All That Consumes Us

by Erica Waters

Genres: YA Contemporary

Synopsis

Ninth House meets The Dead and the Dark in this gothic dark academia novel that delves into the human capacity for great love, great art, and great evil. 

Magni animi numquam moriuntur. Great minds never die. 

The students in Corbin College’s elite academic society, Magni Viri, have it all—free tuition, inspirational professors, and dream jobs once they graduate. When first-gen college student Tara is offered a chance to enroll, she doesn’t hesitate.

Except once she’s settled into the gorgeous Victorian dormitory, something strange starts to happen. She’s finally writing, but her stories are dark and twisted. Her dreams feel as if they could bury her alive. An unseen presence seems to stalk her through the halls.  

And a chilling secret awaits Tara at the heart of Magni Viri—one that just might turn her nightmares into reality; one that might destroy her before she has a chance to escape. 

All That Consumes Us will pull readers into a hypnotizing, dark reverie that blurs the lines of reality and shows that the addictive nature of ambition—and its inevitable price—always claims its due. 

Release date: October 17, 2023

Publisher: HarperCollins

Print pages: 416

Sample

Prologue

This is it, the last time you’ll kiss me. I want to burn it into my heart, inscribe every touch so that later, in that dark place, I’ll be able to run my fingers over the memory, feel the worn grooves of it against my skin. A spell for not forgetting, a spell for not disappearing.

It’s midnight, and the moon is a pale sliver in the black velvet sky, less luminous than your eyes. The long fragrant branches of a weeping willow reach and sway, forming a lover’s canopy around us, so that I can almost forget the others who circle us with their burning candles, their chanting voices. You reach out a too-warm hand to cup my cheek. My breath hitches.

Your lips touch mine, your tears wet against my cheeks. It’s a soft, gentle kiss, already grieving for this memory, this time, the two of us.

Then, too soon, there’s the knife and the pain and the ground opening up beneath me.

I’m alone in the dark.

 

One

There are two Corbin Colleges. During the day, Corbin is all autumn leaves and fluttering scarves—a postcard-perfect campus. But as I rush down this dimly lit, deserted sidewalk, I’m in the grip of nighttime Corbin, a different creature altogether. Just a few hours after sunset, Corbin has become a place of shadows and whispers, millions of trees creaking in the dark. Fog drifts up from the ground, muffling every sound except those nearest. The green hills of Appalachia seem to loom and lean, closing me in.

But it’s not the dark or anything it might hold that I’m afraid of. Public failure is a far more frightening specter, one I’ll be facing the second I walk into the lit club’s reading to share my work for the first time. I’m already five minutes late, and I haven’t even written the story’s ending yet, so I break into a run when I see the English building. It’s a stately, red-bricked thing, with perfectly symmetrical windows full of light, inviting me in from the dark and the cold—as if I’m not safer out here in the fog, far from the threat of public humiliation.

I jog up the stairs and through the heavy front doors, making my way down the hall to the largest of the classrooms, a lecture hall built like a small auditorium. I slip inside, trying to make as little noise as possible as I hurry down the aisle. But I needn’t have bothered. They haven’t started yet. Students mill around, sipping sodas and laughing at jokes like they aren’t the least bit nervous about the lit club’s flash fiction reading. They’re mostly English majors, but they look like all the Corbin students do: well-dressed and self-assured, a sea of wealthy private school kids whose parents have ensured they will never have to know the cost of their education, let alone pay for it.

As soon as I find my seat, I yank out my unfinished story and start scribbling. I only had a half hour to write it while I scarfed down lunch between classes. It’s basically Jane Eyre fan fiction, and it’s got that gangly first-draft energy, all awkward sentences and overblown exposition. It’s also the most cringey self-insert garbage I’ve ever written, and I know it. A young writer who has to teach high school English to pay off her college debt? It’s a painfully obvious look at my future, and everyone will see straight through it.

But that can’t be helped now. I jot down a final line and skim the pages quickly, looking for anything I can improve in the next thirty seconds. The opening is weak. I scratch it out and add a sentence to the top: I sat by the window in the train, watching the dusty moors sweep by. It’s a little better, but not much. I find a few unnecessary adverbs and cross them out, fix a dangling modifier, cut the passive voice.

