“What does it say?” Alex asked.
“I don’t know,” Dawes said. She sounded breathless. “I don’t even recognize the alphabet.”
Alex had to force her feet to move. But she knew it wouldn’t get any easier. It never did.
“Be ready,” she told Dawes, and then she was rounding back past the entrance and down the nave once more. The soldier. The one to walk alone.
Alma Mater gazed benevolently down at her, surrounded by artists and scholars, flanked by Truth, naked in her allegory.
It wasn’t until Alex was right in front of the mural that she realized what had changed. They were all staring at her now. The sculptor, the monk, Truth with her mirror, Light with her torch. They were watching her, and whatever
human features the artist had granted them did not seem quite natural anymore. Their faces looked like masks, and the eyes peering through them were too bright, alive and keen with hunger.
She made herself keep walking, resisting the urge to look back, to see if somehow one of them had pried itself free of the frame and crept after her.
She passed beneath the Tree of Knowledge, noting the sculptural niche at its center. Empty. How had she never noticed that before?
Finally, she arrived at the glass door that would lead her to the courtyard.
A panel of yellow and blue stained glass marked the entrance. She had looked it up. Daniel in the lions’ den.
“We’re coming for you, Darlington,” she whispered. She could hear the soft ticking of the metronome.
Once more she touched the porcelain box in her pocket. I have been crying out to you from the start. She dipped her thumb into her blood and dragged it across the door.
It vanished. Alex stared into the starless void, felt the cold of it, heard the rising wind, and then, floating above it, the soft sweet hum of middle C.
Come on along. Come on along. She stepped into the courtyard.
As soon as her boot hit the stone path, the ground seemed to shake.
“Shit,” Tripp squeaked from somewhere to her left.
She could see now: ordinary night, Mercy at the courtyard’s center, Dawes, Tripp, and Turner at the other corners.
She kept walking, kept marching toward the basin, keeping time with the metronome. With every step came another little earthquake. Boom.
Boom. Boom. Alex could barely keep her footing.
Ahead she saw Mercy, her face panicked, trying not to tip over.
They were all stumbling now, the stones of the courtyard buckling beneath them, but still the metronome ticked away.
Maybe the ground would just open up and swallow them. Maybe that was what Dawes had meant by submerged.
“Is this supposed to happen?” Tripp shouted.
“Keep going,” Alex yelled, lurching forward.
“The basin!” cried Mercy.
The square basin was overflowing, water gushing past the cherubs, pooling at its base, and coursing through the crevices between the stones, creeping toward them. Alex felt a weird relief that it wasn’t blood.
The water struck her boots. It was hot.
“It stinks,” muttered Tripp.
“Sulfur,” said Turner.
It’s just a river, Alex told herself. Though she didn’t know which one.
All borderlands were marked by rivers, places where the mortal world became permeable and you could cross into the afterlife.
They splashed through, the water level rising, still marching, still in unison. When they reached the fountain, they stood staring at each other as the water boiled and bubbled over the sides. The cherubs sat at each of the basin’s corners, gazing into its center, eyes trained on nothing. But maybe they’d simply been keeping a watch, waiting for the door to open.
Dawes’s teeth were dug into her lower lip; her chest rose and fell in short, shallow pants. Tripp was nodding as if he heard secret music, a psych-up song from some collection of Jock Jams. Turner’s face was stern, his mouth set in a determined line. He was the only one of them with experience in anything close to this. He’d probably kicked a few doors down in his time, without knowing what trouble might be waiting on the other side. But this wasn’t really like that, was it?
They were pilgrims. They were cosmonauts. They were as good as dead.
“On three,” Dawes said, her voice cracking.
They counted together, their voices barely audible over the rush of the water.
One.
A wind rose suddenly, that cold wind they’d all felt rushing through the darkness. Now it shook the courtyard trees and rattled the windows in their casements.
Two.
