Chapter 14 Faye, again

Their phones came down, one by one. They weren't useless: they were repurposed as flashlights, their white beams replacing the flickering white candles. Poof. Poof. Poof. The candles were extinguished and allowed to fall to the floor, and in the bright new light, they could see the full spectrum of fear on one another's faces.

"Do you think Kip fell and cut himself?" Soraya asked Faye. She must have known that was impossible; there was so much blood.

"You don't need a phone signal to call 9-1-1," Ro said. He alone hadn't switched on his flashlight. He alone was holding his phone high above his head. "Someone stabbed that guy. I have to be able to call 9-1-1."

'Tis not too late to seek a newer world, Faye thought. She was beginning to believe it less. What new person could she make herself, trapped down here with a killer?

"It's not connecting, but you're not supposed to need phone service for 9-1-1." He walked away from them, screen lit up with the unfulfilled promise of that 9-1-1 call.

"You don't need a phone service provider." Ro was almost out of earshot when Faye spoke up. She didn't know if it was true about the phone service provider, had never had occasion to try it, but she thought she'd heard some fact like that, once upon a time. That a cell phone right out of its box would always be able to dial 9-1-1. "But you still need to be able to connect to a cell tower," she said.

"If I could do that, I could just FaceTime to make a call!" Ro's phone was still high overhead, his face grotesque in its green light.

"I work down here all the time," Faye said. She tried to be kind. The best thing you could be with a desperate person is kind. "My phone never works. It's too far down. The concrete's too thick."

"It's impossible," Ro said. "Everywhere has cell service. The New York City subway has cell service. There's a spot, a transponder or a modem or antenna or whatever."

"Whoever stabbed Kip, they've gotta still be down here, right?" Mary said.

The question made Faye touch her back pocket, a reflex. She hadn't forgotten about the scalpel in there, not exactly. She was aware of it when she sat down. She'd meant to put it back with her things on her worktable. The end of the day had been so rushed that from the moment she'd cut open the mascara until now, her need to sterilize the thing and put it away hadn't come to mind. There was supposed to be so much time tonight that it shouldn't have mattered. No one had stabbed Kip. But if someone had, it would have been Faye who had the weapon to do it.

"This isn't New York City," Umu said. It was her job to calm her friend, but she could hardly calm herself. She wanted her mother. "You'll drain your battery if you keep trying and you need the flashlight, Ro."

"Everywhere has cell service," he repeated.

Faye and Umu and Mary and Davey, all had their flashlights pointed right at him. He walked backward. Because the light from their phones was hurting his eyes, because he didn't want to be near them, because he was certain that somewhere in that basement there was a spot where his phone would break through.

"I don't think he was stabbed," Faye said. "There wasn't any cut…" She wanted to reassure them somehow, but how could she? Kip was dead. A man was dead.

"There's so much blood," Soraya said. She looked down at her clothes, a reminder that she was covered with it. "Someone cut him right open."

"He wasn't stabbed," Faye said. "The blood was his vomit, I think. I saw the body, Soraya. No one hurt him. He ingested something and it made him sick. It's terrible, but no one hurt him."

She was lying. Not about Kip having been stabbed—that was true—but someone or something had brought on all that blood.

"Babe, stay with me," Umu said to Ro. There was a pleading quality to her voice. A pitch to it that Faye was hearing for the first time that night. What must it be like, Faye thought, to have a friend like that, who spoke in tones that only you could understand?

Alas, Ro's hearing wasn't working as it should have been. He held his phone up, up, as if the extra two feet lent by the length of his outstretched arm would make the difference against all that concrete.

"Somewhere has cell service," he said, and then he and the glow of his phone disappeared around the corner of a bookstack and into the dark.

The five of them remained at the gate, in the not-insignificant light cast by four of their flashlights. Soraya was in the most obvious distress. The background on her phone had gone dark, but she was still looking at it, and she stood there shivering, her teeth actually chattering, as things became worse and worse and worse.

She wore her fear the most, but she wasn't alone in it. If they weren't high, it might have been clearer, if they knew each other better it might have felt safer, if the lights weren't moving, if time wasn't going in the wrong direction, if they could know for absolute certain that whatever was out there, and had hurt Kip, wasn't also here with them.

It was supposed to be spiritual, it was supposed to be ecstatic, but then the fear got in and now it covered them like bugs.

"What do you think happened to him?" Davey said. He went to Faye and took her hand, actually grasped her hand the way a little boy would grasp his mother's hand before crossing a busy street. She didn't know you could do that. Just take someone's hand without asking them if it was okay first. "I don't really know you, but you didn't take anything, right? So maybe you see something we don't. You didn't take anything?"

But he did know her. He'd spoken to her at least nine times before that night. It made her want to yank her hand away. His hand in hers, his eyes on her, it felt so hopeful. Mary and Soraya and Umu didn't share his look of hopefulness. They didn't know her. They scarcely knew each other.

"You didn't take anything," he said again, gripping her hand so tight it felt like a threat. "You didn't take anything so you have to help us."

Davey loosened his grip on Faye but he didn't let go. His hand was warm. When was the last time someone had touched her before tonight? Her mother, hugging her goodbye at the end of the summer before she got on the plane back to Vermont? The occasional hand on her arm or shoulder? Nothing as thrilling as this. He said he hardly knew her, but how could that be true when his hand was so warm against hers? When he needed her so badly.

"I can help," she said. "I'll figure something out. I can help."

"Is she going to turn herself into a key and get us out of here?" Mary asked.

Davey squeezed Faye's hand. Reassured her.

"She's smart. Physics, right?"

Faye nodded a little.

"Do you understand physics, Mary?" he said. "That's the whole universe. She understands the whole universe. If she understands the whole universe, then I think she can figure out basement level two."

"I'm sober," she said. It was thrilling to hear Davey tell the others she was smart. He did know her. He had been paying attention. "We're all smart. We wouldn't be here if we weren't smart, but my head's clearer than everyone else's, that's all. I can't open the gate—"

"Told you," Mary said.

"I can't open the gate, but I can make sure everyone's safe."

"She'll fix it," Davey said. "She's here because she's good and she's smart and she knows about the universe."

They were still by the gate, a conspicuous reminder that they were trapped inside that didn't seem to be doing much good for anyone's mental state. Davey, who'd been holding on to his faculties so tight, was finally beginning to slip in a way that worried Faye. He was her friend, after all, her closest ally, and as much as he was relying on her to know what to do, she relied on him for their basic needs. What other supplies he had hidden in the basement, who would be at the library to unlock the gates in the morning, these were details she would need to extract from Davey.