Finally, too disgusted to look at my own words any longer and desperate for a distraction, I scan the room for someone to talk to. I recognize the twenty or so other English majors from the orientation meeting the department held six weeks ago. They all seem to have brought friends—more people to watch me totally bomb my first reading. Even still, I wish I’d had someone to ask along for moral support. The room buzzes with warmth and energy, but I feel outside of it, left out in the cold. I’ve been so busy with work and trying to keep up with classes that I haven’t really had time to go to the mixers. Still, there must be someone here I know. I brace myself and study the crowd again.

Britney Prins, a creative writing major with unnervingly perfect eyebrows and an obsession with Sally Rooney, sees me looking at her group and

gives me a polite smile. Was it an invitation to join them? I wait to see if she’ll catch my eye again, but she doesn’t. It’s always so hard to read the students at Corbin. Back home if someone didn’t like you, there was nothing subtle about it. But here, there’s a whole system of slights and innuendos that I always seem to read incorrectly.

I still haven’t decided whether to go over when someone touches my elbow.

“Tara, right?” Dr. Coraline asks. He’s the lit club’s faculty sponsor. He’s handsome in a late-forties kind of way, with sandy hair falling across his forehead.

I nod, summoning up a weak smile.

“There’s a problem with the mic, so we’re not going to start for a few more minutes. Feel free to mingle.” He nods toward the group of English majors I’d been watching. “If I remember correctly from your orientation survey, you and Britney are both fans of Rilke.”

“Oh,” I say, a blush starting at my neck. “Okay, sure.” I did mention Rilke in that survey, but I suspect this is more about my pathetic social skills than literary kinship. I walk mechanically toward the group, already feeling my shoulders rolling in, arms wrapping protectively around my middle.

When I join Britney’s circle, everyone goes silent.

“Hi,” I say.

More silence. I’ve broken into the flow of their conversation.

“I’m Tara?” My voice goes up at the end, turning my name into a question.

They look at me expectantly, as if waiting for me deliver news. As the silence drags on, I start to panic.

“Dr. Coraline wanted me to let people know the mic isn’t working, so we won’t start for a while,” I say, desperately seizing onto the lie. “Sorry to interrupt.” The blush goes all the way up my face, and I know they can see it.

“Thanks, Theresa,” Britney says with a big pitying smile. She starts to say something to the others.

“Oh, it’s Tara actually,” I say.

“Right, sorry.” Britney grimaces at me. “We were talking about how much we love Evelyn Waugh.”

“Oh, I’ve always wanted to read her,” I say.

Britney raises her spectacular eyebrows, her mouth opening slightly. Someone else laughs.

“Evelyn Waugh was a man,” Britney’s boyfriend, Bobby, says, a smirk on his lips. He fiddles with a small ivory inlaid box that I think is a cigarette case. “Brideshead Revisited? A Handful of Dust?”

I close my eyes, embarrassment washing over me. I’d mixed up Evelyn Waugh and Edith Wharton. “Of course. I meant—”

“You know, Brideshead Revisited has made me consider doing that study abroad program at Oxford,” Britney says to Bobby. She angles her body away from me, toward the others. I want to flee back to my seat, but I make myself stand there, nodding and smiling like an automaton without comprehending a word that anyone says. Dr. Coraline catches my eye and shoots me a thumbs-up, clearly proud of himself for drawing me out of my isolation.

I glance at my watch and wonder if I ought to just bail on the reading. It’s already been a long day, I’m tired, and I’m wasting precious time

here. I still have homework to do before my janitorial shift tonight. I’ll be lucky if I get to bed by two before I’m up again at seven to shelve library books. But if I don’t make myself participate in these lit club readings, I’ll never get any better at my writing. And then what’s the point of coming to a school like this?

“Look,” Britney says, the tone of her voice changing.

It jogs me out of my spiraling thoughts. The others turn, and I do too, just as a trio of freshmen from Magni Viri walk in. Two girls and a guy, deep in conversation. They’re as well-dressed and self-assured as all the other students, but they look slightly hungover, their eyes red-rimmed, their clothes wrinkled like they slept in them. I only know one of them, a girl with waist-length curly red hair and pale ivory skin, dressed all in black except for the checkered laces in her Doc Martens. Meredith Brown, the English department’s fastest rising star.

I bet she knows who Evelyn Waugh is.

“What do you think that’s about?” Britney asks the others.

