The Underhill Chronicles

           His computer had bit the dust, and Grandma Marian hadn’t been able to afford to buy him a new one. Mac searched his roommate’s side of the room until he found his laptop. Eric would be in class for a couple of hours yet, but just in case, he put a chair under the door before he turned the sleek little machine on.  Of course it was blocked with a password. “Megadeth” didn’t work.

He stared at the screen and said aloud, “I am going to type the right password.” Then he just let his fingers fly, ten strokes, some combination of capitals and numbers and letters, and hit Enter.

A screensaver of the band KISS in their black and white clown makeup suddenly appeared. He was in! The password floated through his head for a second: RQCK5T@R.

Let Nikki Ervin doubt him. His fingers had just typed a password he didn’t know, simply because he’d wanted them to. The feeling that was welling up in his chest, foaming and frothed with excitement, was of confirmation. Rightness. It didn’t matter that it had never worked like this before, no possibility of coincidence. He’d known for a long time that he could do it. That he would do it, eventually. And “eventually” was now, apparently.

           Smiling, triumphant, he pulled up a dictionary website on the laptop and typed in the word “Aedifex.” Zero results. So he tried a couple of other spellings, and when that didn’t work any better, he found a translation website. It wasn’t Spanish.  Not French.

Latin.  It meant creator, fabricator, constructor, maker. And “cambiarus” meant changer.

           Understanding filled him like light. He was the maker. He could make his wishes into actions with a thought . . . sometimes. And Nikki was the changer. She’d somehow made everyone’s aura bigger. He knew it. But could he convince her?

With shaking hands, Mac closed down the laptop and put it back where he’d found it. He began to pace his room. Cambiarus.  Aedifex. She was yellow and he was blue. What about all the others? All the ones with the pink auras? What were they? All the blazing pink auras, bursting into blossom suddenly. And the biggest of all? Caleb’s, like a sun going nova. Even before the earthquake, he’d been lit up. And he’d been sick.

           Mac stopped in mid-step, suddenly worried. The aura was real. Framed in his roommate’s vanity mirror, it glowed around him, a blue circle centered around his head, huger than he’d ever seen it. But Caleb’s pink glow had covered his whole body.

The old custodian’s accusing finger, the command to Get Out, clearly a warning.

Maybe they were all sick. Aedifex could be a disease. Sylver might have been trying to quarantine them, or form some sort of support group for people who were sick, maybe even dying. Jeremy and Victoria, Bryony’s brother and sister, dead. A hereditary disease would explain all the family trees.

And Caleb had no idea. Within seconds Mac was out the door and down the hallway, worry making him walk faster. He stood outside Caleb’s door, six rooms down from his own. The kid was almost certain to be inside.

           Mac’s rapping was met with silence, and he reconsidered. Caleb might have felt well enough to go to his next class.

The closed door reproached him. A disease support group was about as unlikely as all of them being crazy. He was just about to turn back down the hall when he heard a very small sound from inside, a gasp, really, fluttery and tentative.

           Mac tried the door. It was unlocked. He stepped into darkness, the curtains drawn over the windows. In the light seeping in from the hall, he could see that one side of the room looked a lot like his roommate’s, even some of the same posters. The other side was decorated with a few nice framed paintings and a bedspread and lamp that all looked like a mom had picked them. The bed was made. The wardrobe doors were shut. The entire room was empty.

           Yet he could feel it:  someone was there.

           “Caleb?” Mac called softly.

           A groan of pain came from under the bed.

           Mac got down on his hands and knees. Yeah, maybe Caleb could fit under there – but not many other high school boys could. The space was so dark that he couldn’t make out anything, but still there was a sense. A presence, black holding denser black. But strangely, no aura.

           Mac reached up and switched on the bedside lamp. From under the bed came a whimper, another gasp, a piteous plea to “Thurn it oth.”

