When she woke, it was to the twisted shriek of rent metal. She opened her eyes to see the elevator doors parting open, all of the water draining out of the cabin. Writhing in a puddle on the floor, she attempted to breathe in a series of gags and gasps, garbled by water and vomit.

With her lungs clear, she was able to ground herself. The walls of an office took shape around her as her vision came into focus. Big windows, glaring in the sunlight. A butcher’s slab of a desk—on it, the bust of a young boy cast in brass. A man knelt on the floor beside her. His eyes were closed, and he was bleeding from the mouth. He looked familiar, and she tried to reach for his hand, but her limbs had not yet come to life. But she could hear his voice in her head: Lennon.

Lennon. Yes, that was her name.

And this room, it was in Irvine Hall, on Drayton’s campus. She recalled it from the scent—wood polish and cedar. The glimpse of magnolias beyond the windows, a steeple piercing high above them. A woman stepped into view. Pale skin. Thin ankles. Leather pumps.

Eileen. “Do you still have your name?”

“Lennon,” she spat out, repeating the name the bleeding man had placed into her head.

“Very good. And who is the man lying to your right?”

Lennon tried to remember his name, but it didn’t come to her. “It’s…he’s—”

“Don’t strain yourself,” said the woman. “His name won’t be of much importance anymore. Better not to trouble yourself—”

“Dante,” she said, decisive if a little clumsy when it dropped from her lips. And with his name came the memories—of his kindness, of his knuckles brushing her cheek, the word August tattooed in the hollow between two of his ribs, the taste of him, the sound of his voice. It was Dante, beside her.

“You people have such a rage in you,” said Eileen, shaking her head. “I’ve never quite seen anything like it. You have no inhibitions or restraint. There’s no line of propriety that you won’t cross. No building you won’t burn. No institution you won’t attempt to dismantle.”

“What have you done to Dante?” Lennon asked. Her voice was so weak. She didn’t sound like herself.

“Dante is fine. Or at least he will be if you listen carefully and do as I ask. Our sitting chancellor, William Irvine, has suffered a massive stroke. The doctors don’t think we have long now, and by ‘not long,’ I mean we’re counting his life in hours, not days.”

“I’m not going to be your sacrifice,” said Lennon.

“I know. You’ve made your stance quite clear, but I was hoping that Dante might change your mind.” When his name dropped from her lips, Dante gave a cry of pain. Lennon thought she might’ve heard the hollow pop of a bone breaking.

“Stop it.”

“I will, if you raise the gates,” said Eileen. “Your service in exchange for the freedom of the man you love. And to clarify, you do love him, right? That’s what all these theatrics are about?”

“Let him go.”

“I’ve just told you that I would,” said Eileen, laughing a little, incredulous. “Don’t you see? You sit at the helm now. You’ve single-handedly made yourself the most important person on our campus. A kind of rising chancellor, in everything but name. If you want to save Dante, that’s well within your power. You just have to cooperate.”

“Don’t…do it,” said Dante, too weak to even raise his head.

Lennon reached for him, but Eileen paralyzed her arm so violently her elbow overextended with a gnarly crunch. It felt close to breaking. She cried out.

“All you have to do is let me into your mind and I’ll guide you. I don’t possess the ability to move through time, as you do, but I’ve spent many years of the vice-chancellorship dwelling in the mind of William Irvine. I’ve learned enough from him to be able to perform the act of raising the gates myself, through you, of course.”

“You just want my mind,” said Lennon, understanding for the first time. If William was the machine that the school ran on, Eileen was its conductor. All of these years while William had lain in agony, it had been Eileen siphoning his power, using it to sequester the school.

“I’ll be gentle with you,” said Eileen. “It’ll be as easy as going to sleep. You won’t feel anything.”

“She’s lying,” said Dante, on all fours now, struggling and failing to push to his feet. His arms—corded with muscle—were now so weak they couldn’t even support his weight. “Don’t listen to a word she says.”

Lennon attempted to push to her feet and go to him, but the wind was knocked right out of her lungs when Eileen dragged her down again, her ankle rolling painfully beneath her.

Dante extended a hand to her, his fingers twitching as they dragged along the floor. A fresh mouthful of blood spilled between his lips and slicked his chin.

Desperate, Lennon extended her mind to his, and what she found took her breath away. It wasn’t just Eileen who was suppressing Dante. The full weight of half the faculty on that campus bore down upon him, bursting blood vessels and breaking bones. Lennon sensed Alec’s signature—a venomous force that corrupted Dante’s nerve endings and contracted his muscles, so that every time he attempted to push to his feet they spasmed and stiffened. There was Dr. Lund, holding his thoughts submerged under a cold tide of catatonia. And there were others too that Lennon didn’t know.

It was torture.

They were torturing him.

But why?

“Why are you doing this to him?” said Lennon. “He’s on your side. He did everything you asked. He tried to get me to raise the gate.”

Eileen turned on a heel to look at Dante, perplexed. “You didn’t tell her?” She laughed aloud, and Lennon thought it strange that such a pretty sound could come from such a horrible person. “It was Dante who helped you get out. He attacked Alec and half of the faculty, myself included, to ensure that you were able to flee. Because of him, we very nearly lost you.”

Lennon looked to Dante, wondering if it could possibly be true. All of this time, she’d thought he’d betrayed her, but was it possible that he hadn’t? That this was by design, that he’d been working in secret to save her life while pretending that he’d turned against her?

“It’s all quite romantic,” said Eileen, but she sounded irritated. “Though I did warn you that it would end badly, Dante. If only you’d listened to me. I wanted to be gentle. To do this in her sleep—”

Dante raised a hand and the words caught in Eileen’s throat, died into something that sounded like a whimper.

