The Madness Underneath

THE

MADNESS

UNDERNEATH

DON’T MISS THE FIRST BOOK IN THE

SHADES OF LONDON SERIES:

The Name of the Star

THE

MADNESS

UNDERNEATH

THE SHADES OF LONDON,

BOOK TWO

maureen johnson

G. P. PUTNAM’S SONS

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Copyright © 2013 by Maureen Johnson.

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Design by Annie Ericsson. Text set in ITC New Baskerville Std.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Johnson, Maureen, 1973–

The madness underneath / Maureen Johnson.

p. cm.—(Shades of London ; bk. 2)

Summary: “After her near-fatal run-in with the Jack the Ripper copycat, Rory Deveaux is back in London to help solve a new string of inexplicable deaths plaguing the city”—Provided by publisher. [1. Boarding schools—Fiction. 2. Schools—Fiction. 3. Murder—Fiction. 4. Ghosts—Fiction. 5. London (England)—Fiction. 6. England—Fiction.] I. Title.

PZ7.J634145Mad 2013 [Fic]—dc23 2012026755

ISBN: 978-1-101-60783-1

ALWAYS LEARNING

PEARSON

For my friend, the real Alexander Newman,

who would never let a tiny thing like having twelve strokes

get the better of him. When I grow up, I want to be you.

(Maybe without the twelve strokes? You know what I mean.)

Table of Contents

The Royal Gunpowder Pub

The Crack in the Floor

1

2

3

4

5

6

7

8

9

10

11

12

13

14

15

16

17

18

New Dawn Psychic Parlor

The Falling Woman

20

21

22

23

24

25

THE ROYAL GUNPOWDER PUB,

ARTILLERY LANE, EAST LONDON

NOVEMBER 11

10:15 A.M.

CHARLIE STRONG LIKED HIS CUSTOMERS—YOU DON’T RUN a pub for twenty-one years if you don’t like your customers—but there was something about the quiet in the morning that pleased him to no end. In the morning, Charlie had the one cigarette he allowed himself daily. He drew on the Silk Cut slowly, listening to the satisfying sizzle of burning paper and tobacco. He could smoke inside when no one else was here. Good mug of tea. Good smoke. Good bacon on his sandwich.

Charlie switched on the television. The television in the Royal Gunpowder went on for only two things: when Liverpool played and Morning with Michael and Alice, the relentlessly cheerful talk show. Charlie liked to watch this as he prepared for the day, particularly the cooking part. They always made something good, and for some reason, this made him enjoy his bacon sandwich even more. Today, they were making a roast chicken. His barman, Sam, came up from the basement with a box of tonic water. He set it on the bar and quietly got on with his work, taking the chairs from their upside-down positions on the tables and setting them upright on the floor. Sam was good to have around in the mornings. He didn’t say much, but he was still good company. He was happy to be employed, and it always showed.

“Good-looking chicken, that,” he said to Sam, pointing to the television.

Sam paused his work to look.

“I like mine fried,” Sam said.

“It’ll kill you, all that fried food.”

“Says the man eating the bacon sarnie.”

“Nothing wrong with bacon,” Charlie said, smiling.

Sam shook his head good-naturedly and continued moving chairs. “Think we’ll get more of them Ripper freaks today?” he asked.

“Let’s hope so. God bless the Ripper. We did almost three thousand pounds last night. Speaking of, they do eat a lot of crisps. Get us another box of the plain and”—he sorted through the selection under the bar—“cheese and onion. And some more nuts while you’re there. They like nuts as well. Nuts for the nutters, eh?”

Without a word, Sam stopped what he was doing and returned to the basement. Charlie’s gaze was fixed on the television and the final, critical stages of the cooking segment. The cooked chicken was produced from the oven, golden brown and lovely. The show moved on to the next segment, talking about some music festival that was going on in London over the weekend. This interested Charlie less than the chicken, but he watched it anyway since he had a cigarette to finish. When he was down to the filter, he stubbed it out and got to work.

He had just started wiping down the blackboard to write the day’s specials when he heard the sound of breaking glass from below. He opened the basement door.

“Sam! What in God’s name—”

“Charlie! Get down here!”

“What’s the matter?” Charlie yelled back.

Sam did not reply.

Charlie swore under his breath, allowed himself one heavy post-smoke cough, and headed down the stairs. The basement stairs were narrow and steep, and the basement itself was full of things Charlie largely didn’t want to deal with—broken chairs and tables, heavy crates of supplies, racks of glasses ready to replace the ones that were chipped, cracked, or stolen every day.

“Sam?” he called.

“In here!”

Sam’s voice was coming from a small room off the main one. Charlie ducked down. The ceiling was lower in this room; it just skimmed his head. Many times he had almost knocked himself senseless on it.

Sam was near the wall, cowering between two shelving units. There were two shattered pint glasses, as well as a roughly drawn X in chalk on the stone floor.

“What are you playing at, Sam?”

“I didn’t do that,” Sam replied. “Those weren’t there a few minutes ago.”

“Are you feeling all right?”

“I’m telling you, those weren’t there.”

This was not good, not good at all. The glasses clearly hadn’t fallen off a shelf—they were in the middle of the room. The X was shaky, like the hand that had drawn it could barely hold the chalk. No one looked healthy in the basement’s faintly greenish fluorescent light, but Sam looked particularly bad. The color had drained from his face, and he was quivering and glistening with sweat.

Maybe this had been bound to happen. Charlie had always known the risks, but the risks were part of the agreement. He had gotten sober, and he trusted that others could as well. And you needed to show that trust.

Charlie said quietly, “If you’ve been taking something—”

“I haven’t!”

“But if you have, you just need to tell me.”

“I swear to you,” Sam said, “I haven’t.”

“Sam, there’s no shame in it. Sobriety is a process.”

“I didn’t take anything, and I didn’t do that!”

There was an urgency in Sam’s voice that frightened Charlie, and he was not a man who frightened easily. He’d been through fights, withdrawal, divorce. He faced alcohol, his personal demon, every day. Yet, something in this room, something in the sight of Sam huddled against the wall and this crude X and broken glass on the floor…something in this unnerved him.

There was no point in checking to see if anyone else was down here. Every business in the area had fortified itself when the Ripper was around. The Royal Gunpowder was secure.

Charlie bent down and ran his hand over the cool stone floor.

“How about we just get rid of this,” he said, wiping away the chalked X with his hand. In cases like this, it was best to calmly get things back to normal and sit down and talk the issue through. “Come on, now. We’ll go upstairs and have a cup of tea, and we’ll talk this out.”

Sam took a few tentative steps from the wall.

“Good, that’s right. Now let’s just get rid of this and we’ll have a nice cuppa, you and me…”

Charlie continued wiping away the last of the X. He didn’t see the hammer.

The hammer was used to pry open crates, to knock sticky valves into action, and to do quick repairs on the often unstable shelving units. Now it rose, lingering just long enough over Charlie’s head to find its mark.

“No!” Sam screamed.

Charlie turned his head in time to see the hammer come down. The first time it did so, Charlie remained upright. He made a noise—not quite a word, more of a broken, gurgling sound. There was a second blow, and a third. Charlie was still upright, but twitching, struggling against the onslaught. The fourth blow seemed to do the most damage. An audible cracking sound could be heard. On that fourth blow, Charlie fell forward and did not move again.

The hammer clattered to the ground.

THE

CRACK

IN THE

FLOOR

Out flew the web and floated wide;

The mirror crack’d from side to side;

“The curse is come upon me,” cried

The Lady of Shalott.

—Alfred Lord Tennyson, “The Lady of Shalott”

1

BACK AT WEXFORD, WHERE I WENT TO SCHOOL BEFORE ALL of this happened to me, they made me play hockey every day. I had no idea how to play hockey, so they covered me in padding and made me stand in the goal. From the goal, I could watch my fellow players run around with sticks. Occasionally they’d whack a small, very hard ball in my direction. I would dive out of the way, every time. Apparently, avoiding the ball isn’t the point of hockey, and Claudia would scream, “No, Aurora, no!” from the sidelines, but I didn’t care. I take my best lessons from nature, and nature says, “When something flies at your head—move.”

I didn’t think hockey had trained me for anything in life until I went to therapy.

“So,” Julia said.

Julia was my therapist. She was Scottish and petite and had a shock of white-blond hair. She was probably in her fifties, but the lines in her face were imperceptible. She was a careful person, well spoken, so achingly professional it actually made me itch. She didn’t fuss around in her chair or need to change over and cross the other leg. She just sat there, calm as a monk. The winds might blow and the rains might fall, but Julia would remain in the same position in her ergonomic chair and wait it out.

The clock in Julia’s office was hidden in plain sight; she put it behind the chair where her patients sat, on top of a bookcase. I followed the clock by watching its reflection in the window, watching time run backward. I had just managed to waste a solid forty-five minutes talking about my grandmother—a new record for me. But I’d run out of steam, and the silence descended on the room like a vague but ever-intensifying smell. There was a lot going on behind her never-blinking eyes. I could tell, from what now amounted to hours of staring at her, that Julia was studying me even more carefully than I was studying her.

And I knew about her relationship with that clock. All she had to do was flick her eyes just a tiny bit to the left, and she could see both me and the time without moving her head. It was an incredibly small move, but I had started to look for it. When Julia checked the time, it meant she was about to do something.

Flick.

Time to get ready. Julia was going to make a move. The ball was heading for my face. Time to dodge.

“Rory, I want you to think back for me…”

Dive! Dive!

“…we all learn about death somehow. I want you to try to remember. How did you learn?”

I had to restrain myself. It doesn’t look good if your therapist asks you how you learned about death and you practically jump off the couch in excitement because that’s pretty much your favorite story ever. But as it happens, I have a really good “learning about death” story.

I wasted about a full minute, grinding away the airtime, tilting my head back and forth. It’s hard to pretend to think. Thinking doesn’t have an action stance. And I suspected that my “thinking” face looked a lot like my “I’m dizzy and may throw up” face.

“I was ten, I guess. We went to Mrs. Haverty’s house. She lived in Magnolia Hall. Magnolia Hall is this big heritage site, proper antebellum South, Gone with the Wind, look-at-how-things-were-before-the-War-of-Northern-Aggression sort of place. It has columns and shutters and about a hundred magnolia trees. Have you ever seen Gone with the Wind ?”

“A long time ago.”

“Well, it looks like that. It’s where tourists go. It’s on a lot of brochures. Everything about it looks like it’s from 1860 or something. And no one ever sees Mrs. Haverty, because she’s crazy old. Like, maybe she was born in 1860.”

“So an elderly woman in a historical house,” she said.

“Right. I was in Girl Scouts. I was a really bad Girl Scout. I never got any badges, and I forgot my troop number. But once a year there was this amazing picnic thing at Magnolia Hall. Mrs. Haverty let the Girl Scouts use the grounds, because apparently she had been a Girl Scout back when the rocks were young and the atmosphere was forming…”

Julia eyed me curiously. I shouldn’t have thrown in that little flourish. I’d told this story so many times that I’d refined it, given it nice little touches. My family loves it. I pull it out every year at our awkward get-together dinners at Big Jim’s or at my grandmother’s house. It’s my go-to story.

“So,” I said, slowing down, “she’d have barbecues set up, and huge coolers of soda, and ice cream. There was a massive Slip ’N Slide, and a bouncy castle. Basically, it was the best day of the year. I pretty much only did Girl Scouts so I could come to this. So this one summer, when I was ten, I guess…oh, I said that…”

“It’s all right.”

“Okay. Well, it was hot. Like, real hot. Louisiana hot. Like, over a hundred hot.”

“Hot,” Julia summarized.

“Right. Thing was, Mrs. Haverty never came out, and no one was allowed inside. She was kind of legendary. We always wondered if she was looking at us from the window or something. She was like our own personal Boo Radley. Afterward, we would always make her a huge banner where we’d write our names and thank her and draw pictures, and one of the troop leaders would drive it over. I don’t know if Mrs. Haverty let her in or if she just had to throw it out of the car window at the porch. Anyway, usually the Girl Scouts got Porta Potties for the picnic. But this year there was some kind of strike at the Porta Potti place and they couldn’t rent any, and for a week or so, they thought there was going to be no picnic, but then Mrs. Haverty said it was okay for us to use the downstairs bathroom, which was a really big deal. On the bus ride over, they gave us all a lecture on how to behave. One person at a time. No running. No yelling. Right to the bathroom and back out again. We were all excited and sort of freaked out that we could actually go inside. I made up my mind I was going to be the first person in. I was going to pee first if it killed me. So I drank an entire bottle of water on the ride—a big one. I made sure our troop leader, Mrs. Fletcher, saw me. I even made sure she said something to me about not wasting my water. But I was determined.”

I don’t know if this happens to you, but when I get talking about a place, all the details come back to me at once. I remember our bus going up the long drive, under the canopy of trees. I remember Jenny Savile sitting next to me, stinking of peanut butter for some reason and making an annoying clicking noise with her tongue. I remember my friend Erin just staring out the window and listening to something on her headphones, not paying any attention. Everyone else was looking at the crew that was inflating the bouncy castle. But I was on high alert, watching the house get closer, getting that first view of the columns and the grand porch. I was on a mission. I was going to be the first to pee in Magnolia Hall.

“My Scout leader was probably on to me,” I continued, “because I had a reputation for being that girl—not the leader or the baddest or the prettiest, or whatever that girl is. I was that girl who always had some little idea, some bone to pick or personal quest, and I would not be stopped until I had settled the matter. And if I was gulping water and bouncing in my seat, claiming extreme need of the bathroom, she knew I was not going to shut up until I was taken inside of Magnolia Hall.”

Julia couldn’t conceal the whisper of a smile that stole across her lips. Clearly, she had picked up on this aspect of my personality.

“When we pulled up,” I went on, “she said, ‘Come on, Rory.’ There was a real bite in how she said my name. I remember it scared me.”

“Scared you?”

“Because the Scout leaders never really got mad at us,” I explained. “It wasn’t part of their jobs. Your parents got mad at you, and maybe your teachers. But it was weird to have another adult be mad at me.”

“Did it stop you?”

“No,” I said. “I’d had a lot of water.”

“Let me ask you this,” Julia said. “Why do you think you behaved that way? Why did it matter so much to you to be the first one to use the toilet?”

This was something so obvious to me that I had no mechanism to explain it. I had to be first to that bathroom for the same reason that people climb mountains or go to the bottom of the sea. Because it was new and uncharted territory. Because being first meant…being first.

“No one had ever seen the inside of her house,” I said.

“But it was just a toilet. And you said this was a behavior you were aware of in yourself. That you come up with plans, ideas.”

“They’re usually bad plans,” I clarified.

Julia nodded slightly and wrote a note in her pad. I’d given her a clue about my personality. I hated when that happened. I refocused on the story. I remembered the heat. Heat—real heat—was something I hadn’t felt in England since I’d arrived. Louisiana summer heat has a personality, a weight to it. It wraps you entirely in its sweaty embrace. It goes inside of you. Magnolia Hall had never known an air conditioner. It was like an oven that had been on for a hundred years, and it felt entirely possible that some of the air trapped in there had been there since the Civil War, blown in during a battle and locked away for safekeeping.

I can always remember my first step through that doorway, that slap of dust-stinking heat. The stillness. The entrance hall with the genuine family portraits, the marble-topped table with a bowl of parched and drooping azaleas, the hoarded stacks of old newspapers in the corner. The bathroom was in an alcove under the stairs. Mrs. Fletcher had to supervise the unloading of the bus and make sure Melissa Murphy had her EpiPen in case she was stung by a bee, so she told me to come right out when I was done and not to touch anything. Just go to the bathroom and leave.

“I was in there by myself,” I said. “The first person ever…I mean, first person that I knew, so I couldn’t not look around. I only looked in rooms with open doorways. I didn’t snoop. I just had to look. And there was this dog in the middle of one of the sitting rooms in the front, a big golden retriever…and I like dogs. A lot. So I petted him. I didn’t even hear Mrs. Haverty come in. I just turned around and there she was. I guess I expected her to be in a hoop skirt or covered in spiderwebs or something, but she was wearing one of those sportswear things that actual senior citizens wear, pink plaid culottes and a matching T-shirt. She was incredibly pale, and she had all these varicose veins—her calves had so many blue lines on them, she looked like a road map. I thought I’d been caught. I thought, ‘This is it. This is when I get killed.’ I was so busted. But she just smiled and said, ‘That’s Big Bobby. Wasn’t he beautiful?’ And I said, ‘Was?’ And she said, ‘Oh, he’s stuffed, dear. Bobby died four years ago. But he liked to sleep in here, so that’s where I keep him.’”

It took Julia a moment to realize that that was the end of the story.

“You’d been petting a stuffed dog?” she said. “A dead one?”

“It was a really well stuffed dog,” I clarified. “I have seen some bad taxidermy. This was top-notch work. It would have fooled anyone.”

A rare moment of sunlight came in through the window and illuminated Julia’s face. She was giving me a long and penetrating stare, one that didn’t quite go through me. It got about halfway inside and roamed around, pawing inquisitively.

“You know, Rory,” she said, “this is our sixth meeting, and we really haven’t talked about the reason why you’re here.”

Whenever she said something like that, I felt a twinge in my abdomen. The wound had closed and was basically healed. The bandages were off, revealing the long cut and the new, angry red skin that bound the edges together. I searched my mind for something to say, something that would get us off-roading again, but Julia put up her hand preemptively. She knew. So I kept quiet for a moment and discovered my real thinking face. I could see it, but I could tell it looked pained. I kept pursing and biting my lips, and the furrow between my eyes was probably deep enough to hold my phone.

“Can I ask you something?” I finally said.

“Of course.”

“Am I allowed to be fine?”

“Of course you are. That’s our goal. But it’s also all right not to be fine. The simple fact of the matter is, you’ve had a trauma.”

“But don’t people get over traumas?”

“They do. With help.”

“Can’t people get over traumas without help?” I asked.

“Of course, but—”

“I’m just saying,” I said, more insistently, “is it possible that I’m actually okay?”

“Do you feel okay, Rory?”

“I just want to go back to school.”

“You want to go back?” she asked, her brogue flicking up to a particularly inquisitive point. You want tae go back?

Wexford leapt into my mind, like a painted backdrop on a suddenly slackened rope crashing down onto a stage. I saw Hawthorne, my building, looking like the Victorian relic that it was. The brown stone. The surprisingly large, high windows. The word WOMEN carved over the door. I imagined being in my room with Jazza, my roommate, at nighttime, when she and I would talk across the darkness from our respective beds. The ceilings in our building were high, and I’d watch passing shadows from the London streets and hear the noise outside, the gentle clang and whistle of the heaters as they gave the last blast of heat for the night.

My mind flashed to a time in the library, when Jerome and I were together in one of the study rooms, making out against the wall. And then I flashed somewhere else. I pictured myself in the flat on Goodwin’s Court with Stephen and Callum and Boo—

“We’re at time for today,” she said, her eye flicking toward the clock. “We can talk about this some more on Friday.”

I snatched my coat from the back of the chair and got it on as quickly as possible. Julia opened the door and looked out into the hall. She turned back to me in surprise.

