Lennon’s laughter had died to a soft tickle at the back of her throat by the time the cabin slowed to a stop in the foyer of Logos House. Her intended destination had been somewhere—anywhere—beyond Drayton’s campus, but she didn’t have the stores to get them that far. She and Dante stepped cautiously out of the cabin and edged into the living room, where Lennon was shocked to see not only her housemates, but the better part of the student body crowded there, the room so tightly packed that there was barely enough space to stand. The kitchen and foyer were crowded too. As was the stairway, students sitting huddled together on the steps.

Blaine and Sawyer stepped forward to hug her, a fierce embrace. Upon pulling away, Lennon took in the surrounding crowd, saw the bleeding noses, the broken bones, the faces blank with shell shock, and the glazed eyes with burst blood vessels, the whites gone red. She noticed that toppled bookshelves barricaded both the front and back doors of the house, students standing guard by them, a few watching the windows too through the slits between drawn curtains. The house looked like the scene of a war, and that, Lennon realized, was exactly what this had become.

“Why did you fight?” Lennon’s voice sounded distant, to her own ears. A thing apart from herself. “Why would you all risk it just to help me?”

Blaine looked genuinely surprised, and then hurt. “I mean…we’re your friends.”

All of this time, Lennon had thought she was alone. Betrayed and abandoned. Rejected and loathed by the greater student body, but she saw now that this wasn’t true.

“So you all did this just to help me?”

Sawyer nodded. “To help each other. It’s no more than what you would’ve done for us.”

Lennon wanted to believe that was true. But she wasn’t sure anymore. When she’d first come to Drayton, she had been desperate and afraid. Even then she had known her own darkness, had seen it leering at her in the mirrors, but she’d rejected it. Or tried to. And was successful until the night she’d put the knife through Ian’s hand, since then the violence she’d harbored within her had been cast outward to devastating effect.

And it wasn’t just Ian crushed in the elevator, or even Benedict dead at his desk. It was all of her other, smaller crimes. It was Carly’s eyes filling with tears as she ripped memories from her mind. It was straddling Eileen on the floor of her office, bludgeoning her with glee. She told herself that Eileen, at least, had deserved this. But the truth was, Lennon wasn’t sure she would’ve been able to stop herself if she hadn’t. The vice-chancellor—for all her hypocrisy—had read her right: Lennon had a rage in her. A darkness that she couldn’t control.

And yet, as she looked at the faces around her, drawn with fear, hanging on her every word—she felt something stir to life within her, like a flame struck alight. A bright desire to protect them all, these people who had stood by her when she couldn’t even stand up for herself, her friends who’d risked everything to defend her, knowing it was an impossible fight. How could she turn her back on them now, when they needed her most?

Lennon began to wonder if this was destined in some way. The night she’d first received the call from Drayton, she had wanted to die. But maybe it wasn’t a want at all—maybe it was prophesy. It made sense that if she could travel through time, she could see through it too, sense what was coming down the line. Maybe Lennon had known, deep down, that it would end this way. Until this moment, death had been the thing she’d seen in the mirror, something to escape and run away from. Now, though, she wondered if it was mercy. If perhaps this was a way for her to atone for the person she’d become.

Dante now looked to Lennon and spoke as though he’d been reading her thoughts. Perhaps he had. “If you raise the gates on your own, without Eileen’s interference, you can use the school itself as leverage and put an end to all of this violence. You can protect them if you can keep the gates up. No one could hurt you after that. You’d have the whole school as your leverage against Eileen and the rest of the faculty. You could tie their hands.”

“You know I’m not strong enough.”

“You are with my help,” he said. “We need to get you to the chancellor before he dies and the gates fall. You have to be in the room when it happens. If we miss our window to act, the gates could fall entirely and expose Drayton to the world. There is no margin of error. We have to time it perfectly.”

“And we don’t have long,” said Blaine softly. “William is dying. If things are as bad as they seem, then he only has hours left.”

“Can you call another elevator to the chancellor’s mansion?” Emerson asked. Of everyone in the room she seemed the most pensive.

“She shouldn’t,” said Dante. “She needs to save her strength for the gate. She’s already expended too much energy. We can’t risk getting into that room only for her to start seizing.”

“But we can’t risk going on foot either,” said Emerson. “If we just march up to the chancellor’s front door, we’ll be obliterated by the faculty.”

“Those aren’t our only two options,” said Kieran. “There’s a network of tunnels beneath the school. We can take them straight under the chancellor’s house.”

