t. It’s too much. I can’t concentrate here—”

“Try,” he ordered, putting real force behind the words.

Lennon shut her eyes, grabbed at something deep within herself that felt like power, and tried to transmute the graffitied door of that bathroom stall into an elevator. She gritted her teeth so hard she thought her molars would crack in two at the back of her mouth. Nothing. “I just can’t,” she said. “I’m so sorry.”

“All right, then,” said Dante, nodding first to himself, then her. He reached back into his waistband. He produced a small handgun. Extended it to her. “If it comes through these doors instead of me, you put this gun in your mouth and pull the trigger.”

“What? No, I can’t just—”

He pushed the grip into her palm, folded her fingers tight around it. “That thing out there will do worse to you than a bullet ever could,” he said, already backing away, but she reached out a hand, caught him by the arm.

“What was that out there?”

“An ambush,” said Dante. “An abomination.” And with that he turned and left, leaving her alone in that empty bathroom as the fluorescents flickered overhead. Moments later the room plunged into outright darkness.

Lennon heard sounds, words exchanged, but the interactions stretched—like a recording slowed—becoming incomprehensible. It was almost as though time itself was warping, malfunctioning, the flow of the moments interrupted. She felt the sudden and violent urge to be sick. Then—splitting the silence—a horrible, inhuman scream.

Things went quiet for a few beats after that, and then, footsteps. Lennon raised the gun to her parted lips, fitted the muzzle between her teeth. The barrel pressed her tongue flat against the basin of her mouth. She tasted the bitter tang of cold metal.

She slid her finger over the trigger.

The bathroom door swung open with a groan.

To her shock, it was Dante that stood there, bleeding but alive. She lowered the gun, stunned. In the time that he’d been gone, Lennon had come to terms with the fact that the both of them were going to die there in that club. That she would be slaughtered in that bathroom stall, that the memories of her loved ones would be extracted, and they would not even remember her well enough to mourn.

She ripped the gun from her mouth. “Why the fuck didn’t you tell me it was you? I almost blew my head off. I—”

Dante put a blood-slick finger to his mouth, a silent shushing.

“You’re hurt,” she said, but couldn’t see where the blood was coming from. “What happened out there? Are you okay—”

“I’m fine,” he said, but it sounded pained. “And we don’t have time for this. We need to get out of here.”

He caught her by the arm and dragged her sharply down another hallway and through a pair of black doors. They staggered out into a narrow alleyway and started down it, toward a high (it must’ve been more than eight feet) chain-link gate that cut between the two buildings. It was topped with vicious snarls of barbed wire. Lennon, upon testing the lock, moved to climb over it when Dante, eyes closed, lids twitching slightly, made a motion with his fingers and the bolt—inexplicably and with a sharp click—released and struck the asphalt at their feet.

“It’s just an illusion,” he said. “One so good that it became reality, if only for a moment.”

The gate swung open, and they slipped through, cutting fast down the last of the alley and stepping into the deserted street.

Lennon had expected to see police cars and firetrucks, the emptied crowds of the club and perhaps a handful of news reporters there to cover the scene of the stampede. But there was nothing, no one, except a few pigeons and a plastic bag tumbling like a lone phantom down the long stretch of the road. In the far distance, she saw a bruised girl hobbling down the sidewalk with a cell phone raised to her ear.

“Where did everyone go?” said Lennon, and even though she was whispering, the words seemed loud and grating, like laughter at a wake.

Dante nodded down the street. “Keep pace,” he said, so quietly that Lennon wasn’t sure whether he’d spoken aloud or if she’d merely read his lips.

They walked with urgency but didn’t flee. Kept their hands in their pockets, their heads down. Moved along at a steady but measured pace, entering the Red Light District.

“Are we being followed?” Lennon asked, when she felt it was safe to speak in something above a whisper.

“Yes,” said Dante.

“Are we in danger?” she asked, risking a glance up at him. The blood on his hands.

His expression was totally taciturn. “Yes.”

“What was that thing?”

“An old friend of mine,” he said.

Lennon felt a pricking at the back of her neck, all of the downy hairs bristling and standing on end. It was the feeling of being hunted. “Why is your old friend trying to kill us?”

“I don’t have time to explain. Do you think you can call an elevator?”

Ashamed, Lennon shook her head. “I tried back in the club, but I’m too weak. I’m sorry—”

“Do you remember the way to the elevator we took here?” Dante asked, skirting past one of the crimson windows of a brothel. One of the girls in those windows—tall and brunette, standing on platform stilettos, dressed in beige spandex, as if wearing the hide of someone she’d skinned—blew him a kiss as he passed.

“No,” said Lennon, ashamed that she was of such little use. That she had begged Dante to allow her to come, only to be such a burden. She hadn’t even been able to raise a gate when they’d needed one most.

