Chapter 22 Mary

"Did something happen with the barricade?" Davey asked, his voice squeaking, when Mary rejoined him and Umu just before two in the morning. His fear, it seemed, was still of Faye, his attention still on Faye, just as Mary needed it to be, just as it should be.

Mary followed the sounds of their voices back to the arena. When she arrived, she found they'd dragged Ro's body over. It was so morbid. She could imagine Umu and Davey sweating over that beautiful dead boy, determined to bring him somewhere more comfortable to rest, and she sent a silent prayer of thanks into the universe that she hadn't been with them so she hadn't been asked to help.

Mary was self-conscious about having to walk in front of Umu and Davey. The walk was when she worried they'd spot the lie. Even when they weren't speaking, there was a languid sort of quality in the way they both walked that made it clear they were on something. She could stare into the middle distance with the best of them, but she couldn't duplicate that walk, so she sat on the floor almost as soon as she came into their view.

"The barricade's fine," she said. She kept her eyes on the ground in front of her. She'd found that not speaking at all was the safest way to avoid notice, but if it couldn't be escaped then a lack of direct eye contact was helpful. "She made a bunch of noise right after you guys left, but the door didn't move and then it was quiet for a pretty long time. She might even be asleep."

"Sleeping like a baby with blood on her hands," Umu said. She was sitting by Ro's head again, absently stroking his hair.

Mary nodded silently. Nodding was good, too. The up-and-down bobbing of a head in lieu of speech could hide so many faults. Davey was pacing around the arena. It was littered with torn pages and empty book covers that had made their way over, stuck with blood to someone's feet or body, and he occasionally had to kick one aside to make his way through in his slow, loping stride. He wasn't faking anything. That was the walk of a man who was high as fuck.

She was surprised when Davey first invited her to—whatever this was. He'd never describe himself this way, but he was as straitlaced as Soraya. It just wasn't as obvious on him because he didn't have the severely smooth bob as a signifier.

"You want to do what in the what?" she'd asked.

"It's from the myth told in the Homeric Hymn to Demeter," Davey said.

"I wouldn't say that's a helpful description."

"If you'd read the Homeric Hymn to Demeter," he said, holding up a hand to block her protestations, "then you'd know the ritual involves the consumption of kykeon. Or in our case, acid. Drugs, Mary. You love drugs almost as much as you love your phone."

They were weeks from graduation. Everyone knew Davey was getting the one permanent job the library had salary money to offer, and Soraya was going somewhere she'd wear a well-cut suit in exchange for a million dollars a year, but Mary was in the job application trenches. Her long shot, the only thing she really wanted to do, was a social media director position with a growing community museum in New York. New York! A director job for a fresh graduate, even a graduate from a master's program, was a stretch, but she had her history of viral posts from her time at the library. The job application for the museum wasn't due until the week after graduation, and if she had one more banger, she was sure they'd have to consider her.

"Why the basement?" she asked. The library proper was a more handsome backdrop from the point of view of a content creator. She was sitting on the pretty library steps when he'd asked her, so she had aesthetics on the brain.

"The ritual requires we reenact the story of Demeter getting Persephone from the underworld. The basement's the underworld."

"I guess the basement's cool. People love a behind-the-scenes vibe."

She didn't ask, exactly, if she'd be able to take photos or video because she'd thought it was implied that where she went, her camera went. If she was being asked to fast for nearly twenty-four hours, she wanted something out of it.

"Who else is going?" This part she remembered asking. It mattered to her.

"A few people from the library, but not everyone. No one who might tell Ronald and get the whole thing canceled."

That was when she had suggested Faye, and Davey had ignored her.

What she remembered was that Kip wasn't in that first batch of invitees. He'd only been added to the group later. Mary didn't know why or how. Maybe Davey had always planned on inviting him but didn't say, or maybe he'd weaseled his way in, but she knew that she wasn't the only one who wouldn't have committed to coming if she'd known Kip would be there, too.

***

After a long while, Umu stopped stroking Ro's hair. "If she's sleeping, then isn't it the perfect time to go over there and take care of it?"