“How the hell do you know that?” Lennon asked.

He shrugged. “I have my ways. I’ll show you. I can get you anywhere.”

So they went down to the basement of the house, where a few students shoved aside a large shelf to reveal a child-sized iron door. It looked like something you’d find in a bank vault. And it was so tarnished that when Dante cranked the handle, rusty flakes scattered across the floor.

A sulfurous and moldy stink wafted from the dark of the tunnel. Blaine gagged. “Jesus Christ, it smells like a fucking sewer.”

Dante, Emerson, Kieran, Sawyer, and Blaine all climbed down the ladder and into the tunnel. Lennon was the last to descend, struggling on account of her broken collarbone, the pain white-hot and constant, sharpening whenever she attempted to move her arm. In the end, Kieran and Dante had to hold her, lowering her down into the tunnel as gently as they could.

Under the glow of the flashlights, Lennon could see an oily layer of scum across the surface of the waist-deep water, and the ceiling was so low that Dante couldn’t stand at full height. The floor of the tunnel was slippery with scum and whatever else coated the bottom, so that several times Lennon slipped and had to catch herself on the wall to keep from going under.

“You don’t think there’s, like…snakes or alligators in this water, do you?” Sawyer asked.

“I’ve only seen two, maybe three snakes max,” said Kieran. “And only one was poisonous.”

Emerson glared at him. “You’re not helping.”

“Keep it down,” said Dante. “The campus floods into these tunnels via sewer grates.” He pointed to one ahead, a slat of filmy white light falling down through the iron slats and across the black water. “If we’re too loud someone might find out we’re down here, and if that happens—”

“We’re fucked?” Kieran offered.

“Pretty much.”

They kept walking, sloshing through the muck, the waters rising and falling as they went. Sometimes the water climbed as high as Lennon’s chin, but another bend might take them through tunnels so shallow that the water barely came up to their knees. They were close to the chancellor’s mansion when Dante, who had been walking just ahead, threw out an arm and motioned for silence. He pointed up at one of the dripping sewer grates, and they heard a familiar voice speaking from above. Alec. “Eileen wants the girl alive, of course. The rest are collateral.”

“What about Professor Lowe?”

“Eileen wants him too. Of course.”

The men walked on, but it was a long time before Dante gave them the go-ahead. The six of them edged carefully around the sewer, their backs flattened against its scummy walls, as they slid past and continued on their way. Lennon felt almost crushed by relief when the waters shallowed and gave way to a run of slick stone stairs.

Sawyer opened the door and checked to see if the room was empty and gestured them all through. They emerged into what was a glorified crawl space, so low they had to bend double and inch their way to the cellar door leading up to the first floor of the house. The six of them emerged into a dark pantry. Overhead, the sound of footsteps. Voices in the halls.

“Can you take them all?” Lennon whispered, looking to Dante. It was one of the only occasions that she’d questioned his ability. Dante was strong, but so were his fellow professors, and she wasn’t sure he could take them on, given that he was still so weak from the torture, and the clash with Eileen.

“We can take them,” said Emerson, perhaps sensing, like Lennon, that Dante lacked the strength. “Kieran, Sawyer, and me. We’ll divert their attention so that you can get to William’s room.”

“Out of the question,” said Lennon. “You heard what Alec said. If you offer yourself as bait and get caught, it’s over for you.”

Kieran shrugged. “What’s a few memories anyway?”

“Kieran, no.”

Emerson looked to Dante. “What do you think?”

Dante thought for a moment, then nodded. “Distract them as best you can. Lennon, Blaine, and I will make our way to the chancellor.”

The three left. Only seconds later, shouts, footsteps, the sound of glass breaking.

With the diversion underway, Dante, Blaine, and Lennon fled from their hiding spot unseen. They made it to the hall of memories in moments. It stretched out in front of them, dozens of doors on either side, the one that led to William impossibly far away.

They weren’t even halfway there when Alec stepped into the hall. “You really are clever. I have to give you that.”

Dante placed himself between Alec and the girls.

Alec smiled. “You think you’re so chivalrous, but look at you. Dragging them into your own personal vendettas. It wasn’t enough to kill Benedict. You just had to tear the school apart brick by brick and get these little soft-minded idiots to help you do it. When are you going to learn to leave well enough alone?”

As Alec spoke, Lennon could feel Dante’s will charging the air like static. It made the hairs on her arms bristle and stand on end.

