Chapter 23 Faye

In her entire life, Faye couldn't have imagined that she'd see as much bloodshed as she'd seen in that one night.

"She cut me!" Umu cried. Mary made a quick escape into the dark and left the three of them with the consequences of her attack.

"You're bleeding," Davey said. "You should really put something on that."

It seemed to be a reflex Davey had, recommending antibiotic cream for a scratch, even as he stood next to a bomb that was about to explode.

Umu held her forearm up to the light from her phone. The gash ran from her wrist to her elbow. It wasn't deep, but it was ugly. There was some blood, but it didn't spray or gush, so it made the whole thing anticlimactic. Mary's rubber-soled shoes gave no clue where she'd run to, but she'd taken the scissors with her. Umu and her wound were the immediate danger, but Faye had equipped the killer with a weapon, and there was little chance they'd be safe from her until the morning.

"Can I take a look?" Faye said. She had to approach Umu slowly. Even with evidence that Faye wasn't the villain, the air between them was uneasy. Umu hated her, and with good reason, and Faye knew to stay away from girls who hated her if she didn't want to be subject to unnecessary cruelty. The moment called for something bigger than Faye's instincts, though. Umu needed Faye's comfort more than Faye needed Umu's kindness. Umu's big eyes were wide, and if Faye had hoped for praise for warning them that Mary was dangerous, she saw now it wouldn't come, but it didn't matter, not while Umu stood there and bled.

Umu shivered and looked between Davey and Faye and the darkness where Mary had disappeared. Any or all of them were killers, and she looked like she didn't know who to be most afraid of. But at least for now, Faye had no weapon. There was no sign of immediate danger, so Umu extended her bleeding arm for Faye to see.

Faye was wearing a loose blue T-shirt over a tank top. Both were stained with blood, and in an ideal world, she'd have liked something sterile to put on Umu's arm, but there was nothing in the whole basement that wasn't covered with human fluids. Faye pulled off her blue shirt and wound it tight around Umu's arm to create a makeshift bandage. When she first touched the girl, Umu flinched, but then she let herself be helped. She may not have trusted Faye, not yet, but there was evidence of some softening as Faye tucked the ends of the shirt in on itself to hold it in place.

"I'll bet you don't even need stitches for it," Faye said, and when Umu only nodded instead of snapping something about Faye not knowing what she was talking about, Faye counted it as a win.

An ear of corn, now one of two, was by Faye's foot. If Davey hadn't been there, if she'd been alone with Umu, she might have picked it up, pulled off the husk, and suggested they break their fast.

"Hello?" Davey said. Faye stepped back from Umu like she'd been caught doing something illicit. "If you're done playing nurse now, we have to go after her."

"Why?" Faye said.

"You're the one who came here to warn us about her," Davey said. He was speaking as though an accusation hadn't been made about him after one had been made about Mary. Like that part had been erased. "Do I really have to explain this to you?"

"She's dangerous and she has a weapon," Umu said, holding her blue-wrapped arm to her chest.

"Which is why we should stay here," Faye said. "We're together. We're in a space that's pretty open. This is the safest we can be."

"We can't be safe while she's still out there with a weapon," Davey said. "What we need to do is find her and restrain her so she can't do anything to us between now and morning."

It wasn't funny, but Faye laughed. They were moving in circles. "Davey, that's what you tried to do to me. How did that work out?"

He was surprised to be second-guessed. "It was Mary who told us the barricade was secure. And it was Mary who it turns out we shouldn't have trusted. This will be different. Can we go, please?"

"I can't stand here and wait to be attacked again," Umu said, and then she surprised all of them when she turned to Faye. "You should come with us."

Did she want Faye to come because she was afraid to be alone with Davey or because she was afraid of what Faye was capable of if left alone? When Faye looked at Davey, she could see him clearly with his hands on a wobbly bookshelf, pushing it down over Soraya. She couldn't take instruction from him; she couldn't run after him into the dark.

"We're going," Davey said. "With or without you."

She shook her head. They went without her.

