Good. Better. Best. That was the trajectory that got you to this place. What Darlington
and probably all the rest of these eager, effortful children couldn’t understand was that Alex would have happily settled for less than Yale. Darlington was all about the pursuit of
perfection, something spectacular. He didn’t know how precious a normal life could be, how easy it was to drift away from average. You started sleeping until noon, skipped one
class, one day of school, lost one job, then another, forgot the way that normal people did
things. You lost the language of ordinary life. And then, without meaning to, you crossed
into a country from which you couldn’t return. You lived in a state where the ground always seemed to be slipping from beneath your feet, with no way back to someplace solid.
It didn’t matter that Alex had witnessed the delegates of Skull and Bones predict commodities futures using Michael Reyes’s guts or that she’d once seen the captain of the
lacrosse team turn himself into a vole. (He’d squealed and then—she could have sworn it
—pumped his tiny pink fist.) Lethe was Alex’s way back to normal. She didn’t need to be
exceptional. She didn’t even need to be good, just good enough. Turner had given her permission. Go home. Go to sleep. Take a shower. Get back to the real work of trying to
pass your classes and make it through the year. Her grades from first semester had been
bad enough to land her in academic probation.
She’s town.
Except the societies liked to shop town girls and boys for their experiments. It was the
whole reason Lethe existed. Or a big part of it. And Alex had spent most of her life as town.
She eyed the coroner’s van, parked half on and half off the sidewalk. Turner’s back was
still to her.
The mistake people made when they didn’t want to get noticed was to try to look casual, so instead she strode toward the van with purpose, a girl who needed to get to the
dorms. It was late, after all. When she rounded the back of the vehicle, she shot one quick
glance in Turner’s direction, then slipped into the wide V of the open van doors as a uniformed coroner turned to her.
“Hey,” she said. He remained in a half crouch, face wary, body blocking the view behind him. Alex held up one of the two gold coins she kept tucked in the lining of her
coat. “You dropped this.”
He saw the glint and without thinking reached out to take it, his response part courtesy,
part trained behavior. Someone offered you a boon, you accepted. But it was also a magpie
impulse, the lure of something shiny. She felt a little like a troll in a fairy tale.
“I don’t think …” he began. But as soon as his fingers closed over the coin, his face went slack, the compulsion taking hold.
“Show me the body,” Alex said, half-expecting him to refuse. She’d seen Darlington flash one at a security guard before, but she’d never used a coin of compulsion herself.
The coroner didn’t even blink, only backed farther into the van and offered her his hand. She clambered up behind him with a quick glance over her shoulder and shut the doors. They wouldn’t have much time. All she needed was for the driver or, worse, Turner
to come knocking on the door and find her there, having a chat over a corpse. She also wasn’t sure how long the compulsion would last. This particular bit of magic had come from Manuscript. They specialized in mirror magic, glamours, persuasion. Any object could be enchanted, the most famous being a condom that had convinced a philandering
Swedish diplomat to hand over a cache of sensitive documents.
The coins took tremendous magic to generate, so they were kept in tight supply at Lethe, and Alex had been stingy with her allotted two. Why was she squandering one now?
As Alex joined the coroner in the enclosed space, she saw his nostrils flare at her smell,
but his fingers were already on the zipper of the body bag, the coin clutched in his other
hand. He was moving too quickly, as if in fast forward, and Alex had the urge to tell him