           “Caleb, it’s me,” Mac said, leaving the light on. It was the only way he was going to be able to see what the kid was doing under the bed. “It’s Mac Balthasar.  Are you okay?”

           After a long moment, a snuffly sound was followed by, “No.  I not othay.”

           Caleb’s voice sounded strange, like he had a rag in his mouth. Mac leaned down, blinked, and called upon his Sight. It washed into place, everything going a charcoal gray except for a sudden pink light blazing from beneath the bed.  Again, the Sight had come at his command.  

           A minute ago, he’d seen nothing of Caleb’s aura. Only his Sight had brought it out. What was going on? The light was so bright it was hard to see the huddled form squashing itself to the back wall.

           “Come on. Crawl on out of there, dude.” Mac used his friendliest voice. “Listen, I’ll make sure you get to the nurse’s office okay. And I’ll even stay with you.”

           The tiniest sound of movement, a scrabbling like Caleb was digging his fingernails into the floor.  “I not coming outh. And I not going anywhere.”

           Mac sat down sideways on Caleb’s bed and propped his pillow against the wall so he could lean back. He had time. He could wait the kid out. “Hey, this is a great pillow,” he said conversationally, as if they were just hanging out. “Is this that memory foam stuff?”

           “Go away,” Caleb begged. Another slight scrabbling sound, another snuffle.

           Mac leaned over, blinked back into normal Sight, and took a peek beneath the bed.  

           Bulging, huge eyes met his. Between them, a deep, furrowed crease unlike anything found on a human face. What the hell was that?

           Mac straightened, swallowing his shock. “Um, anything under there with you?”

           “No. Juth me.” This was followed by what sounded like a sob.

           Something had happened to Caleb.

Mac almost said, “Hey, it’s going to be okay.” Then he remembered what it had been like after his mom died, when he was the kid whose mother was killed in an accident, whose dad was a cripple, the oddball that everyone whispered about and watched and tried to say something nice to, meaningless pats on the shoulder, promises that it was going to be okay.

           It was better to be honest. “You look like hell, man.”

           From under the bed, “I know, right?” Caleb almost sounded like himself for a moment.

           The door to the dorm room flew open. Josh Doakes came striding in, his face full of surprise at the sight of Mac. “What are you doing here? Where’s the dweeb?” Doakes paced around, changing a sweat-soaked PE shirt, kicking Caleb’s backpack out of his path. “Man, what stinks? It smells like a wet dog in here.”

           Mac hated it when guys were jerks. What would Doakes say if he got a look at what was under the bed? He couldn’t let that happen. He stood up and walked straight toward Josh Doakes, putting his face so close to the other guy’s that he could count the blackheads on his nose. “Caleb and I have been talking. We’ve decided to switch rooms.”

Doakes’ face lit up.  “Now we’re talking.”

Mac didn’t let him get rolling. “You’ll be the one leaving. I’m moving in. We want you packed and out by tonight.”

           Josh Doakes started to say, “Wha--?”

           “You’ll like my current roomie. Eric MacMillan. He’s into metal too.”

           Doakes began nodding. “Eric. Yeah, he’s okay.”  

           Mac nodded along with him. “But right now, you’re going to get out and let Caleb rest.”

           Doakes looked around. “Rest? Where is he?”

           Mac pointed his chin at the door. “You know that flu that’s been going around? He’s down in the bathroom hurling, but he’ll be back any minute.”

           The look of alarm on Doakes’ face would have been comical if Mac hadn’t wanted him to get out so badly. When he was gone, the door shut behind him, Mac locked it, then sat back down and leaned against the pillow again.  

           “Dude, you have to talk to me.” He tried to keep his tone light. “What happened to you?”

           Caleb sighed, a brave, ragged sound. “I doan know. I sthick. I theel ther’ble, and thomething’s happening thu me.”

           “Can you come out?”

           “I’ll thry. Buth the light hurths my eyeths. And under here theels . . . well, ith’s the only plathe that feelths thafe.”