Mary kept her eyes down and Davey kept pacing. Umu wasn't in a place to be ignored. The ear of corn that had survived the night far better than the humans who might have eaten it was by Umu's left foot. Umu grabbed the corn off the floor and lobbed it at Davey. It hit him square in the back of the head.

"What is the matter with you?" Davey screamed at Umu. Mary sat with her eyes down. There'd been so much violence already that evening, but she hadn't yet figured out how she was supposed to respond to it. Every time there was violence, she found herself fixated on the person being attacked, and not on the others, whose behavior she was meant to be emulating.

"Didn't you hear her?" Umu said. "Faye's sleeping. If we're going to do it, we should do it now."

"Do what?" Davey said. He'd picked up the ear of corn that had struck him, which really undercut any sense of seriousness and authority he was trying to project. Corn was like bananas. It made the holder a bit ridiculous.

"Take care of her," Umu said. "The door might not hold all night. She's coming after one of us next unless we do something about it."

"The door will hold," Davey said.

"The door will hold," she said in a mean imitation of his baritone solemnity. "Don't be such a pussy and just do it. It's only going to be harder once she wakes up."

Mary looked up.

"You want me to do it?" he asked. Mary didn't have a part in their quarrel, but even she had to admit Umu was being stupid. "You're the one who wants it done; you do it yourself. Why would I ever do it?"

"Because you're the reason we're down here in the first place!" Umu said. "Your stupid fucking ritual that you called a party, but it was never anything like a party because parties have somewhere to go to the bathroom!"

Mary wished they would both shut up. If they were arguing, their attention was off her, but it was exhausting hearing them scream at one another, and she was already exhausted.

"You were excited enough to come when Kip invited you," Davey said.

Umu had the head of the lifeless body of her best friend in the world on her lap, and they were bickering about whether she'd wanted to come to Davey's party in the first place. Mary didn't know a lot about the world, but she was certain that once she got to New York, the people wouldn't be this inane.

Davey stopped pacing and sat on the floor. Were his feelings hurt? There were bodies down here, and he had hurt feelings. The wicker basket he'd brought out hours ago was still here in the arena with him, and he scratched his nails along the wicker. He looked like he might cry.

"Oh my god and your props. Your props!" Umu wasn't prepared to let this go. She gently put Ro's head on the floor, and then she went over and crouched in front of Davey, the basket between them. "There's a murderer in a half-assed jail cell across the basement from us who might wake up at any moment and come finish what she started, and you're here crying over your props?"

He put a hand on the lid of the basket protectively. "I'm not going over there to kill her. Enough is enough. The way I see it, there are three of us and one of her, and as long as we keep together, we're safe."

"And until then, you'll sit here and play with your toys." Umu reached for the basket and he yanked it back. Mary was irritated they were arguing, but she was curious about the basket, too. A basket of secrets, he'd called it. What kind of secrets were supposed to be revealed at the end of his ceremony?

"We can't open it if we haven't done the ritual," Davey said.

"The basement is littered with human sacrifices." Umu swept her arm around and pointed at what was left of Ro. "I think Demeter will be cool with the fact we skipped some chanting." Hard to argue with a body. Davey took his eye off the ball for just long enough that Umu was able to yank the basket out of his hands. It seemed the lid wasn't as tight as she expected and the contents weren't as heavy as she expected, so when she pulled back from him, the lid flew off and the contents of the basket flew behind it.

Mary almost laughed. She would have laughed if it all weren't so tragic.

Corn. It was an ear of corn.

"What in the fruit of the loom?" Umu said.

Now they were going to argue about corn. Mary wasn't high, but she was tired enough to hallucinate, and she was just now building an elaborate fantasy world where she had a needle and thread and was able to keep each of them still long enough to sew their lips closed in a choppy crosshatch.

"The mystery is a metaphor," Davey said. "You're seeing corn because we didn't complete the ritual."

"I'm seeing corn because it's an ear of fucking corn!" Umu held up the hateful thing. "One wasn't useless enough; now we have two. You couldn't have made your metaphor a couple of bags of Skittles?"