She means the argument the MV kids are clearly having. Meredith’s eyebrows are drawn together in a scowl, her lips moving fast. The boy is shaking his head vehemently. It looks like a pretty serious disagreement, but given Magni Viri’s reputation, it’s probably an intellectual debate we mere mortals cannot comprehend.

I strain to catch their words, but their voices are hushed.

“Probably deciding whose turn it is to sacrifice a virgin,” Bobby says in a low voice.

“What?” I look away from the MV kids. “What are you talking about?”

“Haven’t you heard the rumors?” Britney asks, apparently more willing to talk to my uncultured self now that there’s gossip to be had.

“You mean about them being a cult?” I’ve heard that rumor plenty of times, and it’s not completely unwarranted. Magni Viri students rarely hang out with anyone outside their academic society. They live only with each other, study only with each other, date only each other. Even their dorm building, Denfeld Hall, is completely inaccessible to the rest of us. Legend has it that no one outside of Magni Viri has ever set foot inside. Denfeld is perched at the very edge of campus, looming from its hillside like a dark angel surveying the graveyard below. It’s one of the few original buildings on campus still standing, a stone mansion like something out of a Gothic romance.

“They’re not just a cult. They’re a secret society,” Bobby says.

“How can they be a secret society if we know about them?” I ask. It comes out snarkier than I intended. “I mean, they’re not like Yale’s Skull and Bones. They’re a registered academic society that anyone can apply to. I applied.”

Magni Viri is clearly too rarefied for someone like me, but of course I wanted a chance at free tuition, free room and board, and incredible connections.

“The academic society is just Magni Viri’s public face. But they have a whole dark underbelly,” Bobby says, lowering his voice, his eyes lighting

up with lurid interest. “My dad went here, and when he was a student, he saw them perform a satanic ritual under a full moon.”

“A satanic ritual?” I ask. This boy is such a tool.

“I’m serious. They’re super creepy. My dad had wanted to join Magni Viri, but after what he saw, he was glad he got rejected. He said even if I’d been accepted, he wouldn’t let me join.”

I nearly roll my eyes. Of course two generations of entitled rich people will choose to believe that an academic society is some nefarious underground organization rather than accept their own mediocrity.

“Sure,” I say.

“Believe what you want,” Bobby says indignantly. “But I’m glad those creepy fucks keep to themselves.” He ties his scarf more securely, as if the thought of Magni Viri gave him a chill.

I shoot a final surreptitious glance at the Magni Viri kids, who have settled into seats near the back of the auditorium. They don’t look creepy to me. They look like the luckiest people alive. Full scholarships, academic support, connections I can only dream of. And best of all, a built-in friend group. Every time I see a group of them, their lives knitted so tight together, I feel my loneliness like a broken rib, an ache spreading through my entire body. I’m just as jealous as Bobby and every other Magni Viri reject at Corbin College. Though at least I’m more honest about it.

I can’t help but imagine what my life would be like if I’d been accepted to Magni Viri. I could have majored in creative writing instead of the more practical English-for-teachers track. I’d have time to write. I wouldn’t need to work two campus jobs to make ends meet. I wouldn’t be drowning in loneliness as just another face in freshman housing.

But Magni Viri didn’t want me. They wanted Meredith Brown.

If I’m honest, sometimes I feel like she’s living the life I should have had.

 

By the time they get the mic working, it’s seven thirty. I ask Dr. Coraline if he can make sure I’m in an early slot since I have to work tonight.

“Just not first,” I say, and he laughs and puts me down for second place.

I go back to reading over my story, already hating every word of it. I only look up when the overhead lights go down. Dr. Coraline hurries to the mic to introduce the first student . . . Meredith Brown. I immediately regret having to go second.

Meredith stands tall at the front of the dim room, long curly red hair blazing in the single light trained on her. Her alabaster skin seems to glow, as if it has swallowed up all the other light in the room.

“This story is called ‘Incubus,’” she says in a slow, steady voice, the barest trace of a wealthy Southern accent softening her vowels. She holds

a few printed pages in her hand, but she doesn’t even glance at them. Head tilted up, green eyes on the audience, she recites her story from memory—or perhaps she creates it on the spot, drawing the words up from some secret well inside her.

After her first few sentences, everyone around me has stopped breathing. It might be because Meredith is one of the most beautiful people any of us has ever seen, or it might be because her words have woven a spell around us that we’re afraid to break. I suspect it’s a bit of both. No one shifts in their chair, clears their throat, leans over to whisper to a friend like they usually do at these readings. Most college-aged writers haven’t exactly mastered the art of commanding a room.

