Chapter 18 Umu

Save for the tattoo, Ro's naked body looked to Umu exactly the way he used to when they were children and they used to swim together. She was the stronger swimmer, he was the fearless one. He would drag them over fences, through bushes, to wherever there was water, and she'd sometimes have to drag him home, his scrawny arms wrapped around her neck as she kicked with all her might to get them back to safety. Back on the shore, or the dock, or the pool deck, he'd laugh and laugh and then pull them on to their next adventure. 'Tis not too late to seek a newer world. It was always just the two of them, and now here they were again, Umu and Ro, all alone. Except she couldn't pull him back to safety. There were no new worlds for them to explore.

The rest had gone to chase a fire that wasn't burning. Faye first, determined to pull a fire alarm that the rest of them insisted she wouldn't find, had been gone for what felt like half an hour. Good riddance. Her sad eyes and whispered apologies, as if Ro's death was somehow hardest for her, a tragedy for her, were more than Umu could stand. Not while Ro lay here, his body barely cold. If she had a heavy conscience, then good. Umu hoped Faye carried Ro's death for the rest of her life.

Soraya had gone after, chasing smoke the rest of them didn't smell. Umu wasn't surprised at Soraya's bad trip. From everything Kip had said about his girlfriend, it would be shocking to learn she'd ever even smoked weed before. Why she'd been willing to jump right to acid was a Stonehenge-sized mystery, as was the question of why her supposed friends hadn't planned on guiding her through.

Davey chased after Soraya, of course. She'd known them all of five minutes when she clocked that he was gagging after Kip's girlfriend. The only mystery was why Soraya wouldn't have gone for him over Kip. Neither Kip nor Davey was especially pleasant to be around, but Davey at least had the advantage of a nice smile.

Mary said she was going after Davey not long after he said he was going after Soraya. That part hadn't made a lot of sense, but it didn't matter, not to Umu. It was a relief to be rid of them all. Sure as she was that Ro couldn't have killed Kip, it meant that one of them had. She'd been placating them, letting them play at their funerary rituals to avoid arousing anyone's anger, lest she become a target, but what she wanted was for them all to stay as far away from her as possible.

Ro had been so mad when she'd told him she was coming to this stupid ritual.

"Your professor wants you to buy drugs from me?" he'd asked. He'd been shutting down the bar at Applebee's. She sat on one of his barstools, eating maraschino cherries while he unpacked clean glassware.

"He's not my professor. He's a TA. It's a different thing."

He hoisted a tray of wineglasses onto the counter for her to unpack into the cabinet on the other side of the bar. She hopped down from her stool. They had this part well choreographed.

"Sorry I don't have my higher education labels all straight," he said. "Please, draw me an org chart on a cocktail napkin."

"What I'm saying is he's a student, too," Umu said. "He's a PhD student. The professor gives the lecture and Kip runs the tutorials, helps grade papers, that sort of thing. We don't call him Mr. Pickens or Professor Pickens or whatever. He's just Kip."

"But he stands at the front of the classroom and teaches you things?"

"Yeah," she said, sliding wineglasses onto their dusty shelves.

"And he assigns grades to your work?"

"Yeah." She passed the empty glass rack back over the bar to Ro.

"And he wants you to buy drugs for him?"

At the time, she'd thought Ro was being weird about it. Jealous, even.

"He wants me to come to a cool, all-night party where a bunch of us are going to get high, and since I'm an undergrad, he thought I was more likely to have a hookup."

Ro climbed onto the narrow counter of his backbar to clear the dust off a light fixture. He wobbled a bit when he got to his feet, and she flinched, imagining the moment he fell, his head hitting the hard tile floor. He'd always been the fearless one; she'd always been the one to worry.

"Tell me," Ro said, his back to her as he dusted. "Anyone else in your class that's Black, or is it just you?"

In the second grade, when they were already inseparable, Ro had been coming to a parent-teacher conference with his mother, just as Umu was leaving with hers. The teacher, Mrs. Rakhola, put a hand on each of the children's heads and mussed their hair as the quintet exchanged hellos and goodbyes.

"These two," Mrs. Rakhola said. "My smarty-pants and my troublemaker."

Their whole lives, every teacher, every parent called Umu the smart one. Ro did it, too. Umu was his smart best friend. Umu was the only one who knew better. She could always count on her friend to find the fact that she was too dumb to spot.

Ro and Umu grew up in town down the road from the college, reading about the Woodend family in the paper and seeing the town population swell every September, then shrink back down in May when the students went back to their lives in real towns and cities all over America. Umu knew her whole life she'd go to school there—not because it was such a great institution and not because she didn't dream of somewhere better but because her mom was a member of the English faculty and a family tuition waiver meant Umu didn't have to take on any student debt. That she got to stay close to Ro was a bonus.