"I didn't bring the first ear of corn!" Davey succeeded in snatching the basket back from her, though she held fast to the corn. "Kip brought the first one, even though no one asked him to."

Duct tape would do, if she couldn't have the needle and thread. She wouldn't just cover their mouths with it. She'd wrap it all the way around the back of their heads so they'd know she was serious.

"I'm going to check to see if the barricade held," Mary said. She might have risen too fast or spoken too clearly but she didn't care. She needed to get away from these two. It felt like she'd been back here with them for hours, but her phone said it was only now three o'clock.

"The barricade didn't hold," a voice said from the dark stacks.

Umu dropped the corn and Davey dropped the basket. Faye stepped out of the dark, holding the longest, shiniest pair of scissors that any of them had ever seen. Her hands were slick with fresh blood, and her eyes were as wild as any of them who had actually taken the drugs.

"Faye," Davey said. To the surprise of all of them, he was back on his feet, approaching her first, without being asked. "Put down the scissors. Whatever you've decided to do, you don't have to go through with it."

She held them wrapped in her fist like a knife, and there was no doubt in anyone's mind that they'd wield as much damage as a knife if plunged through someone's skin. That was the thing about working in a place like this. They always kept the scissors well sharpened.

Davey took small slow steps toward Faye, his hands up and open to show he meant her no harm. Though Davey was the closest to her, though Davey was the one trying to reason with her, he wasn't the one who had Faye's attention. As Davey tried to get her to hand over the scissors, Faye only had eyes for Mary.

"I'm not here to hurt you," Faye said to Davey, though the scissors threatened otherwise. "I'm here to protect you."

Mary went cold. She was still sitting on the concrete floor, cross-legged, but she put the fingertips of both hands down so she could spring up if she needed to. Faye looked wild, thirsty for blood, and Mary was beginning to understand that it was her blood that Faye had come for.

"We don't want anyone else to get hurt," Davey said. "We're going to sit here until morning and let the police sort out the rest."

Mary had the advantage of familiarity with Davey. Faye had the disadvantage of having killed Umu's best friend. The seesaw was tilted in Mary's favor, yet she couldn't think of a way to shove Faye off the other side.

"I don't want anyone else to get hurt," Faye said. "But she does." She pointed at Mary with her free hand, and Davey and Umu both looked back at her, bewildered. "Check her pockets, Davey," Faye said. "Check her pockets and you'll see."

"We'll see what?" Umu asked.

Mary began to pull herself up.

"That I didn't kill Kip," Faye said. "She did."

"A killer saying they're not a killer, how novel," Mary said. She had risen to her feet slowly. Jumping up would arouse suspicion or, worse, would startle Faye and those terrifying scissors. Getting up a little bit at a time was cautious, sensible.

"You think I killed Kip because I'm the only one who didn't take the drugs, right?" Faye said. She moved toward Mary, and she had enough of Davey's attention now that he let her. "The person who poisoned the drugs wouldn't eat the drugs, right? That's why you all dragged me into a cage like an animal even though all I've been trying to do all night is help you?"

"You killed my best friend," Umu said. Mary could have kissed her. "In front of all of us, you killed him in cold blood. Is that helpful?"

"It was self-defense," Faye said. "I'll regret it for the rest of my life but at the time, I swear, I thought he killed Kip and was about to kill Davey. I didn't think I had a choice." She had eyes only for Mary. There were four of them standing there in the arena, four of them speaking, but this showdown was for two.

"We should have killed you when we had the chance," Umu said, though it was unconvincing. She didn't sound bloodthirsty. She sounded sad.

"Maybe." Faye took another step toward Mary. Mary stayed where she was. To move away from Faye, or toward her, would be to admit some sort of culpability. "But if you'd killed me when you had the chance, then there'd be no one here to warn you."

"To warn us about what, Faye?" Davey asked. There was a softening to his tone Mary didn't like.

"About Mary," Faye said. "You said I had to be the killer because I didn't take the drugs, but I told you all I wouldn't. There's insufficient research available about the long-term effects of LSD on brain function."