“You came by yourself today? That’s very good. I’m glad.”

Today, my parents had let me come to therapy by myself. This was what passed for excitement in my life now.

“We’re getting there, Rory,” she said. “We’re getting there.”

She was lying. I guess we all have to lie sometimes. I was about to do the same.

“Yeah,” I said, stretching my fingers into the tips of my gloves. “Definitely.”

2

I WASN’T GOING TO BE ABLE TO COPE WITH MANY MORE OF these sessions.

I like to talk. Talking is kind of my thing. If talking had been a sport option at Wexford, I would have been captain. But sports always have to involve running, jumping, or swinging your arms around. You don’t get PE points for the smooth and rapid movement of the jaw.

Three times a week, I was sent to talk to Julia. And three times a week, I had to avoid talking to Julia—at least, I couldn’t talk about what had really happened to me.

You cannot tell your therapist you have been stabbed by a ghost.

You cannot tell her that you could see the ghost because you developed the ability to see dead people after choking on some beef at dinner.

If you say any of that, they will put you in a sack and take you to a room walled in bouncy rubber and you will never be allowed to touch scissors again. The situation will only get worse if you explain to your therapist that you have friends in the secret ghost police of London, and that you are really not supposed to be talking about this because some man from the government made you sign a copy of the Official Secrets Act and promise never to talk about these ghost police friends of yours. No. That won’t improve your situation at all. The therapist will add “paranoid delusions about secret government agencies” to the already quite long list of your problems, and then it will be game over for you, Crazy.

The sky was the same color as a cinder block, and I didn’t have an umbrella to protect me from the dark rain cloud that was clearly moving in our direction. I had no idea what to do with myself, now that I was actually out of the house. I saw a coffee place. That’s where I would go. I’d get a coffee, and then I’d walk home. That was a good, normal thing to do. I would do this, and then maybe…maybe I would do another thing.

Funny thing when you don’t get out of the house for a while—you reenter the outside world as a tourist. I stared at the people working on laptops, studying, writing things down in notebooks. I flirted with the idea of telling the guy who was making my latte, just blurting it out: “I’m the girl the Ripper attacked.” And I could whip up my shirt and show him the still-healing wound. You couldn’t fake the thing I had stretching across my torso—the long, angry line. Well, I guess you could, but you’d have to be one of those special-effects makeup people to do it. Also, people who get up to the coffee counter and whip off their shirts for the baristas usually have other problems.

I took my coffee and left quickly before I got any other funny little ideas.

God, I needed to talk to someone.

I don’t know about you, but when something happens to me—good, bad, boring, it doesn’t matter—I have to tell someone about it to make it count. There’s no point in anything happening if you can’t talk about it. And this was the biggest something of all. I ached to talk. I mean, it literally hurt me, sitting there, holding it all in hour after hour. I must have been clenching my stomach muscles the whole time, because my whole abdomen throbbed. Sometimes, if I was still awake late at night, I’d be tempted to call some anonymous crisis hotline and tell some random person my story, but I knew what would happen. They’d listen, and they’d advise me to get psychiatric help. Because my story was nuts.

The “official” story:

A man decides to terrorize London by re-creating the murders of Jack the Ripper. He kills four people, one of them, unluckily, on the green right in front of my building at school. I see this guy when sneaking back into my building that night. Because I’m a witness, he decides to target me for the last murder. He sneaks into my building on the night of the final Ripper murder and stabs me. I survive because the police get a report of a sighting of something suspicious and break into the building. The suspect flees, the police chase him, and he jumps into the Thames and dies.

The real version:

The Ripper was the ghost of a man formerly of the ghost policing squad. He targeted me because I could see ghosts. His whole aim was to get his hands on a terminus, the tool the ghost police use to destroy ghosts. The termini (there were actually three of them) were diamonds. When you ran an electrical current through them, they destroyed ghosts. Stephen had wired them into the hollow bodies of cell phones, using the batteries to power the charge. I survived that night because Jo, another ghost, grabbed a terminus out of my hand and destroyed the Ripper—and, in the process, herself.

The only people who really knew the whole story were Stephen, Callum, and Boo, and I was never allowed to talk to them again. That was one of the conditions when I left London. A man from the government really had made me sign the Official Secrets Act. Measures had been taken to make sure I couldn’t reach out to them. While I was in the hospital after the attack, knocked out cold, someone took my phone and wiped it clean.

Keep quiet, they said.

Just get on with your life, they said.

So now I was here, in Bristol, sitting around in the rented house that my parents lived in. It was a nice enough little house, high up on a rise, with a good view of the city. It had rental house furnishings, straight out of a catalog. White walls and neutral colors. A non-place, good for recuperating. No ghosts. No explosions. Just television and rain and lots of sleep and screwing around on the Internet. My life went nowhere here, and that was fine. I’d had enough excitement. I just had to try to forget, to embrace the boredom, to let it go.

I walked along the waterside. The mist dropped layer upon delicate layer of moisture into my clothes and hair, slowly chilling me and weighing me down. Nothing to do but walk today. I would walk and walk. Maybe I would walk right down the river into another town. Maybe I would walk all the way to the ocean. Maybe I would swim home.

I was so preoccupied in my wallowing that I almost walked right past him, but something about the suit must have caught my attention. The cut of the suit…something was strange about it. I’m not an expert on suits, but this one was somehow different, a very drab gray with a narrow lapel. And the collar. The collar was odd. He wore horn-rim glasses, and his hair was very short, but with square sideburns. Everything was just a centimeter or two off, all the little data points that tell you someone isn’t quite right.

He was a ghost.

My ability to see ghosts, my “sight,” was the result of two elements: I had the innate ability, and I’d had a brush with death at the right time. It was not magic. It was not supernatural. It was, as Stephen liked to put it, the “ability to recognize and interact with the vestigial energy of an otherwise deceased person, one who continues to exist in a spectrum usually not perceived by humans.” Stephen actually talked like that.

What it meant was simply this: some people, when they die, don’t entirely eject from this world. Something goes wrong in the death process, like when you try to shut down a computer and it goes into a confused spiral. These unlucky people remain on some plane of existence that intersects with the one we inhabit. Most of them are weak, barely able to interact with our physical world. Some are a bit stronger. And lucky people like me can see them, and talk to them, and touch them.

This is why in my many, many hours of watching shows about ghost hunters (I’d watched a lot of television in Bristol) I’d gotten so angry. Not only were the shows stupid and obviously phony, but they didn’t even make sense. These people would rock up to houses with their weird night-vision camera hats and cold-spot-o-meters, set up cameras, and then turn off all the lights and wait until dark. (Because apparently ghosts care if the lights are on or off and if it’s day or night.) And then, these champions would fumble around in the dark, saying, “IF SPIRITS ARE HERE, MAKE YOURSELVES KNOWN, SPIRITS.” This is roughly equivalent to a tourist bus stopping in the middle of a foreign city and all of the tourists getting out in their funny hats with their video cameras and saying, “We are here! Dance for us, natives of this place! We wish to film you!” And, of course, nothing happens. Then there’s always a bump in the background, some normal creaking of a step or something, and they amplify that about ten million times, claim they’ve found evidence of paranormal activity, and kick off for a cold, self-congratulatory brew.

I edged around for a few minutes, taking him in from a few different angles, making sure I knew what I was looking at. I wondered what the chances were that the first time I came out and walked around Bristol on my own, I’d see a ghost. Judging from what was going on right now, those chances were very good. A hundred percent, in fact. It made a kind of sense that I’d find one here. I was walking along a river and, as Stephen had explained to me once, waterways have a long history of death. Ships sink and people jump into rivers. Rivers and ghosts go together.

I crossed in front of him, pretending to talk on my phone. He had a blank stare on his face, the stare of someone who truly had nothing to do but just exist. I stared right at him. Most people, when stared at, stare back. Because staring is weird. But ghosts are used to people looking right through them. As I suspected, he didn’t react in any way to my staring. There was a grayness, a loneliness about him that was palpable. Unseen, unheard, unloved. He was still existing, but for no reason.

Definitely a ghost.

It occurred to me, he could have a friend. He could have someone to share this existence with. Something welled up in me, a great feeling of warmth, of generosity, a swelling of the spirit. I could share something with him, and in return, he could help me as well. Whoever this guy was, I could tell him the truth. He was part of the truth. No, he didn’t know me, but that hardly mattered. He was about to get to know me. We would be friends. Oh, yes. We would be friends. We were meant to be together. For the first time in weeks, there was a path—a logical, clear, walkable path. And it started with me sitting on the bench.

“Hi,” I said.

He didn’t turn.

“Hi,” I said again. “Yes, I’m talking to you. On the bench. Here. With me. Can you hear me?”

He turned to look at me, his eyes wide in surprise.

“Bet you’re surprised,” I said, smiling. “I know. It’s weird. But I can see you. My name’s Rory. What’s yours?”

No answer. Just a wide, eternal stare.

“I’m new here,” I said. “To Bristol. I was in London. I’m from America, but I guess you can tell that from my accent? I came here to go to school, and—”

The man bolted from his seat. Ghosts have a fluidity of movement that the living don’t know—they remain solid, yet they can move like air. I didn’t want him to go, so I bounced up and reached as far as I could to catch his coat. The second I made contact, I felt my fingers getting pulled into his body, like I had put them into the suction end of a vacuum. I felt the ripple of energy going up my arm, the inexorable force linking us both together now, then the rush of air, far greater than any waterside breeze. Then came the flash of light and the unsettling floral smell.

And he was gone.

3

THIS DESTROYING-THE-DEAD-WITH-A-SINGLE-TOUCH THING was even more recent than the seeing-the-dead thing. It had happened once before, the day I left Wexford. I’d found a strange woman in the downstairs bathroom where I’d been stabbed. She too had looked frightened, and I’d reached out, and she too had exploded into nothingness. I’d tried to tell myself that this had been a fluke, something to do with the room itself. The bathroom was where the Ripper had cornered me. The bathroom was where the terminus had exploded. I’d convinced myself that the room did it.

But no. It was me.

I walked home, an entirely uphill walk in every way, feeling queasy and shaky. Once there, I went to the “conservatory,” which was really just a glassed-in porch. I sat with my head resting on my knees and replayed the scene again and again in my head. The inevitable rain came and tapped on the roof, rolling down the panes of glass.

I’d tried to make a new friend, and I had blown him up.

I’d been told to keep quiet, and I had. But it wasn’t going to work anymore. I needed Stephen, Callum, and Boo again. I needed them to know what was going on with me. I had made a few efforts to find them in the last week. Nothing serious—I’d just tried to find profiles on social networking sites. No matches. This much I expected.

Today I was going to try a bit harder. I Googled each of their names. I found one set of links that were definitely about Callum. Callum had mentioned that he was good at football. What he didn’t say was that he had been a member of the Arsenal Under-16s, a premier-level junior club. He’d been in training to become a professional footballer. And all of that ended one day when he was fifteen, when a malicious ghost let a live wire drop into the puddle Callum was stepping through. He survived the electrocution and recovered, but something in him was never the same. Whether it was physical or psychological, who knew, but he couldn’t play football anymore. The magic was gone. Callum hated ghosts. He wanted them to burn.

In terms of contact information, though, there was nothing.

I moved on to Boo, Bhuvana Chodhari. Boo had been sent into Wexford as my roommate after I saw the Ripper. It was her first job with the squad. There were a lot of Chodharis in London, and even quite a few Bhuvana Chodharis. I knew Boo had been in a serious car accident, but I found nothing about it. Nothing about Boo at all, really. That surprised me. Of the three of them, I expected her to pop up somewhere. But I guess once you joined the squad, your Facebook days were over.

I searched for Stephen last. In terms of his past, I knew very little. I think he said once he was from Kent, but Kent was a big place. He went to Eton. He had been on the rowing team while he was there. I started with that, and managed to come up with one photo of a rowing team in which I could clearly see him in the back. He was one of the tallest, with dark hair and eyes fixed at the camera. He was one of the not-smiling ones. In fact, he was the least-smiling person in the photo. Like everyone else, he had his arms folded over his chest, but he seemed to mean it.

But again, there was nothing in terms of how to make contact.

I stared at the photo of Stephen for a long time, then at the ceiling of the conservatory, which was thick with condensation and fat drops of water. I knew that Stephen and Callum shared a flat on a small street in London called Goodwin’s Court. I’d been there. I had never, however, looked at the building number. The few times I’d been there, I was following someone to the door, usually in a state of distress.

I pulled up a map and some images of the street. The trouble with Goodwin’s Court was that it was very picturesque, and very small, and all of it looked more or less the same. The houses were all quite dark, with dark brick and black trim, so it was hard to see numbers. I found one pretty grainy picture that I thought was probably their house, but I couldn’t see the number.

My phone rang. It was Jerome. He often called me on his break between classes. Jerome had been what I suppose I could call my “make-out buddy” at Wexford. But since I’d been gone, we had become something much more. I still couldn’t talk to him the way I needed to talk to someone, but it was nice that I had someone in theory. An imaginary boyfriend I never saw. We were planning to see each other over the Christmas break in a few weeks, probably only for a day, but still. It was something.

“Hey, disgusting,” he said.

Jerome and I had developed a code for expressing whatever it was we felt for each other. Instead of saying “I like you” or whatever mush expresses that sentiment, we had started saying mildly insulting things. Our entire correspondence was a string of heartfelt insults.

“What’s wrong?”

“Nothing,” I said quickly. “Nothing.”

“You sound funny.”

“You look funny,” I replied.

I could hear Wexford noises in the background. Not that Wexford noises were so particular. It was just noise. People. Voices. Guys’ voices.

He was talking quickly, telling me a story about some guy in his building who’d been busted for claiming to have an interview at a university, but actually he went off to see his girlfriend in Spain, and how someone had ratted him out to Jerome, and Jerome had the unwelcome task of reporting him. Or something.

I was only half listening. I rubbed at my legs and stared at the images of Goodwin’s Court. I hadn’t shaved in three weeks, so that was quite a situation I had going. For the first few days, I hadn’t been able to bend over completely or get the injured area wet, so I couldn’t shave. The hairs sprouted, and they were kind of cute. So I just let them go to see what would happen, and what had happened was that I had a fine web of delicate hair all over my legs that I could ruffle while I watched television, like some people absently pet their cats. I was my very own fuzzy pet.

The grainy picture told me nothing.

“Hello?” Jerome said.

“I’m listening,” I lied. I guess the story had finished.

“I have to go,” he said. “You’re disgusting. I want you to know that.”

“I heard they named a mold after you,” I replied. “Poor mold.”

“Vile.”

“Gross.”

After I hung up, I pulled the computer closer to stare at the image. I moved the view up and down the row of tiny, dark houses with their expensive gaslights and security system warning signs. Up and down. And then I saw something. There was a tiny plaque on the outside of one of the houses, right above the buzzer. That plaque. I knew it. That was their building. There was some kind of a small company downstairs, a graphic designer or photographer or something like that. The print was impossible to make out in the photo, but it began with a Z. I knew that much. Zoomba, Zoo…Zo…something.

It was a start, enough to search the Internet. I tried every combination I could with Z and design and art and photography and graphic design. It took a while, but I eventually hit it. Zuoko. Zuoko Graphics. With a phone number. I pulled up the address in maps, and sure enough, it was the same building.

Now all I had to do was call and ask them…something. Get them to go upstairs. Leave a note. I would say it was an emergency and that they needed to call Rory, and I would leave my number. So simple, so clever.

So I called, and Zuoko Graphics answered. Well, some woman did. Not the entire agency.

“Hi,” I said. “I’m trying to reach someone else in this building. It’s kind of an emergency. Sorry to bug you. But there are some guys? Who live upstairs? From you?”

“Two guys, right?” the woman said. “About nineteen or twenty?”

“That’s them,” I said.

“They moved out, about a week and a half ago.”

“Oh…”

“You said it’s an emergency? Do you have another way of reaching them, or—”

“It’s okay,” I said. “Thanks.”

So that was that. I struck that off the list. They’d moved out. Because of me? Because I knew where they lived? Maybe they were really cleaning up their tracks so they could never be found again.

I heard someone come into the house. I quickly clicked on a link to BBC news and pretended to be deeply engrossed in world affairs. My mom came into the kitchen.

“We have chairs,” she said.

“I like it down here. It’s where I belong.”

“Doing some work?” she asked.

My parents weren’t stupid. They knew I hadn’t really been keeping up with school stuff, but they hadn’t been pressuring me. I was recovering. Everyone was very gentle with me. Soft voices. Food on demand. Command of the remote control. But there was just a little lilt of hope in her voice, and I hated to disappoint her.

“Yup,” I lied.

“I just got a call from Julia. She’s asking all of us to come in tomorrow for a group session. Is that all right with you?”

I ran my thumbs along the bottom edge of my computer. This wasn’t right. We didn’t do group sessions. Was this an intervention? It sounded like an intervention, at least like the ones I had seen on TV. They get your family and a psychologist, and they sit you in a room and tell you that the game is up, you have to change. Change or die. Except…I didn’t drink or do drugs, so I wasn’t sure what they could intervene about. You can’t stop someone from doing nothing all time.

I thought about the man again…my hand reaching out in greeting. Maybe the first greeting he’d had in years. The hand that wiped him from existence. Or something.

“Sure,” I said, slightly dazed. “Whatever.”

The next day at noon, the three of us waited by Julia’s door, staring down at the little smoke-detector-shaped noise-reduction devices that lined the hallway. That’s how you could tell a therapist was behind the door. One of these little privacy devices would spring up naturally, like a mushroom after a rainstorm.

“So,” Julia said, once we were all squeezed onto her sofa, “I want to talk to all of you about the progress we’ve made, and just a little bit about the process. Recovering from a trauma like this. There’s no one method that fits everyone. I want you to know, and I want you to hear this, Rory…I think Rory is very, very strong. I think she’s resilient and capable.”

It was supposed to make me feel good, but I burned…burned with anger or embarrassment or resentment. I felt my cheeks flush. This was the worst of it. Right now, this. I’d survived the stabbing. I’d survived all of the other, much crazier stuff. But now I was a victim. I might as well have had the word tattooed on my face. And victims get strange looks and psychologists. Victims have to sit between their parents while they’re told how “resilient” they are.

“In my opinion, I feel…very strongly…that Rory should be returned to Wexford.”

I seriously almost fell off the sofa.

“I’m sorry?” my mother said. “You think she should go back?”

“I realize what I’m saying may run counter to all your instincts,” Julia said, “but let me explain. When someone survives a violent assault, a measure of control is taken away. In therapy, we aim to give victims back their sense of control over their own lives. Rory’s been removed from her school, taken away from her friends, taken out of her routine, out of her academic life. I believe she needs to return. Her life belongs to her, and we can’t let her attacker take that away.”

My dad had a look in his eye that I’d once seen in a painting at the National Gallery. It was of a man who was facing down an angel that had just come crashing through his ceiling and was now glowing expectantly in the corner of the room. A surprised look.