Or it was a bonus at first. Umu's mom had studied at Columbia, which meant she had these fabulous friends she'd met in New York who would occasionally swan up to Vermont for a weekend to be charmed by quaint, small-town life. They wore incredible colors and smoked impossibly skinny cigarettes and had always just been to Berlin or Tangier.

Umu had no illusions about growing up to be that fabulous, but she wanted people like that in her life. Friends who would arrive unannounced at her door when she was forty and tell a tale of a love affair they'd just had in Mongolia and make her cooler by association.

Soraya, Kip, Mary, Davey, even Faye, none of them were from Vermont. She felt guilty about it now, but the motivation for coming to the party was that it all sounded so kooky and mysterious and so unlike sitting in her basement smoking weed with Ro, which was the very unglamorous way she'd spent most of her evenings since starting college.

***

"I'm coming with you," Ro said, jumping down from the bar counter and tossing his dusty rag into the sink. "You want me to get you acid, I can get you acid, but the condition is that you let me come with you."

"It's not my event. I can't just invite you along."

"You're not going to Buckingham Palace," he said. "You said it's a few people who are getting together to party, or to chant, or whatever. I like to party. I can manage chanting. I'm coming with you."

She'd been so irritated about it. Mean to him, even.

"Why do you even want to come? Why do you suddenly care about college events? Aren't you too cool for all that? Isn't that your whole deal? You'd rather spend your time at Applebee's?"

"I have no doubt it'll be insufferable." He untucked his uniform shirt as he spoke. Unclipped his name tag and put it in his pocket. She had landed a blow. "But I'm not sending you there alone, all night, with a bunch of privileged white assholes who are dropping acid, probably for the first time in their lives."

"You're a white asshole," she said.

"Not a privileged one," he reminded her. "I leave you there alone, they're going to offer you as a human sacrifice, or roast you on a spit, or your creepy professor is going to try to…"

"Stop. I get it."

She'd been so mad at him. That he didn't understand she would seem less sophisticated if he was with her. That she couldn't form a lifelong friendship with a hopelessly fascinating scientist the way her mother had if she had a tagalong. The alternative was to tell Kip she couldn't get the drugs, and then maybe she wouldn't have been allowed to go at all. So she assented. And because of her awful selfishness, Ro lay here dead.

Her phone was face down so its light could illuminate the space. She flipped it over to check the time. It was a little past one in the morning. Hours to go until someone found them. She sat there, still, with her legs crossed and Ro's head in her lap. Her legs ached from the position, from the cold concrete floor, but she didn't dare move. She owed him this discomfort. It was the very least she could do.

"Just me and you now," she whispered down at the body. It wasn't her friend in there anymore. Mary with her insistence on cleaning him, and Davey with his instructions and his self-flagellation, she hated that she'd let them touch him. If they really believed Ro to be innocent, then they would have begun to tear each other apart. Except for the one of them who knew Ro was innocent, because they had their own secret.

The lines on the tattoo on Ro's chest seemed to rise and dance, to pulse in time with a heartbeat, and Umu squeezed her eyes closed to get them to stop. She wished she weren't high. She and Ro smoked weed all the time, they'd done acid once or twice when especially bored in the quiet Vermont summers, and not once before tonight had she considered the need to turn a trip off once it had started. She crammed her fists against her eyes, hoping pressure on her eyeballs would be enough to get control of her body back and she and Ro went quiet that way, alone in their mourning pose until Umu heard the metallic squeal and boom and crash of a violent act from across the basement.

She had to rise slowly—so she could respectfully place Ro's head on the ground and because her feet had fallen asleep against the concrete. Could she have hallucinated the sound? No. The concrete floor had shaken when she'd heard it. Whatever it was, it was real. And it meant the violence wasn't over.

"Hello?" she called into the dark. There was no reply. She dropped back to her knees for a moment and kissed Ro on the forehead. "I have to go for a minute," she said. "But I'll be back. Don't be scared."

She took her light. That was the worst part. That she was leaving him alone in the dark. She glanced back at his body one last time, and then she and her sleeping feet shuffled forward to find the source of that awful noise.

Faye, Davey, and Mary arrived before Umu did. Maybe they'd been closer to the source of the sound, maybe they weren't hampered by sleeping feet. She arrived on pins and needles, seeing the backs of their heads before there was enough light to see what the three of them were staring at.

Eerily, they weren't moving. When her light caught them, they were a strange tableau. Each more than an arm's length from the other, like strangers in a bank line. Not moving, not speaking, wholly overcome by their own guilt or their own fear or the awe at what they were observing.

"What was the sound?" Umu said, her attention mostly back on Ro, worried that he was frightened, alone in the dark. Faye and Davey and Mary. None of them spoke. They only stood and stared, and finally Umu fell into the light and saw the terrible and inevitable scene and the source of the horrible crash.

"Has it ever happened before?" she asked.

Davey, it was Davey who moved first, finally turned his head, making her flinch when he did, noticing for the first time that she'd arrived.

