Chapter 13 Still Faye

No one can pinpoint the exact moment sobriety leaves their body. Faye learned that in a first-year chemistry elective, when the professor began to expound on blood alcohol level and she'd been interested enough to look up a couple of papers after the class. There are moments before and after sobriety when the subject is aware of their state, but the precise crossing of the line remains one of life's mysteries. Maybe Ro, who had been back and forth more times than most of them, could come closest to finding the border, but the others were kept guessing as the minutes ticked by. It was nine o'clock.

Soraya hadn't left the floor. Faye didn't blame her. The concrete was cool, nice. There were dust bunnies—not in Soraya's direct vicinity, tangled around the base of the rolling shelves—but Soraya didn't look like she minded them. Once or twice, in the early minutes of their wait for Kip to return, of their wait for something to happen, she called out that she could see the dust bunnies moving, and the others laughed because, yes, the dust bunnies had moved, but only because something nearby disturbed them. She didn't say as much, but Faye suspected that Soraya would prefer to be very high by the time Kip returned and that she hoped he'd be the same. Everything is more forgivable when you can't see straight.

Faye hadn't considered the need for a bathroom until Kip left, and now it was all she could think about. She didn't have to go—she hadn't eaten anything in twenty-four hours—but not having access to a bathroom had always accelerated her bladder. It was like the game where you're not supposed to think about elephants. She supposed that, once Ronald left, they could go upstairs and use the regular staff bathroom, but then again, she had no idea whether the alarms were on the entrances and exits to the outside world or whether the interior doors were alarmed, too. Davey would know, Soraya would know, Mary would know, but Faye could think of little that was more horrifying than having to ask someone for details about the bathroom.

She imagined Kip, detestable Kip, wandering around the stacks looking for somewhere to relieve himself. "What if he shat his pants?" She contemplated saying that aloud, wondered if it would get a laugh, but decided it was too crass. But isn't that how friendships are made? Over lewd jokes and hatred of a shared villain?

Trying not to think about the bathroom—what if she suddenly found she was menstruating, what if she broke her fast and then immediately felt sick—she focused on the others. It was Umu who she saw the change in first. She began to open and close her mouth, slowly. First she parted her lips and then her teeth and then allowed her tongue to separate from her palate making a noise that was either very rude or very pleasing, depending on one's culture. And she did it over and over again.

The corn, tender yellow kernels carried safely in its leaves, was still on the floor by Soraya's feet, and as the minutes stretched Faye found herself fixated on it, and on the idea that once they started she could break her fast, once the ritual had begun she wouldn't need to purify herself with hunger anymore and she could just eat. She was scared of eating the corn, scared it would make her ill, scared it would make her need a bathroom (don't think about elephants!), but she wanted to devour it all the same.

Not long after Umu began making her noise, Soraya finally sat up. She said nothing, looked at no one, and moved so slowly it was hard to notice her at all, but in the space of what felt like fifteen minutes, she went from flat on her back to sitting with her arms wrapped around her knees.

"The long day wanes: the slow moon climbs: the deep moans round with many voices. Come, my friends, 'tis not too late to seek a newer world," Soraya whispered, breaking up the rhythm of Umu's mouth sounds. Then she climbed to her feet so quickly it startled all of them, even Faye, who had no cause to be startled. Soraya sprang over to the bookshelf and pulled a volume down and now Faye could see it: a slim volume bound in red leather with POEMS stamped on its spine. Soraya wasn't making a declaration. She was reciting a line that Faye knew too little to recognize.

It was a quarter past nine. Still an hour before the drugs would peak, but long past time to get started, and Faye, for whom time wasn't bent or stretched, for whom time was just time, was impatient for the sound of Ronald departing or Kip returning. Whatever tonight would be, she wanted it to begin.

"So what's the bet?" Davey said, getting shoulder to shoulder with Soraya by the bookshelf. "Is he off somewhere crafting an apology?"

Soraya slid the book and its unknown poems back with the others. Her dark hair had fallen right back into its neat bob when she got up off the floor. By some miracle her clothes were free from dust and she looked as clean and in control as she'd ever been, and yet to Faye, she was changed. It could have been the sight of her, an exemplary student, the shining employee, taking the drugs, but no. Fairly or not, to Faye she was stained by proximity, by association, because of Kip's repulsive rhetoric.