"You'll be sorry if she comes for you," Davey said. But wouldn't she be just as sorry if she disappeared around a dark corner with him and felt hands on her throat? He and Umu were moving to the edge of the arena. Davey was wound up like he wanted to sprint, but Umu moved slowly. She was tethered to Ro's body and, newly, to Faye, who she might have preferred to tie herself to for safety, if that had been an option.

"Umu?" Faye said. "You don't have to go. It's not safer out there."

"She could be right behind that stack, watching us." Umu waved her blue-bandaged arm at a dark bookshelf. "I won't stay here and be hunted."

Faye understood. There was no level of comfort she could provide that would compete with Umu's fear. She only hoped she was wrong about Davey. She hoped she was somehow wrong about both Davey and Mary, and the whole thing could still be explained away. There was too much blood to make that possible now, but she felt she owed a debt to Umu, and allowing her to run off with Davey was no way to repay her.

Any patience that resided in Davey had evaporated, and he walked out of the arena, with Umu behind him.

"Be safe!" Faye called after them, but neither gave any indication of having heard her. When she was alone again, she was worried for Umu but also relieved. Faye was good at being alone, used to being alone, and she knew she was no danger to herself. She sank to the floor and put her head in her hands, finally with some time to think. It was almost four. It would be three hours at the very least before someone came to find them. The battery life indicator on her phone said she was down to 15 percent, so she turned off the light. The darkness was absolute but what had seemed to be quiet was suddenly deafening. She'd expected to hear Umu's and Davey's footsteps, or whispers, but any distant noise was drowned out by the sounds around her. The loose sheets of torn-up books on the floor that rustled any time she moved. The air conditioner that must have been running all night but now roared like a jet engine. She'd insisted she was safer here but with all the noise, she'd never hear if someone crept up on her. Faye turned her light back on.

There were still half-burnt candles scattered across the floor, and she lit one and then reperformed the ceremony of creating a little wax pool as a candle stand before, again, turning out the light on her phone. The candle added another noise. The hiss of the wick burning down. The occasional pop of the flame. It was all so loud, but at least she wasn't in the dark anymore. She sat and she waited. It wasn't long before she finally reached for that ear of corn. After she picked it up, she paused again. No footsteps. No breathing. Only the hiss of the wick, the rustle of the paper, the roar of the air conditioner. She pulled off the husk. As she did her mouth filled with saliva, every cell in her body hummed in preparation for the most delicious thing it had ever tasted.

The candle beckoned and she imagined the aroma, the flavor, of those perfect yellow kernels licked by the flame. There was no butter or salt, of course, but the sugars in the corn would caramelize and release their juices.

In the end, she couldn't wait for the corn to cook. She needed it and she needed it immediately, so as soon as she'd removed the husk, she took a hungry bite of the raw kernels. The pleasure of hunger satisfied! She chewed slowly, a necessity after so many hours of fasting, but the corn was so sweet that she might have been floating three feet off the floor. The cob in her hand promised so much more to eat. She could have devoured the whole thing in seconds, but she took her time, decided on twenty-five chews before she would let herself swallow and while there was a sense of denying herself something, there was also such pleasure each time she chewed and extracted more sugar from the corn in her mouth.

She had finally counted to twenty-five, she had finally allowed herself the ecstasy of sending calories down to her depleted body, and was raising the cob of corn to her lips to take that next, ecstatic bite, when she locked eyes with Ro.

It was an illusion. Ro's eyes were closed. Ro was dead. Ro was dead because she had killed him. He would never enjoy sweet summer corn again and here she was, basking in the euphoria of perfect food. She put the corn down without taking that second bite. She wasn't hallucinating, she knew he wasn't watching her, but she also knew that she couldn't disrespect him by eating in his presence. She smoothed the husk she'd torn off the corn in haste and wrapped it back around that perfect yellow fruit—the wrapping on a gift she'd had no right to open in the first place.

"We want to talk!" Davey's voice rang through the basement. "Come out so we can talk to you!"

It sounded to Faye like he wanted to do more than talk. She could hear the spite in his voice, and she was sure Mary could, too. There was a promise in his tone that if she emerged from her hiding place it would be a death sentence. The only thing she could do to break that promise would be to wield the weapon she was still carrying.