“That’s all right,” said Dante. “Here.”

Lennon felt something like pain, and then became privy to the transference, a blurry memory, the way back to the elevator returning to her, like a video of the walk played at three times the speed. Dante’s memory made hers.

The effort of this act of transference drained him considerably. He staggered, his knees folding beneath him, and caught himself on one of the lampposts that lined the narrow street. Lennon tried to help him to his feet, pressed a hand to his side. When Dante stood and straightened, her palm came away dark with blood. “Dante—”

“Never mind that,” he said. “I’ll be fine. You know the way now?”

“Yes, but—”

“Then you go. You go back to Drayton. You tell Eileen what happened.”

“But I can’t—”

“No buts.”

“I won’t leave you.”

At this moment Lennon realized something. The street they were standing on, which had been so busy only a few minutes before, had been entirely cleared of crowds. The windows of the brothels went dark, one by one.

“He’s here,” said Dante, and when he smiled Lennon could see blood filling the seams between his teeth. For a moment she thought he was injured, but then she realized that his gums were bleeding, the same way her nose bled in class sometimes from the intense effects of persuasion.

He began to laugh, and Lennon staggered back, realizing that the man in front of her was no longer the Dante that she knew.

Across the street, from an open window, a baby began to cry. And then it was the pigeons, a flock of them roosting in the arch beneath a bridge, that took to the sky wailing. The lights in the windows of the brothels began to flicker; girls broke to their knees, tearing at their hair, gnashing their teeth, weeping and screaming and dragging their nails along their thighs. Like Dante, they tossed back their heads with laughter—their necks boneless—eyes rolling back to expose a slivered glimpse of white. In the distance, a chorus of shrieking car alarms. The sound of breaking glass. The whole city was under attack, and this time it wasn’t the girl from the club, it was Dante doing this, destroying everything, conducting this orchestra of chaos and anguish. He was coming undone, and everything in his vicinity was coming undone along with him…except Lennon.

“Dante.” She seized him by the shoulders, shook him roughly. “You’ve got to stop this—you’ve got to come back. Please, you’re hurting people.”

His bleeding smile only widened. She wanted to slap it off his face. Would that be enough to bring him back to her? Or would that make things worse?

As it turned out, Lennon didn’t have the chance to decide.

The entity, that demented aberration from the club materialized behind them, stepping into the center of the street, and Lennon saw—as if a double exposure—a face beneath the one the boy wore. His true face—soft, almost doll-like—was screwed with grief. He seemed younger than Lennon, and he looked…afraid.

Dante twisted to face him so sharply he tore free of Lennon’s grasp and sent her sprawling to the asphalt at his feet. The boy’s mouth wrenched open to shape a scream—but the sound was lost amid the shrieking chorus of sirens and sobbing and hysterical laughter. He lunged for Dante, a thick and wicked shard of broken glass clutched in his bleeding hand.

Dante didn’t move. The city kept screaming.

Lennon closed her eyes.

After that first night in the garden, every time that she had tried to call an elevator, Lennon had asked a simple question: Will you please appear? When the elevator did not answer, she’d grown increasingly desperate. She’d begged and she’d bargained. She’d wheedled like a sniveling child. On her most desperate occasions—like the day Benedict had provoked her with pain—Lennon had cut her psyche wide open and let her own will spill from her body like blood from a wound, her a groveling servant, the elevator a god sneering down at her pathetic offering.

But no more.

This time, Lennon asked no questions. There would be no more begging or bleeding. No bargains to be made.

She commanded the elevator to appear, and when she did she felt something tear open within herself, as she dragged and struggled and grasped for the strength she needed to pull the elevator from the ether. Her nose began to bleed and her eyes soon after, so that she saw the whole scene—Dante facedown on the ground, the monstrous entity prowling nearer—through a blurry red filter.

And then, when she was ready, Lennon cast out a hand.

There was the trill of a bell and an elevator cabin crashed down through the brothel storefront, its windows imploding in a storm of glass. Its doors parted open. On the ground, inches from Lennon, Dante’s eyes fluttered open, and he gasped as if he’d been held underwater for some time. He locked eyes with Lennon: “Run!”

Dante, Lennon, and the aberration feet from them broke toward the elevator in tandem. Lennon stumbled through the doors first, Dante behind her, the aberration at his heels. Lennon pressed the Door Close button just as Dante slipped sideways between them. They snapped shut on the boy’s outstretched hand, crushing it with a sickening crack. His fingers twitched, caught between the doors for the briefest moment, and then he ripped them away with a shriek. Lennon punched another button on the control panel at random. The lights flickered. The music died. The cabin plunged into free fall.