Mary seemed clearer than the others, her trip was going the most smoothly, but she radiated fury. If she had the mental capacity to be helpful, she didn't have the desire. Still, Faye was grateful to see that Mary would mostly be able to take care of herself.

The overwhelming sense from Umu was that she wanted her friend to come back. Umu was the youngest of them, younger than Faye even, and she looked especially babyish at the moment. Her pretty face was scrunched, she was chewing her lower lip, and while the others were pointing the lights from their phones at their feet, she was still pointing hers off in the distance toward the stacks, as though to beckon Ro back with it. She'd worn a silk skirt with flowers on it that day, and while her right hand held her phone aloft, her left was busy with the skirt. She held the fabric between her thumb and forefinger and rubbed it back and forth and back and forth and back and forth. She'd been doing it since Ro disappeared—it made a faint whooshing that was deafening in the silence of their vast cavern. If she kept it up, she'd wear the fabric out by midnight. It felt like they had been down there forever, but it was just after eleven o'clock.

Faye's real fear was how to bring Soraya through the night. Soraya and her single shoe. She wanted Soraya's second shoe to restore a sense of order. Before the lights had gone out, when Soraya was tracing the spines of the books with her fingertip, the pleasure had radiated from her, and now that body emitted only terror. At some point, while Davey had been complimenting Faye, Soraya had taken her shivering to the floor. She sat with her arms wrapped around her knees, her phone placed on the concrete in front of her, still dark, like she was waiting for a call that would never come. The blood down the front of her, Kip's blood, had begun to dry to a rusty brown, which had the effect of making Soraya appear dirty. Dirty was better than bloody. An improvement.

Her teeth weren't chattering anymore, but her whole body was shaking. She was clenching her jaw so tight that the muscles in her cheeks were flexed, and Faye worried that along with all their other problems, Soraya would shatter her back teeth and require a dentist.

Umu was the youngest and Faye was the least confident and Ro was a stranger to the place but it was still undeniably Soraya who was most in need of help. It was such an unpleasant choice to make, but Faye shook her hand free from Davey's. If he was right, and she could help them, if he was right, and she was smart and capable, then the first thing she needed to do was to attend to Soraya. Faye knew that to approach children and dogs, you were supposed to get down to their level, and as little as she knew about children and dogs, she knew less about people who had taken psychotropic drugs directly before experiencing a traumatic event. But she figured a cautious approach was likely the right one, so to start her approach to Soraya, she got down on the floor with her. If Soraya had been Beans, she'd have calmed down immediately. Beans was afraid of fireworks and on the Fourth of July, he always found somewhere to hide and shiver, but as soon as Faye got down on the floor with him, his heart rate settled.

"Tell me how I can help you," Faye said, as gently as she could but still making Soraya flinch when she came close. She didn't touch Soraya, she didn't dare, only waited next to her on the floor until she was ready to speak. There was blood clumped in her eyelashes.

"Open the gate," Soraya said. "And let me go home and wash off the blood."

"We're safe if we stay together," Faye said. She didn't say what they were safe from. Wasn't she the one who'd said that whatever had happened to Kip was just a matter of something he ingested? "We'll take you somewhere that you can go and rest."

Getting away from the gate, she told herself, would be the beginning of the end of their troubles. It was a reminder, taunting them, of how trapped they were. If there was no getting out, then there was no use sitting by it.

"You hid some supplies, didn't you?" she asked Davey. When she'd let go of his hand, he'd laced his fingers through the grating that trapped them.

"I prepared a basket of secrets," he said, and he looked like he knew how stupid it sounded. He'd wanted this night so badly.

"Let's go back," she said. "Would you like that, Soraya? To go back to where we were sitting before? Surrounded by books? That's not so scary." Faye looked to Davey for his support. "We can see what else there is, in terms of supplies. Maybe if Soraya ate something?" Her own stomach burned.

"What about the body?" Umu asked. "You don't think sitting by Kip's body might be scary?"

"Davey and I will move it," Faye said. She didn't know if Davey had it in him, but Ro was nowhere to be seen and if nothing else, Davey was strong enough to do it. She turned back to Soraya, her voice gentle. "I'm going, but only for a minute. Stay here with Umu and Mary and they'll take care of you, okay?"

Davey unlatched his fingers from the grate. She expected him to protest, but he didn't. "Yes!" he said. "I knew you were going to help us."

"It'll be a minute," Faye said, though no one was looking at her. "Stay here and we'll come right back for all of you."

Umu kept rubbing her skirt back and forth and Soraya kept staring at her dark phone and Mary kept seething with anger, so it was silent when Faye and Davey took themselves back to the arena.

"Was there anything to eat that you hid down here?" Faye asked. She'd give Soraya the corn if it came to it, though she hoped for something better. If there was food, she never learned of it. They arrived at the body so quickly—it felt like it had taken an age to get to the gate in the first place, and now they were back in just a moment.

"Do you want the feet or the head?" Davey asked. Kip looked just as horrible when they stood over him this time. On Soraya the blood had dried to look like dirt, but on Kip it was so clearly blood. Something he ingested, Faye told herself. Nothing scary about that.

"You take his feet," Faye said. "Keep your eyes closed if you need to and I'll tell you where to step." She laid her phone on the ground with the flashlight pointing up, and Davey did the same.

"I don't mind keeping them open," Davey said.

She was meant to be the one in control, but she would have liked very much to be able to keep her eyes closed. She took Kip under his arms and Davey took him by his feet and even still they couldn't lift him, only drag him—as respectfully as possible and as little distance as they could get away with. They'd left no space between the shelves in the B section when they made their arena, but just around the corner were the E stacks. Larger format books, those tomes over sixteen inches in height, lined up and whispering to one another. The first of the E shelves was up against the grating, but there was just enough space there to lay Kip flat. Respectfully, Faye thought, but out of the eyeline of anyone who might be disturbed by the sight of him.

"A scientist and a philosopher. A CEO and an influencer. And whatever it is Umu wants to be. Strange group we are," Davey said. Faye brought Kip's shoulders, his head, to rest gently. Davey let his feet clatter to the ground. He was moving slowly now, occupied by the goings-on inside his head.

"You forgot Ro," Faye said. Davey followed her back out of the arena, where the lights on their phones were still pointing up at the ceiling, illuminating a tiny sliver of the vast space.

"Did I?" Davey said. "Does he want to be anything that he isn't already?"