"Probably," he said. "Before our time though. We're always so careful now."

Though, strictly speaking, that wasn't true. Just that night, when they'd been arranging the arena, they hadn't been careful then. They'd been so haphazard about it all.

The scene would have appalled any bibliophile. Six stacks in total. Those rickety old stacks, arranged on tracks so they could be pushed together to preserve space. Each stack heavy with the weight of hundreds or thousands of volumes, overstuffed by anyone's count. The stacks that swayed and threatened no matter how slowly you moved them on their tracks. It was inevitable that one would come down eventually. But here were six in a sickening pile. Their contents torn and frayed and scattered about like someone had ripped open a vein.

It was horrible to see but also, the level of harm, of damage, wasn't it on par with the devastation they were already feeling? Umu found the dominos of shelves, the shredded mass of books, the splintered wood, almost satisfying. If they had bled, shouldn't the library bleed, too?

Faye and Davey and Mary, and now Umu, made up that tableau. Umu was so caught up in the horrible image that it took her a minute at least to realize what else was wrong.

"Where's Soraya?" Umu said, when at last the absence became clear.

No one said anything.

"Soraya!" she yelled into the dark. Soraya with the bad trip, Soraya who had been curled up and lying on a shelf since Ro was killed. Had she found herself another perch? Was she sleeping somewhere in the dark, oblivious to the crash?

"Soraya!" Umu called again, her voice breaking this time.

Faye and Davey and Mary, they said nothing, did nothing; they only stared at the collapsed stack. They'd all arrived at the scene first. Did they know something she didn't? Had they seen Soraya somewhere, sleeping safely? Or was there a truth even more terrifying than one of them being a killer? What if they were all in on it together?

"Davey," Umu shook him by the arm, willing herself past her paranoia. "You went looking for her after she ran off. Did you find her? Where's Soraya?"

Davey said nothing. Did nothing.

"Soraya!" Umu yelled again.

"Stop," Mary said. Like she was mad at Umu. Like Umu was the one who was acting crazy. "She's there." Mary pointed at the pile of books and steel and paper and cardboard. What did she mean Soraya was there?

***

She didn't know any of these people. She might die with them. And even if she didn't die here, she'd be tied to them, these killers or victims or whatever they were, forever, in a way she found disgusting. She'd read stories before about strangers who were united after some sort of shared trauma—because they'd been in the same movie theater during a mass shooting, or they were the scattering of survivors after a train derailed, or they were trapped in an elevator during a daylong power outage. Strangers who had nothing to unite them except for the fact that they'd chosen the same bad time and the same bad place to gather together and the power of the event they survived together bound them like handcuffs. People fall in love with one another or invite their partners in trauma to come to their children's weddings. They break bread and tell stories and continue to survive the horrible thing they survived in the first place with the help of these participants in their lives.

Umu didn't want to be bound to Faye and Davey and Mary forever. She had no idea how the night would end, but she knew that when she walked out of the basement, she didn't want to see any one of their faces ever again. Not in the least because there was a good chance one of them was a murderer. She knew Ro hadn't killed Kip, and that could only mean that one of them had.

Of the three of them, Davey seemed the most agitated about the disappearance of Soraya. The idea of him pushing one of the bookstacks with all his might and sending the shelf and its contents tumbling down on Soraya seemed unlikely. Not impossible, but unlikely. But of the three of them, there was no doubt that Davey hated Kip the most. To Umu, he'd seemed barely fussed when Kip died his bloody death. He could be forgiven for his impassive attitude to Ro's death—Ro might have killed him in self-defense if given the opportunity—but Kip's death was totally unprovoked and Davey hadn't so much as wrinkled his forehead. He was weeping now, though. Silent tears, pooling in his frown lines and reflecting in the light of his iPhone flashlight.

Does a motive, or the lack of one, make a killer? In mystery novels, on CSI, certainly, but in real life, wasn't murder more a matter of opportunity? Did Mary hate Kip? Umu had no idea; Kip hadn't ever mentioned her in class. Did she hate Soraya? It didn't look that way from the outside. If anything made Mary look suspicious, it was that Umu had no idea where she was before the crash. Faye went to go look for a fire alarm. Soraya ran from the smell of smoke. Davey followed Soraya to comfort her. Mary hadn't offered an explanation and maybe she didn't need to, but her lack of a position during the fracas had Umu picturing her with two hands pressed against the old pine bookshelf, her leg planted behind her for stability, the veins in her elegant neck popping from the effort of the push.

Faye had more sense than to disappear without explanation. Kip hadn't ever talked about her in class either, and she hadn't crossed paths with her since they'd had one class together, but Umu had the sense that she hadn't been around the library for very long. If she was looking for a killer, should she be looking any further than Faye? Wasn't she the only one of them who had proven, right there in the open, that she had it in her to end someone's life? There's something about a person who wears glasses that makes them improbable as a villain, and Umu had to restrain herself from running up to the girl and tearing the silver frames off her face, unmasking the monster that might hide behind them.