“I say this with full understanding that the idea may be difficult for all of you,” she continued, mostly to my parents. “If you decide against this, that’s absolutely fine. But I feel the need to tell you this…Rory and I have done quite a lot of work in our sessions. I’m not saying we’ve done all we can do. I’m saying the next logical step is to get her back into a normal routine.”

She was lying. Julia, right now, was lying. And she was looking right at me, as if challenging me to contradict her. We both knew perfectly well that I’d told her nothing at all. Why the hell would Julia lie? Had I said things without even realizing it?

“She can have a normal routine here,” my mom said.

“It’s not her normal routine. It’s a new routine based around the attack. Right now, keeping her away from the learning environment is punitive. I’m not talking about sending Rory out to live in a wild and dangerous environment—this is a structured one, with everything in place to allow her to resume her life.”

“An environment where she was stabbed,” my dad said.

“Very true. But that particular case was a true anomaly. You need to separate your fears from the actual risk involved. What happened will not be repeated. The attacker is deceased.”

Their conversation became a low buzzing noise, like the background sound that’s supposed to run across the universe. Of course I couldn’t go back. My parents would never agree to it. It had taken me a week to convince them I could walk down the hill by myself. They were never going to send me back to school, in London, to the very place I’d been stabbed. Julia might as well have asked me, “Rory, do you want to go live in the sky? On a Pegasus?” It was not going to happen.

As ridiculous as this all was, if there is one thing that could sway my parents, it was a professional opinion. An expert witness. They both dealt with them all the time, and they knew how to take that knowledge and advice. Julia was a professional, and she said this was what I needed. They were still listening.

“I’ve been in touch with them,” she went on. “There are new security measures in place. They have a new system that apparently cost a half a million pounds.”

“They should have had that before,” my dad said.

“It’s best to think forward,” Julia said gently, “not backward. The system includes biometric entry pads and forty new CCTV cameras feeding into a constantly monitored station. Curfew hours have been changed. And the police now include Wexford on a patrol, simply because of all of the publicity. The reality is that it is probably the most secure environment she could be in right now. The school term is only going to last about two more weeks. This short period would allow her to reintegrate herself. It’s an excellent trial run to get Rory back into a more normal routine.”

Oh, the silence in that room. The silence of a thousand silences. I could hear that stupid clock ticking away.

“Do you really feel ready?” my mom asked me. “Don’t let anyone talk you into feeling like you’re ready.”

It wasn’t phrased as a question—I think it was more of an invitation. They wanted me to say I wasn’t ready, and we would just go on like this, safe and secure and static.

This was happening. They were saying yes. Yes, I could go back. No, they didn’t want me to, and yes, it went against every instinct they had…and possibly against every instinct I had.

4

I’M NOT SURE WHAT I EXPECTED TO SEE AS WE BUMPED along the cobblestone road that fronted Hawthorne. Maybe I thought Wexford would be covered in creeping vines, or part of it would have crumbled from age. This was maybe a bit extreme for three weeks, but three weeks is a lot of time in school time, especially when you live at said school. Miss three weeks, and you come back to a different world.

There were Christmas decorations on the streets, for a start. Christmas ads in the bus shelters. Christmas displays in windows. It was three in the afternoon, but the lights by the front door were switched on and the sky had taken on a dusky tint. Claudia, our hockey-loving, large-handed housemistress, met me at the front door, just as she had when I’d first arrived. This time, though, she came down the steps and gave me a car-crusher of a hug.

“Aurora. It is good to see you. And your parents…Call me Claudia. I’m housemistress of Hawthorne.”

Claudia managed the entire return and good-bye process, assuring my parents in every possible way aside from interpretive dance that all would be well and I would be looked after and coming back to school was very much the right thing for me. Before they left, my parents went through the personal rules we’d established. I’d call them every day. I would never take the Tube after nine at night. I would carry a rape whistle, which I’d already been given and which was already attached to my bag.

Claudia shepherded them back to the car. I finally understood why she was in charge of our building. She had skills with parents. She was like the parent whisperer.

“I want you to know,” she said, when we were alone and back in the safety of her office, “I think what you are doing is exceptionally courageous, and all of us here at Wexford are behind you. Those events…are in the past. You’re here to pick up where you left off, and you will have an excellent rest of term. I encourage you to take advantage of our health services. Mr. Maxwell at the sanatorium is an excellent counselor. He’s helped many students…”

“I have someone,” I said. “Back in Bristol.”

“But you might want someone here. If you do, Mr. Maxwell would be happy to see you at any time. But enough of that. How are you coming along with your lessons?”

“I’m a little…behind.”

“Quite understandable,” she said, as gently as Claudia could say anything. “We have people to help bring you up to speed in all your subjects. Charlotte has already volunteered, and your teachers certainly know the circumstances. For the time being, we’ll keep you out of hockey so you can use that time to catch up.”

I tried to look sad.

“Don’t worry,” she said. “Next term, we’ll have you back out there.”

I would work on that one later. There was no way I was going back “out there.”

“Now,” she said, “we’re almost to the end of term. Next week is the final week of classes. Then there’s revision over the weekend and through Monday of the following week, with exams on Tuesday and Wednesday. Obviously, you’ve missed too much to take a full exam, but we’ve worked something out for you. All of your teachers will assess your current level, both through classwork and through some informal testing, and you’ll be provided with modified versions of the exams. If necessary, we’ll give you take-home exams that you can complete over the holidays. Your teachers are prepared to work with you if you are willing to put in the effort. All right?”

Claudia fished around in the top drawer of her desk and produced a small black box. She jacked this into her computer and pushed it across the desk in my direction.

“Are you right-handed?” she asked me.

I nodded.

“Just put your right index finger on the pad there and hold it still for a moment.”

There was a square on the top of the box marked off in white. I put my finger on it, and she clicked the mouse a few times.

“Rotten thing,” she mumbled. “Always takes a…ah. There we go. Now, let me show you how this works.”

She led me back to the front door and pointed to a small touchpad.

“Try it now to see if your fingerprint was accepted.”

I put my finger on the pad. A purple light came on, and there was a click.

“Oh, good. Sometimes it doesn’t like the first time we take the impression. This is how you get in and out. It gives you ten seconds, or you have to do it again. The system monitors the whereabouts of all students. We know when you go in and out of this building. And no one goes in or out between eleven at night and five thirty in the morning. Now, why don’t you go up and get yourself settled back in?”

The stairs of Hawthorne had a pronounced, musical creak as I walked back up to my room. My hall was much more narrow than I remembered, and I clunked along to my room with my last bag. Mr. Franks, our ancient custodian, had taken all my other things up at some point when I was in with Claudia. The room was weirdly bare. All of Jazza’s things were over on one side. The two other beds—Boo’s and mine—were stripped down to the mattress. I would have spread out in every direction, but Jazza had kept to her third with a devotion that made me tear up a little. It was like she refused to accept we weren’t there. The only thing Jazza had added was a new floor lamp—a wobbly thing with a plastic upturned shade. It gave the room a warm glow when I switched it on.

I went to the window and looked out at the square. That’s where the police had found the girl’s body. That was the square I ran across when I met the Ripper. Everything had a Ripper memory attached to it. Julia had given me a whole talk about forging new mental connections to things. She’d said that after a while, the Ripper stuff would take on less significance, and when I looked around Wexford, I’d have new, more positive thoughts come to mind.

She also said it could take a while.

The building was freezing. During the day, they shut the heat down to conserve electricity. It came back up again at night and in the morning, but it was never really that warm. In Bristol, my parents had kept the house so hot, the windows would steam. This was considered very American, but in our defense, we are Southern. We get cold.

I was not going to be a baby about a little cold. I put on my fleece and set to work unpacking boxes and bags. I refilled my drawers, trying to remember the exact way I had arranged things before my untimely departure. I piled all my textbooks in order of subject. Further maths, French, English literature (from 1711 to 1847), art history, and normal history. I stepped back and examined my effort. Yup. Those were my books. Familiar, yet foreign, a wealth of information stashed behind every spine.

What I needed to do now was figure out how behind I was. That meant going through all the notes my teachers had been sending me while I was gone, marking off chapters, counting up assignments.

I pulled out the lists I’d been given: the pages I was supposed to have read, the essays I was supposed to have started, the problem sets I’d been given. I did the math. It didn’t take long. Zero plus zero plus zero plus zero equals zero. When should I tell my teachers that I hadn’t actually done anything since I left?

I flipped to the front of my binder and looked at the term schedule. Just about two weeks. That’s all that was left of the term. So what if the exams started in…twelve days?

I shut the binder. One step at a time. Today’s step was just getting back to school. No need to take it all in at once.

I turned my mind to other matters. I still had no idea where Stephen, Callum, and Boo were, but now that I was back in London, it seemed like I’d have a much better chance of finding them. Possibly. I wasn’t exactly sure how. They didn’t really have a beat or a known routine. The only one who was ever in the same general place was Callum. He covered the Underground network. I guessed I could ride the Tube for hours and hours, trying to catch a glimpse of him at some station. That wasn’t much of a plan. London is a very big place—one of the biggest cities in the world—and the Underground went on for hundreds of miles and had dozens of stations and millions of riders.

I would think of something. In the meantime, I needed something to do, someone to talk to. And there was someone here I could have a chat with. But to do that, I needed to put the uniform back on. Back on with the gray skirt and the white blouse. I could feel myself becoming a Wexford person again through the feel of the fabric—the slight polyester squeak of the skirt, the stiff collar of the shirt. But it was always the tie that did it for me. I looped it around my neck and fumbled with it for a moment until I had it right. I was Wexford property again.

Alistair spent most of his time in the library because he thought Aldshot smelled bad. His favorite spot was up in the stacks, in the romantic poetry section, in a dark little corner by a frosted glass window. This was where I found him, spread out in his usual way.

Alistair died in the 1980s, when overcoats were big and hair was even bigger. He was used to people walking past him, or over him, or through him, so he didn’t really pay any attention when I stood by his Doc Martens.

I was careful to leave a lot of distance between us. Blowing up one potential friend by accident, well, that can happen. Blowing up another would be carelessness.

“Hey,” I said, “Alistair.”

A slow drawing up of the head.

“You’re back,” he said.

“I’m back,” I replied.

“Boo said they took you to Bristol. That you wouldn’t be coming back, ever.”

“I’m back,” I said again.

Alistair wasn’t the hugging type, but I took the fact that he hadn’t already started reading again as a sign that he welcomed my presence. I slid down the wall and took a seat on the floor, tucking up my legs so we didn’t tap into each other.

“One thing,” I said. “Never touch me. Don’t even get near me.”

“Nice to see you too.”

“No, I mean…something’s gone wrong with me. And now I am bad for you. Really. No joke.”

“Bad for me?”

It’s really hard to tell someone you can destroy them with a touch. It’s not the kind of thing that should ever come up in conversation.

“I’m unlucky,” I said, in an attempt to cover. “I attract nutjobs and trouble.”

“So why’d you come back?”

“Why wouldn’t I?”

“You got stabbed,” he said.

“I got better. I was bored sitting around at home.”

“And you came back here? Why didn’t you go back to America?”

“Someone’s renting our house,” I said. “And my shrink said I needed to come back to get my normal life back.”

“Normal life?” That got a dark little laugh.

It was good to see Alistair was the same cheerful entity that I’d left behind.

“So the Ripper,” he said. “The news says he died, that he jumped off a bridge. That’s a lie. They covered it all up. Typical. The press lies. The government lies. They all want to keep people in the dark.”

He scraped the rubbery sole of his shoe against the library floor. It made no noise.

“I don’t think that many people in the government actually know what happened.”

“Oh, they know,” he said. “Thatcher and her kind always know.”

“It’s not Thatcher anymore,” I said.

“Might as well be. They’re all the same. Liars.”

I heard footsteps approaching. The library wasn’t very populated during the day, and not many people made a point of coming to this corner of the second floor. This is why Alistair liked it. It was the literature corner, full of works of criticism. It was also a bit dim and cold.

Whoever was coming seemed to really want some criticism, because the footsteps were sharp and fast. The person hit a switch, waking up the aisle lights, which reluctantly flicked on one by one.

“I thought you might be here,” he said.

I recognized Jerome, obviously, but there was something very strange, something almost a little foreign. His hair had gotten just a touch shaggy and was falling into a center part. His tie was a bit loose. He seemed about an inch taller than I remembered, and slouchy shouldered. And his eyes were smaller. Not in a bad way. My memory had screwed everything up and adjusted all the measurements.

“Oh, God,” Alistair said. “Already?”

I’d gotten used to not being around Jerome, and strangely, this had made us closer. We’d definitely gotten more serious in the last two weeks, but we’d done it all over the phone or on a screen. I’d grown accustomed to Jerome as a text message, and it was somewhat unsettling to have the actual person sliding down the wall to sit next to me. Unsettling, but also a bit thrilling.

“Welcome back, stupid,” he said.

“Thanks, dumbass.”

Jerome shifted a bit, moving closer to me. He smelled strongly of Wexford laundry detergent. He looked down at my hand, which was resting on my thigh, then reached out and touched it, gently tapping the back of my hand with his fingers. We both looked at this gesture, like it was something our hands were doing of their own accord. Like they were children putting on a show for us, and we, the indulgent parents, were watching them.

“On the way here, I saw someone pissing on a wall,” I said. “It reminded me of you.”

“That was me,” he replied. “I was writing a poem about your beauty.”

“I hate you both,” Alistair said, from his side of the dark corner.

I ignored him as Jerome brushed my hair away from my face. When anyone touches my hair, I basically turn to slush. If a friend does it, or if I’m getting my hair cut, I fall asleep. When Jerome did it, it sent an entirely different sensation through my body—warm and wibbly.

The lights in the aisle clicked out. They did that automatically after about three minutes. I flinched. Actually, it was a bit more than a flinch—it was a full-body jerk and a small, high-pitched noise.

“It’s okay,” Jerome said, raising his arm and making a space for me to lean against him. I accepted this offer, and he wrapped his arm around my shoulders.

Here’s something I do that’s really great: when I get nervous, I tell completely irrelevant and often very inappropriate stories. They just come out of my mouth. I felt one coming up now, rising out of whatever pit in my body I keep all the nervous tics and terrible conversation starters.

“We had this neighbor once,” I said, “who named his dog Dicknickel…”

Jerome was somewhat familiar with my quirks by now, and wisely took my chin in his hand and directed my face toward him. He nuzzled me with the tip of his nose, drawing it lightly against my cheek as he made his way toward my lips. The wibbliness got wibblier, and I craned my neck up. Jerome kissed it lightly, and I let out a little noise—a completely involuntary and small groan of happiness. Jerome rightly took this as a signal to kiss a bit harder, working up to the back of the ear.

“How long are you two going to sit there?” Alistair said. “I know you’re not going to answer me, but if you’re going to start kissing, can you leave?”

The only reason I opened my eyes was because Alistair sounded a little too close. This turned out to be a good call because he was, in fact, standing over us—I mean, right over us. Many people would be put off of a good make-out session by the sight of an angry ghost looming directly overhead, all spiky hair and combat boots. What terrified me, though, was the fact that Alistair was just about an inch or so away from my foot. I immediately yanked my legs away from him. In the process, I very nearly kneed Jerome in the groin, but he reflexively tucked and covered the way guys do.

“What is the matter with you?” Alistair said.

It looked like he was going to come even closer to see why I was convulsing.

“Stay back!” I said.

“What?”

Honestly, I have no idea which one of them said it. Could have been either. Could have been both. Alistair backed off a bit, so I achieved my immediate goal of not killing one of my friends. By this point, Jerome had crab-walked back a bit and then scrambled to his feet. He was scanning the aisles and generally looking freaked out. I had just yelled “Stay back!” pretty loudly. Anyone nearby would come and check to make sure I wasn’t being assaulted in the dark of the stacks. It’s one thing to have a girlfriend who gets startled by the automatic lights and then cuddles close to you for a kiss. It’s another thing entirely when said girlfriend curls up like a shrimp in a hot pan when you try to kiss her, nearly nailing you in the nuts in the process. And then to have the aforementioned girlfriend scream “Stay back!”…

The moment, to put it as gently as possible, had passed.

“I’m sorry,” Jerome said, and he sounded genuinely alarmed, like he’d hurt me. “I’m sorry, I’m sorry…”

“No!” I said, and I forced a smile. “No. No, no. It’s fine. It’s good! It’s fine.”

Alistair folded his arms and watched me try to explain this one away. Jerk. Jerome was keeping toward the wall, in a stance I recognized from goalkeeping—knees slightly bent, arms at the sides and ready. I was the crazy ball that might come flying at his head.

“I…didn’t sleep much last night,” I said. “Not at all, actually.” (A massive lie. I’d slept for thirteen hours straight.) “So, I’m like…you know how you get? When you don’t sleep? I really did not mean to do that. I just heard a noise and…I’m jumpy.”

“I can see that,” he said.

“And hungry! It’s almost time for dinner.”

“I know how you are about dinner.”

“Damn straight,” I replied. “But…we’re okay?”

“Of course! I’m sorry if I—”

“You didn’t.”

“I don’t want you to think—”

“I definitely do not think,” I said. And that was the truest thing I’d said in a long time.

“Dinner then,” he said. “Everyone will be excited to see you.”

He relaxed a bit and moved away from the wall. Jerome took my hand. I mean, it was a grip. A grip of relationship. A statement grip. A grip that said, “I got your back. And also we are, like, a thing.” The incident was over. We would laugh about it, if not now, then by later tonight.

“You have the whole campus,” Alistair called as we left. “The whole city. Do you really have to keep coming here to do that? Really?”

The sky was a particularly vibrant shade of purple, almost electric. The spire of the refectory stood out against it, and the stained-glass windows glowed. It had gotten pleasantly crisp out, and there were large quantities of fallen leaves all around. I could hear the clamor of dinner even from outside the building. When we pushed open the heavy wooden door, all the flyers and leaflets on the vestibule bulletin board fluttered. There was another set of doors, internal ones, with diamond-cut panes. Beyond those doors, all of Wexford…or at least…most of Wexford.

This was it, really. My grand entrance back into Wexford, and it started with the opening of a door, the smell of medium-quality ground beef and floor cleaner. Aside from those things, it really was an impressive place, housed in an old church, made of stone. The setting gave our meals a feeling of importance that my high school cafeteria couldn’t match. Maybe we were eating powdered mashed potatoes and drinking warm juice, but here it seemed like a more important activity. The tables were laid out lengthways, with benches, so I got a side view of dozens of heads as we stepped inside and I made my way past my fellow students.

And…no one really seemed to notice. I guess I’d been imagining a general turning, a hush in the room, the single clang of a fork being dropped onto the stone floor.

Nope. Jerome and I just walked in and proceeded to the back of the room, where the trays were. The actual food line was in a small separate room. I got my first welcome from the dinner ladies, specifically Helen, who handled the hot mains.

“Rory!” she said. “You’re back! How are you?”

“Good,” I said. “Fine. I’m…fine.”

“Oh, it’s good to see you, love.”

She was joined in a little cheer by the other dinner ladies. When we emerged, heads turned in our direction. I didn’t exactly get a round of applause, but there was a mumbled interest.

“Rory!”