One of the items Davey had retrieved from his basement hiding place was a small wicker basket with a fitted lid, like something a teenaged girl might keep her private keepsakes in under her bed. When he'd first invited Faye to participate in this party, this ritual, whatever this was, he'd described very little, but the next time he'd spoken to her, when he told her she'd have to fast, there were more details. She wanted to get at the "why." It must have been so obvious to him that he spent the whole time talking about the "how"—that there would be a sequence of "things done," then "things shown," and then "things said" until finally they conjured Persephone and that was all well and good, but why? She looked for the same answer in the book about the rites, and the closest she got was that they would emerge unafraid of the horror of death. Faye was afraid of lots of things, but death wasn't something she often thought about.

"So you figure he's off drawing us all a card?" Davey said again, gesturing to the space beyond the makeshift arena where, somewhere, Kip was all alone.

"It's easier for us than it is for him," Soraya said at last. She had the tip of her finger extended to the shelf and was running it up the spine of one book and down the other, delighting when she hit a bump or indentation. "We graduate tomorrow. Stressful, sure, but then the rebirth happens right after. By, what, September at the latest, we'll know who we're going to be. Some of us will know by tomorrow. Maybe we'll all emerge from here so confident in our blessed postgraduation life that we'll all know by tomorrow. But Kip isn't dying yet."

Faye wouldn't have said this aloud, but wasn't she in the same camp as Kip? Graduating but coming right back to graduate school. Staying in the same apartment, working in the same lab, nowhere nearer to real life than she'd been last week or last year.

Soraya lifted her finger from the books and finally looked at Davey.

"He isn't graduating, I mean. It's harder. That sort of life in limbo."

The cold crept up Faye's back as she listened to Soraya and Davey talk about Kip. Again, she wished she hadn't come. Soraya's voice was so lyrical, so even, like she was reciting a poem in iambic pentameter.

Obviously no one dies in the ritual, Faye thought. Soraya had resumed her work tracing book spines, and Davey leaned himself against the stack. Not soon, but eventually, he'd be in the path of Soraya's finger and she'd have to decide whether to abandon her project or whether she should run her hand up and down his waiting body.

***

At the far side of the basement, they all heard a sound, probably coming from near the exit. The alarm wasn't on yet. Ronald hadn't left, so despite the layers and layers of concrete, they wouldn't call out and tell Kip he was being ridiculous.

Things done, things shown, things said. Didn't these rituals always have a sacrifice as one of their components? She'd half expected Davey to pull a cage with a mouse out from behind a volume of Jane Austen. Faye wasn't squeamish about the idea of cutting an animal open; she'd taken biology courses, she'd seen her share of tiny pink lungs drawing their last breath, though she might feel different if the purpose of the death wasn't science. It was the lack of a mouse that was more worrying. If it wasn't an animal who would die, then who would it be?

"Maybe he fainted from hunger," Faye said. From his perch against the shelf, Davey looked at her like he was just noticing for the first time she was there, she who he had invited himself and even spoken to, more than once, about what she should expect. "Maybe that was the noise," she said. "The sound of Kip hitting the ground."

Now everyone was looking at her, but no one was jumping up to see if she was right. If Kip was crumpled somewhere, his large body overwhelmed by its emptiness. It wasn't a mystery worth investigating for this group.

"Unlikely," Soraya said, freeing Faye from the burden of having been the last one to speak. If there was supposed to be a follow-up to her single word of denial, Soraya forgot it. She went right back to tracing the spines of those 10- to 12-inch books on the shelf.

They'd been waiting for it for over an hour, but every one of them was surprised when it came. The beep signaling that the alarm had been set.

In the seconds after the noise, no one moved: Soraya's finger on a leather-bound volume, Davey against the bookshelf, the others spread out across the ground. Davey had promised them that there were no motion detectors. Soraya, Mary, and Faye had never seen motion detectors, and yet they dared not move.

Ro broke the spell. He reached forward with his right hand, flexed the fingers, which by then must have been dancing before his eyes. And nothing happened.

"I told you guys there were no motion detectors," Davey said. "I don't know what you're so freaked out about."

No motion detectors, no Ronald; the strings that had been holding them in place, the strings they hadn't even seen, were broken. They moved their limbs, they spun around, they laughed as loud as they wanted. They were alone, really alone. The library was theirs to do with as they pleased.