"The fucking physics again," Umu said.

"I didn't take them, but I told you I couldn't. Mary didn't take them, and she lied about it."

Mary wasn't one to sweat and she wasn't one to blush, but when Faye revealed her secret, it was all Mary could do to keep from vomiting.

"What's she talking about, Mary?" Davey asked.

"Check her pockets; the tab's still in there."

Someone smarter would have abandoned the baggie and the uneaten tab somewhere in the stacks, but Mary wasn't smart when she was sober. She held the cross on her necklace, zipped it back and forth against the chain. She'd bought the thing as a sobriety present to herself. In just the past year, she'd gotten high in the middle of the night and bought a collection of thirty-five Beanie Babies, an inflatable kayak that she'd shipped to her mother's house, a mint-green adult onesie, a $400 mounted light for a fish tank (she didn't own a fish tank), and a crate of $50 strawberries that rotted before she ever had a chance to eat them. She was a master of immediate gratification via retail when she was high, but when she was sober, the best she'd been able to do was a necklace with the charm of a religion she didn't even practice.

"Is she telling the truth, Mary?" Davey asked again.

"I saw her," Faye said. "I saw her when she was over by the barricade and the two of you had left. I saw her with the uneaten tab."

"And I saw Goody Proctor with the devil," Mary said. She swallowed bile and managed a laugh. No one laughed with her. Faye still held those blood-soaked scissors and now they were pointed right at her. Umu and Davey seemed to have forgotten that Faye was the one they were meant to be afraid of.

"I don't want to search your pockets, Mary," Davey said. He turned his back to Faye and her scissors. Mary had lost him. "Can you tell us if she's telling the truth?" he asked Umu.

If it had just been Davey, Mary thought she could have talked her way out of it. They'd worked together for two years, they knew one another, he trusted her. There would have been some machinations necessary to explain things, sure, but she could have done it. If not for Umu, the whole thing would have ended differently. Umu was a stranger to them, she had no idea what it looked like when Mary lied, but she had one distinct advantage over Davey. She spent a lot of time with someone who liked to get high.

Umu stalked right up to Mary. Mary didn't move. She kept her body rigid and worried that if she dared even breathe she would begin to shake and the whole thing would be over. They were almost nose to nose, neither girl saying anything, Umu only staring at her. There was a disbelieving sneer when she first approached, but it melted into something else. Still disbelieving, but then confused, then angry, then finally, terrified. It was Umu who began to tremble.

"Faye's telling the truth," Umu whispered. She took a horrified step back from Mary. Her hatred for Faye had been the one unwavering thing that night. Without it, she looked unmoored. "I don't know what else is going on, but I know for certain she's not high."

"You don't have to—" Mary started. The energy of pretending, or of disappearing into the background, that night had been exhausting. If Umu was suddenly unmoored, then Mary was the opposite: anchored, in control.

"Did you kill them?" Umu asked.

"I'm sober!" Mary said. She threw her hands in the air like it was the simplest explanation in the world. Like the real crime was that they hadn't noticed. "For, like, twenty days now, I'm sober."

"You're not sober," Davey said. "You run on Adderall the way most of this state runs on Dunkin'."

"I used to," Mary said. "That used to be true."

Faye was still standing there with those scissors, and all Mary wanted was to walk over and smack her across her smug face the way Umu had done earlier. What did she know about any of them, about anything? She'd come and made this grand declaration, and now she stood there, waiting to be hailed as a hero.

"I just saw you snorting crushed Adderall off the Caxton in the elevator, like, last week," Davey said.

"That was three weeks ago." That he remembered her doing it and didn't think it sounded like a big issue seemed to Mary to prove her point.

"Isn't the first step admitting you have a problem?" Faye said. She made a sarcastic gesture with the scissors, as though the danger were gone now that the others had come around to believing her. "Does it count as being sober if you don't tell people you're sober?"

"It counts as being sober if you don't snort amphetamines off priceless fifteenth-century manuscripts, you smug cunt, the other parts are ‘nice to haves.'" Like she needed this farm-bred physicist telling her what counted as sobriety.