That was Gaenor, from my hall. She was half standing, waving me over. She and Eloise made a space for me that I didn’t quite fit into, but I pressed butt to bench as best I could and turned my tray. Jerome sat on the other side, a few seats down. My hall mates generally swarmed. Even Charlotte poked her big red head over my shoulder just as I was shoveling a particularly drippy chunk of sausage into my mouth.

“Rory.”

I tried to get the fork away from my mouth, but I had already inserted said sausage, so all I could do was accept the weird back-shoulder hug that she gave me. It was quite a long hug too. With something like this, I would have expected a little squeeze—maybe you could count to three, and then it would be over. This hug lingered and settled in, at least ten seconds. This was no handshake hug. This was a contract. A bond. I made haste with my chewing and swallowing.

“Hey, Charlotte,” I said, shrugging loose.

Then I heard the squeal and I knew Jazza had arrived. I turned to see her tearing up the aisle toward us. Jazza always reminded me a little of a golden retriever. I mean that in a good way. Just the way her long hair (which was always bizarrely smooth and shiny) flopped joyfully as she hurried to greet me, the genuine happiness she exuded. She almost flipped me backward off the bench when she embraced me.

“You’re back!” she said. “You’re back, you’re back, you’re back…”

And I was.

5

I WAS DEAD ASLEEP WHEN MY PHONE BUZZED. I REACHED OUT automatically and slapped it silent. Then I grabbed it and held it right in front of my face. It was 1:34, and I had one text message. It read:

Come downstairs -s

I blinked.

Stephen? I wrote back.

The reply, a few seconds later: Yes. Wear shoes.

I knelt on my bed and looked out the window, but I couldn’t see anyone. Just the empty square, the empty sidewalk. Empty London, all tucked in for the night. This emptiness didn’t fill me with confidence. I was in no mood for weird text messages telling me to go outside in the middle of the night, especially when I couldn’t see anyone outside the window.

This didn’t mean I wasn’t going, of course. Because, Stephen.

I got up as silently as I could, grabbed my sneakers from the foot of my bed, plucked my fleece from the hook by my door, and crept out, closing the door quietly behind me. Jazza didn’t stir at all. Downstairs, the hall lights were on, even though no one was around. They used to be off at night. Maybe this was part of the new security plan—always look awake, always look at home, always keep the public areas lit. There was no noise from Claudia’s room as I passed by. I remembered the alarm as I stood by the front door. If I tried to get out, it would go off. Stephen was nodding at me. He held up his thumb in a thumbs-up gesture. I smiled and thumbs-upped back. Then he shook his head no and typed something into his phone.

Open the door.

I can’t open the door, I typed. Alarm go boom.

He shook his head again and typed another message.

Just open it.

I took a deep breath and pushed. The door opened with no fanfare, no screech and flash, no metal bars slamming down. I stepped into the cold night. A great plume of my breath fogged up in front of my face.

I was used to seeing Stephen in his police uniform, but today he was wearing a black sweater and a pair of jeans. He had a scarf thickly knotted around his neck in the way that all English people seemed to tie their scarves (a tie that eluded me no matter how I tried). And although it was very cold, he wore no coat. I think some English people think coats are for the weak.

I’d forgotten just how tall he was, and how worried he always looked. He had very thin and straight black eyebrows that were perpetually pushed slightly toward his nose in a worry wrinkle, like he’d just been told something mildly problematic—not terrible or tragic, just annoying and difficult to fix. He turned this vaguely troubled gaze on me, the newest and most immediate problem.

“Hey,” I said. “You heard I was back, huh?”

My relationship with Stephen had been a strange one from the start. He wasn’t, for many reasons, the most open person. But he was here. I think I’d known he would come. My initial inclination was to grab him around his long, skinny middle and hug him until his head popped off, but Stephen was not really a hugger.

I decided to hug him anyway. He tolerated this reasonably well, though he didn’t reciprocate. I guess I expected a smile or something, but smiling also wasn’t his thing.

“Your roommate,” he replied. “Julianne. Is she asleep? Your lights have been off for a half an hour.”

Nor was conversation, really.

“You’ve been looking at my window for a half an hour?”

“That’s not an answer to my question.”

“She’s asleep,” I said. “At least, she’s quiet. She didn’t say anything when I got up.”

“Would she normally say something?”

“It’s good to see you too,” I said. “They said that’s a really good security system, but not so much, huh?”

“It is quite a good system.”

“So why didn’t it go off?”

“Disarming the alarm system of a school building isn’t exactly the trickiest thing the security services has ever had to do.”

“Security services…”

“We should move.”

“What?”

“Come on.”

“But…”

He had already slipped a businesslike arm across my back and was ushering me down the cobblestone path and around the corner. Stephen was the only person in the world I would tolerate this kind of thing from, because there was one thing I did know—if he dragged me out of bed and ushered me through the dark, there was a reason. And I would be safe.

There was a red car, and I heard the doors unlock when Stephen pointed the remote at it.

“That’s not a police car,” I said, pointing out the obvious.

“It’s an unmarked vehicle. Get in.”

“Where are we going?”

“Let me explain inside the car.”

There was a figure sitting in the front passenger seat. I recognized the head of white hair at once, and the altogether too young face that went with it. It was Mr. Thorpe, the government official who’d come to visit me in the hospital. The one who told me I was never allowed to say anything.

“What’s he—”

“It’s all right,” Stephen said, opening the back door for me. “Get inside.”

Stephen held the door open until I acquiesced.

“Aurora,” Mr. Thorpe said, turning around. “Good to see you. Sorry to pull you out in the middle of the night like this.”

“What are we doing?” I asked.

“We need to talk.”

Stephen started up the car.

“Where are we going?” I asked.

“Do you enjoy being back?” Thorpe asked.

Thorpe didn’t exactly seem like the kind of person who cared whether or not I was adjusting well to my circumstances, and Stephen was suddenly very focused on his driving.

“It’s okay,” I said. “I just got here. As I guess you know.”

“We do.”

“Why do I feel like my being back has something to do with you?”

“It does have something to do with us,” he said. “But I hope that you’re happy about it.”

“Where are we going?”

“We’re just going to take a short ride,” Thorpe said. “Nothing to be worried about.”

Stephen looked at me through the rearview mirror and gave me a reassuring nod. I wrapped my arms around myself and shivered. He turned up the heat.

The first few turns, I knew basically where we were—in the Wexford neighborhood, going south. Then we were lost in a warren of tight little streets for a few moments, reemerging near King William Street, where the old squad headquarters was, where we’d faced down the Ripper. We turned off that quickly enough and were on a road that ran along the Thames Embankment. We were definitely heading west. West was the way to central London. The black cabs got more numerous, the path along the Thames thicker with trees and impressive buildings, the lights on the opposite bank shinier. I caught sight of the London Eye, glowing brightly in the dark, then we were going right, into the very heart of London.

We pulled up into the circular drive of what I first thought was a hotel. It was a moment before I noticed the sign for the Tube, the distinctive red circle with the blue bar across it. We were at Charing Cross station. Stephen pulled the car up right in front of the doors. Thorpe got out at once, and Stephen released me from the back.

“Come in,” Thorpe called. “This way. Come inside.”

There was a female police officer standing by one of the front doors. She pushed it open as we approached. She moved fast, like she’d been waiting for us and her most important job of the night was to open that door.

Charing Cross was a large central hub for both trains and subways. It had a large central area full of shops and ticket counters, with a glass roof crisscrossed with metal latticework. A woman in a black suit waited for us in the middle of the concourse.

“The CCTV is off?” Thorpe asked her quietly.

The woman nodded.

“Stay in the control room. No one comes down.”

I gave Stephen a what-the-hell-is-this look, and he responded with a it’s-fine-no-really-it’s-fine stare.

“We’re just going to go down to the platforms,” Thorpe said. “This way.”

He began walking toward the opening marked UNDERGROUND. We followed him down the steps. Gates had been opened, allowing us to proceed. Charing Cross Tube station was a somewhat grim place, with brown tiles on the floor and tiled walls done in variations of brown; the ticket machine walls were an alarming electric lime green. The escalators were shut off, so we had to walk down to the platforms, Stephen in front of me and Thorpe just behind. It was unnerving to be in a Tube station after hours. There was no body heat from the thousands of people who usually rushed around, no sound of musicians playing or talking or laughing or trains roaring along. Every one of our footsteps on the slated metal steps was clearly audible as we descended.

“Bakerloo?” Thorpe asked.

Stephen nodded.

I looked up at the sign, with the brown lettering that indicated the Bakerloo line. The Bakerloo line at Charing Cross…that meant something to me. But it wasn’t until we got down to the platform that the significance became clear.

“Do you see someone?” Thorpe asked me.

At the far end of the platform was a woman. Her hair was a silver-blond, swept back in heavy wings. She wore a black cowl-neck sweater and a gray skirt—ordinary enough clothes. I think the shoes told me she was from a different era. They were just a bit too chunky, too platform. She stood right at the edge of the platform, her gaze fixed on the opposite wall. The last time I’d spoken to this woman, all she could say was “I jumped” over and over in a brittle whisper. She was vulnerable and pale and, frankly, depressing to be around. Just getting near her made my spirits sink.

“The woman,” I said, glancing at Stephen. “I’ve met her before.”

Thorpe nodded to Stephen, who gently cleared his throat.

“Let’s go and talk to her,” Stephen said.

“Why?” I whispered. “What are we doing here?”

“Something important, I promise. I wouldn’t have brought you here otherwise. I just need you to talk to this woman.”

I looked down the length of the empty platform, where the woman stood by the gaping maw of the silent tunnel. She had turned toward us, expectant. Stephen started to walk toward her, slowly, allowing me to follow. The woman could do me no harm—I knew that. I wasn’t frightened of her. It was more that she was so obviously sad—beyond sad, to some terrible point of existence. She was a palette of grays, and I didn’t want to get anywhere near her.

“It’s you,” she said when we reached her.

“Yes,” Stephen replied. “I was here a few days ago.”

“You came back. You brought her.”

“I did, yes. Rory, this is Diane.”

“Hello,” I said. I kept a foot or two behind Stephen, eyeing the woman.

“He said you would help me.” There was desperation in Diane’s eyes. “Will you help me?”

“Help you what?” I said.

“Make it stop. He said you could make it stop.”

At first, I refused to accept what I’d just heard. It made me vaguely sick. Stephen wouldn’t have brought me down here for that. Stephen didn’t even know I could do that…

“You don’t have to do it if you don’t want to,” Stephen said. “But she’s suffering.”

Except he clearly did know.

“Please,” Diane said again. “Please. Please. I can’t go on like this. Please. Please. I never wanted to be here. I thought it would be quick. Jumping is quick. But I never went away. I jumped…but I never went away.”

I had used a terminus before, so it wasn’t that I was entirely opposed to the idea, in general. And if anyone needed a terminus, it was probably this poor woman, trapped on a train platform for thirty or forty years, constantly stuck in the place that she’d killed herself. This gray and sad woman…

And yet. I’d been brought here all cloak-and-dagger. Stephen knew things that he shouldn’t have known. Thorpe stood down at his end of the platform and watched the show. That’s what it felt like—a show. I stepped away from Diane a bit and waved Stephen closer. His chin was down toward his chest, and he couldn’t look directly at me.

“How did you know?” I said, low enough so that Thorpe couldn’t hear.

“I kept an eye on you in Bristol,” Stephen said quietly.

“An eye on me? You followed me? And didn’t say anything?”

“I wanted to make sure—”

“And you told Thorpe? You told this woman I’d fix things for her? You brought me here to test me or something?”

“You don’t have to do anything you don’t want to do,” he said, lifting his head a bit. “If you want, we walk away right now.”

“Oh, sure,” I said.

“I mean it. We leave right now if you say so.”

I looked back at Diane for just a moment, but I had to turn away. She was the embodiment of depression, of desperation. Releasing her would be fair. It would be right. I could come back and do it some other time, maybe. But not now. Not when I’d been brought here like this.

“Okay,” I said, drawing myself up as tall as I could. “We leave. Now.”

He blinked slowly.

“If that’s what you want.”

“That’s what I want.”

Stephen examined my face for a moment and rocked back and forth on his heels ever so slightly. We stood practically toe to toe, and I could smell the cold on his coat.

“Right,” he said.

Diane must have been listening, because she let out a wail. It was unpleasant to hear, so I blocked it out. I walked back down the platform toward Thorpe and left Stephen to try to talk to her. This was his fault. He’d made the promise. He could explain to her why it wasn’t going to happen.

“What’s going on?” Thorpe called.

“Nothing,” I replied. “I’m leaving.”

“Is it done?”

“Nope,” I said.

“Are you unable to…do what she asks?”

“I’m not—”

“Rory!” Stephen yelled.

This is when I felt something at my back. It felt like the wind—a cold and strong wind. There was a zing of electricity up my spine, and I couldn’t move, couldn’t talk.

It wasn’t unlike that feeling you get at the top of a roller coaster, just when you hear the clanking noise that pulled you up there stop, and something lets go, and you know the feeling is about to get much more intense and extreme. Everything goes up—your pulse, the blood to your head, even your organs seem to leap as it all falls away. The air comes into your lungs faster than you can process it, so you choke on it for a moment.

My ears filled with the sound of my own heartbeat, my blood being forced through my veins. The world went white. Then everything settled just as fast as it had stirred, and I could smell the smoky flower smell, and the world came back into focus.

I fell to my knees on the platform surface, just managing to keep myself from going headfirst over the edge by grabbing at it. Then I felt hands at my waist, holding me steady, pulling me back into a seated position.

“You’re all right,” Stephen said. “You’re all right. She came up behind you. She grabbed you. She was too fast. I couldn’t stop her.”

Thorpe hurried up to us.

“Did something happen?” he asked.

In reply, I got down on my knees on the bumpy yellow section at the very edge of the platform, leaned over the side, and began to throw up on the tracks. Someone—Stephen, I guessed—held me from behind to make sure I didn’t lose my balance. The sickness didn’t last long, and it cleared my head instantly. I pushed back and sat on my heels and wiped my mouth.

“I didn’t do it,” I said, once I caught my breath.

“What?” Thorpe asked.

“It happened,” Stephen said. “The woman touched Rory, not the other way around. That’s what she means.”

“But you are sure.”

“There’s no mistaking it,” Stephen said, a little sharply. “It’s not subtle.”

“Then get her back to her school and make sure she’s all right.”

“Come on,” Stephen said to me softly. “Can you stand?”

I didn’t answer, and when he tried to help me, I pushed his hands away and walked down the platform. I knew Stephen was a few steps behind me, quiet, nervous. I saw several mice dash along the edges of the corridors or along the steps as we approached, put out by our appearance. The Tube belonged to them at night.

I stood outside Charing Cross station for a minute, taking deep, heavy breaths of cold air. The policewoman watched me from a distance—impassive. She couldn’t have had any idea why I was here or what I’d just done. I was trying to figure out what I was feeling. It wasn’t anger, but it was something related to it. Was it exhaustion? Maybe even relief? It was all those feelings, maybe, and I didn’t feel like having any of them, so I decided to ignore them all and concentrate on breathing nice and slow.

Stephen exited the station a minute later. He went right to the car and held the passenger’s door open for me.

“Don’t we have to wait for Thorpe?” I asked. There was a bit of a growl in my voice, mostly from the vomiting. It made me sound very angry. I was fine with that.

“He can ride with the other officer. He said I should take you.”

I got into the car, and Stephen shut the door. He turned on the engine and turned the heat on full blast. Gusts of warm air roared out of the vents and directly into my face. I reached over and turned it down.

“I thought you might be cold,” he said.

“I am. It feels good. I just threw up.”

“She was too fast for me to stop her,” he said. “Sometimes they move quickly, more quickly than us. I couldn’t stop her.”

I’d seen it. I knew that was true. There was nothing he could have done to stop her if she’d been moving as fast as she really wanted to go. Ghosts are quick when they want to be.

Still, I wasn’t letting him off the hook that easy. I maintained a steely silence for a few moments.

“Be mad at me if you want,” he said. “But everything I’ve done has been for good reasons.”

“Like what?”

He took off his black glasses and rubbed them on his leg. His leg bounced a little with tension.

“Rory, I just…it’s…it’s very complicated.”

“Try me.”

“Rory…”

“What’s Thorpe doing?” I said. “Over there, by the door?”

Thorpe wasn’t over by the door. I’d just said that to distract him. I yanked the keys out of the ignition.

“Tell me,” I said, shoving them down my shirt and holding them against my chest. “Tell me, or we go nowhere. Tell me or I’ll start screaming. Do you want me to draw lots of attention to what’s going on here? I’ll totally do it.”

A deep sigh from Stephen. He banged his head gently against his headrest and stared up at the car ceiling.

“They were going to shut us down. They were happy with the results of the Ripper case, but without a terminus, they didn’t know how we could still function.”

“You still have one,” I said. “What about the one in the bathroom? The one Jo used on Newman?”

He reached into his pocket and removed a small plastic vial, then he switched on the interior light so I could look at it. It contained a gray stone.

“That’s it,” he said. “It’s gone cloudy, as you can see. It doesn’t work anymore. We’ve tried. It’s like a blown lightbulb.”

“What about the two in the river?” I asked. “Can you get them back? You can get things out of the Thames—guns and evidence and stuff, right?”

“Guns, maybe, on a good day. But not two extremely small stones. The Thames is a powerful tidal river. Presumably the stones drifted a bit before they sank, and now they’re mixed in somewhere in the millions of tons of sediment and sludge. So you are the only terminus. Then I saw what happened to you…I needed to show Thorpe that there was one terminus left. I also needed a good reason to bring you back. I was never comfortable with you being sent away like that, on your own, with no support. This solved both problems. We’ll be allowed to keep going for a while now that he’s seen.”

Stephen was right. I couldn’t have stayed there on my own, with no one to talk to. He reached over and took the vial and put it back in his pocket.

“And how did you do it?” I asked. “How did you bring me back?”

“Thorpe did that. I honestly don’t know how he set it up. I only know he made a very strong suggestion to your therapist that you should be returned to London. He didn’t give me any details.”

Of course. Now it all made sense. Julia’s sudden decision that I should return to Wexford. Her obvious lie about all the work I’d done in therapy.

“It was up to you,” Stephen said. “You were asked if you wanted to return. You said yes.”

“But I didn’t say I would just…put on some freak show for Thorpe, or blow up some woman. You could have told me where we were going.”

“I wasn’t sure if you’d agree to just…doing it. But I thought if you saw the pain Diane was in…it was appropriate use, Rory. She was in agony. Now, I’ve told you everything. Give me back the keys. Now.”

The keys were sweat-stuck to my chest. I knocked them loose and they fell gracefully into my crotch. I picked them up and handed them over. He started the car again and was putting it into reverse, then stopped.

“Boo and Callum,” he said, his voice smooth and quiet again. “They know you’re back. I can take you to see them now, and we can talk about it. If you want. We can go right now, or we can do it some other time. I don’t know how you’re feeling.”

The rapid change in emotions, the way he wasn’t looking at me…he was still feeling very guilty. His reasons may have been good, but he still felt bad about using me like that, about keeping things from me.