Faye looked over her shoulder. There was no bobbing light, no sound of footsteps, to signal that Ro was anywhere nearby. He could be on the opposite end of the endless basement, his phone still held high in the air searching for a signal. Or he could be just behind the next bookshelf. Watching them. Listening.

"We're on our way back," Faye said into the dark. Gently. She didn't want to startle anyone.

"Corduroy." It was Mary's voice she heard first when she approached the gate. "Do you feel the velvet? Do you feel the bumps?"

"I liked the silk better," Soraya said. An improvement. At least she was engaging.

Umu dropped her hand from the pretend corduroy when Faye and Davey came into view.

"Did you find Ro?" she asked.

"We're touching fabrics," Soraya said, her hand outstretched and stroking Mary's arm.

"We weren't really looking for him." Faye dropped to a crouch to pick up the scattering of candles that had been abandoned in favor of the phones. Their batteries wouldn't last forever.

"I went to a fabric store on acid once," Mary said, though no one had asked. "I was there for seven hours. It was soothing."

"We'll go back to where it's comfortable," Faye said, stretching her hand out to help Umu up. "With the noise and the light, he can find us whenever he's ready, even if his phone dies."

Once Umu was up, she offered her hand to Soraya. Soraya took it, got to her feet. Another good sign. But when she came close to Faye, she reared back.

"You smell like him," Soraya said. "Like his blood."

It was true that Faye's hands and forearms and shirtfront had the telltale rust stains of dried blood, but she couldn't smell anything.

"We had to move his body," Davey said, like he was describing the completion of a household chore.

"I don't like it," Soraya said, and Faye sniffed at herself self-consciously, but all she could smell was the familiar smell of her own sweat.

Their four lights—Soraya's phone stayed dark—led them through the stacks and away from the gate. They had to pass the E stack, where Kip's body was hidden, and Faye tried to shield the spot with her body, but Soraya stopped walking while everyone else passed.

"He's there, isn't he?" If she'd had her light on, she'd have seen him, his unmoving flesh. "I can smell it."

Faye, her own light pointed at the floor, reached to take Soraya's arm, to guide her to the B shelving, where she wouldn't see anything she wasn't supposed to. Her fingertip was almost at Soraya's elbow when a deep, frustrated scream from across the basement stopped all of them. It was Ro.

"I know how he feels," Soraya said. Ro's anger, his exasperation, had broken her concentration. She kept walking toward the arena, guided by the light of Davey's flashlight.

"Ro!" Umu called into the dark, but no one answered. "Why won't he come back here?" Umu asked. "Ro!" she called again.

"He's frustrated," Faye said to Umu. "Let him have his space. He'll come find us when he's ready."

Back in the arena, Mary and Davey put their phones on the floor with the lights facing up, and Faye followed suit. They could hear rattling as Ro took his frustration out on the security grating.

In the center of the arena, not far from their phones, was that ear of corn. Were none of them hungry? She'd intended to offer Soraya the corn, the pop of delicious, sweet kernels being the most soothing thing she could think of, but no one else seemed bothered by the lack of food in nearly twenty-four hours. She might have considered the drugs a moment longer if she'd known they would keep her from feeling the intensity of her hunger.

"You're wrong," Umu said.

Davey and Faye and Mary all turned to her, to see who she was talking to, what she was talking about. Only Soraya was uninterested.

"About Ro?" Faye asked.

There was a new kind of color in Umu's eyes. They reflected the flashlights more sharply. Or maybe it was that her eyes were darting back and forth between them all. She'd been languid before, playing with the fabric of her skirt, but now she was clenched, taut.

"About Kip," Umu said. "It couldn't have been something he ingested. He didn't ingest anything. He fasted. We all did."

It was a puzzle she'd been putting together since the idea of Kip being stabbed had been taken off the table, and she'd finally slotted the last puzzle piece into its place. But Umu didn't make her announcement with any sort of pride. She spat it like an accusation.

"I saw him," Faye said. Eyes to Soraya, eyes to Umu. The two girls and their two different ways of being afraid. "I saw him and the blood was in his vomit. That's awful, I know." Eyes to Soraya. How much detail was too much detail? "There wasn't a cut on him. I promise no one hurt him."

"It was the gods who hurt him."

Davey. She'd lost her focus on Davey.

He picked his light up off the floor and swung it over to where Kip lay. It was too far to illuminate anything, Kip was too well hidden, but it was still a threat.

"He ate a pomegranate seed, and he was punished," Davey said. "It's just like the story of Persephone. It's perfect, really. We purified ourselves for the ritual by fasting. Everyone did, right? Look at the way Faye has been eye fucking that corn. You can tell she kept her fast. If you eat or drink anything in the underworld, you have to stay there forever."

Faye approached Davey with caution. The girls were afraid, but he was in a different sort of headspace that was just as dangerous. She touched his shoulder to swing him and his beam of light back toward the girls. She didn't want anyone's attention on Kip's body.

"We don't have a lot of answers right now, Davey, but I think we can rule out Hades."

"The ritual has to be underground. That's why we came into the basement. It symbolizes the underworld. Kip broke his fast so—"

"He didn't break his fast," Umu said. All the eyes, all the attention, turned to her. If there'd been a spotlight, she'd have been standing under it. "Persephone had to stay in the underworld because she ate the pomegranate—"

Faye would have killed for some pomegranate.

"—but Kip didn't eat anything. He texted me this afternoon about how hungry he was. He texted me about Persephone."

"We're a group of intelligent adults, and blaming whatever is going on here"—Mary waved her hand in the general direction of the E stacks—"on Hades would make us insane. Do you hear yourselves?"

"Why was Kip texting you?" Soraya said.

"It was definitely Hades."

If Davey heard any of the rest of the conversation, he didn't show it.

"To remind me to fast," Umu said. She took the fabric of her skirt between her fingers again and resumed her swishing, though now the sound of the fabric was more frantic, almost threatening.

"Did you need reminding?" All of Soraya's dark energy, the barbs that hung in the air around her, were now focused on Umu. "He was your teacher, right? You do a lot of texting back and forth with your teachers? Checking in on their weekend plans?"

"Maybe he's trapped in the underworld for wanting to add a student to his body count," Davey said.

"Enough about the underworld!" Mary piled her hair on either side of her head like earmuffs. "She's not his student anymore, is she? He can, or could, get it in with anyone he wants."

"Is that true, Soraya?" Davey said, not willing to leave it alone. "Can Kip smush whoever he wants?"

There was no getting the situation under control anymore, but Faye wanted Davey to pull back on the meanness, if nothing else. "You've got to stop it, Davey."