"Were you sober when I invited you to come?" Davey asked.

"I've been overdoing the Adderall, and I'm chilling with it for graduation. The whens and hows are no one's business."

"It's our business if the withdrawal led you to murder a couple of your coworkers," Faye said. "It can take months for your dopamine levels to return to normal after you stop using."

Mary pounced. That Faye was a killer was one thing. But she couldn't do it. She couldn't hear Faye say one more time that she was a scientist.

***

Mary had been prescribed the Adderall in high school. At the private girls' school she went to, the Adderall prescription was as much a rite of passage as a set of car keys for a girl's sixteenth birthday. Mary didn't think she had ADHD, nor did her parents. The Adderall was a competitive advantage, akin to private tutoring, and who were they to deny their daughter something that would keep her at the head of the class? It was all a bit of a cliché, the private school girl popping pills to keep up her productivity, but clichés get to be that way for a reason. The stuff worked marvelously.

In high school it meant she finished her homework, ran the student council, edited the yearbook, and started a Cantonese Club. In college the stakes got higher, and so did the dose. It made her social enough to create excellent Instagram content and focused enough to catalog rare books in Cantonese at the William E. Woodend Library.

Before graduation, when he learned he had funding to fill one permanent role, Ronald insisted that all his graduating students interview for the position. Mary had three finals that week and even though she'd decided she needed to get out of Vermont, even though she didn't even want the job, there was no way she could allow herself to do anything but excel at the interview.

So she might have overdone it on the Adderall.

Ronald let her get through the whole day. The presentation, the interview, the lunch with library donors, until finally at four that afternoon, he'd called her into his office, closed the door, assured her she'd done a wonderful job on the interview, and asked her how frequently she used amphetamines. He wouldn't let her leave his office until she promised to give it a rest, and she'd kept the promise she made him for twenty miserable days.

So when Mary pounced at Faye, it was as much about the built-up rage from the last three weeks of private withdrawal as it was about a sense of self-preservation.

"A murderer is always going to point fingers at everyone they can, and that's all you're doing," Mary yelled. She tried to grab Faye's arm that was holding the scissors, but she reared back and then they were both on the floor, Mary on top of Faye.

Davey and Umu both had their lights on, shining down at the two girls as they struggled. Theirs was an impossible quandary. Fifteen minutes ago they'd been certain they'd captured and contained their killer, Faye. Now they had a credible claim that Mary was the real danger. Mary yelled at them to come and help her, but she knew they wouldn't.

"I know it was you," she said to Faye, loud enough for Davey and Umu to hear. Still, they didn't come to her aid. She lunged up, crawling over Faye's body, and got two fingers on the scissors and that was all it took. "If you can get a finger on it, you can catch it." Her high school boyfriend said that when he tried to teach her to catch a football. Wasn't true in that case, but the scissors weren't a football. Faye's hands were so blistered, so bloody, she didn't stand a chance. Mary wrapped the sharp scissors in her fist and jumped back to her feet to face the others.

"Acid and Adderall," Umu said. "Those have nothing to do with one another."

Faye was on the floor, struck dumb by having lost her one advantage. Umu didn't move to help her, so Mary knew it was still possible to get Umu on her side. She was confused, but not convinced in either direction, afraid, but not sure of who. Mary held the pair of scissors in front of her, the only one of them with a weapon, but made an effort to sound gentle, lest she send Umu running in the wrong direction.

"What do you mean they have nothing to do with each other?"

"You said you were taking a break from Adderall," Umu said. "I get that. Who among us hasn't occasionally overdone it? But it's not like we're smoking meth to summon the gods. It was acid. That's about as far from Adderall as it gets."

How to explain to someone who doesn't intuitively understand that she hadn't so much as taken a Tylenol in the last three weeks for fear of triggering some impulse related to the action of swallowing a pill?

"And why hide it at all?" Davey said, rehashing ground that Faye had already tread. Mary was convinced he just needed to vocalize something so they wouldn't forget that he was meant to be in charge of the whole show. "Faye told us she didn't want to take the acid, and she didn't take the acid. You could have gone the same route. No one gave her a hard time about it."