"Death is the end of life; ah why, should life all labor be? Death is the end of life; ah why, should life all labor be?" Mary began to bellow at the top of her lungs. Umu laughed and joined in. "Death is the end of life; ah why, should life all labor be? Death is the end of life; ah why, should life all labor be?" They put their faces almost right against one another, these girls who had just met, and turned the chant into a kind of song.

"You guys are cheesy as shit," Ro said, but it was infectious. His shoulders had started bouncing to it.

"Is this part of the Greek ritual?" Faye asked. Davey wasn't joining in, but maybe that was the point: that they should start and he would join in later.

"This is a Tennyson poem," he said.

Again, her face got hot. They were people who went to parties, people who could add a beat to any collection of words to make it something you could dance to, and people who walked around with the full text of Tennyson poems in their heads.

"I knew that," Faye said.

"They're being idiots," Davey said. He wasn't bouncing his shoulders to the rhythm of Umu and Mary's chant at all. "But let them. We'll get serious when Kip gets back."

Faye almost smiled. She didn't fit in with Umu and Mary, but at least she wasn't the only one immune to the charms of Tennyson. She almost made a joke about it—she was just putting the words in the right order, but she never got them out because everything around her went black.

By instinct, Faye put her hands to her face first; the terrifying prospect of being without her glasses was always the first fear that came to mind. She'd worn them since childhood, and since she'd become dependent on them for vision, there was always a violent flinch when something came too near her face. She wasn't afraid of being hurt. She was afraid of the disorienting blur. Tonight, the glasses were where they should be, but still, she couldn't see. Somewhere very near her, she could feel the movement of another person—Mary, she realized quickly it was Mary, not because the energy of this other person was familiar but because she began to scream.

We're going to die down here, Faye thought, not moving, not breathing, certain that if she didn't move the air near her at all she could disappear and change her past decision to have come here in the first place. It must have been a full minute that she stood that way, holding her breath while Mary screamed, while the rest scrambled, while she waited for some unseen arm to come and cut her throat until slowly the realization about what was happening dawned on her and she knew there was no reason to be afraid. She let her breath out and reached her hands out to find Mary, to find some way to stop that terrible screaming.

"He said he thought of everything, but no one thinks of everything," she said under her breath, though she counted herself as brave for saying it aloud at all. The depth of the darkness was absolute. It was perfect. They were so deep under the earth that there was no chance of a sliver of sunlight creeping in, and they'd rolled so many bookshelves against each other to create their arena that they'd barricaded themselves from even the light of an exit sign. Surely there must be an exit sign, Faye thought, but there was only black.

"Didn't he say the lights would stay on?"

It was Ro's voice somewhere in the darkness. The sound of it was one of the most soothing Faye had ever heard—a person, there was a person, one who wasn't screaming, one who wasn't out of their mind, one who had come to the same realization she had.

Maybe it was because it was a male voice, maybe because it was because Ro had spoken at his full volume, but as soon as he said it, Mary stopped screaming.

"The lights are just Ronald leaving?" Mary said. "I can't see my nose because Ronald turned off the lights?"

"What the fuck happened to ‘there's not even a switch?'" Ro said.

Faye listened for Davey's reply, but there was none. In the dark, in the screaming, in the confusion, she had lost him in space. He'd been leaning against the bookshelves, she knew that. Was he behind her now? Or could she reach her hands forward and touch him?

Davey might have stayed silent forever, might have let them grope in the dark for him forever, but he wasn't offered that comfort, wasn't allowed to stay hidden. There was a flick and a click and a flame and then Ro's face came into sight and the weak light given off by his lighter was enough to illuminate them all.

"It's not as though I've spent a lot of nights down here," Davey said. He was still leaning against the bookshelf, which was indeed still behind Faye, and if she thought he'd apologize for his error, she found she was wrong. "I've never seen a switch. Turns out there is one. The dark's not the end of the world. I'm pretty sure we'll live."

There was a rustle from over by the bookshelf. There wasn't enough light to see what he was doing, but in a moment there was another flick, another click, another flame. Davey had had a lighter with him all this time.

They should be furious, Faye thought. He'd misled them and he wasn't even sorry. He could have been wrong about the alarm, too, he could have had the police down here and the rest of them hauled away and he wasn't even sorry. They should be furious, but they weren't because the light from that second flame, the weak light that doubled what had been available to them the moment before, was a great relief.