"You're not going to leave her there, are you?" Umu said. She didn't know Soraya at all, but she felt like she did. Kip used to talk about her all the time. His girlfriend who was going into tech, his girlfriend with the overbearing Pakistani father, his girlfriend, his girlfriend, his girlfriend, as though invoking her had the power to protect him from any accusation of impropriety if he sat too close or texted too late at night.

"There isn't anything we can do," Mary said. Wasn't that something a killer would say?

"I can't look," Davey said at the same time. Was that a murderer protesting too much?

Faye was silent. What was more damning than failing to find the words to say? The only thing the three of them had in common was that none of them moved.

There were six collapsed stacks in total. The first and the second were stacked up against each other—lips pressed tight to keep their secret. They hadn't even allowed enough space to spill their volumes out onto the floor. Could there be a body between those shelves? Not likely.

The latter four had fallen at an angle, right off their track. They were shingled like a hand of cards and had wrought most of the destruction. Umu approached them to peer under, but it was too dark to see, it was all too broken to see, so she found herself climbing, on and over and around.

"Soraya?" Umu called. She wasn't stupid, she knew it was no use, but she called anyway because it was easier to say something than nothing. "Soraya?" She called the name again, lifting a splintered piece of wood and peering under it with her light. There were only books, no Soraya.

"You're scaring me, Umu," Faye said. "Can you please get down?" Of course Faye's voice, Faye of all people, only emboldened her, and she kept digging. Leather-bound volumes, cardboard bound, in original dust jackets, in protective acid-free boxes, she tossed them all aside.

"Soraya?" There were so many books, there was so much wood. Soraya wasn't under the third stack, or under the fourth. The fifth and sixth had collapsed against the steel grating. The contractor who installed the grating was to be congratulated. How many thousands of pounds of books had stressed the perimeter when the shelf fell? The grating hadn't even flinched.

Umu's climb had her up against the grating now and she was beginning to doubt there was a body at all. "Soraya?" It was half-hearted this time. Was it a trick? Was Soraya somewhere safe, sitting quiet, enjoying their panic? Was Soraya the type who played tricks? The type who would play this type of trick when there were enough bodies scattered throughout the basement? Umu didn't know enough about her to be able to answer that question.

She was just about convinced—Soraya wasn't under this pile, Soraya was safe, when her light found it. A mass of hair, first. Soraya wore her hair short, but there was a lot of it. A bob, always shining, always flawless. You could tell if she wore it longer her hair might be unruly, but Soraya wouldn't ever allow for such a thing.

It was just a little bit of hair first, then Umu lifted a board and the question answered itself. A bit of hair and the rest of it, and then her head, or what was left of it, what hadn't been pulped by the impact of the collapse. Soraya wasn't safe somewhere. Soraya was right here, and she was dead and one of the three people standing and watching Umu had killed her.

She dug like a dog at the beach. Crouched on her knees, her hands working furiously to toss books, bits of wood, steel shelf brackets, behind her. The quiet basement had become quieter when Umu made her discovery, and every time she tossed something that hit the concrete floor, there was an ugly, reverberating echo. Still, she dug.

It was all so unstable that some of her digging made things worse. She would toss a book behind her, and two more would slide back down in its place but no matter, she kept at it. She exposed Soraya's face. The back of her head was crushed but her beautiful face was intact. Umu hadn't ever had any interest in Kip, except as a key to something, but she'd always been so fascinated by Soraya. When she pictured her future life, her fabulous friends who would pop in on her and make her glamorous by association, she always pictured someone like Soraya.

There was a twisted piece of metal, part of the mechanism for the crank that had moved the shelves, and Umu tossed it aside. This time it felt like the whole basement rumbled when it hit the ground. Had sounds become louder? She pulled a heavy volume off Soraya's shoulder, and now her whole right arm was freed. If she'd been alive, she could have reached that arm up into the dark, waved it for help like a drowning swimmer.

Soraya's shirt was unbuttoned. That flawless girl looked sloppy in death, and Umu was less concerned about why her shirt might be open than with resolving that indignity, so she paused her digging and took a moment to fasten the buttons. It was dark and her hands were shaking and there was blood again—still Ro's or newly Soraya's or perhaps even her own—but she buttoned Soraya's shirt to her chin.

She put her phone between her teeth. The light shone down on her hands, illuminating her work. She used a sort of rubbery case, meant to make the thing harder to drop off the side of a bridge or out a car window if she was trying to get a perfect photo, and it was helpful now in keeping the phone fixed between her teeth.

