against the society, but it had come to nothing. The Bonesmen did have his liver and small intestine in a jar, but she didn’t feel this was the moment to point that out.
“Where’s Darlington?” Turner asked.
“Spain.”
“Spain?” For the first time, Turner’s mild expression gave way.
“Study abroad.”
“And he left you in charge?”
“Sure did.”
“He must have a lot of faith in you.”
“Sure does.” Alex flashed him her most winning grin, and for a second she thought Detective Turner might smile back, because it took a con to know a con. But he didn’t. He’d had to be careful for too long.
“Where are you from, Stern?”
“Why?”
“Look,” he said. “You seem like a nice girl—”
“No,” said Alex. “I don’t.”
Turner raised a brow, cocked his head to the side, assessing, then nodded, conceding the point. “All right,” he said. “You have a job to do tonight and so do I. You did your part. You talked to me. You’ll let Sandow know a girl died here—a white girl who’s going to get plenty of attention without you getting in our way. We’re going to keep this far from the university and … all the rest.” He gave a wave of his hand as if he were distractedly swatting a fly instead of shooing away a century-old cabal of ancient magics. “You’ve done your bit and you can go home. That’s what you want, isn’t it?”
Hadn’t Alex just thought that very thing? Even so, she hesitated, feeling Darlington’s judgment heavy on her. “I do. But Dean Sandow will want—”
Turner’s mask slipped, the fatigue of the night and his anger at her presence suddenly visible. “She’s town, Stern. Back the fuck off.”
She’s town. Not a student. Not connected to the societies. Let it go.
“Yeah,” Alex said. “That’s fine.”
Turner smiled, dimples appearing in his cheeks, boyish, pleased, almost a real smile. “There ya go.”
He turned away from her, sauntered back to his people.
Alex glanced up at the gray, Gothic cathedral of Payne Whitney. It didn’t look like a gym, but nothing here looked like what it was. That’s what you want, isn’t it?
Detective Abel Turner understood her in a way Darlington never had.
Good. Better. Best. That was the trajectory that got you to this place. What Darlington and probably all the rest of these eager, effortful children couldn’t understand was that Alex would have happily settled for less than Yale. Darlington was all about the pursuit of perfection, something spectacular. He didn’t know how precious a normal life could be, how easy it was to drift away from average. You started sleeping until noon, skipped one class, one day of school, lost one job, then another, forgot the way that normal people did things. You lost the language of ordinary life. And then, without meaning to, you crossed into a country from which you couldn’t return. You lived in a state where the ground always seemed to be slipping from beneath your feet, with no way back to someplace solid.
It didn’t matter that Alex had witnessed the delegates of Skull and Bones predict commodities futures using Michael Reyes’s guts or that she’d once seen the captain of the lacrosse team turn himself into a vole. (He’d squealed and then—she could have sworn it—pumped his tiny pink fist.) Lethe was Alex’s way back to normal. She didn’t need to be exceptional. She didn’t even need to be good, just good enough. Turner had given her permission. Go home. Go to sleep. Take a shower. Get back to the real work of trying to pass your classes and make it through the year. Her grades from first semester had been bad enough to land her in academic probation.
She’s town.
Except the societies liked to shop town girls and boys for their experiments. It was the whole reason Lethe existed. Or a big part of it. And Alex had spent most of her life as town.
She eyed the coroner’s van, parked half on and half off the sidewalk. Turner’s back was still to her.
The mistake people made when they didn’t want to get noticed was to try to look casual, so instead she strode toward the van with purpose, a girl who needed to get to the dorms. It was late, after all. When she rounded the back of the vehicle, she shot one quick glance in Turner’s direction, then slipped into the wide V of the open van doors as a uniformed coroner turned to her.
“Hey,” she said. He remained in a half crouch, face wary, body blocking the view behind