I did want to see Boo and Callum. Truth be told, I was still glad to see Stephen. And to tell even more truth, it was just a little bit fun to play with his guilt. And he did feel guilty. And after the last few weeks, I deserved whatever fun I could get.

“We can go now,” I said in a low voice, rubbing a clear patch in the fog on the window.

6

IN JUST A FEW TURNS, WE WERE HEADING TOWARD THE YELLOW glowing eye of the clock at the top of Big Ben. The Houses of Parliament were lit up for the night, and the London Eye loomed just across the water, a neon bluish-purple circle revolving slowly. Everything in this part of London was alight. We crossed the bridge by the Parliament buildings and headed over to the south side of the river.

We turned past Waterloo station and onto the fairly quiet residential streets beyond. He drove down a street with a chip shop on the corner and pulled the car into the only empty space along the street and turned off the engine.

“We have a new flat—” he began.

“I know,” I said.

This seemed to surprise him. He knew something about me, but I knew something about him as well.

“Oh. Right. Well, the owner of our old flat decided it was time to start charging three thousand pounds a month again. So that was that, really. Since we did such a good job with the Ripper, Her Majesty’s Government has given us a proper office and somewhere to live. It’s just here.”

He pointed at one of the many largely identical buildings along the road—plain brick houses in a row, the kind found all over the city. Definitely not as fancy as the old place.

“There’s one more thing,” he said. “I told Callum and Boo there was a meeting tonight, but not what it was about. For two reasons. One, I didn’t know what would happen. It was possible that you wouldn’t go through with it or it wouldn’t work. And two, Boo. She would never have stood for it. And I couldn’t tell Callum without telling Boo. They never knew how close we were to being shut down.”

“Sounds like you’ve been keeping a lot of secrets,” I said.

“It goes with the job. Come on.”

We entered a very narrow hall, stepping on a pile of mail and flyers as we passed inside. There was weird textured wallpaper in the hall, and a light that didn’t quite do the job it was meant for. It glowed down, making a puddle of light in the vestibule, but the stairs were shrouded in darkness. There was no handrail, and the carpet on the steps was slippery from being trod on too many times. I put my hands on the walls and supported myself as I went up, my fingers running over the Braille of the wallpaper. Another jingle of keys. I heard voices inside the apartment on the landing—one low, laughing. The other high-pitched and insistent. I knew that last voice very well. I had lived with that voice.

When he opened the door and I poked my head inside, I recognized a lot of the furniture from the old flat, including the two old sofas and the unstable kitchen table with mismatched chairs. The other flat had been larger, so everything was crammed in, leaving barely enough room to get around. Books were piled on the floor, all along the walls, piles and piles of them in varying heights. There were also document boxes and piles of thick folders. Maps and notes were taped all over the walls, which were covered in more textured wallpaper, this time in a mustard yellow. It was particularly jarring when combined with the red Scotch plaid curtains that were drawn tightly shut over the front windows.

A head popped over the top of the sofa, then the rest of Callum appeared as he climbed over the back of the sofa to get to me.

“Hey!” he said. “Look who it is!”

Callum gave me a big hug, wrapping me in his extremely impressive arm and chest muscles. Boo was on the other sofa, her leg in a cast, stretched out. Boo had been trying to protect me from the Ripper, and he had thrown her in front of a car.

“Get off her, you perv!” she yelled at Callum. “Come here!”

I crossed over and gave her a hug. Boo had touched up her hair in exciting new ways. She’d previously had a sharp-cut black bob, kind of a Louise Brooks look, with a deep red streak. She had added a touch of violet to the edge of her bangs, so that there was a strong purple line running right above her eyes. It looked like a fashionable lobotomy scar.

“How long will that be on?” I said, pointing at the cast.

“Just a few more days, but I’m getting used to it. I have to crawl up the stairs on my bum…”

“It’s very entertaining,” Callum said.

“Make us some tea,” Boo commanded. “Mine’s gone cold, and Rory needs some.”

“I cannot wait until that thing is off your leg,” Callum muttered.

“Make one for me too,” Stephen said.

Boo pulled on my arm, causing me to fall onto the sofa next to her.

“How are you?” she asked.

“Okay.”

“Really?”

“I’m okay enough. What about you?”

“You know,” she said, shrugging. Boo and Jo had been best friends, and Jo’s death—or her after-death death—had been a terrible blow. The pain of that blow was still evident in her expression, but like me, she was shuffling onward.

“I’m doing some research,” she said, patting some folders that sat next to her on the sofa. “As soon as this cast comes off, I start my training. I’m either going to go in as an Underground employee, like Callum, or I’ll do an apprenticeship at British Gas.”

Boo told me some more about her future job prospects, showing me glossy brochures of people in coveralls looking intently at pipes and wires and going down ladders into dark underground places. The prospect really did seem to delight her. Stephen went to a desk by the window and poked at his laptop in a way that suggested he was just trying to stay out of our conversation for a moment.

“Gas company workers can get in anywhere,” she said, “all the good underground spaces. I’d look good with a safety helmet, yeah? Toolbelt?”

“You don’t even need tools,” Callum said, passing by with some cups of tea balanced on a large book. “You’ve got those talons. You could probably pry open a manhole with those things.”

Boo stretched out her fingers, displaying her long, fake purple nails, then slashed playfully at Callum’s hip. She accepted the teas, passing one to me, and Callum moved on to Stephen.

“That’s my atlas,” Stephen said, observing the object Callum was using as a tray.

“Sorry, love.”

“I’ve told you about that.”

“No one needs an atlas,” Callum said, passing him the last mug. “What with the Internet and all. Here’s your tea.”

Stephen came over to join us, and the atmosphere in the room settled instantly.

“Right,” Stephen said. “So, tonight, we had a meeting with Thorpe…”

“I still don’t understand why you had to have a meeting at two in the morning,” Boo said.

“That’s when it had to happen,” Stephen said.

Callum glanced over at Boo.

“And we have official clearance to continue,” Stephen finished.

“Clearance to continue?” Boo asked. “They were going to shut us down?”

“It was being discussed.”

“And you didn’t mention this?” Boo said.

“They were concerned because we don’t have the termini anymore,” Stephen said.

“And so am I,” Callum said, his voice edged with anger. “Please tell me this solution involves getting some new ones.”

“It does,” Stephen said. “It involves Rory.”

Callum and Boo looked at me expectantly. Stephen cleared his throat a bit.

“She…is a terminus.”

I can’t fault Callum and Boo for not knowing what to say to that.

“You’re shitting me,” Callum said, after a moment.

“I’m not,” Stephen said. “I can only assume that it happened at some point after the final Ripper attack. Which is why you need to tell us everything that happened to you from the minute of impact.”

Now the focus was back on me. Julia had been trying for weeks to get me to this very point—the point of the knife as it went in, those minutes when I was slumped on the floor, when I saw the blood coming out of my own abdomen. When the Ripper—his name was Alexander Newman—told me that I was going to die.

It was not something I felt like talking about. But there did seem to be a compelling reason for me to do so—there was a logic to telling them.

“He cut me,” I said. “He said he did it in such a way that I would bleed and die slowly. He gave me the terminus.”

“He gave it to you?” Callum said.

“I couldn’t move. He said he had this theory that if someone with the sight died connected to a terminus, that person might come back…because he had died holding one. He wanted to see what happened when I died. And then…Jo came through the door.”

“The door was locked,” Stephen said.

“She went through the door.”

“That would have hurt her,” Boo said quietly. “She told me that hurt. She said it felt like being ripped apart.”

I paused for a moment out of respect for that. I didn’t know Jo could feel pain, or that she’d felt it coming to get me.

“And once Jo came into the room?” Stephen prompted.

“She took the terminus from me, and she went after Newman with it. That’s when…everything blew up. There was a really bright light, and the mirrors smashed. And then they were gone, and I passed out.”

“When did you first know what you could do?” he asked. “Was it on the bench, in Bristol?”

Callum and Boo looked over in confusion, but I guess they decided to let me keep talking. This story was full of weird surprises.

“No,” I said. “There was one before that, on the day I left Wexford. I found a woman in the bathroom where it all happened. I went down there before I left school, just to look at the room, and I found her in a stall.”

“Had she been there before?”

“No,” I said. “I’d never seen her before. I have no idea where she came from. She was hiding in the bathroom stall, and she looked really scared. She didn’t speak. I don’t think she could. I just reached out…I was telling her it was okay. I didn’t know. I just touched her. And it happened.”

“Did you have to touch her in any special way?” Callum asked. “I mean, did you have to keep your hand on her?”

“I don’t know. I just touched her on the shoulder. It happened right away, I think.”

“Any physical effects after that?” Stephen asked.

“My arm tingled.”

“Nothing else?”

“No.”

“Does it hurt?”

“No,” I said. “It’s not pain. I sort of feel like my arm is being sucked into something, and then it starts to shake. It feels…electrified, I guess. The rest of it is like normal terminus stuff. There’s a light. There’s a burning smell. But that’s it.”

“But tonight you were physically ill,” Stephen said.

“Tonight?” Boo cut in. “That’s where you were? I mean, what if it’s dangerous? What if it hurts her?”

“I thought about that,” Stephen said. “But it’s doubtful we could ever find that out. Much like our sight, it may not come up on any kind of examination. I suppose we can schedule a full physical workup…”

But now that Boo had brought it up, this new possibility was going to be on my mind. What if it did hurt me? What if having an internal terminus was like having cancer?

Or what if it made me super healthy?

God, I was tired.

“Stop,” I said, holding up my hand. “Can we just…stop? I’ve had enough medical stuff in the last few weeks, so…just, don’t.”

That ended that part of the conversation and they all looked very uncomfortable. Even among my freaky friends I was a freak.

“Let me make one thing clear,” Stephen said. “Rory is not a weapon. How she uses her ability is entirely up to her.”

“And that’s fine,” Callum said, “but we aren’t police if we have no power to do anything. This is still the problem, even though Rory is a terminus. If she isn’t around, and if she isn’t—don’t take this the wrong way, Rory—willing or able, where does that leave us?”

“It leaves us exactly where we’ve been for the last few weeks,” Boo said. “We can still do our jobs, just without weapons. Regular police don’t carry guns.”

“But they have units with guns if they need them. Don’t they? There are armed response units.”

“Callum is making a valid point,” Stephen said, “but I agree with you, Boo. The squad long predated the terminus. According to what records I have, they didn’t get them until the seventies.”

“Where did they come from?” I asked.

“That’s unclear,” Stephen said, scratching his jawline.

“They must have come from somewhere,” I said.

“They clearly did come from somewhere, but that somewhere isn’t known to us. Diamonds come from a range of places. Africa. India. Russia. Canada.”

“It doesn’t matter where they came from,” Callum said. “We don’t have them now, and we need them. For weeks, I’ve been getting calls. All kinds of problems on the Tube. Trains being delayed, dangerous situations where people could be hurt or even killed.”

“The Tubes ran for years without us zapping anyone,” Boo countered. “They don’t need us to make the Tubes run. And if there are problems, we go and we deal with them. By talking.”

“And if they don’t listen? Was the Ripper going to listen? And whoever comes next?”

“None of this is for tonight,” Stephen said, and there was finality in his tone. “It’s late. I have to take Rory back before anyone misses her. We’ll deal with our procedural problems some other time.”

I said my good-byes. There were more long hugs with Callum and Boo while Stephen stood by the door, keys in hand. And then we were back in the car, going to Wexford.

“So what happens now?” I asked.

“You get on with your life,” he said. “You go back to school.”

I tapped my fingers against the car window.

“You’re saying if there was something out there, something bad, like the Ripper, no one would force me to go after it.”

“The Ripper is gone. Newman is gone.”

“But something like that.”

“It’s very unlikely that there would be something like that, but yes. That’s what I’m saying.”

“But Thorpe would,” I said. “He’d make me.”

“Forget about Thorpe. He’s seen what he needed to see.”

“He didn’t see anything,” I pointed out.

“He saw your reaction. That wasn’t faked. He knew that. Anyway, Thorpe is my problem, not yours. Whatever’s happened to you…it’s up to you how you use it. It has to be your decision.”

“Thorpe could make your life miserable.”

“You’re suggesting my life isn’t already miserable,” he said, with a slightly too weak effort at a smile. I think he was making a joke. It was very hard to tell with Stephen.

We were almost back to Wexford when we stopped at a red light just outside of a pub that was still doing Ripper specials—Bloody Marys (“Jack’s drink of choice”) were two for one. It was all a joke now. People had been murdered, but it didn’t matter. It was just Jack the Ripper, and he was dead now, so it was funny to have Bloody Marys and have your picture taken lying on the ground of the crime scene.

“So,” I said, “all the Ripper stuff. How did that work?”

“What do you mean?”

“How did they keep it all quiet?”

“It wasn’t that difficult,” he said. “No one saw what actually happened, except for us. Only you saw how it all ended.”

“How did they explain the bathroom being smashed up?”

“The assumed a fight went on—a struggle. The attacker must have broken the mirrors and the window.”

“But they said the police chased him,” I said. “They pulled a body out of the water.”

“That was all staged,” he said. “Some cars were sent to chase a potential subject.”

“And the body?”

“A John Doe from the mortuary. They assigned it a name and an identity. It was all done very high up. Most of the people involved thought they were part of an actual chase.”

“But what if people try to write about him?”

“That was all taken care of,” Stephen said. “The story is that he was just a loner—someone who lived on the street. No neighbors. No living relatives. No one to interview. Just a very unfortunate person with a mental condition.”

“And all of the CCTV footage that had no one in it?”

“The footage was all fake. That was proven.”

“No it wasn’t,” I said.

“Well,” Stephen said. “It’s fake now.”

“What about the crack in the floor?” I asked.

“What?”

“How did they explain that? I mean, you can break a window or a mirror in a fight, but you can’t crack a tile floor, can you?”

“You’re telling me that crack wasn’t there before?”

“No,” I said. “It happened that night. It was a big explosion.”

“Well,” he said, “we’re just very lucky you survived.”

We had reached Wexford. He stopped the car at the far end of the cobblestone road.

“I’ll be able to see you all the way to the door from here,” he said. “It should be open. We unlocked the building and had someone stationed there to make sure no one got in until it was secure again. I’ll be here until you get inside.”

It felt like we should have a more meaningful good-bye than that, but I wasn’t sure what to say. I’d already hugged him once tonight.

“Sure,” I said, unfastening my seat belt. “Right. Okay. So, I’ll see you around, or?”

“You can always reach me,” he said. “If you need me.”

“Right. Okay. So…”

I walked up the road alone. The door opened, just as promised, and I looked back down the lane and raised my hand as a final good-bye. I couldn’t really see him—the road was too dark at the end where the car was parked. But it was still there. I could see the headlights, two glowing eyes pointed at me, waiting for me to get to safety.

7

“RIGHT,” MARK SAID, SWITCHING THE LIGHTS OUT IN ART history the next morning, “let’s get started. John Constable, English Romantic painter, lived from 1776 until 1837…”

Art history was a long class—three hours, with two ten-minute breaks that were really more like fifteen minutes, but still. Long. I wrote down the names of paintings and stared at the slides, but my mind was completely elsewhere. It was on the platform at Charing Cross. It was in the car with Stephen and at the flat with Callum and Boo.

I’d felt something last night, aside from nausea. Something real. Something…exciting? Something that made me feel complete again. Plus, Jerome was pressing his leg against mine—not hard. But it was there. John Constable, English Romantic painter, didn’t stand a chance. (Also, for the record, if someone is called a Romantic, it should mean some sexy times, I think. Instead, what it really means is people in puffy shirts who probably had a lot of real-life sexytimes, but produced almost exclusively pictures of hillsides or people in dramatic poses, like pretending to be Ophelia dead in a swamp. I definitely call shenanigans on this.)

We emerged, three hours later, our brains swollen with images of sky and damp and moping. Once we got outside, Jerome swayed side to side a bit, like he was standing on a teetering top.

“What?” I said.

“What were you going to do today?”

“Work,” I said. “I guess…work. Because I’m kind of behind.”

“I have things this afternoon as well, but I was thinking…we could go out? Properly? On a date. Tonight?”

“A date?” I repeated.

I’d never been on a real date. I’d ended up going places with people—guy people—but it was always kind of, well…kind of crap. “Dates” seemed to be something that existed in movies or television shows or a more domesticated past where you were wooed in high school and got married upon graduation and immediately gave birth to ten children. They were not something for people like me. But here I was, quasi-boyfriend saying he wanted to take me on an actual date, and I was just staring at him impassively, like a horse watching a mime pretending to walk against the wind.

“Yes,” I said. “Date. Yes.”

“Okay,” Jerome said. “Good. So, maybe, instead of dinner? We’ll go out?”

“Yeah. Sure.”

“Would you like to go to dinner, or to a film?”

“Sure.”

“Which one?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “Whichever.”

“Okay, well, we can figure it out.”

“Okay,” I said.

“Okay.”

We shuffled apart, nodding.

I was going on a date, a date, a date. I repeated the word in my head as I pressed my finger on the keypad, as I tripped up the steps of Hawthorne. The word beat in time to the creaking of the wood. A date, a date…I shoved open the first fire door and breathed in that strange, clinical carpety smell that lived only between the fire doors…open second fire door…a date. A date with my man. My boy. My guy. Boyfriend? Whatever. My future activity had a word, and that word was date.

Jazza was out, so I had the room to myself. I sat at my desk and looked at my pile of books. I listened to the radiators hiss and clank lightly. I heard people coming back to the hall, doors opening and closing, bits of conversation. All the familiar Wexford noises and smells, and this new one…date.

I was interrupted in my reverie by a knock at the door. I called for the person to come in, and Charlotte appeared and drifted in. I guess this was the first weird thing, because Charlotte did not drift. Charlotte moved from place to place decisively, like a high-speed train. She walked to class with purpose. She walked to dinner with purpose. She walked to the bathroom with purpose and brushed her teeth with purpose and ran her hands through her hair with purpose.

“Hello,” she said.

She sat on Jazza’s bed, drew her knees together, and put her hands on them. She looked at her hands, and then at me. It appeared that we were going to have some kind of talk. I had never had a talk with Charlotte, and I wasn’t sure if I was ready or willing to have a talk with Charlotte. But the one thing I had learned about living at school—you don’t always get a choice in these matters.

“I don’t know if I could have come back,” she said.

“Oh, well,” I said. “You know.”

Charlotte took that empty statement as a profundity and shook her head in understanding. I started to wonder if she was feeling quite right. The Ripper had nailed her in the head with a lamp on the night of my attack.

“Are you okay?” I asked.

“I wasn’t at first,” she said. “I didn’t sleep at all for a week. I was exhausted and crying a lot. I was having anxiety attacks. I’d shake all over, and my thoughts would race. My parents thought they might have to take me out of school for a while…Then I met this amazing woman. She changed everything.”

For one terrible second, I thought Charlotte was going to tell me that after getting hit on the head with a lamp, she now saw ghosts. That would not be funny.

“She’s a therapist.”

“Oh,” I said, sinking in relief. “I have one of those. It didn’t do much.”