"Mary!" Davey yelled again. There wasn't any reply. Of course there wouldn't be. Faye didn't hear anything from Mary, that was expected, obvious, but she didn't hear anything from Umu either, and she wondered what she might be doing, how she might be feeling. Did she have the same fire in her blood as Davey did? Was she following him because she was afraid? Was she following him despite the fact she was afraid of him?

"There's hours before the sun comes up," he said. His voice was somewhere different now. Not in the direction of the exit but coming from the exhibition room. "You're only making it harder for yourself. Come out and talk to us."

Was Mary cowering in a corner? Or was she poised and ready to pounce when they came upon her? Faye couldn't conjure a picture of her. She thought only of Umu.

When the night started she hadn't had anything in common with Umu. Stylish, beautiful, laughing, confident Umu. But that changed because Faye changed it. Now they had one significant commonality. Neither Umu nor Faye had a best friend. Faye imagined taking Umu back to her house for the summer holidays a year from now. On the longest day of the year, they would sit on her porch for the annual summer celebration. The sky would stay pink until ten o'clock, but they wouldn't mind because they'd have so much to talk about that maybe they wouldn't even notice the moment when the sun finally slipped below the horizon.

Across the basement she could still hear Davey's voice, but it wasn't a shout any longer, so she couldn't make out what he was saying. Was he still in pursuit of Mary, or were he and Umu talking about Faye? Even thirty minutes ago she'd have worried that they'd turned on her, that they were planning to harm her, but she knew now that wouldn't happen. Umu wouldn't allow it.

Umu would help Faye's mother with the baking. Her family wasn't much for sweets, but her mother made exceptional breads. Sourdough, brioche, baguettes, croissants. She treated them as science experiments and they came out perfect—gleaming and crackling every time. Faye had never had much interest. She preferred her science experiments bound to a lab. She could tell that Umu would be different, that she'd delight in the weights and measures and in the pleasure of watching a loaf slowly rise and take on a perfect brown. Faye couldn't be certain, but she thought that Umu's joy in baking with her mother might be the thing to finally turn her on to the activity, so maybe by the second summer they spent with Faye's family, it might be something that the three of them indulged in together.

She wasn't sure what Umu's family might be like, but she looked forward to being brought home to meet them. She let herself fantasize that they'd think her an improvement over Umu's most recent best friend, but she felt guilty for thinking that. It was enough that he was gone. There wasn't any need to be thought better than him. In any case, she'd make a real effort with Umu's family. If they were gardeners, she'd garden with them. If they liked to hike in the woods, she'd do that, too. She'd play video games, go to sporting events, do whatever it was they liked to do as a family so they knew how much she valued Umu's friendship.

She'd been trying to avoid him, but of course her eyes came back to Ro.

"I suppose that's the whole reason you're here," she said to him. "You were making an effort."

If he'd sat up from his dead sleep and looked her in the eye, he couldn't have made her feel as guilty as she felt at that moment. This boy she was so eager to replace only needed replacing because of the work of her hand. The rest of them had been selfish, in one way or another, in their motivations for spending the night in the basement, but not Ro. He came to be with his best friend, to protect his best friend, and he'd given his whole life in the process.

"I'm so terribly sorry," she whispered, but there would be no absolution. He couldn't say he forgave her, no one could, and so she'd never be forgiven and she'd carry his weight for the rest of her life. The only thing she could do was carry on his purpose. She went to him and took his hand. It was cold and stiff.

"I'll take care of her," she said, and then she kissed his knuckles and went to find Umu and Davey.

***

"Mary!" Davey called from across the basement. "Mary, we know you're in here."

Asinine. Unnecessary. Where else would she be?

His voice was still coming from the area by the exhibition room, and then Faye understood. Davey meant that Mary was using the room as a refuge. And why not? If they had thought the room secure enough to lock Faye in, then Mary must have judged it appropriate to keep the rest of them out.