Now Davey was illuminated in a way the rest of them weren't. It was only Ro they could see as well, though Ro was in the same place he'd been before the lights went off. Ro wasn't moving, whereas Davey had dropped to a crouch on the floor and was sweeping his hands, was hunting for something with only the meager flame from a ninety-nine-cent lighter to guide him.

Faye discovered she was holding her breath again, watching this quest or whatever it was. The lighter had to be growing hotter and hotter against Davey's fingers, and every few seconds he had to flick it again to relight it. And soon, sooner than they needed, certainly sooner than the morning, the gas in that lighter, in that lighter and in Ro's lighter, would go out and they'd be cast into darkness again.

"Are you looking for some paper to burn?" she asked. They were surrounded by the stuff. Just one volume under that flame would give them a thousand times as much light as they had right now.

"No," he said, so loud the sound echoed off the concrete ceiling. She went red again, flushed with the stupidity of her suggestion. Of course Davey wasn't looking for a book to burn, certainly not one of these books that were only down in this collection because of how precious they were. "'Tis not too late to seek a newer world." Was that the line Soraya had said before? She was down here with these people and it hadn't begun as she had hoped. She'd been afraid, she'd felt herself in danger, but it didn't have to be that way. It wasn't too late for Faye to make herself the person she wanted to become.

"Got them!" Davey said, and by that weak, flickering light he showed them the big box of taper candles he'd found. Of course a ritual would have candles, of course they weren't going to burn a book.

Davey let his lighter go dark, and he tore open the plastic on the box of candles. Ro, finally motivated to move, came over to help, and between the two of them, they lit six candles in a blink, and even a couple of extras that they placed on the floor, far from the shelves where they might do damage, and then as quickly as they'd fallen into it, they weren't in the dark anymore.

"Something done, something seen, something told," Umu said, running her fingers back and forth through the flame of her candle. "That's how it's supposed to go, isn't it?"

She was speaking to all of them and none of them at once. Her trip, too, had started, but she was a more experienced traveler than Soraya. She wasn't afraid, she wasn't in awe, but she didn't want to waste the feeling.

"There's still Kip," Davey said. "Or there isn't Kip. Wherever he's hiding he's probably trapped in the dark now. Serves him right, but it all works better with seven of us." He was speaking slowly, fighting against what the chemicals were doing to him, working to stay in control of himself and the group.

"Forget him," Soraya said. "I want to start."

"I was going to say the same thing," Davey said. "Forget him. It works better with seven, but forget him."

"There's light now," Umu said. "There's light and there'll be noise and it'll lead him back to us. We've left him a trail of bread crumbs."

It was ten o'clock. The library had only been closed a moment, but somehow it had been closed two hours and Faye, like Umu and Soraya, was eager for them to start. All that had happened so far was that she'd felt embarrassed and then afraid of the dark and there wasn't much in those feelings, embarrassed and afraid, that she didn't feel regularly anyway. She wanted to start so she could feel something different.

"The ear of corn is a symbol of Demeter." Davey picked it up from the ground, and Faye salivated when he touched it. "There are other symbols, mysteries, things that are hidden, but the corn is a good way to invoke her."

"I thought you were mad Kip brought the produce," Ro said. "It's giving a bit of inconsistency, my dude."

"So we're doing it?" Mary said, like she hadn't just heard them speaking, like she hadn't just heard them decide to go ahead without Kip. There was something about Mary's energy that was different from the others, at least in Faye's viewing. A sharpness in her movements, but then Mary always did a thousand things at once, spoke a mile a minute in two, four, six languages, recorded her videos for social media that hundreds, thousands of people fawned over, dazzled her professors, dazzled library donors. Perhaps even LSD couldn't quiet all that energy.

"What's in the basket?" Ro said. "Is that where you keep the bodies?"

"So we're just going to go ahead without Kip after all that?" Mary said. No one was listening to her. They were all excited now at the prospect of beginning. "Won't he be mad? If it were me and I had fasted and done all that and then you started without me, it might hurt my feelings. Do you think we'll hurt his feelings?"

"Don't touch the basket!" Davey said, rushing over to it so that Ro couldn't open it.

"We can't see the secrets yet," Soraya said. She had wandered over from the bookshelf and sat herself on the floor. Her candle had most of her attention, but she explained to Ro what Davey wouldn't. "It's the wrong order. The secrets come second."