But Meredith has. She speaks, and we listen. She does not fidget, play with her hair, adjust the cuffs of her blazer, or pull at the neck of her shirt. She doesn’t look down, sweat, shake with nerves. Her voice is as steady and even as her gaze. She tells us her story. She holds us in thrall.

It’s a strange, surreal story, like a waking nightmare. All sly allusion, evasive as a dream you can’t remember, but it builds a slow dread inside your chest. I’m not even sure what the story is about, but I’m shivering by the time she’s finished, my heart pounding and my eyes darting to the shadowy corners of the room, my arms squeezed tight over my chest. My breath comes short.

“Thank you,” Meredith says, with a simple nod, as if she hasn’t undone an entire roomful of people with her words.

The audience erupts into applause. I clap too, torn between envy and awe as I watch her step down from the stage in her tailored clothing and stride confidently down the aisle to sit with her friends.

Dr. Coraline takes Meredith’s place at the mic. “Thank you, Mer. That was . . . brilliant. Truly brilliant.” He shakes his head in wonder. “Next up is”—he glances at his clipboard—“Tara Boone.”

I close my eyes for a moment and consider getting out of my chair and leaving the room. It isn’t fair to make me follow that, to make me follow her.

“Tara?” Dr. Coraline asks, peering out into the lecture hall, his blond eyebrows raised hopefully behind his glasses. “Tara Boone? Are you still here?”

I shove to my feet with a squeak of protest from the chair and walk doggedly to the front of the room, my notebook gripped in one sweating hand. I can imagine what everyone sees when they look at me—the exact opposite of Meredith. I tug self-consciously at my fuzzy brown sweater, hating the way it sticks to my clammy skin. Once at the front, I push my shoulder-length dirty-blond hair behind both ears and squint at the audience. It isn’t such a big crowd, only about forty people altogether. But it’s forty more people than I’ve ever read my work to.

My hands tremble as I open the notebook. I swallow, loudly, audibly, into the microphone. People in the audience start to whisper to one

another, already losing interest in anything I might have to say. I feel Meredith’s cool gaze on me from the back of the auditorium, and once again I consider walking out of this room, dropping out of college, and never returning to the state of Tennessee as long as I live.

“This story is called ‘The Lady on the Train,’” I say, hating how my voice shakes. “It’s—it’s a work in progress.” I read the story quickly, with terrible inflection, stumbling over the words. I never lift my eyes from the page. I can hear the hollow way the words fall in the room, clumsy and entirely without force. I might as well be rattling off the weather report for all the impact my story makes.

The dull sound of my own voice, the tremor of my hands holding the notebook, the awkward silence of the room around me all builds a slow, smoldering anger inside me as I read, until I’m practically spitting the words. If I didn’t have to work two campus jobs to survive, I might have more time to write. If I didn’t have to take the English department’s secondary education track so I’d have a chance of a job after I leave college, I might get to develop my writing craft. If I’d been accepted to Magni Viri like Meredith was, I wouldn’t have any of these problems. I could be just as good a writer as she is. I wouldn’t have to worry about how to pay for my tuition. I wouldn’t already be stressing about the student debt I’m going to have. I wouldn’t be exhausted and barely keeping my head above water. I’d be holding this room captive just like she did.

Instead, I’m failing in every possible way.

After I read the last words of the story, I don’t bother to thank the audience or wait for their applause. I stalk from the stage, snatch up my backpack, and head for the door. I know it’s rude of me, but I can’t stand to sit here and listen to a dozen stories that are so much better than mine.

When I pass by Meredith, surrounded by her group of friends, her eyes meet mine for an electric, fleeting second. I expect to see mockery there, but instead she gives me a searching glance that seems to see straight through my skin and bones to what’s underneath. I shiver and look away, wanting nothing more than to get out of this room, as far from perfect Meredith Brown as possible.