"This is enough," Soraya said. Maybe it was the dark, maybe it was the drugs, maybe it was her anger, but there was nothing left of her honey-brown irises. Her eyes were all pupil. "Whatever else is going on here, the kid is right about one thing." Umu, the kid, didn't look up. She kept to her swishing. "Kip didn't break his fast. He wouldn't have."

They all knew she was right when she said it. No matter how much or how little they each knew Kip, they understood that he was the type of guy who loved to do something hard, then lord over everyone around him how easy it had been.

Soraya continued.

"If Kip ingested something that killed him, it's because he was poisoned."

"Who would do something like that?" Davey said, and despite themselves, everyone laughed. It wasn't funny, not really. Kip was dead, a man was dead. It was that the man who was dead had been so repulsive to so many people that was the morbid humor in the thing.

There was something soothing about the realization. Kip had been poisoned. Terrible, but soothing. Getting bad news is never as hard as waiting for bad news and, if nothing else, they weren't talking about Hades any longer. It was half past eleven. Two hours ago they'd chanted and stomped in a circle, reciting Tennyson. When Mary sat down, then Soraya, then Umu, and Faye and Davey, they were in that same circle. Not surrounding anyone now, certainly not chanting and laughing, but there was something soothing about being mostly together, back where they'd begun. Faye still had those candles. She signaled to Davey for the lighter. If they weren't going to move around for a while, then she'd prefer the candles to the phones. The light wasn't as bright, but she wouldn't mind something that kept them stationary.

"The culprit poisoned the toilet paper," Umu said. "Then Kip wiped his ass with it, and hours later he met his untimely end."

Mary gave a half-hearted laugh. Faye lit the first of the candles. She didn't want to talk about how Kip had been poisoned. Or by who. Thinking about it was scary enough. Saying it aloud was worse.

"The murderer dipped Kip's pencil in poison," Davey said. "And when Kip came to a difficult passage in his text and began to chew his eraser, he sealed his fate."

"Mine was better," Umu said.

Faye dripped wax from the newly hot candle onto the cement floor, a trick her father had taught her. Once she had a good-sized pool of it, she turned the candle upright and stuck its base into the hardening pool of wax.

"It was his phone," Mary said. "The killer painted his screen with poison, knowing that Kip would get it all over his hands as he sat there, flipping through the Instagram stories of undergraduate snacks." An uncomfortable pause as everyone looked at Umu. "When he'd exhausted his eyes with all that beauty, he reached up to rub them to clear his vision, activating the poison that covered his fingers."

Faye held the candle in place while the wax at the base rehardened. She released it, pleased with the result. The candle held firm, the warmth of its light flickering across their faces in the circle. The candles gave her something to do, something to think about besides food and murder.

"The candle," Soraya said. "Someone poisoned the candle, and when the wax dripped on his fingers, it killed him just like that. Poof."

Of all the theories, outlandish or banal, Soraya's was the only one that was impossible. Kip hadn't lived long enough to pick up one of the candles. None of the theories were funny, but all of them laughed. The longer they made jokes, the longer until they confronted the obvious. Kip had been poisoned by something, or someone, that was down in the basement with them.

***

"It's not the first time someone's died at the library, you know," Davey said. Storytelling was one way to keep them from asking questions about one another.

Faye did know. She researched the place when she'd applied for the job, as if they would ask her questions about its history in the interview, as if they had so many candidates who could prepare X-ray fluorescence samples for rare books. Still, if Davey wanted to tell the familiar tale, she was happy to listen. Anything was better than the morbid show-and-tell of possible causes of death.

"Ronald told me about it," Davey began. "It was the eighties, right after he started here, and he said the place was a bacchanal back then. You've all heard the stories…" Though of course Umu and Faye hadn't. "Cocktail hour would start at three o'clock every day and they'd sit in the workroom and smoke and take turns having their corn ground in the bathrooms or the stacks or on the reference desk."

"Truly, the most shocking part of all that is the smoking near the books," Umu said. She kept looking over her shoulder. She was listening to Davey but hadn't stopped checking for Ro, or for someone else who might be out there.

"So they have this ‘anything goes' attitude and everyone's trading off partners and there's this librarian, new guy, who gets hired away from the British Library, and they weren't angels there either but we're talking about the woods of Vermont here, people get crazy when there's nothing else to do."

"So, what, he overdid it with the Jim Beam one night?" Mary asked. "Drifted off in a snowbank on the way home?"

"How unimaginative," Davey said. He scratched at the bulge by his eye. "His first month here he stays late in the basement with one of the library assistants, this lady who's married to a history professor. They mash the fat, and his tender British heart can't take it. He tells her he loves her, tells her she needs to leave her husband for him, the poor guy was probably just homesick and pouring it all on her, but that's hindsight."

"He killed her husband?" Umu said.

"Let me tell the story." By now, Davey had accepted one of the candles from Faye and he leaned down toward the flame. "He tells her that if she won't be with him, that he can't be there at all, that to be near her is driving him mad."

"He killed the library assistant?" Soraya asked.

"So they close for Christmas, like always, and the library is empty for two weeks and when they come back there's a smell. Facilities thinks there's a rat or a raccoon in the walls and they begin to open things up and look, but someone finally does a walkthrough of the basement and they find the British dude, hanging from a rafter."

"That American pussy drove him out of his mind," Umu said.

"Or if we follow Davey's logic," Faye handed Umu her own candle. "He dared eat a couple of pomegranate seeds before coming down to the basement one night."

They might have laughed, if given the chance. At one of her jokes! It was in the air, that laugh, but then from across the basement, they heard Ro again. Another frustrated growl, another rattle of their cage. After that, they weren't around a campfire telling stories anymore. They were back in a hole with a body.

Now Umu had a candle, too. She hadn't dripped the wax on the floor to make a candleholder, not yet. She held it, savoring the warmth of it in her hands.

"I knew someone who died of poisoning once," Umu said. She looked over her shoulder again; it was a reflex now. "It was totally awful. I was only a kid but my mom ended up telling me, like, way more than she should have, because it was her friend and I guess she didn't want to talk to my dad about it. This lady was a chemist. She and my mom had been college roommates for a minute and then they stayed friends even though my mom didn't know anything about, like, beakers. This happened when I was seven or eight. The chemist lady is working away in her little lab at Harvard, measuring this, mixing that, firing up that Bunsen burner. She's working with some form of mercury but, like, a fancy kind."

"Dimethylmercury," Faye said. She knew this story. They told it in safety presentations in labs at the beginning of the semester. There was a sense of proximity to celebrity, knowing Umu was connected to the story.