As she buttoned the shirt, she could see the blood that stained her hands sparkle. The sight of the sparkle was as intense as the sound of the reverb, so she knew neither thing was real. You have to calm down, she told herself. If your trip starts to go bad, you can't keep yourself sane, so you have to calm down and not feel your feelings. She'd been around enough bad trips to know what the worst looked like, so she paused when she finished with Soraya's shirt to blink over and over, sure the blinking would help her remember what was real.

When she resumed her work, she did so more slowly, doing what she could to avoid throwing something to the ground that might make that awful sound. It might have saved her life, this reduced pace. The next thing she pulled up was another long strip of wood. One of the sides of the bookshelf had broken in two as it fell and was now part of the litter that covered the left side of Soraya's body. Umu had to shift her own weight off it, and then she gave it a gentle tug, and when she did the whole ugly mess groaned and slid and pushed her against the grating and Soraya's lifeless body fell against her. Soraya's right foot, bloody with a freshly popped blister, pressed against Umu's cheek.

The sound or the sight or just a flicker of common sense finally broke Davey's trance, and he was quickly upon her, a hand under each of her armpits, yanking her off the wobbling pile.

"We are surrounded by bodies," he said. "Can you stop trying to create another one?"

She shook him off her as soon as she felt concrete against her feet. He'd pulled her free, but Soraya, poor Soraya, was still in the mess.

"I don't need your help," Umu said. Demonstrably untrue.

"Crush yourself to death the way she did, then," he said. "But we're running out of people to perform funerary rites."

During the fracas, Mary and Faye had begun to pick up fallen books from the perimeter of the scene of devastation and place them in tidy little piles. Having shaken Davey off, Umu was slow to climb back up on top of the heap. Up there it was blood and danger. Down here, there were neat stacks of books, lined up and waiting for some future when the library basement was just a library basement again, and someone picked up each of those stacks and placed them on a shelf.

"There's a body under there," Umu said. She was too overwhelmed, too angry to be afraid of him, of any of them. "She's mutilated. She didn't do that to herself. I didn't know her, but you all did. How can you stand here, how can you tidy, when there's a body under there?"

Mary put down her latest stack of books. It wasn't just any body under there; she and Soraya had been friends.

"She was tripping, and she wasn't careful, and she brought the stacks down on top of herself," Davey said.

Mary and Faye paused what they were doing, long enough that she knew they were calculating if what Davey was saying could be true. That Soraya knocked the stacks over onto herself in some sort of freak accident. But Soraya was so little and the destruction was so big.

"Climbing up there and getting hurt makes it harder for everybody," Mary said, moving past Davey's claim without addressing it. She pulled at the slender gold chain at her throat. "I'm not trying to tidy. I'm getting Soraya's body out. But I'm not trying to get myself hurt while doing it."

"Doesn't matter if you try to get hurt or not," Umu said. She kicked the stack Mary had just put down. "We're being hunted down here, and one of us is going to be the hunter's next prey."

Faye and Davey and Mary. Their motives, their opportunities, it was all making her dizzy, just when she most needed to keep control of herself.

"One of you did this to Soraya, just like you did it to Kip," Umu said. "You probably got a real laugh out of all of us, stalking after Ro, attacking him, doing the hunting on your behalf."

Mary placed a new stack of books down, and the sound was like an explosion. Umu wasn't in control of her faculties, she knew she wasn't, but the hunter was as real as the tiny hairs on her forearms that were standing up.

"Which of you decided we should go after Ro? Quite the sense of humor on you."

"There's no hunter, Umu," Davey said.

"You were so sure Ro killed Kip but now Ro is dead and someone's killed Soraya, and I'm supposed to believe that it's not one of you doing this?" Umu said. Her own voice echoed in her ears.

Faye's cell phone was their main source of light—face down on the floor by one of the book piles. Umu lunged at it. She flipped it over so its cracked screen was face up, and the space went that much darker. She poked at the screen, but there was only an exclamation point where there should be bars indicating cell service.

"I'll bet your phones are even working," she said, though she'd just been disproven. "Separating us from the outside world before picking us off. Stop with the books!" She kicked over another stack, and again the sound made the building shake. "Which of you is doing this?"

She moved quickly over to Mary's phone on the other side of the pile. Faye had picked hers back up and was shining the beam at the ground so it made only a meager light, as if to give Umu some privacy in her raving. Or to throw her even further off-balance in the dark.

Now that she'd begun to point fingers, now that she'd told them that she knew one of them was the killer, she couldn't stop. The three of them watched her in the half darkness, waiting to crush her skull or cut her throat.

"Don't touch my phone," Mary said when Umu approached. She snatched it up off the ground.

"You're going to regret doing this," Umu said, unsure if she meant committing the murders or failing to unmask the killer.

"There's plenty I already regret," Mary said. "I'll take my chances."

Umu's dread rose and with it her control over her own body. Were those Davey's eyes, lustrous in the light of Mary's phone, hungry for more blood? Was that the shuffle of Mary's foot against the dusty floor, flexing before she pounced on her next victim? Her whole body was braced, every muscle held taut, prepared for the feeling of being struck by the hunter's arrow, the hunter's blade.