Eileen went expressionless with shock, her eyes flashing wide. But she recovered herself quickly, with a knowing little smile. “Th-there he is.”

Dante still didn’t raise his head. Blood dribbled from his mouth and nose and spattered his pants. “Leave her alone.”

“If only I could,” said Eileen, and Lennon cut a scream as pain racked her body. It felt like her bones were being crushed from within, the hollow structures of her marrow collapsing in on themselves, imploding almost. She heard a sharp crack as her clavicle bowed, snapping cleanly in two, the jagged shards of bone piercing up through the underside of her skin.

Her vision went and the worst pain along with it.

And she was lost for a while in the murk of unconsciousness.

When she came to, she saw that Dante was on his feet between Lennon and Eileen, making a shield of his own battered body, barely able to stand but protecting her nonetheless.

Eileen’s expression morphed from contempt to ecstasy to childlike delight. But she sounded like a mother when she gazed at Dante with tears in her eyes and whispered: “I’m so proud of you.”

Dante faltered, froze, as if locked within his own body. Blood leaked from his nose and spattered the floor between his planted feet. His breaths were shallow and congested. Each of them escaped with a rattle.

Eileen was killing him.

Lennon pushed to her feet, an effort that very nearly sapped her of all the strength she had left. She cast out a quaking hand and with the raw force of her will snatched Eileen’s legs out from under her, dragging her back and away from Dante. Eileen, stunned by the viciousness of the attack, redoubled her efforts. Shifting the brunt of her will from Dante to Lennon, who staggered back, as if slapped across the face. Lennon watched as her hand seized up, rictus stiff, and wrenched to the left with the hollow pop of a broken bone. She heard herself scream, her vision graying out into the static of stars. She swayed, trying to stay on her feet as the waves of pain emanated from her wrist.

Eileen smiled with mock sympathy, and Lennon raised the walls of her mind a split second before she invaded.

Eileen’s will took shape as a storm that battered the tiny windows of her childhood bedroom and ripped holes in the ceiling, so that rain bled down through the walls and soaked the carpet. She could hear Eileen’s voice in the wind: a culmination of all of her deepest fears and miseries, her greatest sins and the worst of her self-loathing. She occupied all of the space in the house and infiltrated all of the corners of Lennon’s mind: the bedroom safehold contained in her psyche, her memories and desires, her greatest fears.

There was a terrible crack, like a tree felled, and the walls of her bedroom collapsed in the wind, burying Lennon under the wreckage of fallen plaster, downed support beams, and toppled furniture. The rain came down in heavy torrents and flooded what little crawl space there was beneath the debris. The water rose to her chest, then her chin, and all at once she was drowning, buried and alone in the dark of her own psyche.

When she surfaced again, it wasn’t to Eileen’s office or the fallen walls of her own mind. She was in Dante’s house. His den took shape around her, even as the winds of Eileen’s will battered the windows, like the torrents of a hurricane sweeping in off the sea. In the far distance, against the cut of the horizon, the finger of a waterspout threaded down from the churning clouds. And yet the walls of the house held firm.

Lennon cast her eyes toward the storm of Eileen’s will, ravaging the coastline. She opened the back door and screamed into the howling wind, “Get the hell out of my head!”

The storm winds receded and Lennon returned to the present. Somehow, she was still on her feet, but her knees were locked to the point of pain. As she slowly regained consciousness, her nose began to bleed, gently at first, and then in a thick torrent that clogged up her nostrils and made it hard to breathe through her nose. Her mouth gaped open, she heard herself snatch a gasping breath—her lungs on fire with the rest of her. She tasted her own blood hot and thick as it slicked her tongue and ran down her throat in rivulets. She inhaled it into her own windpipe, began to sputter and choke.

Dante lay motionless on the floor. If he was breathing, she couldn’t tell.

A scream tangled in Lennon’s throat.

“Easy,” said Eileen, seated comfortably behind her desk, one leg draped over the other. Dante lay motionless in front of the desk, a few feet away from Lennon. “Don’t make this any harder than it has to be.”

In the window, Lennon saw her own reflection. Spine bent back, mouth wrenched open, blood pooling in her cupid’s bow and spilling down her chin. Her heaving chest and fingers grasping at nothing. And then she realized it was not her own reflection that she was looking at, but the aberration’s. It was smiling at her, laughing. Her chest wasn’t heavy with the effort of breathing, it was laughter that racked her. Great bellowing, rip-roaring, throat-stripping peals of hysterical laughter. In the dark window, Lennon saw the aberration staring back at her. For the first time, they moved in perfect tandem.

Eileen’s will snapped. Like a thread cut.

Lennon slackened, went limp, still laughing, and seemed for a moment to swoon, pitching forward toward the desk, where she grabbed the brass bust of a little boy, a makeshift paperweight, and raised it high above her head.

The first strike caught Eileen at the temple and sent her to the floor. Her eyes were wide with shock, as though in all of her brilliance she had never, not even for a moment, considered that Lennon would be capable of actually harming her. Lennon crashed down on top of her, with a brutal volley of strikes. Here the screaming began, cries for help and shrieks of pain—as Lennon beat her, bringing the weight down on her forearms again and again as Eileen struggled and scrabbled and tried in vain to defend herself from the blows.

Down the hall, the clash of footsteps.

Dante pushed to his feet. “Lennon, get us out. Now.”

Lennon tossed out a hand and called an elevator. It appeared in the wall, its battered doors dragging only halfway open, so that Dante had to pry them apart just to get her through. They stumbled into the cabin just as Alec breached the office.

Lennon slumped to the floor, still laughing, and the cabin fell with her.