"It's a basket full of secrets?" Ro said.

"So like, is Kip just gone? Should we go tell him we're starting?" Mary said.

"He'll hear us," Umu said. She led Mary by the shoulder and they sat on the floor, too, in the arena next to Soraya. "He'll hear us and he'll come."

"Why did you even come if you weren't going to take it seriously?" Davey said to Ro.

"I'm just asking questions, my dude." He motioned to Davey to put the basket back on the ground, and then Ro took a seat on the floor, too, a show of good faith that he was prepared to be serious, that he was as eager to be free from fear as the rest of them. It was just Davey and Faye who were standing now.

"The Eleusinian Mysteries were a secret aspect of Greek life," Davey said.

"Sort of like the orgies," Ro said. "And all the sodomy."

"We know there was ritual sacrifice, but we don't know what form it took," Davey continued.

"When we cut you open down here, no one will be able to hear you scream," Umu said to Ro. He threw a hand in front of his face, miming fear, and then they both descended into giggles. It was infectious. Even Faye laughed.

"We know there was a ritual washing after the sacrifice," Davey said.

"What about the ritual ordering of six pizzas to break the fast?" Mary said. "At what point in the festivities did the Greeks do that?"

"Hear, hear," Faye said. She was hungrier than she was shy. Was no one else hungry?

"What's amazing is that a huge number of people partook in this ritual," Davey said. "Women, slaves, everyone was allowed, but so little is known about how it played out. A perfect secret."

"Women and slaves," Ro said. He mimed a shocked gesture. "And slaves," he mouthed to Umu.

Without drawing too much attention to herself, Faye took a seat on the floor next to Soraya, so now Davey alone had the floor.

"They drank kykeon," Davey said. He held his candle below his chin like the best storyteller around a campfire knows to do with their flashlight. He'd been scratching at his eye all night and his eyelid had begun to swell. The flicker from the candle made it look like it was pulsating. "It wasn't until recently that historians understood kykeon had psychoactive properties. It unlocked the whole thing for researchers."

"Bring on the kykeon!" Umu said, thrusting her candle up in the air. The movement of doing so reminded her how high she was. She brought her arm down slowly, fascinated by the bones in her hand.

"I think the kykeon's already here," Mary said.

"Chanting's an important part of the ritual," Davey said. "So we know it must have occurred, but there's no way to know what they recited and when. It might have changed from year to year or there might have been a sacred text that was whispered between participants. Maybe it'll reveal itself to us before we leave here tomorrow morning."

In a quick motion, Ro was on his feet. Crouched, poised to jump like some sort of hunter.

Or a dancer.

"It has already revealed itself," he said.

He grabbed Umu by the arm and pulled her up, though she needed little goading.

"Death is the end of life, ah why, should life all labor be? Death is the end of life, ah why, should life all labor be?" They chanted in low, deep whispers. The beat hadn't dropped yet. Umu took Soraya's hand, poor stoned Soraya, but she rose without protest. The chanting felt good.

"Death is the end of life, ah why, should life all labor be?" The three of them sang it.

If what came next surprised the group, it surprised Faye more. She didn't wait to be asked, didn't wait to be invited; she got to her feet and even pulled Mary up behind her. Now the five of them were chanting it.

"Death is the end of life, ah why, should life all labor be? Death is the end of life, ah why, should life all labor be?"

She wasn't sure who started the circle. Maybe no one did. Maybe once you're chanting, physical movement happens spontaneously. However it happened, whoever initiated it, they surrounded Davey. They crouched and stomped and held their candles and walked clockwise around the ritual's leader, chanting it over and over and over.

"Death is the end of life, ah why, should life all labor be?"

Maybe they would have stayed that way forever, chanting and laughing until morning, if Davey didn't finally interrupt them.

"Where the hell have you been?" Davey said. It was nearing eleven o'clock. "We thought you settled in with the Cyrillic backlog and fell asleep."

The outline of Kip appeared in the distance by the end of the shelving bay, about as far as the light from their candles would reach.

"I was worried, babe," Soraya said. Her sleek hair was mussed from the movement, stuck sweaty to her head in places. "You should have called out; we would have come to find you."

Kip said nothing.

"We waited for you," Umu said. "We waited for, like, a real long time."