"Until you used her abstention as proof she had killed a bunch of people!" Mary said. She was tiring of walking in circles, but now she was holding these scissors and wasn't quite sure how to get the others to go away.

"Right," Umu said. Her voice was shaky and she was holding on to one of the stacks to keep herself upright, but her tone was more thoughtful than Davey's, and that made her more dangerous. "But at the time you should have refused the drugs, at the time she did"—she stuck her chin out at Faye, not at a place yet where she could use her name as anything but an accusation—"you couldn't have known that abstaining would make it look like you had done anything. Kip was alive."

"So unless you knew someone was going to die from taking those drugs, there was no reason to keep it a secret that you didn't want to take them!" Davey finished Umu's thought. There was a triumphant moment when he looked like he'd solved a puzzle until he absorbed the full weight of what he'd said and his shoulders dropped at the implication.

"You're all so selfish, it's like you're cartoon characters," Mary said, waving the scissors back and forth to make it clear she meant all of them. "I'm standing here telling you I have an addiction, and not one of you asks how I've been doing. This one"—she pointed at Umu—"says, ‘who among us' hasn't been here. Who among you? Most sodding people, Umu!"

"Respectfully, Mary," Davey said, in a tone that wasn't at all respectful, "there are three human corpses down here with us, so you'll excuse us if we didn't pivot quickly enough to making this about Mary and her problems. Promise not to kill any more of us, and I'll bake you a cake myself when you get your one-month chip."

"This is the shit I'm talking about!" Mary said. Umu flinched a bit when Mary waved the scissors, and the flinch was a relief. Finally, they were hearing her. Finally, she had their attention. "I've been clean for almost three weeks and I've been miserable, and not one of you has even noticed."

"Is that why you killed Kip?" Umu asked. Only Faye was still silent. She seemed to understand, the way the others didn't, the danger of a stupid question.

"This isn't about Kip!" Mary could have exploded, she was an overfilled water balloon without any give left. "I've barely slept in three weeks. My eye bags have eye bags. At any point did one of you look at me and say, ‘hey Mary, you feeling okay?' The first week I was throwing up three times per shift, and I know you must have noticed because there's only one staff bathroom, and I definitely always noticed when Soraya would go in there to throw up her lunch, but did any of you ever check to see if I needed a cup of tea or a breath mint or any help?"

"I thought you were stressed about finals," Davey said.

"You didn't think about me at all," Mary countered.

Umu, who didn't work at the library and was innocent of these accusations, put her hands up in defeat. "So is that it, Mary? It was all a sort of revenge?"

"What was all a sort of revenge?" She was past the point in her withdrawal where she constantly needed to vomit, but there was no normalcy in her emotions.

"Kip and Soraya," Umu said.

"For the last time, I didn't do anything to Kip and Soraya," Mary wailed. "What do I have to do to get you to believe me?"

"You have us at knifepoint," Davey said. Davey, who hadn't even bothered to apologize for his total lack of concern about her sobriety. "If you stopped threatening our lives, it would be a good start."

She let the scissors drop a little. She still held them tight but pointed at the ground now, instead of sweeping back and forth between the other three. If she showed herself softening, maybe they would believe her.

"I didn't do anything to Kip and Soraya," Mary reiterated. The darkness of the basement seemed somehow more consuming than it had been all night. Her palms ached from gripping the scissors so tightly, but she didn't dare readjust them or move them to the other hand. Umu was still leaning against one of the stacks, and Mary envied her that little bit of comfort. "Faye did, or Ro did, someone did, but not me. I think you're all awful, every one of you, but that's not enough motive to kill anyone. The only thing I wanted was to get clean and to put Vermont in my rearview mirror. I'm supposed to go to New York next week. You idiots might have ruined my chance to go to New York. I was motivated to leave Vermont behind forever, not to kill some of its residents."

"So what's a motive then?" Umu said.

Mary let the scissors drop even lower as she turned to her. She still held them tight, she still didn't trust any one of these three, but Umu spoke with some kindness in her voice, and Mary had a little bit of regret about lumping her in with the others when her situation was so different.