“She’s really special, though. She changed my life. She’s the only reason I was able to go on with the term. I genuinely feel better after talking to her. I just came from her office, actually. I feel really good.”

Strangely, I could see how good Charlotte felt. It was something about her eyes, the relaxation in her body.

“She knows about you, and she says you’re welcome to call. She’s a private practitioner, but she doesn’t charge.”

“Doesn’t charge?”

“I think she’s independently wealthy. She only takes clients by referral, and she specifically treats victims of violence. I met her through a friend of Eloise’s.”

The door opened, and Jazza came in, dragging her cello case.

“Oh,” she said, seeing Charlotte sitting on her bed. “Hello…”

Jaz hung by the door, clutching her cello for protection. Charlotte stood slowly and stretched.

“It really is good to have you back,” Charlotte said. “Here. I just wanted you to have her card, in case you needed it.”

There was one toss of the red hair and a nod to Jazza as she let herself out.

“What was that?” Jazza asked.

“The name of her therapist.” I held up the card. Jazza snorted. Actually snorted.

“She’s been quite the victim,” Jazza said. “She’s probably furious you’re back to steal the spotlight.”

It was oddly comforting that the attack had messed someone else up—apparently, much worse than it had messed me up. And yet it was also a little annoying. If anyone had a right to be messed up, it was me. Unless I too was acting like that—seeming wounded at one second, utterly confident in the next, my personality flickering on and off like a yard sale lamp.

“Did she look weird to you?” I asked. “Like, relaxed?”

“I have no idea.” Jazza pulled her cello into the room and tucked it into the corner by her closet. Jazza had time for everyone except Charlotte. There was an old feud there, one that predated my arrival. Charlotte was the full moon that brought out the werejazza.

I looked at the card. Clearly, this woman had talent if she had fixed Charlotte, but in the end, she was just another therapist I couldn’t talk to. I dropped the card into my top desk drawer.

“I have a date tonight,” I said. “An actual date.”

“This seems to surprise you.”

“No.” I reclined back on the bed. “I just…a date. It’s so formal-sounding.”

“Is it formal?”

“I think we’re getting dinner,” I said.

Dinner and…perhaps we could have a redo on the making-out fiasco. I spent a pleasant few minutes visualizing what that might entail. I got to the part where the imaginary hand was just sliding under my imaginary shirt…

Where it encountered my scar. My terrible, nasty, jagged, ugly scar. The imaginary hand withdrew in horror. My actual hand reached up under the bottom of my shirt to see if the scar felt as bad as it looked. It could definitely be felt. What was my boyfriend going to do when he saw my scar? My newly labeled boyfriend, who had only tentatively ventured into that territory anyway. My shirt had never come off. I had no idea when we would get to the shirt-off phase. Maybe now we never would, because we’d both know what was under there, aside from the customary attractions.

“I need to show you something,” I said to Jazza. “And I need you to be honest with me. Can you be honest with me?”

“Of course.”

“No, I mean actually honest.”

I stood up and lifted my shirt, pulling it up to just under my chest, revealing my abdomen. I had grown used to the scar. It had to be a shock to see it for the first time, all Frankensteiny with the hash marks across the cut line where the sutures were made.

“It looks bad,” I said, poking at it to show her. “But it doesn’t hurt anymore.”

“It doesn’t look…that bad. It’s not that bad.”

It was totally that bad. Her pained expression and wide eyes and massive lie told me that. It was time to stop talking about it.

“Actually,” I said, lowering my shirt, “I’ve seen worse scars. I told you about the time my grandma got a questionable boob job in Baton Rouge a few years ago?”

“No?”

“She got the boob job because she had a coupon for it. Twenty percent off. She had a surgery coupon. She got her boobs on sale. Those scars were worse.”

This was a partial lie. My grandma really did get her boob job with a 20 percent off coupon from the local paper. We were pretty horrified when we found out, but we found out pretty late, after the surgery was over and she’d been recovering for two weeks. I don’t think there was any bad scarring, though. That was the part I was lying about.

“They definitely don’t seem real,” I went on. “They don’t move. But they’re real-ish. They’re bigger, and they stick straight out. She calls them ‘my new front porch’ whenever she talks about them, which is a lot. She wears these low-cut tops and says, ‘Just getting some sun on my new front porch.’”

That part was entirely true.

“What I think,” she said, as she repositioned herself and straightened up, “is that you are very brave. And it looks fine. It’s not bad. It’s not. It’s just—a line.”

“But my bikini modeling career is over,” I said. “Unless it’s for pirate bikinis. They don’t mind it if you have a bitchin’ scar when you wear a pirate bikini. That would be amazing. A little skull and crossbones on each boob—”

Jazza held up a hand, possibly because I was saying “boob” too often.

“You don’t have to make jokes,” she said. “Have you been downstairs? To where it happened?”

“I skipped that,” I said.

“Do you want to go now? You and me,” Jazza said, offering her hand. “Together.”

There was something about Jazza Benton that just made the world stable and right. She could rock a sensible sweater and mutter at you in German. I’d missed her face, with her big cheeks and small-animal-of-the-forest eyes.

I went downstairs with her.

The bathroom was at the end of the short hallway, just a few doors down from the common room. Even as we walked just a few feet in its direction, it was like we were in a different world, a world where I descended into somewhere quiet, where my fears lived. The door was new. I’d heard that the last door had been broken down when the police came in, ripped right off the wall. I pushed it open.

The light was on. The bathroom used to have an on-off switch, but it appeared that it would now be illuminated at all times.

There it was. Just a bathroom. The smashed window had been replaced, as had the shattered mirrors. There was a faint tang of fresh paint as well. The crack in the floor was still there, though an attempt had been made to fill it in with some kind of white substance. The spot where I’d been stabbed was over by the sinks. I went over and stood there, running my hand down the wall. I’d slumped here. I’d slid down. I remembered looking around this room and thinking that this was where I was going to die.

But I didn’t.

I walked across the room, to the toilet stall where I’d seen—and accidentally blasted—the woman. I pushed the door open.

There was a toilet. Nothing more.

“Just a bathroom,” I said.

“Just a bathroom,” Jazza repeated.

I looked at the crack in the floor. It was a lot like my scar. The room and I had been broken, and we had a similarly shaped reminder of what had happened to us. And if the Ripper came back, which he wouldn’t, I would blast him into a giant ball of white light and smoke. One brush of my hand, and that was all it would take. I was empowered, literally. That’s what I had to remember. I was bigger and badder than any ghost that crossed my path. That hadn’t occurred to me before. They needed to fear me. I’d never been fearsome before.

“Better?” she said.

“Yeah.” I nodded, giving her the best smile I could manage under the circumstances. “I think so.”

8

THAT EVENING, AFTER JAZZA HAD GONE OUT TO SOME KIND of German language immersion meeting at a pub, I prepared myself for my date. This mostly involved deciding which of my small selection of similar outfits to wear and putting my hair up and taking it down again.

When I was ready (hair up, wearing jeans), I spent fifteen minutes staring out the window, waiting to watch Jerome cross over from Aldshot. I didn’t want to stand outside. It seemed much cooler to come sweeping down the stairs like Scarlett O’Hara in a sweater, with an “am ah late?” (I had noticed that I had one thing going in my favor—my English friends seemed to love it when I amped up the Southern thing. If anyone at home had heard me talking, they would have wondered why I was suddenly talking like someone who lived on a plantation and had servants weaving magnolias into her hair at that very moment. My English friends couldn’t tell the difference between real South and cartoon South, and this, to me, was adorable.)

He appeared at six fifty-five, his curly head bobbing along, his scarf looped casually around his neck. I waited out the five minutes, even though I could see him right below.

“So I was thinking,” he said, rocking back on his heels, “a meal, and…I don’t know. We can go anywhere you like.”

“Where do people go?”

“I have no idea. Do you want food? Are you hungry?”

“I’m always hungry,” I said.

“What kind of food?”

“Whatever you’d like.”

“I’d like whatever,” he said. “Whatever you want to do.”

“Are you hungry?”

“I’m hungry,” he said.

Once we had established that we were both in the mood for food, it took five more minutes to establish that food should be Italian food, and another ten of looking at Jerome’s phone for possible places to obtain said Italian food. The restaurant we’d decided to go to was near Spitalfields Market, which is pretty much where everyone goes on a Saturday night. Every pub was filled to capacity, and people spilled out into the streets. We dodged around a giggling and very drunk band of women wearing fascinators that looked like tiny top hats, except for one in a tiny bridal veil.

The place was very small, with about ten tables. Small restaurants, I realized, were scary. Small restaurants watch you. Small restaurants expect something of you. You have to be a better sort of person, and I wasn’t sure if I was that person yet. They seated us like we were together, which we were. When I was asked if I wanted a glass of wine to start, I laughed out loud, and the guy just looked at me and wandered off. A small plate of bread appeared between us, and the waiter took away our wineglasses in a snatching motion that felt a little judgmental.

I’d been planning on ordering the cheapest or close-to-cheapest thing on the menu, which turned out to be spaghetti and meatballs. Jerome ordered risotto, which just sounded cooler. Mine sounded like food you get for children. Maybe I would get crayons as well.

“How is it so far?” he asked. “Being back?”

“It’s good,” I said.

“Yeah?”

“Yeah,” I said. “Well, I haven’t done any actual work yet, so I guess I’ll see.”

Though I’d talked to Jerome every day, I had never told him that I wasn’t doing any work from school. We never discussed my work from school. It was like my work, or lack thereof, was my dirty little secret—as opposed to the mushy and sometimes vaguely graphic things we’d said to each other. It was my secret shame.

“What about you?” I asked.

“The Oxford and Cambridge UCAS was due back in October. I didn’t apply. For Bristol and Durham, it’s due in January, but…I think I’m going to take a year and try to run my own business, just to see what happens.”

“Business?”

“Tours,” he said. “I started giving Ripper tours when you were away. I didn’t want to say, because…I mean…I didn’t talk about you. There were just so many people around, all the time. And they wanted tours of the area, so…”

“It’s okay,” I said. And it was okay. Jerome had been obsessed with the Ripper from the start.

“What I was thinking,” he said, “was that I could stay in London for my gap year and do walking tours and freelance work. My uncle has a spare room in his house in Islington he’ll let me stay in. I could make all the money I need to pay the university fees. It’s not the most exciting gap year, but it will keep me from being destitute. What about you?”

“I guess…I go home, and…”

At this point, I was interrupted by the arrival of a plate that contained very little spaghetti and three suggestively large meatballs.

College applications. I was supposed to start collecting those. I was supposed to have taken the SAT at a remote testing center in November. I was supposed to start asking for recommendation letters. A lot of things hadn’t happened. The gaping hole called “my future” gaped a bit more.

Maybe I would go home and just repeat school. Maybe I would work at the grocery store for Miss Gina and save up money for a year, like Jerome was doing. Maybe I’d be assimilated back into the crazy quilt that was Bénouville, Louisiana, and never, ever, ever leave again. It was, after all, a swamp. And swamps suck people in.

“I’m freestyling it a little right now,” I said, poking at my spaghetti.

The waiter futzed around us, moving our bread basket and hovering pointlessly, demanding updates on our enjoyment levels while we had mouthfuls of food. If dates were like this, then dates were kind of weird. I felt like every move I made was being watched. I think Jerome felt equally uncomfortable, so we skipped dessert, paid up, and decided to take a walk around the market. Then we looped through the crowded streets, hand in hand. Jerome was talking about some things going on in his building, and it was nice just to listen for a change.

We took the long way back to school, walking down Bishopsgate, through the throngs of people coming in and out of Liverpool Street station. We turned onto Artillery Lane, which is a very narrow, very Dickensian street running along the Wexford campus. There was no one around, and this was about as close as we could get to Wexford without actually being back on the grounds. We both came to a stop by a little recessed spot next to one of the buildings, a stump of an alley off of the alley where they kept the trash bins. A sub-alley used for trash is also a fine spot to kiss. I mean, people talk about the top of the Eiffel Tower and tropical beaches at sunset—but those places sound demanding, like they expect something from you. That’s just too much backdrop. A dark London trash alley is real privacy, and it doesn’t judge you. It’s probably just glad that you’re there to kiss, because those alleys probably see far more unpleasant things on a nightly basis. The small pile of empty vodka bottles and discarded T-shirt and single sneaker in the darkest corner spoke to that.

I leaned up against the wall, feeling the cold of the bricks against the back of my neck. Jerome brushed my hair back from my face, because the wind had kicked up a bit and blown a few strands into my mouth. (Oh, the ongoing love affair between hair and mouths. Hair always goes for the mouth. The mouth opens, and hair says, “I’m going in! I’m going in!” like a manic cave diver.)

“Is this all right?” he asked. He was using that very low, somewhat husky universal kissing voice.

“Huh?” I said, because I am sexy.

“This,” he said. “Are you…all right?”

“Oh. Yeah. No. Yes, I mean, fine. I’m fine. We can do this.”

Now it was awkward. Never get stabbed—it makes everything awkward.

He leaned in slowly, and I found myself caught somewhere between two very different emotions. One was the gushy warmth and general excitement, the tingling. And the other was the bald awareness that kissing is kind of weird. The half closing of the eyes. The O shape of the mouth. Seeing that little bit of the inside of the lips when someone purses in preparation for the kiss.

He stopped just short of my face.

“This isn’t all right,” he said.

“It is,” I said. “It is. Come here.”

I pulled him forward and pressed his mouth to mine. I think he liked the forcefulness of it—although maybe I was a bit too forceful, because I felt the delicate clink of tooth on tooth. After a moment or two, I started to relax and closed my eyes fully, sliding my hand up into his hair, feeling the general warmth of the whole thing. It was all going well until a couple of guys from Jerome’s building passed by and started to snicker, and then one of them interrupted to say his door handle was broken.

“I suppose we should get back,” he said.

On the way to Wexford, we passed the local pub, the Royal Gunpowder. The sidewalk surrounding the pub was covered in flowers and candles stuck into liquor bottles.

“What’s all that?” I said.

“Oh. Yeah. That happened after you left.”

“What happened?”

“One of the staff murdered the owner,” he said.

“There was a murder next to Wexford?”

“It’s not connected. The guy who did it had a drug problem. The press made a big deal about it because of the Ripper stuff and the timing, but it was just one of those things.”

“Just one of those things” is probably not the best way to describe a murder, but I knew where he was coming from and what he was trying to do. A murder around the corner was freaky and unwelcome. Julia had mentioned that I might hear about other violent things on the news and imagine connections or have unpleasant memories. But I understood—these things do happen. They’re not good, but they’re also not all connected. I was calm about it.

I think. I may have walked away kind of quickly, but aside from that, I was calm about it.

We could have stayed out a bit longer; it wasn’t curfew yet. But the night felt over. Going to the restaurant and talking—that had been exhausting. The kiss had been good while it lasted, but it had taken a bit of effort to get it going. And we’d concluded the night by walking past a murder scene. It was jimjam time for Rory.

We had a quick kiss in front of Hawthorne—not a full-on one, but enough to catch the attention of anyone around. It was a statement kiss. Then I let myself back in and took the creaking steps back upstairs. Jazza was still out making Teutonic merriment, so I had the room to myself for a little bit. I put on my pajamas and tucked myself into bed.

Why had tonight been so weird?

I had a very uncomfortable thought—I wasn’t actually sure why I liked Jerome, aside from the fact that he liked me. And he was English. And he was cute. Mostly cute? What was “cute”?

His head was kind of large.

Where did that thought even come from? By what standard was I supposed to judge? His head was fine. Did looks matter, anyway? I liked making out with him. I liked that we were together, that people saw us together. I liked the general feeling of it all.

Maybe that’s what relationships were.

I was overthinking this. I hadn’t accomplished much in my time with Julia, but she had told me that I might react weirdly in “emotionally and physically intimate situations.” Things might feel weird at first. All things considered, I was doing well. (Also, I had clearly been paying a lot of attention to what Julia said. She had gotten in my head.)

I got out of bed and trundled next door. Gaenor and Angela were around. Gaenor and Angela were easily the two loudest people on the hall, possibly the building. Possibly the world. They never minded me coming into their room and shooting the breeze for a while. That’s how I would dispel the creeping darkness—be normal.

Just be normal. That’s all I had to do.

9

WHEN I WOKE UP ON SUNDAY, JAZZA WAS GONE. THIS was because I woke up at noon.

At home, I’d been getting up at noon on the weekends, but I’d never done that at Wexford. Nobody did, unless they were sick. There was something unspeakably decadent about it. I felt wanton, like I should stroll around Wexford in the creepy silky-polyester robe my grandmother had bought me for my birthday. My grandmother basically wears whatever the Disney star of the moment is wearing, and she tends to buy me matching items. These things include the aforementioned silky robes, matching pajama sets of shorty-shorts and tank tops, see-through lace body suits, and fishnets. I hadn’t brought that robe to Wexford, because I didn’t think the good people of England really needed to see the poly-silk outline of my thighs as I shuffled along in the morning.

Also, I realized I was alone yet again. Before—the great before, which seemed so long ago and so very different from the now—I never felt like I had any privacy. There was always someone else in the room. Often Jazza, and definitely Boo, who shadowed me everywhere I went. But now Jazza was gone a lot. It was the week before exams, after all, and her calendar was full of study groups and rehearsals. Room 27 was all mine. It was big and lonely and cold. I put on my fleece, which served as my bathrobe, my jacket, and my safety blanket.

As I walked down the hall, I noticed how quiet it was. A few people had their doors cracked open, and when I peered inside, I saw them hard at work, bent over computers and books. I was the only one swanning down the hall, freshly awake. I showered and dressed and tried to slide into the rhythm everyone else had set. I left the door open just a crack and settled in at my desk. (The slightly open door was to invite visitors, and also I felt I was more likely to work if everyone could see me.)

And I did work. I did some reading. I did a little French. I did a few problem sets.

I paused when I noticed it had gotten darker—not dark, but there was a dim quality to the daylight, a low fade made worse by the overcast sky. Three in the afternoon, and already it seemed like dusk. I reviewed what I had accomplished, thumbing through pages read and counting up assignments completed. I had done reasonably well, better than anything I had done in previous weeks, but it wasn’t even in spitting distance of enough.

It dawned on me, perfectly and clearly, that I was going to fail everything. I’d known this. I’d even said it out loud. But I’d never really breathed that fact in. Smelled it. Tasted it.

This was failure. Doing all you could and yet knowing that it just wasn’t going to cut it.

I shut my door to panic alone.

Why was I here? They’d brought me back, and now what was I supposed to do? I felt like I was faking all of this, like I was playing the part of a student. I had the costume and the props, but I didn’t really belong here. I’d pinned notes on the stupid corkboard backing of my desk, and I’d highlighted things…But it was all so meaningless.

For about an hour, I had an overwhelming urge to grab my bag, stuff in a few things, and take the next train to Bristol. I could be back on my parents’ couch that night if I got moving. I could admit that I wasn’t ready for this, that the semester was a wash. My parents would be thrilled, I was sure. Not about the semester being a wash—but certainly about having me back where they could keep me safe and sound. It would be so easy to do. The very idea made me warm inside. It was okay to give up. I’d been brave. Everyone would say so.