Faye followed the sound of Davey's fists against the door. Her candle blew out almost as soon as she started jogging with it, but she didn't dare turn her phone back on. It was only four. There was too much night left to go and too little battery to go with it, and besides, she was intimate with the basement now. She could find her way to them in the dark.

She knew she was getting close when she saw the faint red glow of the exit sign. It had illuminated Mary for her a short while ago, and now it illuminated her path back to her. She was right upon them, Davey's voice, Davey's fists, they were right around the corner, but before she reached them, she saw something else that she'd been seeking for hours. The exit sign pointed to a door that was behind the grate and out of reach, but on the wall inside the grating, there it was. A fire alarm. She exhaled in absolute relief and pulled it and the alarm began to scream.

"You've pulled the wrong pig, Mary. Open this door!" Davey screamed as she came around the corner. The door to the exhibition room swung out and there was no lock on it, so Mary must have been keeping it closed by sheer force, pulling it in while Davey tried to pull it out. She was half his size, so it should have been impossible, but nothing is impossible when someone is desperate.

"Is there a fire alarm after all?" Umu said when she saw Faye. She was standing by Davey but offering no help. Only holding the fabric of her skirt with her uninjured arm and swishing it between her anxious fingers again. The alarm wailed. When you hear a siren like that, you're supposed to flee, and it was a disconcerting sensation, hearing the warning but remaining fixed in place.

"You'll be sorry if I have to break down this door!" Davey took a break from pulling at the handle and went at the door with his fists.

"I found a fire alarm and pulled it!" Faye said. She went to Davey and put a hand on his shoulder. "We can stop this now. Someone is going to come and rescue us. The fire department is going to come."

He took Faye's hand off and grabbed the door handle and, maybe he was imbued with new strength or maybe Mary's was depleted but, in any case, the door flew open and Mary stumbled back from it, deeper into the room. She clutched for her scissors and then got herself into a fighting stance.

"Put down the scissors," Davey said.

Faye could see the muscles in Mary's forearm tighten as she clutched the scissors harder. One thing was clear. She had no intention of putting them down. The fire alarm was the old sort; it sounded like a desperately clanging bell or a screeching telephone. It rang for three seconds and then paused for one and then rang for three seconds again and so on.

"I want to talk," Davey said. "We can't talk if you're holding a weapon at us, so put down the scissors and let's sort this out."

"The second I put down these scissors, you grab them and you kill me," Mary said, and if the only evidence under consideration was the murderous look in Davey's eyes, then she was right. If she put down the scissors, she didn't stand a chance. But if she held on to them, it might be another one of them who perished.

To be heard over the sound of the alarm, they had to scream, but Davey went to Umu and whispered something in her ear. Umu looked uncertain. Faye thought she knew the girl well enough to be able to say that now—what she looked like when she was uncertain—but Umu nodded.

The alarm shrieked and Mary clutched the scissors and then Davey and Umu, in time with one another, ran at Mary.

Mary laughed the way people do when something is wholly unexpected and they aren't sure how else they're meant to react. I have to stop this, Faye thought. I have to stop it. But she couldn't move, so she only watched. Umu was a step or two behind Davey, and Faye was sure it was because she still wasn't certain which of the two, Davey or Mary, was the real threat in the room. Davey threw his whole body on top of Mary's and pinned the arm that held the scissors to the ground above her head.

"Umu, grab them," he said, and she tried, but Mary wasn't going to go down without a fight. Three seconds on, one second off, the siren continued to wail. Mary rolled onto her side and managed to get herself out from under Davey's arm and then she was back on her feet.

"End this," Davey said, and all Faye could do was stand in the doorway with her hands over her mouth, willing them all to stop, though she knew it had gone too far now: they'd never stop. One of them would run out of strength, and their body would be the next offer for the waiting gods.

The problem was that the three of them were so tangled in one another. Davey got back to his feet after Mary did, but Umu was now somehow in between the two of them—she'd remained upright all along—and in the heat of the moment and over the shriek of the siren, he didn't tell Umu what he intended to do. He lunged for Mary, lunged for the scissors, and Mary held them up, either because she had the taste of blood in her mouth or because a person will always defend herself. But there was Umu, caught between them, and it was no one's intention that it should end so, but those impossibly sharp scissors caught on Umu and plunged right into her beating heart.