"So the safety information on the fancy mercury says she has to wear gloves and, of course, sis is wearing gloves. A swanky lady chemist! She's no fool! She drops a little bit, one drop of the fancy mercury on the back of one hand, but it's okay because it lands on her latex gloves. Cleans herself up, washes her hands, grabs new gloves, thinks nothing of it. You know, you think of poisoning as something that happens right away, like in the movies, but it doesn't. She got a little sick pretty quick but she stayed sick for months. She's over at my house one day, and she's a skeleton because she can't eat anymore and she's all dizzy and shit, and my mom begs her to go see a doctor, and finally she does and like a week later, she's dead. Before she went into the coma, she was blind and deaf, and she couldn't speak."

"Holy shit," Mary said. "So did someone poison her with some of her chemicals?"

"Nah," Umu said. "For a long time my mom was sure it was on purpose. If I'm being honest I'm pretty sure she and the lady chemist were more than friends after a couple of glasses of wine, you know? When I was a kid, I was sure my dad did it."

"Your dad murdered your mom's lover?" Mary said.

"No. I thought my dad murdered my mom's lover. Turns out it was the fancy mercury that dripped onto her gloves. She was wearing latex gloves and they weren't strong enough, and the stuff got into her bloodstream and ate her brain. She wasn't murdered; she just wasn't careful."

"I think," Faye said, sprung into action by the repeated use of the word "murder" and her need to distract them from it, "that I'm going to steer us away from stories about terrible ways that people died."

"Are you jealous because people in whatever Mennonite community you're from only die in really prosaic ways?" Mary asked.

Faye lit a candle for Mary and passed it to her in the spirit of generosity. Mary was scared; they were all scared. "I'm not from a Mennonite community. It's going to be a long night, it's been really stressful, an awful thing has happened, it would be helpful if we could talk about things that aren't quite so ghastly."

"What are you all doing after graduation?" Umu said. She was looking at Soraya. "That's a happy thing, right? Your brand new lives."

"We're down here because that's a terrifying thing," Davey said. "Future plans are just as off-limits as gruesome murders."

Soraya nodded her agreement. She'd also recently received a candle, and the hand that held it shook, just a little. She was looking at the group of them the way Umu was looking over her shoulder. Like she knew there was something there about to come for her.

"He did break his fast." Soraya spoke quietly, her eyes moved from person to person. "Not with food, not with pomegranate seeds or whatever Davey's talking about, but Kip did ingest one thing."

Mary zipped her necklace back and forth, and Davey scratched at his eye as they waited for Soraya's proclamation.

"The acid. He ate the tab of acid. We all did."

Seven little tabs in seven little baggies.

"I really don't think we should talk about—" Faye tried to interject.

"He put it right into his mouth in front of us," Soraya said. "It's not food. Was everyone else trying to think of food? I was trying to think of food. But anyway. We all saw him swallow it."

"We'd all be sick, though, if that were it." Davey looked around the circle for agreement. "I mean, if we all took the same thing, we'd all be sick by now, or at least beginning to feel strange."

"I feel pretty fucking strange," Soraya said.

"That's because you're high on acid." Umu was the only one who didn't appear energized by this new theory.

"I mean, there's a pretty significant difference," Mary said. "Remember right when Ro was passing them out and Kip acted like he knew everything the way he always acts like he knows everything? He swallowed his, right? And then Ro gave him shit for it and then the rest of us put ours under our tongues so they would dissolve. Maybe his stomach acid made something activate more quickly? I don't know. But if the way you take it can change the high you get, then who knows what else it can change."

"I don't think that's what happened," Faye said.

"I don't know." Soraya was gazing in the direction of the body again. Like she really could smell it.

"If Mary's right, that means it's a matter of time for the rest of us, doesn't it?" Davey said. He was speaking slowly, deliberately, adding the figures up in his head. "Kip swallows his drugs so the stomach acid or whatever activates the poison and all of a sudden he's bleeding out of his eye sockets—"

"He did not bleed out of his eye sockets," Faye said, to reassure Soraya, to get control of the situation.

"It should follow that the rest of us will start bleeding out of our eye sockets any minute now. How long's he been dead? An hour? Longer? Mine mostly dissolved under my tongue, but I swallowed it eventually."

"Okay," Mary said, rolling Davey's argument around in her head. "What if Kip's tab was the only one poisoned?" Zip, zip, zip, that cross against her chain, the chain against her throat.

"I like that I'm not about to start bleeding out of my eyeballs," Davey said. "So you mean he lost some sort of weird game of Russian roulette he didn't know he was playing?"

"Kip is exactly the type of guy who would insist he could win at Russian roulette," Umu said. Faye laughed a little. No one else did.

"I guess it could be that," Mary said. "Russian roulette is random. Could have been any of us. But like, the drugs weren't random at all."

"What are you saying?" Now Davey laughed a little. A nervous laugh.

"When you play Russian roulette, you spin the chamber or whatever it's called and then you pull the trigger, and if you get shot in the head, you get shot in the head. Shitty luck." Mary mimed a gun against her temple with her thumb and forefinger. "But the drugs weren't random. The tabs had those little pictures on them."

***

Faye had been enjoying the bit where they sat and told stories. Too morbid to ever say it out loud, but this is the sort of thing people did, wasn't it? Told each other tall tales, exaggerated a bit, made each other laugh, made each other a bit sad. Did Umu really think her father murdered a noted chemist? Unlikely. Made for a good story though, didn't it?

"Let's not speculate," Faye said. "We're only going to drive ourselves crazy or make ourselves terrified. The thing of it is to stay calm." But she wasn't calm. Because Soraya was right.

Soraya didn't look as though she had good control over the flickering flame of her candle. Any modern library wouldn't allow for candles at all. Strictly speaking, they weren't allowed in this library, but there were none of the complicated technological systems to dissuade them. Faye was sure that just thinking about a flame at Yale would set off all manner of alarms, but the William E. Woodend Rare Books Library was a different sort of animal. It was in financial trouble almost from the day it opened, so there was never any sort of question of upgrades or improvements, save for the security fence and the air-conditioning system (donated by an alumnus who insisted on refitting the whole campus because he thought it indecent to sweat). There were materials donated, sure, but no one with money wanted to use it on something so unglamorous as a fire suppression system.