           Mac switched off the lamp, leaving only the faint light creeping through the side of the shades. The whole dorm was quiet. The passing period must have ended. Everyone would be in class again. “Come on. I’m here to help.”

           The sound of nails on wood began, like claws scrabbling. Mac found he was holding his breath.

           The head that emerged didn’t look like Caleb’s, and the only resemblance the stocky body had to Caleb’s was its approximate height – still small. It bulged in the wrong places. Four spindly limbs came out at odd angles. And there was hair. A lot of it, like a short, cream-colored fur.

           The face that looked up at him wasn’t human. Mac felt his expression freeze in the encouraging smile he’d put on to greet his friend with. Caleb’s mouth was now a piranha’s maw, so wide that it wrapped around his face and almost reached his ears, thin-lipped, full of a lot of little jutting teeth. He had hardly any chin at all, just a massive jaw. His eyes were large, protruding, with pouches hanging beneath them. The whites rolled toward him, their dark centers fixing on him, tears leaking into the reddening bags beneath. And that wasn’t a human nose, not with the rough, charcoal-black nostrils pushed up and flattened against his face like a bulldog’s. Caleb snuffled at him and the mouth fell open, slobbering, a huge, flat tongue lolling out. His ears cocked. They were pointed now, and higher on his head, with flaps that fell forward, but they lifted in what seemed like hope as Caleb watched him, his head tilted, his narrow chest heaving.

           Mac searched for the right words. “Are you wearing a mask?” seemed like the safest way to begin.

           He was alone in the classroom. Even Nikki was gone. He stepped into the hallway, wondering why he was the last one left, and caught the fading sound of someone’s feet on the stairs down to the basement. So Nikki had stayed behind. He needed some face time with her.

           Mac found her outside of Sylver’s office, fumbling with the key to the door. She wouldn’t look at him, but her yellow aura seemed to pulse with distress. He put his hand on her arm and watched his own blue aura blaze a little brighter.  “We have to talk about this.”

           With a quick glance at him, she got the door open and pushed inside. She didn’t turn on the light switch, so neither did he. He would have liked some light. The room was gloomy and a little spooky, and way too quiet. Sylver’s chair squealed as she sank into it, her hands clasped between her knees. “He died right here, you know.” She was staring at the carpet, biting her lip.

           And how the hell would she know that? A tendril of suspicion snaked through his head. Mac slouched into the armchair, his thoughts tripping over themselves. His power had been growing for days. He could feel it, but what did that mean? What was he supposed to do with it?

           “Professor Sylver called them coronas,” Nikki whispered. “He said most people can’t see them.”

           Mac waited until she looked him in the eyes. “He’s gone. We can’t ask him anything. So we’re going to have to find out what they are ourselves.”

           Her gaze narrowed. “We search his office? Okay.” Feeling his way, he added, “Sylver rounded us all up for his senior seminar. And the earthquake made the auras all get bigger, just now, did you see?” Saying it aloud made it real. He checked her face, saw the reflection of knowledge on it.

           “We’re not the only ones.” Nikki pulled her hands away from his. “The guy I work for, Lenny, has a purple one. And a bunch of juniors – little thin auras, but they’re there.”

           Mac gave a reluctant nod. “Okay, a few of them, but a lot smaller.” Discussing this helped him take a deeper breath. “All pink, right? Except for yours. And mine. But the principal and the teachers, everyone in town – no one else has them.” He felt like he was working out a formula with too many variables, and it chilled him. “Sylver picked us for this class. How did he know who was going to have these auras?”

           Nikki pulled open a heavy desk drawer and took out the old, dinged-up Polaroid camera that he recognized from every visit he’d had with Professor Sylver. She set it on the desk between them with a clunk. “Remember this? How he’s been taking our pictures for years? They show our auras.” She reached across the desk and pulled a stack of manila folders toward him. “Check out your file.”