All night Faye had been hanging back, waiting for permission to give a comforting touch, allowing Davey to reach out and grasp her hand but not daring to give that same outreach herself, but at the moment before Umu realized what was happening, she turned her head and locked eyes with Faye and though the alarm drowned out her words, Faye could read them clearly on her lips.

"I'm scared," Umu said, and it was all the permission Faye needed. She threw herself toward the fray so she could grasp Umu's hand and promise her that things would be all right.

Her own breath, her own heartbeat, drowned out by the sound of the siren, Faye waited for Umu to shake off Mary and Davey, but she didn't. When Faye got to her, when she took hold of her lovely hand, Umu fell, face-first to the ground, and the impact of that concrete floor forced those long scissors all the way through so the gleaming tip peered out by her lifeless shoulder blade.

Did Mary rear back in horror, or did Davey push her away from Umu's body? Impossible for Faye to know; it all happened too quickly. Mary was scrambling back across the floor and Davey was scrambling after her and Faye's heart was broken. She knelt by Umu's body and put her fingertip on the end of those scissors. The summer nights watching the sun go down, the laughter in the kitchen as they baked with her mother, the shared secrets, the shared jokes, they all vanished when she touched the weapon that had killed her would-be best friend.

Davey and Mary were at the far end of the room, where the big table had been before Faye moved it. Now there was dust and their rolling bodies. They swore and grunted and banged at each other and the siren shrieked, three seconds on and one off, and Faye's only relief was that they were far from any sort of weapon, that the only implement of murder in the room was through Umu's heart, so at the very least, they would be spared more blood.

During one of the second-long pauses, Faye heard the back of a head smash against the ground, but when she looked over at them, they were both still moving, still fighting, so she kept her attention on Umu's body. There was an indecency to letting her stay face down, but Faye wasn't yet prepared to see her face in death, so she stroked her back and offered her apologies and assured Umu that she would be reunited with the friend that she would have missed so terribly if she'd stayed in the living world.

"Please!" Faye yelled at Mary and Davey during one of the pauses in the alarm. They were disturbing Umu's rest. The endless fighting, the endless violence, was a disrespect to the dead. "Please, I'm begging you to stop this. The fire department will be here any minute; what's the point? Please stop."

Davey yelled something in her direction, but he didn't wait for a pause in the alarm so she didn't hear him. Faye recalled where the campus police building was, close to the largest of the residence halls, but had never seen a fire station. She imagined the fire truck would have to come from a nearby town but even still, it was summer, it was the stillest part of the night, it would be there in minutes.

"There's no one coming!" Davey yelled. Maybe he repeated it when he saw that Faye still looked hopeful. The alarm rang for another three seconds and then Davey yelled over to her again in the next pause. "It's just noise. The alarm doesn't call anyone."

Some part of her must have known that. In a building so old it didn't have working smoke detectors, in a building so old it didn't have fire exits, she must have known that the fire alarms wouldn't have a link to the fire department. It was a noise, a warning that someone should call the fire department, but they were the only ones who could hear it. She hadn't freed them. She'd only caused a racket.

'Tis not too late to seek a newer world, Faye thought as she watched Davey and Mary wrestle. He was stronger; she was faster. He had the intensity of the intoxicated; she had the focus of the sober. They were evenly matched. It might go on all night. There was no one coming to stop them. Only Faye and a pile of bodies to wait for the outcome, and the truth of the matter was that one of the two who were grunting and shouting across the floor from her had killed Kip, which could only mean that when they finished with each other they were coming for her. Tennyson was wrong. It was too late.

The alarm, that terrible alarm, kept at it. Three seconds on and one off, and she might have had the clarity to find a way out of it if not for the noise, but she couldn't think of anything but her fear and her despair in all that clamor.

"Please stop," she said, her voice little, her sentiment half-hearted. Did she want them to stop? If they stopped, wouldn't they come for her? "Maybe Soraya was an accident," she offered, weakly. Repeating Davey's claim that she hadn't herself believed. She didn't wait for the pause in the alarm that time. In the next pause she heard another crack of a body part against the floor. A head again? A knee? What did it matter? They would tear each other apart.