Dr. William E. Woodend (the doctorate was honorary, awarded after he donated the funds for the library) made his fortune as a broker of some sort in the latter part of the nineteenth century. A Princeton man, he chose not to give his money to that institution, with which he mostly lost touch after graduation. That, or his sources of income were too questionable for the Ivy League. He liked Vermont. People weren't fussy about where money came from; they were only glad when you had it.

He donated the money for the library to the university in 1903. That same year, he summered on Long Island and was sued by his neighbors when he used a shared roadway for the purposes of exercising his show horses and used a rented cottage as a stable for those same horses.

He was an asshole, was the thing about William E. Woodend.

By 1904 he was bankrupt. The Princeton alumni magazine detailed the smashup of his brokerage firm and listed his residence as "address unknown." In fact, he was in Vermont. Rents were easier in the Green Mountain State, and he'd found himself embroiled in a further legal matter as he tried to get the university to give back the money he'd gifted for the library.

Having made no effort to maintain positive relations with his fellow Princetonians, he didn't have a network of fellow captains of industry that he could run to when he found himself in dire financial straits. The $400,000 that he'd donated for the construction of a grand campus library was a drop in the proverbial bucket when he promised the funds and signed them over in 1903, but by 1904 it was a fortune to him, a fortune that could have kept him clothed and housed for a good, long time.

Donations generally have a "no take-backsies" policy. Even a hundred years ago, cultural institutions didn't deal in promises; they dealt in legal agreements, and Mr. Woodend had signed documents promising the money, had instructed his bankers to forward the money, had posed in the newspapers announcing the donation. As the university's lawyers and his own told him, as much as he wanted it back, the money was no longer his.

It being America, he sued anyway, despite being told by anyone with a legal opinion that he had no legal claim on the funds. The lawsuit was unsuccessful, but it dragged on for years and proved an expensive proposition for both Woodend and the university. It branded the library as persona non grata (instituta non grata?) when it came to donations and other sources of funding. The matter wasn't settled until after the First World War, at which point most of the great American industrialists either lost their fortunes or committed them to other causes. There was nothing left in the pot for fire exits, backup generators, or extravagances of the like.

When development officers from the university tried to court new donors, and brought up the possibility of the library as a cause, they were immediately rebuffed. Despite his empty coffers, Woodend did a remarkably good job of making his case in the press, and donors lost all faith in the library's ability to steward their resources.

Woodend and his wife, an equestrian who never forgave him for the sale of her prized horses after the change in the family's financial circumstances, spent years settled in the very same Vermont town where the university stood. The case was being heard in Montpelier, but also Woodend liked to hang around the campus during the construction of the library building, watching his dimes and nickels be spent. Surely, it was never their plan to stay so long, but Woodend was a difficult plaintiff who fired lawyers at a whim and dragged the case out in every manner. Eventually the Woodends had children in Vermont, which complicated things further because Vermont, as it turns out, is a lovely place to rear children, and having become accustomed to it, Mrs. Woodend found herself quite unwilling to leave.

The whole sorry chapter in the library's history was finally settled in 1919, when William Woodend was imprisoned for the murder of his equestrian wife. He'd taken a $400,000 life insurance policy out on her, desperate to recover his funds by any means available to him, and she was found at the bottom of the stairs in their family home with a broken neck only days after the policy went into effect.

***

"Kip really liked you when you were his student, huh?" Mary turned her attention to Umu. It was phrased as a question, but spoken as a statement. An accusation.

"He was nice to all his students," Umu said.

"Kip? Kip was equally nice to all his students?" Mary laughed. Kip was a lot of things, but he wasn't nice. Everyone knew that. "Okay. I'm sure he was equally nice to every student so long as they're beautiful and thin and brilliant and read Greek. That's why he invited all his other students tonight, right? Because he was equally nice to all of them. I'll bet your bestie loved that. How nice Kip was to you. I'll bet your lifelong bestie who's so impressed with his darling Umu he can barely stand it thought there was nothing weird, nothing shady about your teacher and the special attention he was giving you."

"Did you tell Ro that Kip was hitting on you?" Soraya asked. Faye was still holding out that candle, trying to distract Soraya with the flame, trying to soothe her with it, but there was no distracting anyone from this thread. It was unspooling.

"He's the one who brought the drugs," Davey said.

"Where's Ro now?" Mary said. "Still looking for phone service? It's been an hour. I think it's safe to say at this point that he's not going to connect. Why's he still gone? Why isn't he here with his bestie who he loves so much, who he came here to watch out for? Kip is gone and all of a sudden, Ro doesn't feel like he has anything to protect Umu from."

"Where did Ro go?" Soraya said. "Did he get out? Did he find a way out?"

"No one got out," Davey said. "The gates are still locked. He did what he came here to do and then he disappeared—he's hardly going to stay around and make eye contact."

Their circle of five, lit by candles, lit by their flashlights, settled around the lights like a campfire, had begun to cast more frantic shadows.

"What if he can hear us?" Soraya leaned forward and whispered. "What if he's just around the corner, listening?"

"If he hurt Kip, he could hurt any of us," Davey said. "What was his problem with Kip, that he hit on Umu? That he violated some sort of ethic of the teaching assistant? If he's willing to kill Kip over that, you don't think he's willing to hurt the group of people who know what he did?"

Soraya wasn't seated any longer. She was crouched like a runner at a starting line, slightly off-balance on account of the missing right shoe. Was she preparing to run from something or toward something? Impossible to know.

"He hates people like us, doesn't he?" Soraya said. "People like him, all blue-collar and bad opinions, they always hate people like us."

Was she a person like Ro, or a person like Soraya? Faye wasn't sure which group she belonged to.

Davey had a foot up too now. With him Faye didn't question it. He was preparing to run at something.

"Where is Ro right now?" Davey said. He was whispering now, too. "I'm not going to wait here to be hunted."

"You're being insane," Umu said, but her tone was so much less convinced than Soraya's and Davey's.

"He was on the other side of the floor." Davey put a finger up to his lips to quiet them all. Was that the sound of the cage rattling? Was that a footstep? It was hard to hear anything over the sound of all their hearts pounding.

"I'm not waiting," Soraya said, now fully on her feet. "I'm not sitting here and waiting to be hunted because, what, because my parents have a summer home?"

Davey was on his feet now, too. Mary and Umu and Faye rose, too. Because they agreed it was time to run? Or because it's a human impulse to jump up when the person next to you does? She was meant to retain order. Faye was meant to keep them calm until morning, but now Davey and Soraya were moving, were running, toward the other end of the cage and Faye found herself running right behind them.

