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“Aniyah—”

“No. I’m done. I don’t know what your problem is or why you’d want to hurt me, but I’m not sticking around to find out. I’m going to the housing office and asking to switch rooms. Maybe everyone was right about you, and you’re actually crazy.”

My chest constricts. “Please, just let m—”

“Let you what? Lie to me some more?” She shakes her head. “I can’t share a room with someone who’d do this and then pretend they didn’t. I can’t.”

She heads for the door, and I start after her, but she yanks it open before I can reach her and steps into the hallway.

“Wait!” I say.

The door slams shut behind her. Fuck! I could go after her and beg her to come back and hear me out. But what would I even say? I’ve got no proof, no explanation she’d accept, and the only thing that might actually make her understand is supposed to be a secret.

Now my only friend at this whole stupid college is gone, and there’s nothing I can do about it, unless I want to risk the wrath of the society. And even then, Aniyah might still have chosen not to believe me. I sigh. Great. Just fucking great. Now I’m truly alone here.

But falling apart isn’t going to fix anything, and it’s definitely not going to convince Aniyah to come back. If the society thinks doing this will make me crawl to them, they picked the wrong girl. I won’t join anything or give them the satisfaction.

I can’t let them ruin my life either. If someone in my family really was part of the society, then maybe I can find out who it was on my own. And maybe I can figure out why they picked me and how to make them leave me alone for good.

The problem is that I don’t have a clue where to start, since I’ve never heard of anyone in my family going here. So either the masked man was lying, which is possible, or there’s something I don’t know.

I chew on the inside of my cheek. There have to be records of everyone who’s ever gone here, like yearbooks. If a relative of mine was a student, they’d be in one of those books. It’s a long shot, but it’s better than nothing.

The library has to have old yearbooks somewhere, maybe in some archive section that no one ever bothers with. Actually, I should go there right now. Who knows? Maybe I’ll actually find something, because if I don’t, I have no idea what I’m going to do.

Chapter 17

JAYDEN

I FIND VERONICA OUT on a bench all alone, her hood pulled up, her shoulders hunched. As I hang back and watch her a moment, a grin tugs at my mouth, because this is exactly what I wanted.

My plan worked like a charm, and Veronica’s got no one left on her side. She’s mine now. Well, maybe she doesn’t know it yet, but she will, because someone with no friends and no one to turn to always ends up leaning on the first person who’s kind to them, and I’m about to be very, very kind. And once she trusts me, she’ll be willing to do things the society asks of her. Once that’s done, I’ll finally have the answers I want.

I roll my shoulders and put on a serious look on my face before she glances up. As I make my way toward her, she lifts her head, and her brow furrows.

“Hey,” I say, taking a seat on the bench next to her. “Are you okay? You look kind of... I don’t know...”

She lets out a short breath. “I’m fine.”

Yeah, sure she is. She looks as if she hasn’t slept.

“You don’t seem fine,” I say, leaning in a little and keeping my voice low. “Come on. You can tell me anything. What’s going on? Is it them? The society? Are they messing with you too?”

She narrows her eyes at me. “Too? What do you mean? What did they do to you?”

The best way to convince Veronica I’m really on her side is to give her a believable enough story so she’ll think we’re really in this together.

I run a hand over the back of my neck and let out a sigh. “Um, so I had this essay due... Important one that’s, like, a huge chunk of my grade. I finished and saved it. Then, right before I emailed it to my professor, I opened the file one last time, and I realized something was wrong. My name and title were still on the front, but not a word of the essay was what I actually wrote.”

Her eyes go wide, her hood slipping off her head. “No way.”

I shake my head. “And I lost it, because I figured it was my roommate pranking me or something. We share a room, he’s got access to my laptop, and we’d been getting on each other’s nerves for weeks over stupid little stuff. So I went off on him, accused him of switching my paper, and it all kind of escalated from there and he refuses to speak to me and now stays at another friend’s room. And after everything that’s been going on around here... I don’t think it was him at all. It was probably them.”

She presses a hand to her mouth. “Something exactly like that happened to me!”

I fake a surprised look. “Wait, seriously?”

“My roommate, Aniyah,” she says. “She printed out her assignment, had it in her bag overnight, and when she went to hand it in, it’d been switched for some random history paper. And she’s convinced I did it. She thinks I tried to sabotage her out of jealousy or whatever. I don’t even know. She went to the housing office and asked for a transfer, and she moved out. I couldn’t even explain anything to her, because... you know. I can’t say a word about the society to anyone except you.”