 

Two

The moment I step inside my dorm room, I wish I’d gone to the library instead to study before my janitorial shift. My roommate, Helena, is here. She looks up from her laptop and blinks at me for a few seconds before turning back to her work. Helena is a business major from Connecticut whose pale blond hair lives in a permanently sleek ponytail, whose skin has the poreless sheen of porcelain, whose words are clipped and precise. Her side of the room looks like an interior designer put it together. She decided after one conversation with me on move-in day that I wasn’t worth her time and has barely said another word to me since. I hardly mind since she did little more than grill me about my career plans and call my accent “sweet.” When she does bother to talk to me, she’s polite in a waspish way, but I overheard her on the phone with her mom once saying she expected a “higher caliber” student body. It was pretty clear she meant me.

So I do my best to ignore her right back. I toss my things onto my bed and then collapse there too. I lie still, staring at the ceiling, the horrible reading running over and over again in my head. I listen to Helena’s fingers tap-tap-tapping on the keys and feel hot tears forming at the corners of my eyes.

Is every year at Corbin going to be this hard, this grueling, this lonely? I think I made a mistake coming here. I think I overshot. I should have gone to community college or at least a state school. I don’t know why I thought I could do this. Why I thought my life could be different, could be more. When I got waitlisted, my mom told me a college like this wasn’t for people like us, that I should set my sights closer to home. If she were still talking to me, I might call her up and tell her she was right.

But I was so sure of myself back then, so convinced I was going to get everything I dreamed of. High school had been easy. The teachers didn’t expect much from a bunch of kids whose parents mined potash, waited tables, drew unemployment. There was nothing for me there, so I took as many online dual-enrollment courses as I could and graduated a year early, a month before my seventeenth birthday. I just wanted to get out of there, be someone else. Start my life. My real life.

I shouldn’t have been in such a rush. Because back home, I might have been the weird, nearly friendless smart girl who read at pep rallies and always knew the answers in class. But here—here I’m not even that.

Instead, I am . . . no one. Nothing. Unremarkable. Another face in the crowd. A girl who writes half-finished stories that no one will ever like or remember.

The loneliness washes over me so powerfully that I almost can’t stand it. I pull out my phone and scroll through Instagram to distract myself. I pause on a photo of Robin, my best friend from home. She smiles at the camera with her face pressed against her boyfriend Charlie’s. They’re both in band uniforms. She looks happy.

I click on her profile and scroll through all her recent photos. It’s mostly her and Charlie, or her and other kids from band. There aren’t any recent ones of me, which was more or less my own doing. After I started taking online classes, Robin and I drifted. She got busy with band, and I was always at work, trying to save up for a car to get me to college.

I have to scroll a long way to get to a photo of her and me. We’re at the river, both in bathing suits, and I’m holding her up out of the water like she’s a giant baby. We’re both laughing. Right after the photo was taken, she dunked me under the water. I smile at the memory and wipe a few tears off my face.

I comment “Miss you” on the photo, then click the button to send her a private message. But my thumbs hover over the screen. Why should I break into her happiness with my problems? I’ve barely talked

 to her since I got here—we barely spoke before I left. And it’s not like she can help me anyway.

I sigh and turn my phone over onto my chest. I need to stop this pity fest and get my essay that’s due tomorrow done before I head to work.

I consider staying and writing my paper in bed, but the silence coming from Helena’s side of the room feels so heavy I’m afraid I might collapse under it, sink through the floor and into the earth.

I hardly make a sound as I slip out of the room to find another place to haunt.

Back outside, on the foggy sidewalks of nighttime Corbin, I walk slowly and tiredly to the library, my one refuge on campus. Like Denfeld Hall and the chapel, the library is a pre-1900s building, one of the few that Corbin hasn’t had to tear down or renovate into modern oblivion. Tonight it looks deliciously Gothic, hulking in the shadows like a gargoyle.

I push open the nearest of the two sets of heavy oak doors and walk beneath the arching stone doorway, my angry, dejected mood already starting to give way to the romance of the place. It’s as silent as a tomb tonight, and Foster, the senior philosophy major who works the circulation desk at night, doesn’t even look up when I pass by, earbuds in and his glazed eyes locked on a copy of Derrida’s Of Grammatology.

Just as I reach the bank of carrels at the back of the first floor, my phone rings, startling me. I thought I’d silenced it before the reading. I yank it out of my back pocket and quickly reject the call, not even bothering to see who it is. I flick on the silent setting. Immediately, another call starts coming in again, mutely lighting up the screen. My phone never rings, so I can’t help but wonder if it might be something important. But there’s no number listed. It reads “Unknown Caller.” My mind starts to spin through scenarios. Maybe there’s a problem with my financial aid. Maybe Mom was in an accident. Maybe—

I shake my head. It will probably be a scam about my nonexistent car warranty. Still, I feel compelled to answer. I swipe the green phone icon.