Faye hadn't considered that Ro could be anything but a friend of Umu, anything but a kid who had been invited along with his friend and found himself trapped in something terrible, until she found herself running toward him. What an insane idea this was, running toward the danger. She followed Davey and Soraya, Soraya with her one bare foot. They navigated the rows and rows of shelving with only the meager lights from their phones to guide them. What did she know about Ro? That he sold drugs. That he had kind eyes. That he wore soft, dove-gray pants. What else? Had he ever committed a crime? Selling drugs was a crime. Was he violent? Was he quick to anger? He sounded angry when he shook the grating. Every instinct told her not to run toward him but to run away. I'm running because I'm the only one who can keep everyone safe, she told herself. But that brought the obvious follow-up question—who would keep her safe?

"Ro, where are you?" Umu called into the dark. The volume was startling after so much whispering. "Ro, yell out and let me know where you are so I can find you!"

Davey kept moving forward, even if he didn't know exactly where his end point was. "You're warning him we're coming?" He hissed back at Umu. "If you were so sure he hadn't done anything, why would you be warning him we're coming?"

"I'm trying to find him," Umu said, raising her own light high in hopes that Ro would see it, a beacon through the dark. "I'll find him and he'll explain you're crazy."

"Umes?" A voice out of that darkness. Ro's voice.

"He's over here," Davey whispered, and then began to lead the others, his flashlight first and Soraya's—Soraya had finally turned on the light on her phone—behind him.

"If he'd done something, he wouldn't want to be found," Umu said. "If your crazy theory was right, wouldn't he be hiding from us?" Davey and Soraya didn't answer her. Her point was undercut by the fact that they had to seek him out in the dark at all.

"We should leave him alone," Faye said, unhelpfully. "We can stay where we were and he can stay where he was and it'll all get sorted out in the morning." She was scared of what Ro might do to them. She was scared of what they might do to him. In any case, it didn't matter because she turned a last corner, rounded a last shelf behind Davey, and there was the man they were all seeking.

"Did you get it open?" Ro said. His question was for Umu, he cared only about Umu, he must have long decided he was done with the rest of them. "Umes? Did you find a way to get the gate open?"

Impossible, the position Umu was in. The beautiful girl, all long limbs and silk skirt, shrank in on herself. She pointed her light at the floor and Faye could smell the regret oozing from her pores. She wished she hadn't brought the others to find him, she wished she hadn't brought him to the library in the first place. There were only bad outcomes left.

When they came across him, Ro was standing on a shelving stool. A knee-high round thing made of plastic and metal with a corrugated nonslip coating on its step. Standard in any library, there are usually dozens of them scattered about so the library assistants can have a seat while working with volumes on low shelves.

"Anything you want to tell us, pal?" Davey crossed his arms and shone his light in Ro's eyes.

"I'm not your pal." Ro stepped off the stool, was right in front of Davey now. "Umes, did someone get their phone working? Did you guys figure out how to call out?"

"Not yet," Umu said.

Ro turned his back to Davey and got back on the stool.

"This thing gives me another foot and a half. That's not nothing."

"Get down here," Davey said.

"I'm talking to Umu." Ro held his phone in the air.

"There's not even remorse," Davey said. He and Soraya were shoulder to shoulder, a little audience for Ro on his stool.

"Stay with me, Umes," Ro said from his stool. "It's faster if there's two of us, and the sooner we can find the spot with the phone service, the sooner we can be out of here."

"He wants to keep her with him?" Soraya whispered to Davey. "Imagine what he has planned for the rest of us if he's insisting on keeping his friend close by?"

"He wants to keep her safe," Davey said. "That's what he keeps saying."

In the glow from the flashlights, everyone's features were harsher, meaner. From behind Soraya and Davey, Faye watched it all unfold like she was the audience and they were players on a stage. In this production, there were only bad guys. Frustrated that he was being ignored, Davey stepped past Umu and tugged Ro's sleeve to get him off the stool, to get him down to eye level. Ro flicked him away.

"Who are you trying to call?" Davey said. "The police? Seems like a strange choice considering what they'll find when they get here."

"They think the drugs were what killed Kip," Umu said, her tone somewhere between apologetic and searching. "We all fasted, so it would have been the only thing he ingested in close to twenty-four hours." She was close enough to touch Ro. To reach out and take his hand and pull him down from the stool herself. She didn't. She stayed back from him, both hands clutching her phone. She looked afraid. Afraid of her own best friend. Umu's fear crept into Faye. It rose from the floor like an electrical current and soon tore through Faye's whole body. Is this what a murderer looked like? Shaggy-haired, in gray sweats?

"You take a risk every time you ingest a street drug." Ro stepped off his stool, but only so he could move it over by a foot and a half, and stepped back on, still seeking a signal for his phone. "Don't you remember those informational videos they made us watch in grade school? Or do they not show those in private schools? They don't want you feeling limited? Even in your ability to buy cocaine from strangers in public restrooms?"

"Babe, was there something wrong with the drugs?" Umu asked.

"Does it feel like there was something wrong with the drugs?" Ro said. "Don't you feel high, just like you wanted to? Don't you feel on top of the fucking world for the amazing ritual, or party, or whatever the fuck you wanted to have in this basement? There's something wrong, but it's not the drugs."

"Get down and talk to us," Soraya said. "My boyfriend is dead. My boyfriend who you're not even treating like a real person is dead, and you're up there trying to get phone signal? Get down!" This time she pulled on him. Harder than Davey had. Hard enough that he stumbled, though he kept his footing atop the stool.

"Are you insane?"

"She's trying to talk to you, pal," Davey said.

"Soraya's not being careful," Mary whispered. She was pulling her necklace so hard that the chain disappeared into the flesh of her neck. "She doesn't know what he's capable of, and she's not being careful."

"Why do you hate us all so much?" Soraya had her hand on Ro's wrist. "Because you have to wash dishes or sell drugs or do whatever it is you have to do? Is that Kip's fault somehow?"

"I thought he was the worst of you," Ro said. "I thought he deserved to go, but it could have been any of you, huh? You motherfuckers are all exactly the same. A different haircut on the same set of ideas."

What a funny thing words are. There's a giver and a receiver and words are shared. But it's not like a gift or a parcel. If a giver wraps a toy elephant in a box, the receiver will open a toy elephant. Did Ro gift wrap an admission of guilt? An accusation?

"You know what I'm going to do when I get out of here?" Soraya said. "I'm going to pour a giant glass of expensive scotch into an expensive tumbler, just like I'm sure you imagine rich assholes do. And I'm going to toast to the memory of my boyfriend and toast to the piece of garbage who thought he could get away with hurting him, who I made sure will never hurt anyone ever again."

