Stevie shook her head, partially because she could not find the words and partially to hold down the feeling of sickness.

“What is happening?” Nate said again.

“Ellie,” Stevie replied. “Ellie is down there.”

“Ellie is down there? Hiding? I have to call for help!”

Stevie shook her head, and Nate got the message and fell back against the wall.

Stevie pulled her phone from her pocket. David lurched along the wall and reached for it, pushing it down.

“Don’t. No, I have to call,” David said, pulling out his phone. “Both of you should go in your rooms. Put some headphones on. That’s where you’ve been. Play something loud. Go.”

“What?” Stevie said.

“You can’t have been down there, Stevie. You get it? Nate, you get it? She wasn’t there. I went down there alone. Just me.”

“What, we’re lying now?” Nate said. “To cops?”

“You know what it means if Stevie was down there. I’ll be okay. She won’t be. All we’re doing is reporting. That’s all.”

There was an urgency in David that was entirely unfamiliar, a high flush to his cheeks and a rasp in his voice. Nate turned gray, as gray as the wizard robe he was still wearing.

“Just go in your rooms and shut the door,” David said again, his voice pleading. “That’s all you have to do.”

Nate swore under his breath but pulled himself away from the wall.

“Are you going?” he asked Stevie.

Stevie was not sure where she was. Moments ago, she had been in the tightness of the tunnel, in David’s arms, embraced by the earth, alone in the universe. Then, there was Ellie.

Nate shook Stevie’s arm.

“I’m not going if you’re not,” he said. “Tell me what you’re doing. I don’t understand anything right now.”

David looked at her. His hair was still tousled from where her hands had been. She had kissed the fine smoothness of his neck. . . .

The smell of the tunnel poisoned her memory.

David would be safe. Nate didn’t know why, of course.

“Yeah,” she said. “Go to your room.”

This felt entirely wrong, what she was doing for herself, but entirely right for Nate. Nate didn’t need this. Nate had been struggling enough with what happened to Hayes.

“Jesus Christ,” Nate said as he went past them, tripping on the hem of the robe as he went up the curve of the stairs.

Stevie gulped down some air. She started moving on autopilot, stumbling toward her room.

She heard the first arrivals about five minutes later. She had put in earbuds, but turned nothing on. Her heartbeat echoed back at her in her ears. There was another arrival. More voices in the common room, in the hall.

She turned on some music. Loud. She closed her eyes and put her head back against the wooden bed frame. When the knock came on Stevie’s door, she actually didn’t hear it at first. She had put the volume up too high. Pix eventually cracked the door.

“Stevie?” she said.

Stevie peeled her eyes open. The effort was tremendous, the light from the ceiling offensively bright.

“Stevie,” Pix said again. “Can you . . . stay in here for a few minutes? There’s something going on. Nothing to worry about. Security just has to look at something in the hallway.”

“Sure,” Stevie said. Her voice sounded sleepy.

“Sorry to disturb you. Go back to sleep.”

Stevie closed her eyes again and let movies play out on the backs of her eyelids. She summoned the feeling again, of David’s kiss and touch. There was so little time to savor it. The memory would fade, the sensation would be corrupted by whatever was coming.

This had all happened before. The same, but different.

Pix returned and told her to pack some things in a bag. “Take your time,” she said, but her face betrayed her shock. “There’s an issue in the house and we’re sleeping somewhere else tonight.”

Stevie got out of bed and began mechanically filling her backpack. Medicine, clothes, her computer and phone, everything shoved into the backpack until it squeaked a bit from the strain. She was about to close it when she had another thought. The tin. It would not fit. She pulled out a shirt that was taking up valuable space and put the tin in its place. Better safe than sorry.

There was a security officer blocking the view to the end of the hall. Nate was sitting at the table in the common room, and Janelle, still dressed as Wonder Woman, was grabbing at things in her room and packing her own bag. Pix stood at the table, her expression grim.

“Where’s David?” Stevie asked Pix.

“He’s over at the Great House. He found Ellie, Stevie. In a tunnel. She . . . wasn’t okay. She died.” Pix waited for Stevie to absorb this.