The last time she'd done acid, she and Ro had prepared by purchasing three bags of chips. Plain salted, ruffled, and Doritos. There's nothing more powerful to an intoxicated mind than the Dorito. Her body remembered every corner of every chip. The way the cheese dusting coated the little air bubbles that sprang up in the deep-fried corn flour. The way the saliva filled her mouth when the powdered topping hit her tongue. It was bliss, eating those chips, until she took one at a wrong angle, and the sharp edge of a triangular chip pierced the chapped edge of her mouth and she'd been fleetingly certain that she'd accidentally eaten shards of glass. For a few terrifying minutes, she prepared to die, certain the glass would pierce her esophagus and then her intestines and she'd bleed to death from the inside.

Ro was high, too, that night, but he was straight enough to talk her down, to convince her that the Doritos were just Doritos and that if she died, it wouldn't be at the hands of Cool Ranch. The momentary terror stuck though. It was how she felt now, waiting to be hunted.

"It's Faye," said a voice over the sound of Umu's rapid breath. "You're panicking. I think—I'm in physics, not medicine, so I can't be sure—but I'm pretty sure you're having a panic attack."

Now the face fell into focus: Faye, Faye, who had killed Ro with her bare hands, all of a sudden wanted to be Umu's doctor. Faye had crept up to her like she was the wild thing, like she was the thing that should be feared down in the basement, and the sight of that flushed face, those smudged glasses, it would have made her laugh if she weren't so disgusted.

"Back up before I bite your nose off your face," Umu said. "One of you did this. You did this."

Faye glanced back at Davey, and Davey shook his head. Cahoots! They knew something she didn't. They knew that hers was the next neck on the chopping block.

Faye hadn't backed off the way Umu needed her to. She was standing within easy arm's reach in a way that felt like a taunt. Umu took the proximity to mean that Faye wanted her to know that she could reach her throat just as easily as she had reached Ro's. I'll be ready for her, Umu thought. Ready in a way that Ro wasn't.

"Ro didn't see you coming, but I do," Umu said to Faye. "I won't go down as easily as he did." His blood still clung to her clothes, was still buried under her fingernails, but she wasn't scared of it anymore. She was energized by it. She wore Ro's blood like a shield.

"There's no hunter," Faye said. "Ro killed Kip. Soraya's death was an accident. There's no more danger."

It was telling that none of the three of them was as frightened as they should be. It was telling how easily Faye swallowed Davey's lie about Soraya knocking the stack over herself. Faye was still too close to Umu's face, and she was mumbling something about corduroy, about visualization, and Umu tried to look past her so she could keep an eye on all three of them at once, when Faye stepped even closer and Umu had no choice but to strike her with all her might across her stupid face.

"I told you to get away from me. All of you get away!"

Open palm against hot cheek. Umu's hand was sweating a little, as was Faye's face, and the sweat held them together for a half second after the moment of connection. Umu had never hit anyone before. It rang in her ears. It made her palm ache.

She liked it.

Faye stepped back, finally, clutching the side of her face. "You hit me," she said, as though there could be any doubt about what happened. The sound of the strike got Davey and Mary moving; they approached Faye to perform concern as though she was the thing they needed to worry about, not the reality that one of their group was surely the next to die. The fools.

Faye brushed Davey aside. "Don't worry about me. I'm fine."

How big of her, Umu thought.

"It's Umu who needs you. She's freaking out. She was doing okay all night, but she must have started hallucinating."

It was a strange strategy, Umu thought, to call the danger a hallucination when they were all soaked in Kip's and Ro's and Soraya's vital fluids. Faye was playing at something dangerous.

"You're bleeding a bit," Davey said, bringing his fingertips to Faye's freshly struck cheek. "You should put something on it."

"There are literal dead bodies down here, Davey," Mary said. "I don't think it's the end of the world if she skips the Polysporin."

Faye put her own palm to her red cheek. "She's right. I'm totally fine. Umu's having a bad trip; you need to do something."

"You're the sober one," Davey said. "You said that you could do something."

They were bickering about Umu as if she weren't there. They were bickering about trivialities as if one of them or all of them weren't coming for more throats. Umu stepped sideways toward the stack, inching closer toward where Ro lay. Ro who had come here to protect her. Who had known all along that something about this night wasn't right.

"She's clearly not responding well to me," Faye said. "I'm only making it worse. One of you needs to talk to her, to hold her, to do something to bring her back to earth."

They'd put her in the earth if they had their way, Umu thought. She wasn't cold but she shivered. Shivered like she was in the middle of a frigid lake, looking for a rescue.

"I'm not doing any better than she is," Davey said.

Umu leaned against the bookshelf, longing for Ro. No one was coming to help her.

"A bad trip isn't contagious," Faye said, as though she knew anything. "She's a danger to herself and to us the longer she keeps freaking out."