           His pulse leapt as he picked up the files and began to sort through them, recognizing in the photos clipped to the front younger versions of everyone in the Senior Seminar, their middle school faces haloed in pink.

Auras. Right there in the photos. He picked up his own file, his 13-year-old face staring back at him, closed off and guarded. “What’s so important about an aura?”  

Nikki didn’t answer. When he glanced up at her, he was surprised to see her eyes looking shiny and vague. His next breath was filled with a flowery stink. Since when had there been so many vines hanging down from that shelf? He couldn’t remember seeing all the blossoms there behind Nikki, bunches of them, blue and yellow, sharp leaves silhouetted in the filtered light. Flowery runners stretched over the bookshelves and all the way to the desk, like they were reaching for him in slow motion.

           Nikki blinked sleepily. “I have no idea. Some project he was doing.” She gestured at the file cabinet in the corner. “He wanted me to note things down in the files. He was going to explain it to me when . . . .” Her words died away.

           Mac toyed with a blue flower petal as he tried to puzzle it out. A stack of eight files on the desk. How many were in the file cabinet? Maybe all the rejects with no auras? He got up heavily and went over to it, pulling the top drawer open.

It was crammed with hanging folders labeled by year, each holding ten or a dozen files. Just this one drawer held a decade’s worth of files. No, he realized, walking his fingers through the files, more like almost three decades. He pulled one random file from the back.

Niska, Robert. 1993. The Polaroid photo was faded, but the pink aura was clear. The kid who grinned up at him had freckles and a mullet, a Guns n Roses t-shirt. He opened the file. Six pages of notes, each dated in sequential years starting in 1988. He glanced over the first page, trying to decipher Sylver’s writing. Robert Niska had been eleven. Something about “pink aura 1 cm,” with later entries chronicling its growth. The final page noted, “uneventful extraction, seven min. office visit.” A yellow Post-it note stuck to the page added, “1997 married Emily Maxwell, Grivian line. Check offspring.”

None of it made sense. He put the file back and let his gaze travel over the names. The year 1995 included Emily Maxwell’s file. He didn’t pull it out, but thought for a moment. If Robert and Emily had children, they might be high school age by now. Hadn’t there been a Niska going to Mt. Lehr a couple of years ago?

Niska, Thomas. The file was stuck into the 2014 folder at the front of the drawer.  

“What are you looking at?” Nikki was standing, staring at him.

Mac closed the top file drawer and opened the second one. Two more decades hung in sequential folders. Forty-five years of files in two drawers. Sylver was old, but had he really been at Mt. Lehr over forty years? He reached for a file in the back and opened it, expecting different handwriting. But it was the same old-fashioned script with its jagged, leaning letters in blue fountain pen.

He forced himself to take a breath and bent to pull out the bottom drawer. A quick scan of the folders told him the files went back to the 1940s.

As soon as he pulled out the last file, Nikki held out her hand. “Let me see that.”

Engels, Beverly. 1943. The same handwriting. No Polaroid this time but a single processed color photo of a teen-aged girl in old-fashioned clothes, around her a tell-tale pink aura.

“How can this be possible?” Nikki held up the file and shook it at Mac. She seemed almost mad. “These can’t be Sylver’s.”

Mac shrugged. “Maybe he was a lot older than he looked. A really good plastic surgeon?”

The attempt at a joke fell flat. Nikki was shaking her head. “It’s impossible. The handwriting’s the same.”

The scent from the flowers was making him dizzier by the minute. Mac wiped his hand down his face. “Whether he wrote it or someone else did, there’s some reason all these kids with auras have been tracked.”

Sitting there in Sylver’s chair, Nikki looked so confused that he was afraid to tell her everything. She would scoff, label him crazy, and he would never get any closer to finding out what he was. But he had to try.

