Page 16 of Thrall
In memoriam, it read. Followed by a link.
Lucy caught that scent again: that sharp penny tang. When her eyes darted down toward the source of it, she saw that she’d clenched her fists tight enough to draw blood.
She clicked the link. And those same fifteen or so faces from the staff directory smiled up at her.
She didn’t let herself read each paragraph. Every accolade and anecdote, every list of surviving family—if she let herself stop and take it in, she didn’t know what she would do. But she couldn’t stop herself from finding Luke’s grinning face halfway down the page, or reading the last few sentences under his name.Luke Thompson was recently accepted into the prestigious philosophy graduate program at Rollins University.
Numbly, Lucy tabbed away from the dead boy’s face. And returning to her search, she clicked on the next link down the list. A news item.
TRAGEDY IN THE OUTER BANKS: 15 missing, presumed dead.
A stifled whimper broke the silence of the dorm. Even as Lucy felt it on her own lips, she couldn’t quite believe that such a wounded, animal sound could live within her.
The search for the missing crew of the Outer Banks–based Demeter Cruise Lines has been called off, a representative from the Coast Guard announced this morning. One month after the company’s flagship vessel was found abandoned near Bodie Island Lighthouse following an all-staff party, divers still report “no sign” of the attending employees. The vessel was discovered clean and intact, and police have not yet declared whether foul play is suspected.
The family of Demeter president and CEO Walter Rengrove issued a statement expressing “sorrow and solidarity” with the families of the missing. Rengrove, who is at this time the sole confirmed casualty of the group, was found in nearby waters one week after the ship’s discovery. The cause of death was determined to be drowning, though local naturalists remain concerned by the unusual animal bite—
The screen blurred then. The sounds coming from outside faded, sinking into the hum of the computer and Lucy’s own harsh breaths. She shut her laptop hard, pushing herself back across the bed and away from it.
But she already understood that there was no pushing this away. Didn’t she? She couldn’t push away something that was already underneath her skin.
Lucy curled up tight, burying her face in her pillow. And she cried until it hurt.
She lay wrapped in her blankets for a long time. Long enough that she moved past crying, past anything except for short, ragged breaths. Her pillow was coarse against her face. Some cold water would have helped. But she didn’t know how safe it was to unlock the door. How safe it was to beanywhere.
Her eyes slid shut, though she was far beyond sleep. But she was so tired. Tired enough that unlocking the door didn’t sound so bad, when she imagined it. Lucy used to joke, when she had friends to joke with, that if the zombie apocalypse hit, she hoped she’d die immediately. Ideally before she knew what was going on, before she had time to be scared, because she sure as hell wasn’t much of a runnerora fighter.
It was a joke. But it wasn’t all that different from the way she felt at home sometimes. The way that she’d felt all those years, when it didn’t seem like she was going anywhere except for maybe around the corner once in a while.
She wanted to have a real life. She wanted it so badly that all these years she had taken her living wherever she could get it: in fake IDs or in late-night walks or in ill-advised amateur tattoos.
But maybe she wasn’t meant to be the kind of person who’d get to live. Lucy scrubbed at her face, as if with enough force she could scrub right at the thought.
No. No, that wasn’t true. She’d already lived with death for this long. All those hours and all those years Jillian spent planning around and obsessing over and trying to avoid death, she made space for it in their home instead. It ate at their table every night. It slept with them in their beds.
If the zombie apocalypse came, if the boy who called himself Luke Thompson appeared at her door, if any one of the mundane horrors Jillian imagined manifested, maybe Lucy wouldn’t be able to control what happened next. But she wouldn’t welcome it in, either. Shewouldfight, no matter how tired she was. She would outrun it the same way she’d outrun that house, the one that had kept her safe but had never made her feel all that alive. She hadn’t made it all the way here just to stop running now.
Blearily, she checked her phone. It was much later than she realized, already a little past nine thirty. Whitney still wasn’t back. And the sounds of life out in the hall had started to quiet down. In the absence of voices, she could hear the stirrings of the building itself. Breathing in and out with the movements of the earth below.
The walls felt so thin as they shuddered around her. Thin enough that they didn’t seem like much of a match for a tall, sandy-haired stranger introducing himself with a dead boy’s name.
Lucy swallowed. Her crying had wrung all the moisture out of her throat. That, at least, was a problem she could solve.
She reached for her nightstand. Her fingers brushed cardstock on the way to her water cup. The little stack of Pallas Radio advertisements, poking out of her tote bag.
Lucy gathered them up, slid forward on the mattress so she could reach the recycling bin at the end of her bed. She noticed the ink first. Fresh enough to come off a little on her thumb.
The flyers fanned out as she loosened her hold. And that was when she saw it, on the flyer closest to her hand, where her finger had smudged against neat, blocky handwriting, at the center side of the page:
Lucy—call us.
Her eyes scanned each of the flyers spread across the floor. Because the message wasn’t just written on one of them. Each of the flyers had it written in the same exact spot.Lucy—call us. Lucy—call us. Lucy—
Jolting upright with the force of a sudden memory, she grabbed for her purse where it was drooping along the edge of her bed. The flyer she’d been handed in the café sat near the top, folded neatly behind her wallet. As she fumbled it open, the words were the first thing she saw:
Lucy—call us.
Her breath shook on the way in.Maybe they do this for everyone, she thought, without any real conviction. Even if anyone put that much effort into advertising their independent student radio show, stuffing mailboxes was one thing. The girl at the Pallas Radio booth this afternoon had put this flyer directly into Lucy’s hand, at the café in a quad where Lucy didn’t even live. Lucy was a stranger. There was no reason at all for that girl to know her name.