She and Ro had failed each other. If she listened to him, she'd never have come and he'd never have followed her. If he were alive, he could have protected her from these monsters.

When she felt something grab her, she was too terrified to even scream. The room swam in front of her eyes, and she thought she would faint, but she fought with all her might to stay conscious, knowing if she closed her eyes it would be for the last time.

"You're safe," Davey's voice said in her ear. She writhed against his arms but he wouldn't let her go. He was behind her, his arms around her and holding her tight at the waist, pinning her arms down. His chin rested on her shoulder and he whispered in her ear. She was in the frigid lake and she'd found a set of hands, but they weren't there to save her: they were there to push her below the surface.

"No one's hunting you. I know you loved Ro but he did this. He did this and now he's gone, and I've got you and you're safe."

She stopped writhing. Davey had no weapon, only the secret he was whispering in her ear. If the booming of the books hitting the floor earlier had made the room shake, then the tone of Davey's whisper now made it vibrate. Though she'd promised herself she wouldn't, she closed her eyes. She was ready to let the water slip over her head.

"It's just the four of us standing here," Davey said. "And for the rest of the night, we take care of each other."

She had no sense of how long they stood like that, preparing to die. With her eyes closed, she let herself imagine it was Ro who was holding her. Not in a hug, they weren't friends who hugged, but that they were in that lake and after all the times she'd done it for him, this time he was the one who was bringing her back to shore.

She opened her eyes. She hadn't moved and nothing had changed, but she wasn't afraid anymore. Davey still held her but she knew he wouldn't hurt her.

"You're going to be safe because the four of us are going to take care of each other," Davey said.

He was right and he was wrong. She was going to be safe. But only because she knew exactly who had killed Kip and she was going to protect herself from them.

"You can let go of me," Umu said, removing Davey from her finger by finger. "I'm better; I'm seeing everything a lot more clearly."

He was slow to unwind but he did it, and she turned to face him so she could whisper her revelation just to him.

"I know who's doing it," she whispered. She might have sounded crazy, but she wasn't crazy. She was sure. "She's right behind you. Ro's not the one who poisoned Kip. Faye is."

A murderer is a murderer is a murderer, Umu thought. She showed us who she was when she hurt Ro, but we didn't believe her.

"Umu." Davey wasn't whispering. He wasn't afraid of Faye overhearing because he thought Umu was babbling, hallucinating. "All we need to do to get through the night is to stay calm."

All we need to do to get through the night is to keep Faye's hands off our throats, Umu thought. "I'm not imagining this," she whispered.

Their back-and-forth had attracted Mary's attention. Faye, hand still on her cheek, kept her distance. "You feeling better, Umu?" Mary asked.

"She's saying it was Faye now," Davey said, and there was a sort of exasperated sigh that followed that gave Umu a chill. He didn't believe her, and if he didn't believe her, he would make himself easy prey. It was what Faye had been counting on: how easy it would be to point a finger at an outsider like Ro, how well she could hide behind her glasses.

"Listen," Umu whispered to them both. Faye was looking over. She was curious, too, but still too dumbstruck to make her way over or too self-satisfied with her deceit to bother speaking in her own defense. Umu didn't have a lot of time to make herself heard. "Ro is dead. Whether you believe me or not, admit that there's no way I'm motivated by a desire to protect him."

"Sure," Mary said. With caution, she moved closer. Umu's newfound lucidity was rubbing off. The three were suddenly clear-eyed.

"You all blamed Ro for Kip's death, but that doesn't make any sense. It never did," Umu said. "He sold Kip the drugs, sure, but he took them himself. If he had poisoned the batch, why in the world would he have taken a tab and put himself at risk? Ro liked to get high, but there are easier ways, you know?"

"If I'm hearing you right," Davey said, practicing an active listening trick that Umu recognized from the college's mandatory conflict-resolution training. "You're saying that Ro couldn't have poisoned the drugs. So, what then? It was an accident? Or whoever sold to him poisoned them?"

She put an arm around each of their waists and pulled them so they were right against her, so her mouth was pressed in the space between their ears.

"Davey, you hid the drugs in the stacks after you got them, right?" Umu whispered. She could feel Mary's goosebumps rise up against her cheek, but she knew Mary wouldn't pull away, if only because she was wary of being struck as Faye had been. "They were down in the basement before the rest of us got down here at the beginning of the night, weren't they?"

The muscles in Davey's face tensed. Like he was beginning to understand what she was suggesting before she even had a chance to say it. Like he was finally as scared as he should be.

"Sure," he said. "You all saw me pull them out. I hid a bunch of things in the stacks over the last week so Ronald wouldn't see me bringing anything down tonight."

She wanted to give one of them the opportunity to say it, to point the finger so she wouldn't have to, but neither spoke. She could feel them coming around, those tense muscles and goosebumps saying what their words wouldn't, but neither was willing to say it.