Alec felt it too and responded in turn, advancing down the hall. As he drew closer, Lennon’s vision began to fail, black encroaching from the corners of her eyes. Blaine must’ve felt it too, because she staggered back, blinking rapidly.

Lennon lost her balance, crashed back into the wall, and it was Dante who kept her from falling, lashing out at Alec with the full force of his will. But it was clear that Dante, in his weakened state, didn’t have the stores to put up a fight.

And Lennon saw—from the smile that curved Alec’s lips—that he knew it too.

Alec was rallying his next attack when someone appeared behind him.

Emerson’s will carved through the air like a scythe, and Alec—stunned by the sudden attack—broke to his knees.

“Go,” said Emerson. “I’ll hold him off for as long as I can.”

While Emerson clashed with Alec at the hall’s entrance—a vicious battle of wills—Lennon, Blaine, and Dante raced to William’s quarters. The door was locked today, but Dante made it give with a sleight of his hand, a motion that usually would’ve demanded little of his strength, but Lennon noticed the way his knees buckled the moment the bolt slipped out of place.

The three of them rushed inside, Lennon first, then Blaine, Dante coming from behind. Lennon had expected a team of doctors and nurses to be in the room, but it was just Dr. Nave from the infirmary. Lennon managed to wrestle him into submission with her will, capitalizing on the element of surprise and knocking him out before he could launch a counterattack.

As Lennon subdued Nave, Blaine locked the door and Dante dragged furniture—an armchair, a table, a few detached oxygen tanks—in front of it as a makeshift barricade. It wasn’t enough to keep anyone out for long. Whatever happened next would have to happen quickly.

Dante turned to Blaine. “It’s time.”

Blaine’s chin quivered. She went to William’s bedside. He lay, gaunt and waxen, in a nest of pillows. His mouth was wrenched ajar, and the floor and walls of that horrid house trembled with his death rattles. If the bed wasn’t nailed down, it probably would’ve skittered across the floor like the rest of the articles of that room, the side tables and the armchair by the fire, humming in place, sliding. A Holter monitor measured the rhythm of his heart, which was both sluggish and erratic, like water glugging from a bottle with a narrow mouth. The long breaks between each beat, the sputtering palpitations.

Blaine took him by the hand. The floor shuddered.

Lennon wondered, then, about the nature of what Blaine shared with William. The bond between them was a palpable thing, not unlike love. Nor was it one-sided. It became clear to Lennon in that moment that William could sense and feel in his own way. And as Blaine held his hand for the last time, tears slicking her cheeks, she wondered if he knew he was going to die.

If he was relieved to be set free.

“We’re running out of time,” said Dante, a gentle urging, and for a moment Lennon thought that Blaine had lost her resolve. She saw the conflict in the way her brows drew together, the way her eyes scanned back and forth across the floor, searching for the answer to an impossible question.

Dante turned to Lennon. “I would ask you if you’re ready, but I think we’re out of time. Either you do this now or you don’t do it at all. On your mark?”

Lennon nodded and looked to Blaine. “Let’s go.”

Blaine nodded back and shifted her hand to William’s heart, and Lennon knew at once what she was going to do. It was a cruel lesson that Dante had taught them, months ago, demonstrating on a rat that had cancer, a way to manipulate the mind into creating a lethal arrythmia.

An ordinary persuasionist would have the power to fight back against an attack like that one, to regain control of their own mind and body, defend themselves. But William—lying comatose in his bed—was as helpless as a newborn child.

When Blaine seized his beating heart, he didn’t struggle.

The heart monitor shrieked, and the room gave a shake so violent that a crack tore the floor open. Lennon flinched back, but Dante steadied her, taking her by both hands, rubbing his thumbs in circles in the middle of her palms the way he used to when she was falling asleep at night. “I’m going to be with you through every step of this, all right? You just have to listen to me. Can you do that?”

Lennon nodded.

“Good. Now I want you to focus on grounding yourself.”

“That’s a difficult feat when I’m just trying to stay standing.”

“Try for me.”

She did, centering herself with deep breaths, even as the floor swayed beneath her feet and sheets of plaster rained down from the ceiling. If the rafters gave, they’d be crushed beneath the rubble. But she tried not to think about that, or about anything apart from Dante’s voice.

“Now I want you to call your elevator, a cabin that can move through time. Then, when the gate is present, channel your energy into stretching it larger, to encompass the campus.”

“I’m not strong enough for that.”

“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.