Outside the library, in the world they had no access to, the sun would soon begin to rise. In these endless sunny days, the sky turned purple well before five in the morning and the pinks appeared not long after. The raccoons and skunks would soon be heading for their rest. It was too close to morning for a late-night reveler to be passing the library and hear the alarm and too steeped in night for an early morning runner or cyclist to be passing. The alarm shrieked. Mary and Davey struggled. One of them had killed Kip. They would soon finish their battle and then they would kill her.

"What is the matter with you?" Davey yelled, and it was clear he was yelling at Faye, not at Mary. "How can you sit there? She's going to kill me!"

Was she? Faye supposed it was possible. Hadn't she been the one who had exposed Mary's lie? Hadn't she blistered and bloodied her hands so she could warn Davey and Umu about the danger Mary posed to them? That felt like days ago.

"The scissors," Davey panted when the alarm next paused. "Help me." Three more seconds of shrieking. "Get the scissors and hand them to me."

The scissors, the weapon, the thing they were too far from to reach themselves, were still buried in Umu's chest and sticking through her back. To get him the scissors would mean disturbing Umu's rest. Turning her over to see her face in death, grabbing the scissors in her fist, and yanking them out of her body. It was an act so violent it made Faye physically ill to think about it. Could anyone but a killer ask her to inflict such violence? Could anyone but a murderer ask her to defile a body in such a manner?

"The scissors!" he called again, and he sounded so bitter, so angry. How could she consider him anything but a threat to her safety? "Stop with this pathetic turtling and give them to me!"

He had Mary pinned to the floor, held so securely that he was only using one hand to hold her arms. The other was stretched in Faye's direction, certain that any moment she would hand him the scissors, certain that she would do what he asked, certain that she was so desperate for his approval that she would aid him in a murder. If he wanted to restrain Mary for safety, he'd done so. Faye would take this no further. She sat with Umu's body and hugged her knees, waiting for the violence to end.

***

They both looked terrified, Mary and Davey. Someone's phone, Mary's perhaps, was face up on the floor, and it illuminated their features. They were frozen in place. Davey atop Mary with no means by which to advance the fight and Mary under Davey with no means of escape. One of them was a killer, Faye reminded herself, and she kept her place by Umu's body.

It might have ended there. They might have been locked in that impasse until morning. Until the sun sat high and the door swung open, but Mary's impulse for flight was stronger than her impulse to remain as she was, and Faye heard a groan of pain during one of the pauses as Mary managed to free her leg and jam her knee as hard as she could at Davey's groin. It only took a moment, but a moment was all Mary needed. She rolled out from under his arms and then she was atop him. There was a metallic clatter as they struggled, some forgotten object out of Faye's view. She didn't want to look, she didn't want to see any more violence, but she looked because she knew she was next. She moved to a crouch, her toes flexed so she could flee if she needed.

Mary pressed her forearms down on Davey's throat as he writhed to get his arms out from under her chest. His eyes bulged, he gurgled something unintelligible. She was going to kill him. And with the act, she would dispel any doubt Faye had about the identity of Kip and Soraya's killer. Death is the end of life, ah why, should life all labor be? The chant from earlier in the evening, a lifetime ago, played in her head. Without joy, without amusement, with only good grades and sterling graduate school recommendation letters to show for their years. This is where it would end.

Like she had been about so much else that night, Faye was wrong. It wasn't the end. Davey let out a desperate gulp for air and in doing so, summoned some hidden strength. There was another metallic clang and then he rolled Mary's body off his. Mary gasped in surprise, and then there was that metal sound again, louder now, the sound of Mary's head against something hard that sounded different from the concrete floor, and then Davey roared so loud that Faye didn't have to wait for a pause in the alarm to hear him, and he brought the curved steel arm of the paper cutter down, the heavy green paper cutter that dropped to the floor when Faye moved the table, the paper cutter Mary had rolled onto, the paper cutter that Davey used to cleanly sever Mary's head.