“Where are we going to go?” Nate asked.

“We’re setting up for the night in the yurt. They’re going to bring in beds, and we’ll hang dividers from the ceiling. It’ll be nice and cozy. We can talk.”

“Oh good,” Nate said, picking at the table surface with his fingernail.

“As soon as Janelle is ready, we can go. I’m going to get my things.”

“She must be tired of having her students die,” Nate said when Pix went upstairs. “Think of the paperwork.”

When Stevie did not reply, Nate nudged her hand.

“Are you okay?” he asked.

“I have no idea.”

“How the hell is this happening? Didn’t we just do this? I thought she ran away, like she went off with circus people or something. Not that she was . . . under us.”

“She wasn’t really under us,” Stevie said. “She was kind of far away.”

“Oh, good.”

“You know what I mean,” she said.

“I know what you mean. I know that this place may suck. Two people are dead.”

“It’s not the school’s fault.”

“No, but . . . maybe? Maybe this place . . .”

“Are you saying this place is, like, cursed or something?”

Nate shook his head.

“I’m saying, two people have died, and that’s a lot more than the number who died at my last school. I know shit happens. Terrible shit happens. But this is weird terrible shit with tunnels and dry ice and people suffocating to death underground . . .”

Stevie pulled her shoulders closer into her body. Her mind drifted away. It went to David and his story of his mom and his sister, of the promises she had made, of the coldness of the case she wanted to solve and the coldness under the ground.

Janelle emerged in a pair of fleece pajama bottoms and a massive fuzzy sweater, a silver overnight bag on her shoulder. She walked over to Nate and Stevie and dropped an arm around each. There were tears at the edges of her eyes.

“Pix said Vi could come over to the yurt too, if that’s all right with you. I’d just really like to see them.”

“Sure,” Stevie said. “Of course.”

Nate nodded absently.

“David found her. They took him over to the Great House.”

The blue door creaked open and Larry came inside in his red-and-black fleece coat, his walkie-talkie buzzing on his hip. He surveyed the group at the table.

“We’re going to take you over to the yurt now. We haven’t told the school at large yet. Some people are still at the party. I’d ask you, if you don’t mind, not to spread this. I know Vi Harper-Tomo has permission to come over. But please don’t text this to anyone.”

“We won’t,” Janelle said.

Larry’s focus landed on Stevie. He was reading her. She tried to shut herself, as loud and cleanly as shutting a book.

But people aren’t books, unfortunately.

The group made its way into the night, the two officers flanking them. The night was cold and still as glass, with only a sliver of a moon. Vi met them halfway, with the head of Juno House as an escort.

“What’s going on?” they said. “Are you okay?”

They looked at Janelle closely, then thumbed away the tears under her eyes.

“We’ll talk over there,” Janelle said. “I’m okay. We just have to go.”

Nate put on his headphones and lowered his head. He was checking out of the situation. Stevie wasn’t sure which one of them led this movement, but it seemed that she and Larry were at a different pace than the others, and a fractionally different trajectory, until they were on their own little path together. Either he wanted to talk to her or she subconsciously had to talk to him. Whatever the case, it was something she could not bear to hold in. As they passed the conference of statue heads, Stevie came to a stop. Larry nodded to the others to keep going. He leaned against one of the plinths and examined her.

“You need to talk?” he said.

“I was down there,” she replied.

“I know.”

He held up a fake mustache. It must have come off when she was making out with David. She had forgotten she had been wearing it.

“What you need to do, right now, is tell me the truth.”

Stevie dug into her pocket and pulled out the fragment of trash bag. She handed it to Larry.

“I found this on the floor down there.”

“What were you doing, Stevie?” he said. “I told you. No tunnels.”

“Fenton—Dr. Fenton—thought there was a tunnel. I looked. I found it. It was homework, sort of. I didn’t know Ellie was there. I had no idea she was there. It was just a tunnel. I didn’t want to go in. But he went inside.”

“David.”

Stevie nodded.