I shiver. “Is it…”
“Dead.” He grimaces. “Looks like, anyway.” Seeing my expression, his face softens. “Hey. It happens. Things…die.”
Not like that, I want to say. Not like that, they shouldn’t.
It isn’t justthe stove. Or the bird.
The storm is first. A ripping, violent sort of Nor'Easter a few nights later, with hail the size of fists and lightning scissoring across the purple sky.
“Whoa.” In the Camlann study room, facing the lake, Callahan lifts his head from his textbook. “Look.”
He stands slowly, amazed, and I follow where he points, through the wide frame of the window: a tree, on the other side of the lake, blazing orange flames eating its black limbs.
“Must have?—”
Before he can finish, another streak of white sizzles across the sky and slams into the trunk, exploding with sparks.
The next morning, it’s gone.
Then the fish. Bobbing up on the surface of the lake, a few at a time, then dozens—maybe hundreds. Bloated, dead,rotting,pushed ashore by the wind in a wave of slick, liquefying scales and fins.
And then the water.
Kai is first to see it. One minute he’s in the shower, the next he’s slamming out of the bathroom in a towel, his chest and shoulders dripping a thick, viscous red.
“What the fuck?” he mutters, staring down at himself, his hands spread wide. “What the actual, living fuck?—”
It’s all across campus, we hear: dorm showers and bathroom taps, drinking fountains and even?—
“Thepool,” Elena shrieks in Holy Grounds. “The whole swimming pool isblood.”
Not blood, the dean is quick to alert everyone, through whisper networks and paper notices stuffed in everyone’s mail cubby. There’s an explanation, something about iron particulates, continental dust sucked up from pressure changes and all the rainfall dumping them into our watershed.
I don’t know enough about weather patterns to believe or disbelieve it.
But then the darkness falls.
THIRTEEN
GWENNA
Darkness.
Not dense cloud cover. Not fog or pollution. We wake up one morning surrounded by just…lightlessness, the gray sky stuck in permanent twilight and only a glimmering edge of pale gold at the very edge of the trees.
The sun did not rise.
Classes are cancelled for the day. The power is out, campus-wide, everyone assuming some kind of weather event, a freak eclipse, atmospheric shifts, and the mood on campus is humming, almost giddy. It’s fun. Or people act like it’s fun—the energy of a snow day. Freebie downtime. Students scream and laugh like middle-schoolers, playing flashlight tag across the quads, carrying candles around with fake seriousness, taking moody flash-on selfies in front of campus buildings that they can upload whenever the cell towers come back online.
Hours pass, and the giddiness curdles.
By hour sixteen, no one’s laughing. Campus quiets, people retreat to dorm rooms, their candles melted to stubs and their phone batteries waning. Eventually everyone seems to give upand go to sleep, as if things will just reset when we all open our eyes and a new day dawns.
But it doesn’t dawn.
The second day comes and there is no sun. It’s dark, just as dark, butcolder—fifteen degrees and falling, reads an old mercury thermometer outside one of the science buildings. The dining hall’s on generators, paper meal boxes handed out in silence. People cross campus in groups, no one wanting to be alone. I leave Camlann House midmorning just to see, to walk through the quads at what should be high noon and have nothing but blackness greet me at every turn. I pass a bench where a girl is quietly sobbing into her friend’s shoulder, hysterical.
After that, I hurry back.