Kip took two steps toward them, but they weren't steps at all. He staggered.

"Are you okay?" Faye asked.

He wasn't okay.

He made a sound. It wasn't speech and it wasn't a scream. It was lower than that. A low, wet gurgle that was more terrifying than any scream could have been. Then he staggered forward two more steps and fell fully into their light.

His face, his button-down shirt, his trousers, were covered in blood. He made the wet noise again.

"Kip!" Soraya yelled when she saw it.

He staggered again, but the effort of it was too much and fresh blood oozed from his mouth. He threw himself at the closest comfort he saw, at Soraya, but she wasn't strong enough to hold him and he collapsed to the ground with a terrifying thud.

Soraya looked down at the front of her, at the short-sleeved green silk shirt with delicate little buttons, at the black pencil skirt she'd tucked it into, even at her oxfords, all covered in Kip's blood. When she screamed, Faye didn't hear it as a scream for Kip. Soraya screamed for herself. For the horror of being soaked in blood. That it was someone else's blood and not her own was somehow worse, or it would have been for Faye. Kip was in a heap at her feet, unmoving, and Soraya didn't care, how could she care when she was covered in blood?

"Please get it off," she said. "Please, please, please get it off."

She was swiping at herself, trying to shake off the blood like it were so many ants crawling on her, but she was succeeding only in making it worse. Smearing it on her stomach when she tried to get it off her shirt, covering her arms in it while trying to clean off her legs. At some point her candle had hit the ground and Ro had moved quickly to stomp on its flame but now he could only stare. The problem wasn't only that she was so high, it was that they all were. If she'd been hallucinating it, someone could have talked her town, assured her it wasn't real. But it was real. Wet and sticky and real and she was soaked in it.

Faye, the only one of them who had full control over herself, would have liked to have helped Soraya, but there was a man in a heap on the floor and no one had moved to do anything about it.

"Someone needs to help him," Faye said.

Ro reached down and picked up Soraya's extinguished candle. "I'll hold this for you."

"Is this part of the ritual?" Mary said. "I don't like it if it is. Some people faint when they see blood. Not me, but some people."

"It's not part of the ritual," Davey said slowly. "Unless Kip planned this. Do you think Kip planned this? Kip, did you plan this? It's not funny, man. None of us are laughing."

"Please get it off me," Soraya said. Umu stepped forward to try and help but there was so much of it and she was so high and the slick red of it looked like it was dancing in the light of the flame from her candle so then she didn't help. She just watched Soraya.

"Someone has to help him," Faye said.

"No one has to do anything; he's pretending," Davey said. "He couldn't stand the idea that this wasn't his thing, so now he's staging whatever this is." He pointed his toe in the direction of the heap like he might kick at Kip. "Get up, asshole."

"I don't think he's pretending," Faye said.

"Whichever of you planned it, do you know that some people faint when they see blood?" Mary asked.

"I don't want to be high anymore," Umu whispered to Ro, though of course they were all so close to each other, Faye couldn't help but hear it.

She was suddenly so cold. Every inch of her skin was covered in goosebumps, the flame of her candle quivering as the hand that held it shook. She was so hungry and so tired and so cold and she had no choice but to do what she did next.

"Can you please hold my candle?" And she handed it to Davey without waiting for his answer.

"He's pretending," Davey said. "The moment you touch him, he's going to yell ‘boo.'"

She lowered herself to a crouch. Slowly. If her instincts were right, then there was no rush about it. Davey, out of generosity or curiosity or the creeping realization of what was happening, lowered the candles so Faye could see.

When Kip had fallen, he'd crumpled with this face to the floor. He hadn't hit his head; that was such a particular sound, a head hitting concrete, that Faye would have recognized it. It was the only thing that gave credence to Davey's argument. If Kip was pretending, if this was all some elaborate ruse, he'd have been careful to make sure he didn't hit his head.

She had to take him by the shoulder to turn him. There wasn't blood on the shoulder of his shirt, mercifully. She couldn't see the source of the bleeding at all.

"Help me move him?" she said to Davey, who lost that generosity or curiosity or whatever it had been and took a step backward.

Kip had at least fifty pounds on Faye and she was trying to be gentle, because what if he was hurt, what if he needed help, so it took time and sweat to move him. She pulled at his shoulder and nothing happened, and she had to grasp the fabric of his shirt in her fists and pull with all her might before she finally did it. It took a grunt from Faye, but then Kip was on his back.