"Who was working down in the basement today?" she whispered. "You told me when you brought us down, Mary. You named someone who spends most of their time working down in the basement."

"That's a bit of a leap, isn't it?" Davey asked. None of them dared look at Faye, who had to be rattled now, who had to know she'd been discovered, who had to be preparing to strike out in defense.

"If I remind you she killed Ro, you'll brush it off as self-defense, so I'm not going to go down that road, even though she quite literally has blood on her hands," Umu said. She wasn't whispering anymore. Faye started to approach them and Mary flinched, trying to pull away from Umu, but she held tight. No matter Faye's intentions, Umu knew the three of them could overpower her if they stayed together.

"Ro couldn't have poisoned Kip's drugs, because Ro took the drugs, too; he wouldn't have put himself at risk that way." Mary wrenched free and Umu let go of Davey, too, so all three were standing to face Faye. "Doesn't that mean that the person who poisoned the drugs has to be the person who refused to take them?"

They grabbed hold of Faye without telling each other they were going to. Umu took one of her arms and Davey took the other and Mary went for her waist and there was a sickening bit of doubt that came with the fear creeping over Faye's face. Umu was able to ignore it as just another hallucination. This was the murderer in their midst. She knew it to be true.

Faye's protestations came out in a low and steady babble as they dragged her across the floor in the dark. She fought against their hold, but not too hard. They were three, and if she couldn't overpower them, she tried to reason with them. Faye said they were wrong, or that they were confused, or that they were hallucinating all the way across the basement floor as they dragged her, and Umu wouldn't let herself hear a word of it. There had been enough lies tonight.

One of them, she couldn't remember who, maybe it had even been her, suggested taking Faye somewhere she could be put behind a door, keeping her separate to keep themselves safe, and there was only one place any of them knew of in the basement where that could be done. It was the room where Umu had started her evening with Ro.

It was when they got to the door of that side room, where Umu and Ro had hidden under a table and waited for the library to close, where Faye had joined them with full knowledge of the terrible thing she was planning to do, that she really began to fight. If she was saving her energy or she hadn't really believed that they were prepared to lock her up, then she believed it now. A gurgling cry came from her throat, and she began to thrash against them. The girl they'd dragged all the way across the library floor wasn't a killer, but this girl trying to escape them was, and as Umu struggled to keep her grasp, she was also relieved to see Faye fight. She was letting the others see her for what she really was.

Umu knew the room itself was secure. She'd had plenty of time to look around it when she and Ro waited down in the basement, but she also knew there was no lock on the door. Why would there be? The room was a quiet place for a librarian to do the work of preparing an exhibition. The basement itself was a vault, as they'd learned that night, so the room didn't have to be.

The library was preparing for an exhibition from their map collection. The long, delicate sheets were laid out on a giant table in the center of the room, and Umu had passed the time by flipping through them while she and Ro waited earlier. Her favorite was a portolan chart showing the Red Sea that was labeled as having been drawn in 1505. It was illustrated in brilliant greens and reds with palm trees and church spires and, in an unscientific detail, it included the land bridge that parted the Red Sea in Exodus. Had that really only been a few hours ago? Umu's energy was occupied with keeping her grasp of Faye and with forcing her through the doorjamb. Her earlier awe at the maps was quickly forgotten. She was worried about that door, about how they'd keep Faye in the room once they forced her in.

Umu's arms were burning with the effort of keeping Faye contained. She didn't know how much longer she could hold out and she knew that Davey and Mary must be feeling the same. Mary had blood dripping from her nose, the shins of Davey's trousers were blackened from Faye's repeated kicks. This was enough now. Faye had proven who she was; now they needed to be rid of her.

The wooden skid to the side of the exhibition room door fell into view like it was under a spotlight. Once, it held a stack of book boxes, but now it was neatly standing against the wall, waiting for someone from facilities to come and discard it. For their purposes, it was made of strong wood and was just slightly taller than the handle of the door that it stood next to. They had their cage, now here was their barricade.

"Throw her," Umu said. The sight of the skid had renewed her, and the confidence with which she spoke rubbed off on the others. In a reversal, she felt Faye's fingers turn to claws and try to dig into her arms, to keep grasping and avoid the inevitable. Umu would allow no such thing. This girl, this animal, had poisoned the batch of drugs for a group of people she scarcely knew; she'd let Ro stand accused of her own crime and then had brutally killed him herself; and then she'd crushed Soraya, poor Soraya, who had already been so terrified.

They didn't give count to announce when they would throw her. It was like they were all thinking with one brain. They heaved back and then the three gave a mighty push that sent her into the room and onto her hands and knees, her glasses skittering against the dark concrete. Davey slammed the door shut and held his body against it while Umu grabbed the skid and pushed it under the door handle. Whatever Faye had already done, they could be sure they were safe from her now.