And yet…even as I opened a dresser drawer and figured out which things I would take with me in this hypothetical scenario, I remembered the problem.

There would still be ghosts.

I would still have a future.

I would still go back to school eventually. You can’t curl up on the sofa and deny life forever. Life is always going to be a series of ouch-making moments, and the question was, was I going to go all fetal position, or was I going to woman up? I went into fetal position on the bed to think about this. Fetal position turned out to be very comfortable.

Someone had to help me.

I slithered to the end of the bed and stretched my arm as far as I could to reach around in the top drawer of my desk and find that business card. Jane Quaint. The therapist who had changed Charlotte into the shiny New Charlotte. The one who made her unafraid of school and life. I flicked the card with my nail a few times and rubbed the edge under my chin. I’d had a therapist, and that had been a pointless exercise. A time-suck. A total pain in the ass. But this woman had done some kind of magic with Charlotte, and now Charlotte was fully functional. Maybe she could make me fully functional.

The gloom accumulated outside. God. So dark. So early. My books, so thick. My confusion, so total.

It couldn’t hurt to call.

I would call.

Now. I would call now.

English phones have a double ring that I still found strange and charming, kind of like the chirping croak of a little frog. The call was on its third ring-ring and I was just about to hang up when a surprisingly deep yet clearly female voice answered.

“Hi,” I said. “My name is Rory, and—”

“From Wexford?” said the woman.

“Oh. Yeah.”

“I know who you are, dear. A friend of Charlotte’s, yes?”

That might have been stretching things a bit, but I wasn’t going to split hairs.

“Right,” I said.

“Well, I’m very glad you’ve called. I was hoping you would.”

“You were?”

“It was no small thing you went through,” she said. “And from the tone in your voice, it sounds like you aren’t having the best day.”

I cleared my throat. “No,” I said. “I guess not.”

“Why don’t you pop round?”

“What, now?”

“Why not?” she said. “It’s a quiet Sunday around here. Why don’t you pop round, and we’ll have a nice chat?”

I could see, even from this brief exchange, what Charlotte was talking about. Julia was nice, but she was clinical. When you spoke to her, she was clear and firm. You didn’t “pop round” to Julia’s. You had an exact time, to the minute. This Jane sounded more like a friend. She gave me an address in Chelsea, and when I asked her what Tube stop that was, she was dismissive.

“Oh, just get in a taxi, dear. I’ll pay for it when it arrives.”

“What…really?”

“Really. Just come over now. I have some time.”

I regretted making the call already. I had agreed to see this strange woman, and now I really had to go. She was even paying for my ride, which was just…incredibly odd. But health stuff was different in England. Well, I’d done it. I’d called, and now I had to go see this woman. I told myself that doing something was better than having this dithering breakdown.

While I was in the cab, winding across London, it began to pour rain. Chelsea was on the west side of the city, far, far from Wexford. And London is a very sinuous place. I don’t think there is a straight line in the entire metropolitan area. Water ran down the cab windows, so much that I couldn’t even see where we were. I just caught the glint of signs and the red of buses. By the time the cab stopped, the downpour was so fierce, I wasn’t sure how I was going to make it from the curb to the house. This is why English people do not leave home without umbrellas. I was an idiot.

The cab ride came to thirty-six pounds. That was an incredible amount of money to have to pay for a ride across town, and I felt a twang of panic. I didn’t have that much on me. I’d gotten in this cab on the word of some person on the other end of a phone. I looked at the house, wondering what happened now. The house that was set back from the road and gently guarded by a brick wall with a black iron gate. Through this gate came a woman carrying an industrial-sized umbrella. I presumed this was Jane, as she went right to the front window of the car. As she spoke to the driver and gave him the fare, I heard her voice. This was Jane.

Jane Quaint looked like she was somewhere around sixty. Her hair was a furious orange-red, which stood out in stark contrast to her very pale, very delicate skin. The color couldn’t have been natural—that kind of pulsating orange rarely exists outside of fruit and tropical birds. She had on an outfit that consisted of many wraps and folds and layers of fine gray wool that looped around and around from about five different directions. I couldn’t tell if it was a shawl or a sweater or a dress. It bagged down to the knees, where it seemed to turn into pants. The whole thing was bound together at her right shoulder by a long silver pin in the shape of a twisted arrow.

I opened the door carefully as Jane reached over, making room for me under her umbrella.

“Wretched day,” she said. “Come inside. Let’s get ourselves out of this.”

The gate surrounded a small square of brick-paved ground, with a few small potted trees. The house was certainly large by London standards—three stories high, three windows across. It was completely detached, an impressive pile of bricks with a porticoed entryway.

Jane set her umbrella in a stand in the large entry hallway, which was very dark. It was papered in a rich black wallpaper with a recurring fan pattern in metallic gold. All the decorations were generally dark, lots of black with gold accents. I fixed my eye on a life-sized porcelain leopard in the corner, colored silver and black.

“I’m still very fond of the tastes of my youth,” she explained. “I was a bit of a rock-and-roller back then. After that phase was over, I went into psychology. But I kept the decor. I find if you keep things, they tend to come back into style eventually.”

“I like it,” I said.

“That’s very kind. One friend of mine describes it as looking like a Victorian brothel on Mars. I’ve always found that description rather pleasing. Do come through to the kitchen. I think we need a cup of tea.”

The house was very warm, which I appreciated. And the kitchen was warmer still, and huge. This room was not black. Unlike the sharply Deco feel of the hall, this was a cheerful green, with a big farm table and lots of plates on display. Jane busied herself with the kettle, and I sat on a stool and tried to figure out how to deal with the most awkward part of this entire affair. I decided I just had to ask.

“Charlotte said, about paying you—”

“I don’t charge,” she said, cutting me off. “I’m a woman of independent means, and I do this because it’s my calling. If you can afford to provide a service to society, you should do so. That’s what I think. Now. Tea or coffee?”

“Coffee?”

“Right, then. Oh, and here…”

She indicated the counter by the window, on which there were several plastic containers of what looked like baked goods. Many, many baked goods.

“One of my clients is a baker,” she said. “I don’t accept money, but some people bring things, little presents. She always makes sure I’m fully supplied with baked goods. I hope you’re not one of these girls who doesn’t eat.”

“Oh, I eat.”

“I’m glad to hear it. There’s a reason they call it comfort food. I’m not saying you should eat these sorts of things all the time, but food does provide a bit of comfort. And if you’re having a bad day, a brownie might be just what you need. Give yourself a little kindness and perk up the old blood sugar. Here you go.”

She presented me with a brownie on a beautiful little china plate in a rose and white willow pattern.

“Have a taste of that,” she said. “Angela’s quite good. She uses all kinds of exotic things in her baking, curry powder, tea, chilies, herbs. Things you’d never think should go into baked goods. She’s frightfully clever with that sort of thing. I think she’s going to be on a baking show on television…must remember to look out for that.”

She filled a tray with coffee- and tea-making equipment—proper loose tea for herself, and a fancy single-serve French press for me.

“All right,” she said, picking up the tray. “Come this way. And could you get the door?”

She led me through a set of double doors. Unlike the all-black room, this room was white and silver, absolutely stark. There was a fuzzy white rug, white leather chairs, a white sofa. The walls here were bare except for a few diplomas. I could make out the names of Oxford University and King’s College. At one end of the rug was a gleaming silver ball chair, like a big egg that you could climb inside. A cocoon. A cocoon was precisely what I wanted right now.

“Go ahead,” she said, nodding to the chair. “People love sitting in it.”

She took a seat on the sofa and poured herself a cup of tea.

“Right, then,” she said. “I’ll tell you what I know about you, and you can tell me the rest. I know your name is Aurora, or Rory, and I know you were stalked and stabbed by the Ripper.”

“That’s me,” I said.

“And I imagine people have been asking you a lot about how that makes you feel. I can guess at that—I think it makes you feel not good. But looking at you, you seem to be someone who’s gotten on with things.”

“I do?”

“Well, you returned to your school, where I’ve heard—in the most conversational terms—that you seem to be getting on very well with things. Charlotte thinks very highly of you.”

“She does?”

“Absolutely.”

I took another big bite of the brownie.

“The thing is,” I said, “I’ve had therapy before, and I didn’t really…I don’t really like talking about the attack.”

“Understandable. But I’m sure you know that talking about it is often the way of dealing with it and processing it?”

“I know that. But…I can’t.”

Julia would have latched on to that and dug in, mining her way into my soul. But Jane shrugged, took off her shoes, and tucked her feet under her on the sofa.

“Some people want to talk about what happened to them, to break it down bit by bit. Other people do not. Why don’t we just talk about how things have been going since your return? We can talk about whatever you like. Why did you ring today?”

“I was doing homework and studying,” I said. “And I realized I was dead.”

“Dead might be overstating the case.”

“Not really,” I said.

“Why don’t you tell me about it?”

So, I did. I told her about school and having all my assignments in Bristol but never looking at them. I told her how I had piled my books up and how I had kind of felt nothing about them for a while, and then all of a sudden, I felt everything about them. I told her my fears of falling behind and generally not being a part of Wexford. And if I fell behind at school, I would have no place in the world, and how my future seemed so blurry to me right now, like I was driving in heavy rain. I might be on the right path, but more likely I was heading for a wall or into a rushing river.

I told her I was homesick, but had no desire to go home. I told her I was excited about having a boyfriend, but sometimes I didn’t even know why I liked him.

God, I talked a lot. Even for me, I talked a lot. I saw what Charlotte meant by feeling better around Jane—you just felt like you could say things around her. And she wasn’t checking a clock. She just listened. She didn’t try to get me on any track or on any subject. She only stopped me when I said, “I wish I was normal.”

“Let me say this…” Jane leaned forward and adjusted her long-empty tea cup. “There is no normal. I’ve never met a normal person. The concept is flawed. It implies that there is only one way people are supposed to be, and that can’t possibly be true. Human experience is far too varied.”

“But I’ve met normal people,” I said. “I swear I have.”

“You’ve met people who get on well with life, and some of the people who get on with life with the most skill are far from what most people would call normal. So I never worry about normal. I do find that there are generally two types of people, though—there are people who have seen death up close and people who have not. People who survive, people like us—”

“Like us?”

“Oh, yes.” She nodded. “I’m like you. I’ve gotten close to death as well. That’s why I’m here. That’s why I do what I do. Because I know.”

She settled herself back in the sofa a bit and adjusted the folds of her complicated outfit.

“Where I grew up, in Yorkshire, there was a man who lived down the road from us who ran a television repair shop. I never liked him. I always felt like he was looking at me strangely when I walked past. I never actually thought there was something wrong with him, just that I didn’t like the feeling I got when he looked at me. One night, around this time of year, it was late, and I was walking back from a friend’s house. I took a shortcut across a bit of field. That sort of thing never worried me. Nothing bad happened in our village. Then I realized I wasn’t alone. He was walking behind me. I asked him what he was doing. He said he’d seen me and followed because he wanted to make sure I got home safely. And I think I knew then. I think I knew that if someone follows you at a few paces, you’re in trouble. It’s our animal instinct. When I heard him speed up, I ran. There were woods on the edge of the field, and I went for those. He overtook me.

“I’ll tell you, he didn’t expect me to fight like I did. There was a thick bit of downed tree branch on the ground, and I picked it up and gave him a right old thumping. I’ll never forget it, because the moon was so bright that night, and I was beating a man with a tree branch, using a strength I didn’t even know I had. I almost had him, too. But he managed to get the branch away from me. I ran and started screaming. The other houses were fairly far, but I think my scream must have carried over those fields. It certainly gave the sheep a start.”

Time was moving very strangely. My absorption in her story was total. It was like I was there. I knew what it was like to run across that field in the moonlight.

“Oh, he hit me good,” she said. “Knocked me right on the back of the head. I was quite dazed. I think he was in a panic by then, because he was swearing and panting for breath. He dragged me across the field, through the mud and the dung, then he gave me another good whack and rolled me into the small pond there, the one the animals drank from. It was only a few feet deep, but that was deep enough. I was unconscious for a few moments, I think, but some part of me said, ‘Stay awake.’ And I did. I fought, and I stayed awake. I was a good swimmer, and I could do a dead man’s float, so that’s what I did. I made him think I was dead. He ran off in terror, and I pulled myself out of that water and fell on the grass, and I looked up at the sky…and everything was different. After that, I felt like I had two lives. There was the me I had been before the attack, the one people knew and wanted to relate to. The one people wanted to comfort and fix. And there was another me, a hidden me that no one ever saw. There was a me who had tasted death. That me knew things other people didn’t know. Do you know this feeling?”

I could only nod. There was a gentle throbbing in my mind—I needed to get back. It was getting late.

“I should really go,” I said. “I…I feel better now.”

“I’m glad,” she said.

Jane walked me to the door. The rain had slowed to a light drizzle, and the sky was dark and bright. The streetlights glimmered and refracted the light. London was beautiful, it really was. And it smelled so clean after the rain.

“I’d like to speak again,” she said. “I have a policy. Once I’ve taken someone on as a client, I make myself available. You can always come here if you’re having a bad day.”

“Thanks,” I said.

“I mean it. I hope to see you again. Take a cab back.”

She put two twenty-pound notes in my hand.

“I can’t,” I said. “You don’t have to.”

“I know I don’t have to, Rory. I want to.” She put her hand on my shoulder. “Let me tell you one more thing. After the night of my attack, I was never the same, but in a good way. I left home. I came to London. I did the things I dreamed of doing. I met rock stars. I met wonderful people. I’ve had a wonderful life. And all because on that night, in that field, I saw something very powerful. I felt something very powerful. I survived. And so did you. What most people will never tell you, or might never understand, is that what happened to us can have a very positive effect. It can make us strong.”

A strange thing happened as I walked away from Jane’s house—I was finally thinking clearly. I could see what Charlotte meant. Jane knew how to fix people. Now that I’d talked through some of my issues, I’d blown the dust and garbage out of my brain and I could think for once. I could smell the rain, heavy with iron. The cold woke me, but it didn’t sting. My breath puffed out in front of me in a great white plume, and I laughed. It was like I was breathing ghosts. I wasn’t in the land of long highways and big box stores and humid, endless summers. I was in London, a city of stone and rain and magic. I understood, for instance, why they liked red so much. The red buses, telephone booths, and postboxes were a violent shock against the grays of the sky and stone. Red was blood and beating hearts.

And I was strong.

10

THE NEXT MORNING WAS THE WETTEST I HAD EVER SEEN IN my life, and I’ve been through a few hurricanes. I don’t know if there is actually more rain here in England, or if it was just that the rain seemed to be so deliberately annoying. Every drop hit the window with a peevish “Am I bothering you? Does this make you cold and wet? Oh, sorry.” The square was now a mud pool, and the cobblestones were slick, so I almost killed myself about six times just getting to class.

My first class was further maths. Further maths had gone further into some incomprehensible zone of mathyness. From there, French, where I discovered that my class had started reading a novel. A novel. In French. Not only hadn’t I started the novel—I didn’t have the novel. So I sat there while everyone else went through a book I didn’t own. Gaenor sat next to me and shared her copy, but this wasn’t much help. I hadn’t read the story so far, and I couldn’t translate fast enough without a dictionary. I sometimes drift a bit in class on the best of days, but today I was tired, it was raining, and people were reading something I didn’t understand. The words oozed together on the page, and the rhythm of the rain beat in my head. The room was so warm…

I woke when Gaenor nudged her elbow into my side. She actually nailed me right in scar territory, and I think she realized that, because she clapped a hand over her mouth. It was fine—it didn’t hurt me. Our teacher was looking directly at us. She had to have seen. I rubbed at my mouth and tried to act like that had never happened. Maybe my eyes had never closed.

Who was I kidding? I’d been out.

“Feeling all right?” Madame Loos asked at the end of class.

“I had to…um, painkiller,” I said. “I had to take one. I’m sorry.”

I was such a liar. It was disturbing how quickly it came. But painkiller was the magic word. I got a terse nod, and nothing more was said. No one was going to ask stabby girl about her painkillers.

Then I went to English literature and had the same experience all over again. I was so far behind in all the reading, I couldn’t get any of the references. I thumbed through the anthology that was our main textbook and counted how many pages I seemed to be behind. It looked to be about 150 pages. There was only one solution: I would have to read. I would have to read and read and read until my eyes went dry. Because reading essays and poetry written in 1770 is not quite the same as blowing your way through a novel written in the last few years. It requires more concentration, more stopping to figure out what they’re talking about.

So I nervously doodled a picture of a horse farting a rainbow and tried to look deep in thought. I was going to have to start drinking a lot more coffee. All day, every day.

What was strange, though, was that I really did feel better about my general situation. Jane had done something. The facts had not changed, but my feelings toward them were more positive. So I was tired and behind. Big deal. I had survived. I was getting on with things. I would take my laptop and drink coffee and embed things into my brain. Coffee was supposed to make you smart. And I had the afternoon to work. You could do a lot in an afternoon if you put your mind to it.

I walked down Artillery Lane on my way to get the coffee. I paused by the Royal Gunpowder and looked at the various tributes that had been left to the dead man. There were bottles, but there were also notes and some dead and dying flowers mixed in with a few fresh ones. Just inside the window, facing out to the street, was a photograph of a man. He looked middle-aged, big and friendly, with a very red face. There was an unlit votive candle next to the picture. On the brick wall, just under the window, someone had written in what looked like black Sharpie JUSTICE FOR CHARLIE.

The rain picked up a bit, and I hurried along so my computer wouldn’t get wet. It was in my bag, and I was under an umbrella, but I always get paranoid about things like that. Once I was safely in the coffee shop with a large cup in front of me, I logged on to their Wi-Fi and decided to look up some articles about what happened at the Royal Gunpowder. There were plenty of these to choose from.

England has some pretty seedy newspapers, and there were several headlines like this:

PUB OWNER PAYS PRICE FOR CHARITY

Charles Strong knew about the dangers of drink. A recovered alcoholic, fifteen years sober, he managed to maintain his pub without touching a drop of his wares. “He believed that the pub was the centre of the community,” says daughter-in-law Deborah Strong. “It didn’t matter that he didn’t drink. He was there for the customers. He was there for the people.”

But Charles never forgot what it was like to recover from an addiction. He made it a policy to hire people in recovery, to give them a chance to get back into the working world. He was proud of his employees, many of whom went on to other jobs. But it may have been Charles’s altruistic nature that caused his death. On the morning of 11 November, Charles was beaten to death with a hammer by his employee, Sam Worth, a former drug addict with a history of violence. Worth called the police and led them to his employer’s body. Worth claimed innocence at the scene but, in the face of overwhelming evidence, changed his plea to guilty. He has offered no explanation for his actions. No motive has been determined, but the suspicion is that it was an argument about money.

All of this has come as a shock to an area of East London still reeling from the Ripper murders. Only two days before the death of Charles Strong, a student at the Wexford School was attacked on school property, just one street away from the Royal Gunpowder. The Metropolitan Police have increased their presence in the area. A Met spokeswoman offered this comment: “While these two unfortunate events are unconnected…”

The BBC offered something a little less sensational in tone.