"Turn him back," said Ro, burying his face in Umu's neck. "Turn him back so we don't have to see."

There was so much blood. The front of his shirt was soaked in it, his chin was soaked in it, his hands; it was everywhere. Faye held her breath, the way she'd learned to hold her breath when she did anything distasteful—taking horrible cough medicine, listening to her parents fight.

"He might have a pulse," she said, but the only way to know was to touch him again and to stain herself with his blood. It was fresh, he was slick with it, but she reached out and put two fingers on his Adam's apple.

No one breathed. There could only be one answer, but they needed her to say it aloud, to confirm what they could see plainly in front of them.

"He's dead," Faye finally said. "Kip is dead."

Faye scrambled to her feet to get away from the body. There was blood on her hands.

"We have to get help," she said.

No one moved.

"We have to get help! He's dead!" she said.

"Please, please, get it off me," Soraya whimpered.

They were still in the middle of their arena; Davey's little wicker basket with the fitted lid had been left abandoned; so, too, had the ear of corn. The books watched them, wise and silent, but they were alone, now just six of them in the basement, and they had to decide what to do.

From the ground floor reference area, there was an elevator that went to the first basement, then the second basement, where they were now. Next to the elevator was a flight of emergency stairs—the stairs most of them had taken to get down. The door to those stairs was always kept locked, unless someone was scheming to hold a ritual in the sleeping library.

The stairs were locked now. It was on the checklist Ronald would have completed before leaving for the night.

The elevator required a tap from a staff pass card to bring a rider down to the basement. A necessary precaution. They couldn't have readers wandering through the reference area and helping themselves in the stacks. It wouldn't have been a problem, they had plenty of pass cards between them, but there was a gate between the group and the elevator.

Faye started toward the exit and was relieved to find the others were following her. Running was the thing to do. Running for help but also running from that horrible body. He was dead, Kip was dead, a person was dead. And Faye had no idea why or how.

Soraya was bringing up the rear. She'd taken off her right shoe for reasons Faye didn't understand, so she was limping along, but she was coming. It was in everyone's best interest to do so. Faye didn't want to be alone, and no one wanted to be left with the body.

"We'll get someone," Davey said from behind Faye, like it was his idea. "Campus security. Campus security will know what to do."

Faye would have loved to run, but she had only the light from the candle to guide her, and if she even walked too quickly, the flame wobbled and shrank. You're brave enough for this, she thought, and then she turned and saw the faces of the others, her own terror reflected in them, and she didn't feel brave at all.

The gate was really more of a fence. Someone in the decades since the library had opened had campaigned for the fence to be installed, likely after some library or another nearby reported the theft of a rare book. There was a lot of construction in the basement that was amateurish—those wobbly rolling shelves squeezed in at strange angles, the haphazard stacks of packing skids—but the security gate was a professional job. Two-inch metal squares, poles that stood so steady they must have been sunk three feet into the concrete floor. In some places it reached the ceiling, in others it left room for plumbing or wiring, but everywhere it stood guard against the possibility of theft. It surrounded the bookstacks all the way through the basement, and it separated the six from the elevator.

Like someone had pulled an emergency brake, the six of them stopped when they got to the exit gate. Umu and Ro gripped each other, but they stood closest to Faye, quivering with anticipation at the idea of being sprung free. Mary and Soraya walked together. Not arm in arm, Mary wouldn't have risked touching Soraya, but supporting each other anyway. Davey, who knew the library better than any of them, would have come to the realization first. He slowed down before the rest of them did. He was the last to arrive at the gate.

"Open it, open it," Ro said, when Faye paused at the gate. She reached forward, pulled at it, but she knew right away it was no use.

She didn't have to say it to Ro; he understood immediately.

"No, no," he said. He gave his candle to Umu and then grabbed the door himself. He yanked at it, pushed at it, swore at it, and it barely trembled.

"Where the fuck is the key?" he screamed at Davey, when the last of their party finally came to the gate.

"It wouldn't be very secure if we kept the key down here, would it?"

Faye was having trouble taking a full breath. Kip was dead. A man was dead. She'd been in and out of this gate a million times. During the day it was swung all the way open so there was just a doorway through the grate; you scarcely thought about it as a gate at all. It was the first thing the opening librarian did when they arrived and the last thing the closing librarian did when they left was to secure the gate. She'd never seen it closed, so she'd never, for a second, considered the fact that it didn't open from the inside.

