in one of the Sterling Library reading rooms, a copy of Nostromo gripped loosely in her hand, feet propped on a heating duct. At half past ten, she’d woken with a start, drool trickling across her cheek. Her startled “Shit!” had gone off like a shotgun blast in the quiet of the library, and she’d buried her face in her scarf as she slung her bag over her shoulder and made her escape.
Now she cut through Commons, beneath the rotunda where the names of the war dead were carved deep into the marble, and stone figures stood vigil—Peace, Devotion, Memory, and finally Courage, who wore a helmet and shield and little else and had always looked to Alex more like a stripper than a mourner. She charged down the steps and across the intersection of College and Grove.
The campus had a way of changing faces from hour to hour and block to block so that Alex always felt as if she were meeting it for the first time. Tonight it was a sleepwalker, breathing deep and even. The people she passed on her way to SSS seemed locked in a dream, soft-eyed, faces turned to one another, steam rising off the cups of coffee in their gloved hands. She had the eerie sense that they were dreaming her, a girl in a dark coat who would disappear when they woke.
Sheffield-Sterling-Strathcona Hall was drowsing too, the classrooms closed up tight, hallways cast in energy-saving half-light. Alex took the stairs to the second floor and heard noise echoing from one of the lecture halls. The Yale Social screened movies there every Thursday night. Mercy had tacked the schedule to the door of their dorm room, but Alex hadn’t bothered to study it. Her Thursdays were full.
Tripp Helmuth slouched against the wall beside the doors to the lecture hall. He acknowledged Alex with a heavy-lidded nod. Even in the dim light, she could see his eyes were bloodshot. No doubt he’d smoked before he showed up tonight. Maybe that was why the elder Bonesmen had stuck him on guard duty. Or maybe he’d volunteered.
“You’re late,” he said. “They started.”
Alex ignored him, glanced once over her shoulder to make sure the hallway was clear. She didn’t owe Tripp Helmuth an excuse, and it would look weak to offer one. She pressed her thumb into a barely visible notch in the paneling. The wall was supposed to swing open smoothly, but it always stuck. She gave it a hard nudge with her shoulder and stumbled as it jolted open.
“Easy, killer,” said Tripp.
Alex shut the door behind her and edged down the narrow passage in the dark.
Unfortunately, Tripp was right. The prognostication had already begun. Alex entered the old operating theater as quietly as she could.
The room was a windowless chamber, sandwiched between the lecture hall and a classroom that grad students used for discussion sections. It was a forgotten remnant of the old medical school, which had held its classes here in SSS before it moved to its own buildings. The managers of the trust that funded Skull and Bones had sealed up the room’s entrance and disguised it with new paneling sometime around 1932. All facts Alex had gleaned from Lethe: A Legacy when she probably should have been reading Nostromo.
No one spared Alex a glance. All eyes were on the Haruspex, his lean face hidden behind a surgical mask, pale blue robes spattered with blood. His latex-gloved hands moved methodically through the bowels of the—patient? Subject? Sacrifice? Alex wasn’t sure which term applied to the man on the table. Not “sacrifice.” He’s supposed to live. Ensuring that was part of her job. She’d see him safely through this ordeal and back to the hospital ward he’d been taken from. But what about a year from now? she wondered. Five years from now?
Alex glanced at the man on the table: Michael Reyes. She’d read his file two weeks ago, when he was selected for the ritual. The flaps of his stomach were pinned back with steel clips and his abdomen looked like it was blooming, a plump pink orchid, plush and red at its center. Tell me that doesn’t leave a mark. But she had her own future to worry about. Reyes would manage.
Alex averted her eyes, tried to breathe through her nose as her stomach roiled and coppery saliva flooded her mouth. She’d seen plenty of bad injuries but always on the dead. There was something much worse about a living wound, a