“Hello?” I whisper.

The woman on the other end says something unintelligible.

“I’m sorry?” I whisper, a little louder. “This is Tara Boone. Who is this?”

A student working on a laptop at the nearest carrel turns her head sharply and scowls at me. I make an apologetic face and turn away from her.

“Hello?” I try again.

Sounds come from the other end, barely discernable: the rasp of cicadas, nails scraping on wood. I glance at the screen as if it can explain what’s happening. The call duration reads 3:01. Three minutes. Has this gone on for three minutes already, or is my crappy refurbished iPhone on the fritz? It must be.

“Hello?” I try one last time. More weird noises, and then the call disconnects. My skin has broken out in goose bumps, the hair at the nape of my neck prickling unpleasantly, as if charged with static electricity. I drop the phone into my backpack and shake out

my hands, and the strange feeling passes.

I reach the stairs and start up the three narrow, claustrophobic flights to the reading room on the fourth floor. The ancient stairs creak, and the fluorescent lights overhead flicker and shiver, casting strange patterns on the walls. When I finally make it up to the top, I breathe a sigh of relief. The reading room is the best spot in the library, especially during daytime, when light streams in through the huge, soaring windows and sparkles over the green and gold vines painted on the ceiling. It’s what I always imagined when I thought of college.

But tonight, after Meredith’s eerie story and the creepy phone call, even this comforting space feels weirdly unsettling. The windows are dark, reflecting the room back at itself, everything vaguely warped and distorted. Shadows lurk in the corners, filling my imagination with unseen figures. The long rows of battered oak tables are mostly empty, only a few students typing tiredly on their laptops beneath the ghostly glow of green-shaded lamps, their faces shadowed and haggard.

Ignoring the shiver that runs up my spine, I settle into my favorite spot by the wall, nearest the long row of windows, and take a deep breath. I close my eyes, blocking out all the unnerving visuals my mind won’t stop conjuring. Instead, I let the ever-present smells of the library fill my senses: must, dust, old paper, stale coffee. Familiar, comforting, speaking of long years of thought, research, art, creation. The tightness in my chest eases. This is why I’m here, I remind myself. This is what I imagined college would be. A place to dream, write, become.

With that thought, I try to banish the events of the night—the disastrous reading, Helena, and the weird, creepy phone call—and take out my laptop to get to work.

I’m two pages into an essay for Literature of the Ancient Near East about the goddess Inanna’s descent to the underworld when someone lets out an ear-piercing scream that rips me from my work. I shoot to my feet.

The handful of other students in the reading room look around, their eyes wide. Everyone is frozen, unsure what to do. My first thought is that there is a shooter in the building, but then I realize I’ve heard no gunshots.

“Should we . . . ?” a white guy in an argyle sweater, sitting a few tables away from me, asks the room, his arms crossed protectively over his chest.

But no one answers and no one moves.

The scream comes again—weaker this time, laced with horror. My body moves toward the sound, as if of its own accord. Across the long room and down the stairs, my heart pounding in rhythm with my boots as I thunder down the steps. I never have been able to resist answering someone’s cry for help, I think wryly. I almost didn’t make it out of my hometown because of it.

I vaguely sense people following behind me as I break onto the third floor and hear a woman’s voice, muffled by the rows of books. She’s weeping, moaning, whispering frantic words. I hurry toward her as quietly as I can down the long aisle, peeking around each row

On the very last one, a white woman with messy, shoulder-length gray hair stands with her back to me, eyes on the shadowy corner.

“Are you—are you okay?” I ask. The woman cries out and spins toward me, her hand clutching the collar of her blouse, a shawl unraveling around her shoulders. She’s my professor for Intro to Gothic Lit. Behind her oversize glasses, her face is pale and distorted by fright, so different from how she looks in class. She’s usually smiling, lit up from within by her own enthusiasm for the subject. But now she looks shattered.

“Dr. Hendrix?” I ask. “Has anything happened?”

She turns away from me and gestures at the corner. “I found—I found her. Is she—is she . . . ?” The professor lets out another moan and claps her hand over her mouth.

I take a step forward and peer around her. The fluorescent light overhead stutters and hums, ...