"This is a fire hazard!" Ro said. He had his fingers laced through the grating and was yanking it with all his might.

"There aren't supposed to be people down here," Davey said. "It's not like the books could walk themselves out in case of fire."

Mary left Soraya, shivering and scratching at her skin, and came to the gate with Faye and Ro. She gave a half-hearted tug. There wasn't even anywhere to insert a key on their side of the fence. The door was designed to be unlocked from the outside, and the outside only.

"Did you know?" Mary said. She turned to Davey. "You must have known we'd be locked in here."

"I left stuff at my desk I was hoping you'd use later," he said. Behind his eyes, the gears were turning. "But nothing so important. So sure, I guess on some level I knew."

"What's your damage?" Umu said.

"It wasn't supposed to matter. We were supposed to be down here all night and then leave the same way we came in. If Kip hadn't fucked it up—"

"Kip is dead!" Soraya yelled, the first sign she could still hear them since Kip had collapsed on her.

"Obviously I'm not blaming Kip," Davey said, though he very much had been. "Though we wouldn't care about the gate if things were going to plan."

"Paramedics," Faye said. "You guys all took drugs. You have no idea what's in them. There are a million reasons we might have needed the gate. What if we needed to call for help?"

If they really were trapped in here, didn't that mean that whatever had killed Kip was down there with them?

Mary, the least able to extricate herself from her phone in daily life, thought of it first. Everyone but Faye was high, processing at a different speed than they were used to, and Faye didn't use her phone very much at all, but Mary was rarely parted from hers, and she'd been the one to bring the backpack over in the first place.

"We can call Ronald!" she said.

"Or, like, 9-1-1." Umu didn't work at the library, had no relationship with Ronald, and very much wanted to see someone in a uniform, even if she was chemically altered at the moment. "We could call for help to the people who are supposed to help."

Nothing had felt strange about dropping their phones into Kip's backpack, but now that he was dead, it felt terribly wrong to reach in and pull them out. Like defiling a tomb. They had only the light from their candles and the faint glow of the exit sign on the other side of the gate. Had Soraya been in better control of herself, they'd have asked her to dig through Kip's bag for them, but she was in no state, so Mary, who was the most eager to be reunited with her phone, did it instead.

"Mine has a case," Faye said. "It's sort of…rubbery?" Why did she say rubbery? What a disgusting word.

"I don't care whose is whose; just take them," Mary said. She had a fistful of them held out, waiting for someone to grab them. The candlelight flickered against the glass screens.

Ro recognized his and Umu's, and he took them from Mary. She held another but, having lost her patience, she let it clatter to the floor and she went in for another handful.

"Here." She shoved Faye's phone, in its rubbery case, at her. The cracked screen, the cheap old phone, she was so happy to see it.

In a moment they were all bent over like that—candle in one hand, phone in the other, soothed by the familiar motion of scrolling up with their thumbs to bring the thing to life. There was one phone left on the ground untouched—Kip's. No one dared pick it up.

They wrote their messages or dialed their numbers. To who? 9-1-1, Ronald, their mothers, whoever they felt was best equipped to help. Soraya didn't type, she only stared at the picture of her and Kip on her home screen, but it hardly mattered if everyone else was calling for help all at the same time.

If not for the level of panic, Faye would have known. Before she dialed the phone, before Mary handed it to her, before they tried and failed to open the gate, as soon as she'd held two fingers to Kip's throat and felt no pulse.

The call didn't connect.

She dialed 9-1-1 and hit the happy green icon and waited, but nothing happened.

"My texts won't send," Ro said. "Umes, what's the Wi-Fi password?"

"It's not ringing," Faye said, at nearly the same moment.

"The ITS work is happening tonight," Mary said, talking over both of them.

Umu and Davey stood there, too, phones in hand. They didn't say it. They didn't have to. No one's call was going to go through.

Above their heads was a thick concrete ceiling, above that, another layer of basement, tens of thousands of books crammed onto shelves that could scarcely support them, and then another concrete slab before there was the ground level and access to a cell signal. The whole idea of a place like this was for it to be secure. It was built to keep water, pests, thieves, out. And now, those same protections would trap them inside.