"You hated them, you said so yourself," Umu continued. "But hating someone isn't motive enough to kill them? According to you, it isn't. So what is motive enough?"

"Ask her," Mary swung the scissors up to point at Faye, but then again, let them drop. "I haven't killed anyone, so I wouldn't know."

"What if they took something you really, really wanted?" Umu said. "Would that be motive enough?"

There was a weird flickering quality to the light as one of their phones, Davey's maybe, dipped or twisted or changed position somehow. And then the light began to quiver, and Mary followed the quivering back to its source, and it was indeed Davey who was holding the light that was making the space tremble. Umu took a step back from him.

"I know something," Umu said. "I forgot all about it. I'm not sure how, but if we're talking about Kip and Soraya and what they could do to motivate someone to kill them, then I guess I do know something."

"What are you talking about?" Davey said, and Mary didn't understand what was happening, why he was trembling.

"Kip told me," Umu said. "He wasn't supposed to, but like you all keep saying, I don't work here so it's not like it mattered. I saw him last week in the humanities building when I was dropping off a paper for another class, and he told me something about Soraya and, I guess indirectly, about Davey." She backed up again, moving closer to Mary and away from Davey. Taking her lead, Mary moved the point of the scissors so they pointed at him, though she didn't know what Umu was going to say.

"You all interviewed for a job here, right?" Umu said. "Everyone who was graduating had to interview, even if they didn't want the job, or even if they didn't stand a chance at it. Kip thought that was weird. He thought it was weird when Soraya was getting ready for the interview because he said he knew she wanted to work in tech or something, and apparently everyone knew that the job was supposed to go to Davey."

When had they all come to understand the job was Davey's? Mary couldn't remember but she'd always thought so. When she prepared for her interview, she strove to do her best because it was in her nature to do so, but she always felt like she was preparing to interview for Davey's job.

"But the job didn't go to Davey," Umu said. "Kip told me it was offered to Soraya. He was super confused about why and even more confused because after mulling the job offer over for a week, she was planning to accept it."

"What does that have to do with anything?" Davey said, barely above a whisper.

"Because of what Kip said when he told me," Umu replied. "He said, ‘Davey's going to kill Soraya when he finds out.' And I laughed when he said it, but he told me I shouldn't because he was serious: that there was someone at the library who he really thought would kill Soraya when he heard she took his job."

***

They were all liars, that was what threw Mary off-balance. Soraya had said for two years she was just passing through the library, and then she lied about taking the thing Davey desperately wanted. Davey set up this whole elaborate party or ritual or whatever he wanted to call it and lied about bringing Soraya down here as a friend. Even Kip, who doubtless had promised Soraya he'd keep the news about her job secret, had gone on to share it with one of his students. Mary had lied, too, but compared to everyone else's lies, hers was noble or justified or in some way not as terrible.

She watched Umu's pronouncement play out on Davey's face. He opened his mouth to speak in his own defense and then closed it. He looked around the remaining participants, the surviving participants, and she could hear the wheels in his head turning to craft a strategy, having to work terribly hard as they fought against the chemicals he'd juiced them with that very night.

Faye was still on the floor, where Mary had left her when she'd grabbed the scissors, and as Davey stood there, not responding to the accusation, Faye did something strange. She slowly scooted herself backward, creating distance between herself and Davey. With tiny steps and slithers across the floor, they'd repositioned themselves so Umu, the only one of them who hadn't been credibly accused of murder, stood in the middle of this triangle of terror, formed by the three potential assailants.

Why would Faye move? Mary tried to sort out a motive from the girl's face. If she believed Davey was dangerous, then it meant she herself wasn't guilty of anything. If she was putting on a show—wanting them to believe she believed Davey was dangerous—backing away from him was the clearest symbol.

We can't all make it out alive, Mary thought. If there hadn't been so much lying already, it might have been possible. If everyone had been honest about what they knew and why they were doing what they were doing, then the bodies might have stopped falling after Kip, but there'd been too much lying and there was no getting out of it now. Someone else would have to die. The hunger and the fear and the fatigue and the withdrawal had turned into a headache, and the dull pounding in her temples kept her from any sort of clear thought.