NO MOTIVE IN PUB SLAYING

Police are still searching for a motive in the murder of Charles Strong, 56, owner of the Royal Gunpowder public house. Strong was murdered on 11 November by one of his employees, bartender Samuel Worth, 32, of Bethnal Green. Worth had previously been convicted for GBH and possession of narcotics, but had been clean and sober for over a year. There was no known argument between the two men, and police have found no evidence of a criminal motive in the attack.

Worth is currently under observation at the Royal Bethlehem Hospital following a suicide attempt. Worth initially denied any role in the murder, but changed his plea in custody. He is now being evaluated to determine whether or not he is fit to stand trial…

When Jerome had explained it, it sounded much more straightforward: a man had killed his boss. These articles painted a slightly different story. A man killed his boss with a hammer for no apparent reason. Maybe I was a little paranoid, but I knew things now—I knew, for instance, that an entirely fake story had been built around the Ripper to explain the whole thing away. And sure, maybe this guy was just unstable. But…two days after the Ripper and just around the corner from Wexford? What were the chances? London was a big and bustling place, but people generally didn’t go around murdering each other at rates like this.

I took Artillery Lane on the way back, stopping in front of the pub. I walked around the two exposed edges of the building. The pub was closed for business and dark inside. I peered in the windows, but there was nothing other than tables and chairs and a bar all waiting in the dark. Such an ordinary place, too. Table tents advertising a drink special, a trivia machine in the corner, quietly waiting for a player.

As I made my way back around to look at the photograph in the window, something on the ground caught my eye. I knelt down and pushed some of the flowers and bottles away, revealing the edge of the building and the sidewalk.

A hairline crack ran across the sidewalk and butted into the side of the building. The crack was narrow near the street and widened as it hit the wall. I positioned myself against the wall and turned in the direction it pointed, just across the street, slightly to the right. There was another building in the way, but there was no mistaking it.

The crack pointed right toward Hawthorne.

A crack in the sidewalk is nothing to get excited about. London is full of cracks. It’s got a lot of sidewalk. It’s old. But that creepy old rhyme kept running through my head, “Step on a crack, break your mother’s back…” (Who even thought of that? Why would stepping on a crack break anyone’s back? Why specifically your mom’s? Was it an early, failed attempt at a “your mom” joke?)

But there was a crack in the sidewalk, and there was a crack in the bathroom floor.

I thought about it all night. I zoned throughout all of dinner, excusing myself early to walk back around the corner to the Royal Gunpowder afterward. It was too dark to see the crack now, but a sign had appeared in the window saying REOPENING TOMORROW LUNCHTIME.

I got my phone out of my pocket. My finger hovered over Stephen’s number, which was now safely back in my phone after he had texted me. I was just about to press the button to call, when my brain played out the conversation as it was likely to go. “I just want you to know? There’s a crack? In the sidewalk?” After the awkward silence, he would probably say something like, “I see. Well, thank you for informing me.”

Yes, the crack in the bathroom floor had appeared the night of the explosion, because there had been an explosion. Or a power surge. Whatever it was, it had broken glass. Sure, it takes a bit more force than that to crack a tile floor, but…in any case, the crack in the sidewalk had probably been there already. I was making connections where there were none, and to what end? So what if there was a crack?

If I called Stephen with this, I would look like an idiot. And that was unacceptable.

I put the phone away.

I may have mentioned that when I get an idea in my head, I sometimes can’t let it go.

I do try. If it really seems to be pointless or bad for me, I try to shake it loose—but these ideas, they cling. It’s like I’m shackled to them with an iron chain. They rattle along behind me, dragging against the ground, always reminding me of their presence. The crack, the crack, the crack. Step on a crack, break your mother’s back.

It haunted me all through Wednesday, distracting me in class (not that difficult, to be fair). I considered going over to the library to talk to Alistair about it, but then I remembered how I’d almost killed him the last time I was there, purely by accident. Maybe it was best to avoid him until I got this new little trick of mine under some kind of control.

Why was I so hesitant to call Stephen? Who cared if he thought it was dumb?

I sat at my desk in my room that afternoon, puzzling this over until dinner, accomplishing nothing. It occurred to me only right before it was time to go to the refractory that I didn’t have to tell Stephen, but Callum and Boo had also put their numbers into my phone.

Callum would like to go out, do a little investigating. Callum would come out in a second. He wouldn’t even ask why. Why did I always think Stephen had to be called?

So I texted him.

Want to come out and play tonight?

I heard nothing back, even though I stared at my phone for fifteen minutes. I went back to my room and sat at my desk and tried to do some more problem sets for maths, but I kept checking and checking. Dinner came, and there was still no answer. I found it hard to engage in conversation. It didn’t help that much of the conversation around me was about exams, and I did not want to talk about exams. They started this time next week, and everyone was beginning to lose it a little. My normally cool and in-control friends were fraying around the edges. People were starting to look sleepless and get snappy. Doors slammed with regularity. And here, at dinner, people were talking, but there was a moodiness. Some people ate three helpings, while others could barely eat at all. Some people studied as they ate.

I just ate. And waited. My phone buzzed right as I was getting up for dessert.

Was underground, couldn’t reply. Does that mean what I think it means? I’m not too far from you. Liverpool Street? How about 7:15?

That was only twenty minutes from now. I typed a quick OK and put my phone away.

11

“I’M NOT GOING TO LIE,” CALLUM SAID. “I AM VERY, VERY HAPPY right now.”

I met Callum just inside the station. Making my escape from dinner and explaining where I was going—that had required a little bit of fast thinking. I’d said I needed to go to Boots, and Jazza said she would come with me, so then I had to say that I was going to call my parents on the way and have a long talk. And I did give my parents a very quick call as I ran over, just to make myself a little less of a liar.

“I have a whole list of you-know-whats that need dealing with,” Callum said. “Let’s go make boom booms.”

“Okay,” I said, holding up my hands. “But first there’s something I have to show you.”

I led Callum back down Artillery Lane to the Royal Gunpowder.

“Did you hear about the man who was murdered here?” I asked.

“Oh, yeah. This was big news. The hammer murder. Very nasty.”

“Just a few days after the Ripper attacked me. It’s so close to my building.” I pointed in the direction of Hawthorne. “I mean, that’s, like, yards. Or something. Or a few hundred feet. It’s not far. And it happened just two days after the Ripper. And there’s a crack. Look!”

I had to explain my crack theory. Callum listened, putting his hands in the pockets of his jacket and rocking back on his heels a bit.

“Trust me,” he said, “I’d be thrilled if that was one for us. But that’s just a straight-up murder. A man killed his boss. He confessed.”

“But the crack—”

“This is London,” he said. “We have a lot of cracks in a lot of pavements.”

“But there is also a crack in the floor of the bathroom. And this crack…Look, it looks kind of like it’s coming from the direction of Hawthorne.”

“Is it a new crack?”

“I have no idea,” I said. “But isn’t it weird?”

“If the guy hadn’t confessed, then maybe?” Callum said apologetically. “But he did. They know he did it. He had blood all over him. He’d done this kind of thing before. We can go in and look, if you want.”

“It opens for business tomorrow. But maybe we could get in?”

“That’s breaking and entering,” he said. “I like where you’re going with this, but I really think maybe this isn’t one to worry about.”

“But don’t you think…”

“Look,” he said, not unkindly, “when you first get your sight, it’s hard to understand it, yeah? Like I got mine after getting a bad shock with a live wire in a puddle, and I was terrified of electricity and puddles…puddles. Do you know how hard it is to walk around and be scared of puddles?”

Callum didn’t look like someone who would be scared of anything. Maybe it’s a bad assumption to think that just because people have broad shoulders and big muscular arms that they aren’t afraid of things.

“The Ripper stuff, it was really bad. And you went through a lot, so…I’m just saying. You can make yourself crazy thinking that everything has a meaning, or that it could happen again. Like, I knew I wasn’t going to get electrocuted again, but it took over a year before I wasn’t terrified of everything…like using my phone if it started to rain. I thought all water, all electricity wanted to kill me.”

I could see what he was saying. I could make myself sick thinking that all these things had significance.

“I’m not saying it’s not weird that someone was killed here,” he went on, “but people were tense, yeah? The Ripper scared people. And this guy who killed his boss was on all kinds of drugs. But they know he did it, so don’t let it scare you. We can do some real work, yeah? I got a whole list of things I want to deal with, so let’s go do it.”

Since I had asked Callum to come out with me, it only seemed fair that I follow through with it and go with him to where he wanted to go. And the first ghost he wanted me to see was apparently right there at Liverpool Street.

“There’s been one here for a few weeks,” he said as we headed down on the escalator. “I’ve been dying to get rid of this one.”

Callum scanned the platform, which was packed with people all the way to the wall. It was still London rush hour.

“Next train in three minutes. You’ll see him then.”

Sure enough, the train came in. People poured off, and more people tried to cram on as the others came off, and then the platform was clear for a few moments. Except for one guy. One guy who wore only a dirty sheet. He was thin and bearded and laughing. And he was doing some kind of dance, a hopping sideways dance. He leaned into the opening of the door and shouted something inside. It wasn’t English. I’m not sure it was any language. It sounded like loopgallooparg.

The doors bounced back open. He laughed harder and did it again.

“He’s an idiot,” Callum explained. “And doesn’t seem to understand anything I say. Doesn’t like it when I do this.”

Callum slapped the ghost’s head. He wasn’t quite solid, not like Jo or Alistair, but he did flinch and hop away a few feet. The doors closed, and the train glided away.

“So I do that,” he said. “I slap ghosts in the head. That’s what I’m reduced to.”

He looked at me expectantly. I looked at the strange, hopping man.

“Is he really doing anything wrong?” I asked.

“Holding up the trains causes huge chaos.”

“But I mean, wrong wrong. Like, really wrong.”

“Train chaos isn’t wrong enough?”

The platform had already started filling again, so we had to lower our voices.

“Too many people,” I said, looking around. “I can’t do it with so many people. I get sick. I throw up.”

“Sure,” Callum said. “All right. Well, there are some others I know of in some less public places. I just really wanted to take care of this one. But that’s all right. Another day. Let’s take a ride.”

So we got on the train. I looked out into the darkness. Through the Tube windows, I could just about see the walls of the tunnels mixed in with our reflections. The Tube rocked me gently back and forth.

“Been thinking,” Callum said. “I was saying to Stephen that you should, you know, be one of us. Properly one of us.”

From the way he said it, I think he was trying to sound casual on purpose, like this was just a little something he wanted to slip into the conversation. But, of course, there was nothing casual about that statement.

“What did he say?” I asked.

“He said you were American and in school.”

“Why do those things matter?” I asked.

“The American part means it’s hard to be hired to join what’s essentially a secret service. But they can get around that.”

I wasn’t exactly sure what joining would really mean. Probably living in England for a long time, and not being traceable, and lots and lots of lies…I had no idea what went into it all. But the idea fit. It was a future I could see.

“I don’t know,” I said. “I never thought about it.”

“It’s not easy,” Callum said. “But, you know, if anyone was right for the job, it’s you. You should start leaning on Stephen before it’s too late.”

“Too late for what?”

“I don’t know how long this takes, and you’re not here forever, are you? And he needs convincing. I don’t know why he’s being so difficult. It’s just common sense. Anyway, this is our stop.”

Another station, another ghost. This one was much less entertaining than the last, another pathetic creature, barely visible. She looked to be about my age. I couldn’t even tell what she was doing wrong, but Callum claimed that she was probably responsible for a signal disturbance. I didn’t see how. She sat in the corner, just behind the safety barrier, looking generally terrified by everything, especially us.

“Callum,” I said, “I don’t think I can do this. I—”

“I already figured that much out,” he said, looking deflated.

“I’m really sorry. I mean, she’s just not doing anything. I can’t.”

“No,” he said. “I understand.”

He tried to sound like it didn’t bother him, and I appreciated the effort.

When we were back on the train, I nudged him.

“Maybe let me get used to it for a while,” I said.

“Don’t take this the wrong way,” Callum said, “but I wish it had been me. What I wouldn’t give to be what you are now.”

“I know. Sorry.”

“I don’t know how much longer I can do this,” he said. “Not without a terminus.”

“You’re going to quit?”

“I probably would have quit, but…Boo. And Stephen. I don’t think he could cope. We’re like his family, you know? But maybe…maybe I won’t have to. Maybe it’ll all shut down on its own.”

“But you just got permission to keep going.”

“For now,” Callum said. “We still can’t really do anything. You’re the terminus. We’re just some sods who see ghosts and can’t do anything about it. And Stephen should have told us we were in danger of being shut down, but that’s Stephen. Keeps it all to himself. Won’t delegate. It’s driving Boo and me mental. It’s hard, you know? I was good at football. Then I got hurt and got the sight, and I couldn’t play anymore. Then I got this job, and I got a terminus, and everything made sense again. I had control again. I hate to say it, but I get why Newman wanted one so much. I don’t think he should have killed everyone he worked with, but I get him wanting one.”

I curled up in my coat a little. I’d pushed that aspect of Newman’s story out of my mind. Newman had been in the Shades, but when they’d found out he was unstable, they fired him and took away his terminus. Desperate to get it back, he’d confronted the other members of the squad in their old headquarters, in the abandoned King William Street Tube station. He killed them all in his attempts to get a terminus and was himself killed in the process.

It was weird to have the sight. It was weird to be a Shade. It had driven him insane.

“What was it that Newman said to you that night,” Callum asked. “About dying with a terminus?”

“He had some theory that if someone with the sight died holding a terminus, they’d come back. As a ghost, I mean.”

“And he knew this how?”

“I have no idea if he knew it at all,” I replied.

“Stephen is convinced there’s more information that we’ve never been allowed to see. An archive. Maybe he’s right. Maybe Newman had access to things they don’t let us see anymore, but…”

“But?” I said.

“I don’t know. I don’t think they care enough about us to hide anything. And what would be the point of hiding stuff from us? I think he’s being a little paranoid. He hides things from us, and he thinks people are hiding things from him. I mean, if there was a method of making people into ghosts, I guess I could see the point in holding on to that but…no. I don’t know.”

He shook his head and scratched his arm.

“You know they think we’re freaks,” he went on. “You know Thorpe hates dealing with us. And can you blame him?”

We arrived back at Liverpool Street, both of us quiet and pensive. Callum walked me out and down Artillery Lane.

“Really,” I said when we reached the back of my building, “I’ll try harder. Just don’t give up yet, okay?”

“Forget it,” he said, slapping me reassuringly on the shoulder. “I’m just glad you’re back. Things always get interesting when you come around.”

12

I WAS SITTING IN HISTORY ON THURSDAY, LISTENING TO MY teacher go through the list of everything that the exam might possibly cover, when it occurred to me, in a dim and distant way, that I had no idea what he was talking about. I was listening to words, and I recognized them as words, but they were arranged in a way that had no meaning. This is possibly due to the fact that all the people in English history have the same names. William. Edward. Charles. James. Henry. Richard. George. Elizabeth. Mary. Or that there are people with titles that rotate through all these stories. A Prince of Wales here, a Duke of Gloucester there. A Richmond and Buckingham and Guildford and on and on and on.

And when you take English history in England, they sort of assume you know where the hell they’re talking about—that you understand what’s up north and what’s down south and what’s near the water. This is stuff I get when we have to do the Civil War at home. I can picture where Philadelphia is, and South Carolina, and Virginia. These things make sense. I don’t have to look everything up on a map, or try to figure out which of the nine million Duke of Buckinghamshiremondlands they’re talking about, or who was who in the War of the Roses, or why roses? Just, why roses?

Anyway, he was saying words that I was supposed to know, and I was probably supposed to be writing them down. I took a stab at this, writing “Edward” and “James” and “battle of…” It occurred to me I should be more concerned about the fact that I had no idea what was going on, but I felt nothing in particular. At home, I was a top student. Wexford was a much more challenging school, and when I’d first arrived, I was panicked all the time because I couldn’t keep up. Then I was panicked because a murderous ghost was after me. Now I was back, there was no murderous ghost after me, the crack, at last, had passed from my thoughts, and I was so behind as to be out of the race. I felt nothing but a pleasant sleepiness when I looked at my books.

“Aurora,” my teacher said. “A word.”

My history teacher was not, in my experience, an unreasonable person. I was pretty sure he wasn’t going to yell at me for looking spacey. And he didn’t. He did, however, present me with a large, sealed envelope.

“I’m going to have to assess where you are so I can determine what exam questions to set for you next week. This is a short pretest. Take it over to the library. There’s a proctor over there who will monitor your progress and take it from you when you are finished. It’s just thirty minutes. Keep the answers very short and simple—I just need to know where you are in basic terms.”

I felt like I was carrying my own death sentence…or, if not a death sentence, maybe instructions for my own torture. Our librarian, Mrs. Feeley, was indeed expecting me. I was seated by myself at a table. There were only three questions on this pre-exam, with space enough to write a paragraph or two of answer.

Explain the origins of the Bishops’ Wars of 1639 and 1640.

Give the basic timeline and the major events of the English Civil War of 1642 to 1651.

List three immediate repercussions of the Great Fire of London.

These were not unreasonable questions, and should have been easy to anyone following along in class. The third one I could do. The second one I could kind of do. The first one, I had completely forgotten. I’d been given a half hour to do the whole thing. I dithered for a few minutes, trying to figure out if I wanted to start with the one I knew or the ones I didn’t know. Maybe the fact of forcing my brain on to those questions would jog some knowledge. So I jabbed at question two for a bit, penciling some dates in the margins, trying to string them together, adding whatever I could recall. The result was such a broken, spotty timeline that I had to erase it completely. I had wasted time. On to question three.

Three immediate repercussions of the Great Fire. In 1666, a fire starts on Pudding Lane, the most delicious sounding of lanes. London is crowded—the buildings built so far out that they practically touch each other across the street. It spreads quickly, burning for days. It burns down a large portion of the east section of the old city, the one contained within the city walls. Those city walls had stopped just outside of Wexford. This area had been preserved from the fire.

“Five minutes,” Mrs. Feeley said.

Five minutes? How had that happened? I’d just started. Three immediate repercussions…The buildings were rebuilt more safely, in stone and brick, with wider streets. And the fire destroyed many of the rats that spread the plague…

This area had not burned.

The crack was back in my brain.

I recalled the woman I’d seen, and accidentally destroyed, in the bathroom. Could she have been from around that time? It was possible. I’d been looking at a lot of paintings from the mid-1600s in art history and they looked very similar, but peasant dress in the Middle Ages and Renaissance probably didn’t change all that much. I was going to have to start studying clothing history if I was going to see these people.

But if this area hadn’t burned, what had been here? What was underneath Wexford? Maybe that was where I should start. There had to be maps.

“Time’s up,” she said.

I had only written part of the answer to one question.

“Can I ask something?” I said, passing back the paper.

“Of course,” Mrs. Feeley said.

“What used to be here?”

“Can you be more specific?”

“On this site.”

“Wexford was originally built as a workhouse.”

“No, I mean further back than that. I mean this whole area.”

“Well, I don’t know the entire history of the site, but what period are you wondering about?”