How to begin? He looked around the quiet office, hoping for inspiration, and finally just gave in. “Ever since I was a kid, I’ve been able to do things. To make certain things happen.” It was so freaking difficult to explain. More than anything else, he wanted her to understand. But she was watching him like she expected him to burst into flames. He tried another approach. “My Grandma Marian knows about me, about what I can do. She’s always told me to keep it a secret. No one else – well, my mom, I think, but she died before she could talk to me about it.”

           In the dim light from the windows, Nikki’s expression was hard to read, but her brows furrowed as she listened, head slightly tilted. “You were seven when your mom died.” She looked down at her hands. “My mom . . . I haven’t spent much time with my mom. Not time I enjoyed, anyway.”

           He recognized the walled-off look on her face. “Yeah, well, the good times went out the window when that car wreck happened. We don’t even put up a Christmas tree.” In his room, pinned to the bulletin board above his desk, there was an old photograph of his mother sitting next to a lit-up tree, holding Mac as a four-year-old in her lap. He had his arms around a dump truck the size of his head, fierce glee on his face. He could almost remember that moment, but he wasn’t sure if he actually remembered, or if it was from looking at the picture so many times. It was the only one he had brought of the two of them together.

Nikki was watching him with furrowed brows. “You said you can do things? What kind of things?”

           He was not going to say the word magic. She would laugh at him. So he used his private word.  “Wishing, I guess. I can sometimes make things sort of work better. Or work right. And I can see things in a different way.” He added lamely, “It’s getting stronger.”

           “Stronger? Wishing?” Disbelief in her voice.

           He charged ahead. “You saw it, down here in the basement. The tunnel – I think I did that. I was wishing we were all somewhere else. Then it all changed.” To her silence, he demanded, “Tell me what you saw.”

           She lowered her head, not meeting his eyes. “You go first,” she finally got out. “Just one thing.  Say one thing you saw that changed.”

           He let the memory surge through him. The ground had shaken, rumbling. And then the experience came back with a jolt:  “One minute we were in the basement, down the hall. The next, the walls were dirt, with roots hanging down from the ceiling, like we were in some kind of old mining tunnel. I wasn’t wishing for that.”

           Nikki’s voice followed his, weaving in her experience. “There were coins on the floor. What looked like jewels in the walls.”

           “I saw the coins. I didn’t notice the jewels.” He closed his eyes for a moment and concentrated.  “There were these old-style torches way down at the end. And the ceiling was braced up with wooden trusses.”

           “There was a noise.”

           “A screaming noise,” Mac affirmed. His body was giving him away, going cold and trembling. “It was all around us.”

           Nikki hands were gripping the arms of the chair. “That’s what I saw too.”

           His throat was tight with relief, yet the feeling warred with the knowledge that it had all really happened. “What about the others?”

           She slowly shook her head. “I think they saw, or heard, or felt . . . something. But not that. Did you notice how quiet they were? How they all rushed out? Even Bryony?”  

           He tried to imagine what they had experienced. “Maybe to them it was just a small tremor. Marta’s little sister wasn’t even that scared.”

           “Little sister?” Nikki looked confused.

           “You know, the little girl she always brings with her to class.”

           Nikki’s face stayed blank, and a sickening dread filled Mac as she said, “I don’t have any idea what you’re talking about.”

           He couldn’t even think about how to answer.

           Nikki leaned back in her chair, digging into the pocket of her skirt. She pulled out a fist tightly wrapped about something, but when she turned her palm up, it was just one of the red knobs from the old vending machine. In a tight voice, she said, “This was a ruby. I dug it out of the wall.” She held it out to him. “Were we hallucinating? The whole thing?”

           The small screw in the center of the red knob was like an eye staring at them, daring them to deny its form. Mac felt a bubble of emotion climbing up his throat, and he didn’t know whether to laugh or cry. “God, I feel like I’m going crazy.” The stench from the flowers was getting to him. A vine full of blue blossoms was wrapped around the top of Sylver’s computer monitor. He hadn’t even noticed it until now. Why hadn’t the professor cut it back?