"You don't kill someone over a job." There it was. Davey's weak opening serve in his own defense, issued more as a whine than as a statement. Umu faced him, meaning she had her back to Mary and Faye, and Mary could see her discomfort, the way she held her shoulders near her ears. She hadn't yet decided who to believe.

"People have killed over a lot less," Umu said, easily sending Davey's argument back over the net at him.

"What you're saying makes no sense," Davey said. "Soraya wasn't even the first one to die. Kip was. We're down here because Mary poisoned Kip." Mary went cold at having her name invoked. She wanted the focus to stay on Davey. "In your version of events," Davey continued. "In your version of events, I knew Mary was going to poison Kip and I planned to use being trapped in the basement after she committed murder as my opportunity to take out Soraya so I could steal back the job she took from me? Seems like there would be an easier way to go about that."

It made for a much stronger return.

"But you're admitting you knew about Soraya?" Umu said.

"I—" Davey stammered. He'd been expecting her to hit back right down the middle, but this was an unexpected lob skyward. Mary was as curious to hear the answer as Umu was. Had Davey known Soraya was hired instead of him? If so, when had he found out? And who had told him?

The scissors were heavy in Mary's hand, but the point didn't droop toward the floor any longer. Her weapon was pointed squarely at Davey.

"I had no idea," Davey finally said. Mary didn't believe him. "If you're telling the truth and Soraya was hired over me, then this is the first I'm hearing of it."

They were all liars. In trying to return Umu's lob, he'd managed only a weak hit that didn't even clear the net. It rolled pathetically back to his own feet. When none of them replied, Davey did the only thing that could make the situation worse for himself: he kept talking.

"How could I possibly have known?" he said. "You all know Ronald." Though of course, Umu didn't. "He's fair and moral to a fault. If the rules say he can't tell the candidates until all the paperwork has been approved, then he won't tell the candidates until all the paperwork has been approved. I asked him about it today! Or yesterday, or whenever it was that I last saw him, but he said he couldn't make an announcement yet, so we had to keep waiting. I didn't know. Ronald didn't tell me."

Davey seemed smaller then. He was six feet tall and had big broad shoulders left over from his high school swim team, but he shrank an inch for every minute he kept having to explain himself, and if he kept going for much longer, Mary would be able to hold him in the palm of her hand. He was a liar, but she pitied him. She pitied him, but she couldn't look away from him.

Mary understood that Umu had been lobbing balls at more than just Davey only after the full weight of Umu's body came hurtling at her midsection. It occurred to Mary that Umu was smarter than most undergraduates at the precise moment she hit the concrete floor, with Umu on top of her, giving a warrior's wail. Mary had been so fixated on Davey she hadn't felt Umu's fixation on her. Clever girl.

Umu grabbed for the scissors, but Mary would relinquish those over her dead body. It was a clumsy grab and Mary pulled back easily from it. Umu was smarter than Mary gave her credit for, sure, but Mary had an advantage in this fight she knew was unconquerable. She was sober and Umu wasn't.

"Please stop," Faye whined, from somewhere by the stacks. Too much had changed for Mary to name the villain among them with any certainty, but she knew that Faye was a real threat, if only for her sobriety. If Faye didn't intervene, it was only because she was still skittish after Umu's earlier attack on her.

Davey said nothing. He didn't move toward them; he backed away to be near Faye and to let their fight play out. Mary could see he was blinking rapidly, and she had to assume he was in the midst of some sort of hallucination, perhaps uncertain whether or not this altercation was occurring at all.

"Give them to me," Umu said through gritted teeth. Mary got herself halfway up and then with all her might, she pushed Umu to the side and jumped back to her feet.

Umu wouldn't let it be over. She lunged again, grabbing for the scissors with her left hand and leaving Mary with what felt like no choice. She raised the scissors above her head to keep them away from Umu, and then brought them down on that interfering arm.