Soraya took her hand off Ro's wrist. She let her phone clatter to the floor and she reached up at Ro's hips, because Ro's hips were what was at eye level, and she pushed.

If she hadn't been so little, or so malnourished, she could have done a lot of damage. As it was, she succeeded in getting Ro off the stool, but he landed on his feet.

"Are you out of your mind?" he said. "Umu, talk to your insane friends and tell them to get away from me."

"We're not her friends!" Davey said. Davey and Soraya had advanced toward Ro, to where he now stood behind the stool. There was quite a bit of floor space between them and the other three. "We don't even know her, remember? Her friend was Kip, but you've killed him. Or did you forget that part, too?"

"Umu, are they being serious?"

Faye took a tentative step forward. It meant releasing Mary's arm, which she hated to do, but she was too far from the others. She picked Soraya's phone up off the floor. The screen had cracked; it now looked like her own. She was responsible for keeping things safe, for keeping everyone calm. She was responsible for intervening.

"Maybe we can go back to the arena and talk about this?" Faye said. She held out Soraya's phone to try to return it. But Soraya only had attention for Ro. "We can try to get some sleep and sort out the rest in the morning. Everything always feels better in the morning."

"I'm not going anywhere with you all," Ro said. He was in a slight crouch with arms out in front of him like a lion tamer in the ring. "You needed a sacrifice for your janky ritual; you got your human blood. I don't want anything else to do with you."

Soraya lunged first. Soraya, who had been so lethargic. Soraya, who had scarcely spoken all night, who was newly energized by this proximity to the man she believed had killed Kip. If she hadn't had the smell of Kip's blood still flooding her nostrils, she might not have been so quick to violence, but she pounced on Ro, throwing her arms around his waist and succeeding this time in throwing him to the ground.

His phone skidded across the floor when she did that. There was already so little light, and now there was less. Ro sprang up quickly, walking backward to get his phone so he could keep his eyes on Soraya as he went. It had landed face up, the beam of light totally covered, but when he retrieved it he didn't shine it again. Faye saw the quick calculation that he would need his hands. He stashed it in his pocket.

"You're high and you're scared, and you're not thinking," Ro said. "I can chalk it up to that. But if you dare touch me one more time, I'll be less forgiving."

"Come with us so we can talk about this," Faye said. With all her bravery, she advanced. It was only Umu and Mary who hung back now.

"I'm not going anywhere with him; he's a murderer," Soraya yelled. Her pitch was so high and she kept moving forward toward him. Why wouldn't she just back off?

Ro put his hand out again, his lion tamer's arm. "Get a hold of your bitch," he said to Davey. "If she comes at me again, I won't be responsible for what happens."

The next part happened so quickly. Soraya made another lunge for Ro. Whether she was trying to hurt him or incapacitate him was never clear, but once she had lunged the first time, she couldn't stop attacking. True to his word, Ro knocked her aside like a gnat when she came at him. Her body hadn't yet hit the floor when Davey made his own attack. His chivalry or his adrenaline demanded it of him. He was a less easy bug for Ro to shoo away. Davey was a head taller than their guest at the library, though a lot less experienced at conducting himself under the influence of chemical substances. He lunged at Ro the same way Soraya had, throwing his arms around Ro's waist to try and bring him to the floor.

"I'll kill all of you."

They all heard Ro say it, and as Faye took another step toward them, another step toward fulfilling her promise of maintaining the sanity of the group until morning came and help arrived, she put her fingers on the steel scalpel in her back pocket. She had changed the blade just that afternoon. Strange how much courage steel could lend, how much it could soothe her, as she moved toward and not away from the violence playing out in front of her. The blood rushed to her ears; that was her body putting up armor for her. If she couldn't hear the grunts and screams and squeals of pain as Ro and Davey and Soraya writhed on the floor, if all sounds except for the sounds of her own body were blocked out, she could be so much braver.

Ro was on the floor with Davey and Soraya over him; then, before any of them could breathe, he was on his feet again. Faye moved ever closer, the situation slipping into and out of control with every breath. The flashlights on their phones were their only source of light. They'd left the candles burning on the floor in the arena and that felt out of control, too, like if she moved wrong the whole place would go up in flames.

If only Umu or Mary had moved to help.

If only Ro had walked back willingly to talk things through with them.

If only Soraya and Davey hadn't cornered him.

If only he hadn't brandished the shelving stool as a weapon.

If only she hadn't been carrying the scalpel.

Ro hadn't dared blink since Soraya and Davey had descended upon him. Then, his eyes burning and his heart pounding, he was no longer able to keep them off. Soraya was screaming that he had to pay for what he'd done and most of the light had vanished as phones had been dropped, pocketed, or turned away. He picked up the shelving stool because it was there and he held it out because it created some distance between himself and Soraya and Davey and then he swung it because Davey was lunging at him.

Faye wished he hadn't swung that stool at Davey's head. If he'd swung it low, at his legs, at his stomach, then it wouldn't have threatened Davey's life. If Ro swung that stool with all his might and connected with Davey's legs, he could have caused a lot of damage. He might even have broken a bone, but it wouldn't have been life threatening, so she could have let it happen.

The shelving stool was heavy, made of metal, made to bear the weight of an adult and to last a library's lifetime. The corrugated plastic that formed the nonslip coating on the steps ensured that Ro had a strong grip. If he connected with Davey's head, he'd make ground beef out of it.

'Tis not too late to seek a newer world, Faye thought, she hoped. A world in which she was a hero. She'd promised that she'd keep everyone safe. So when Ro swung that shelving stool, when Ro threatened to make contact with Davey's head, he wasn't the only one moving, he wasn't the only one with a weapon. Faye pulled out that scalpel and Faye lunged and, before any of them could breathe, she was upon him and she did the only thing her panicked body could think to do to keep Davey and Soraya safe: plunge the blade of her scalpel into Ro's neck and spill blood all over his dove-gray sweats.

***

Ronald, who hadn't thought of the library since he locked it up earlier that night, contemplated a second glass of wine but thought the better of it when he saw the time. Professor Kopp was already sleeping. Every one of the graduate students who had come on Davey's tour was out at a bar and had been overserved. The ITS group working on the scheduled network maintenance was taking a break for some pizza. Across campus, a crew put the finishing touches on the tent they had erected for the graduation ceremony. On the other side of the country, Faye's mother turned off the episode of Downton Abbey she was rewatching and hoped her daughter was having a nice time at the party before taking herself to bed. It was midnight.