           Nikki put the knob back into her pocket and then seemed to notice a watering can sitting near her feet. She picked it up. “You said you wished it? So it’s all about you? Did you wish us to have auras? For me to . . . for Professor Sylver to die?”

           Slowly, he found the words, “Maybe the auras getting bigger means my . . . power . . . is getting stronger. The earthquake could be a sign.”

           She pinned him with a level stare. “It wasn’t just you.” She stood suddenly, reaching for a step-ladder in the corner. “This started long before you and I got to this school. Those files – I don’t know how Professor Sylver would have explained them to me.” She set up the ladder against the window. “Come on, I need to get some water for these plants. Walk down the hall with me.”

           He followed her into the cool, deserted corridor. The air was fresher, and as the flower smell receded, Mac felt like he was waking up a little. The narrow corridor was lined with stacked boxes, almost blocking another door halfway down the hall. He tried its handle, but it was locked. He considered a moment using his gift to unlock it. “Do you know anything about what’s in here?”

           Nikki seemed to see the door for the first time. She set down the watering can and pulled the key out of her pocket, examining it before she stuck it in the lock on the knob and turned it. The click was clearly audible in the silent hallway. When she’d pulled the door open, Mac reached inside and felt for a light switch. Above them, a bulb in a plain fixture flickered into life, revealing a long, narrow room. It was filled with filing cabinets, each one an older model, the closest made of painted gray steel. Midway down the row were a couple made of oak, and the furthest was a large, heavy piece with glass windows. Six in all.

           Pushing down a growing fear, Mac opened the top drawer of the nearest one and began to scan through the folders. The files went back to the early 1900s. He began to recognize the last names as he saw them repeated. Mortensen, Travers, McCurdy, Dale.

           Dale? That was Bryony’s last name.

           Nikki squeezed past him and opened the next filing cabinet. “Mac, look.” She held up a large, rolled-up piece of paper with a rubber band on it. A label on the outside read, “Pierce.” The file drawer was stacked with them, dozens in a pile. He reached in and sifted through, telling his fingers to find “Dale.”

           He pulled out the roll of paper after three tries. The rubber band was rotten with age and broke easily. The page fell open, curling a little at the bottom as he took one top corner and Nikki held the other. Inked in great detail on the paper was a family tree dating back to 1871. Mac scanned down to the bottom, finding a Randall Dale married to Renee Engels. They had four children: Victoria, Jeremy, Bryony and Addison. Bryony and Addison had birthdates. Victoria and Jeremy had both birth and death dates. Victoria had been twenty-one when she died in 2014. Jeremy had died two years ago at nineteen.

           He glanced at Nikki.

           She was waiting for the look. “Bryony doesn’t talk about it, but they were close.”

           Silently, Mac rolled the page up and put it back in the drawer. Nikki moved to the next file cabinet and opened the drawer in the middle. More scrolls, tied with dusty ribbon. She skipped then to the last cabinet with the glass doors and lifted one. It screeched in protest, the hinges rusty, revealing another pile of scrolls. Turning to Mac, she skewered him with her stare. “What is all this?”

           “I don’t know.” He couldn’t hide the tightness in his voice. “But it’s all the same handwriting.”

           He didn’t want to see any more. Nikki followed him as he backed out of the room, turned off the light and locked the door.

She almost tripped over the watering can. He caught her by the arm until she could regain her balance.

“Thanks.” Nikki straightened, a little unsteady, and carried the can down the hall to a janitor’s sink tucked into an alcove. Twisting one of the taps, she leaned against the top edge of the sink as water gushed into the can. When she turned off the water and faced him, her face was etched in worry. “Is there anyone else who knows about this, do you think?”

           Her tone made him scared.  Had Mrs. Barrett ever set foot down here?

           Nikki hefted the dripping watering can back down the hall, her voice going strangely conversational. “You’re going to need to help me with this. Some of these plants have sharp edges. One of them cut me last Monday when . . . when I watered them.” She set the watering can down on the carpet. When she looked up at him again, her eyes were filled with emotion he couldn’t name. “Those files. So many names. And we’re all part of it.”

           “Sylver called me extraordinary,” Mac began, but then stopped to consider. Why Gil Norton? He’d always been standoffish, superior, laughing at things as if he were above it all. But he didn’t seem unique or especially talented at anything. And why bring a girl over to the school from juvenile hall? What was so special about her? Besides the invisible little sister?

           Nikki was waiting for him to sum it all up. He tried, “We’re different. All of us.”

She stepped up onto the little ladder. “Maybe these auras of Professor Sylver’s are a measure of whether someone’s different. Maybe this class of his was supposed to be some kind of group therapy.”

           From the open doorway behind Mac came a single ragged word: “No.”

           Nikki’s eyes widened. Mac spun around.  

           The old custodian was standing there, a look of horror on his face. “Get. Out.” He pointed one long, bony finger at Nikki. “Don’t give . . . them water.” His voice was creaky but clear, with some sort of European accent. The command was unmistakable.  

           Mac stood up, putting himself between the strange old man and Nikki.  “Why don’t you step away from the door.” He said it firmly.

           The old man seemed to see him for the first time. His gaze lingered on the blossoms covering the monitor, and his wispy white eyebrows rose. “Adifex,” he whispered as if amazed. “Cambiarus and adifex. Whom do you serve?” Even as he asked, Carroway took a slow step backward.

           Nikki came down from the stepladder and plunked the still-full watering can on Sylver’s desk, breathing fast. She reached slowly for her bag. Mac picked up his backpack, grabbed her hand and yanked her forward. They slid through the door of Sylver’s office side by side, neither of them willing to touch the old man watching them so fiercely.

           Then they were running down the hallway, skidding around the corner, leaving the custodian behind.

           Mac was still holding her hand. It was damp and warm.  The connection between them made him feel like he was plugged into a power source. “Is he following?”

           They stood listening for a moment. No sound came from down the corridor. The custodian might still be standing in the doorway of Professor Sylver’s office.

Nikki’s eyes darted around. She was breathing hard. “God, I feel like I’m just waking up from a dream. My head . . . .” She pulled her hand away and cradled her brow. “And this basement. This is where we were, and it’s just a hallway. No coins, no jewels, no dirt, no roots.” She turned a slow circle, her face stricken. “That’s just a vending machine, and I thought the stupid wooden knob was a ruby! Am I crazy? You saw that old man back there; he’s crazy too.” A look of horrified realization washed over her face. “Professor Sylver collected crazy people. Maybe he was bringing us together to help us.”

           He didn’t even have to consider it. “It’s crazy to think one person kept files for over a hundred years. But you saw them.” He felt sick to his stomach. “We need to get out of here. We need fresh air.” Taking her arm, he guided her up the basement stairs. They’d missed third period. “Let’s just walk outside for a while.”

She was nodding, leaning on him a little. “I want go back to the dorm. I haven’t been sleeping, and –“

“Siesta, then. Just for an hour.” It occurred to him as they got outside and headed across the courtyard that Bryony might be wondering where he was. They had started sitting together in English. But he’d he find her at lunch . . . and say what? Every explanation would have to begin with Nikki and I. Somehow he doubted that was going to go over well. He wasn’t going to lie to himself and pretend it wasn’t happening. Bryony liked him and he liked her. And here he was walking down the sidewalk with his arm around Nikki’s shoulders. Trying to be casual, he let it slide off.

She stopped in mid-stride and gave him a once-over. “Don’t worry, Mac. Nobody’s seen us. It’s not like you’ll have to explain to anyone that you’re tight with a colored girl.” Turning her face from him, she began to stride forward on her own.