RIOT HOUSE

by Hart, Callie

  …which is when I see the light.

  Not a streetlight, or a bedroom light: a flash of light, in the form of a narrow pillar of brilliant white, shooting straight up into the air from the very center of the maze.

  I blink and it’s gone.

  Probably imagined it, Stillwater. No one’s out there tonight, after two in the morning, in the pouring rain and cold. There’s just no fucking way. No one in their right minds—

  The pillar of light blazes through the darkness again, this time spearing straight up and then lowering so that it’s shining directly at my window. I’m blinded as the intense beam hits me in the face. I step back, shielding my eyes, but the beam of light has already shifted, swinging from left to right through the maze.

  “What the hell?” I squint out of the window, trying to see where it’s coming from, but with the rain and the impenetrably thick cloud cover tonight, it’s impossible to see much more than dim outlines of the world beyond my room.

  “Whatever this is, it’s none of my business.” I say it out loud, meaning it with every fiber of my being. If someone’s dumb enough to brave this madness, then it must be for a good reason. It’s probably one of the professors, dealing with some kind of weather damage, battening down the hatches.

  Get your ass back in bed, Elodie. Draw the damn curtains and go the fuck to sleep. Now.

  Sometimes I don’t obey my own commands. I do dumb shit even though I tell myself to do the exact opposite. I never disobey myself when I use my father’s angry bark as the voice of reason in my head, though. I pull the curtains closed and get back under the covers, determined to get at least a couple of hours sleep before Carina comes knocking on my door tomorrow morning.

  I can do this. I can switch off my brain and relinquish myself to sleep. I close my eyes.

  The storm outside rages on, and I breathe into my diaphragm, pushing out my belly, filling myself up with oxygen. Breathing like this is a great calming tactic during a panic attack—I still get those from time to time—but it also has the added benefit of making me sleepy. If I do this for a couple of minutes, the tension in my body will ebb away and I’ll pass out before I’m even aware that I’m about to drift off. There’s something hypnotic about the pull and draw of so much air filling and rushing out of my body. It’s rare that this trick doesn’t work.

  I clear my mind…

  Breathe in…

  Exhale…

  Pause.

  Breathe in…

  Exhale…

  Pause.

  I repeat the motion, rinse and repeat, over and over again, but my mind just will not quiet. Goddamnit. I open my eyes, sighing out a weighty groan. And there, on the far side of my room, projected over the wooden door, is an imperfect rectangle of light.

  Fuck. I mustn’t have pulled the curtains closed properly. Growling, I sit up, about to swing my legs over the side of the bed again, when the light flicks off and disappears.

  Huh.

  Okaaaay.

  It’s returned before I can settle back into my pillows.

  It flicks on and off in rapid succession, like a faulty strip light. It looks random at first, but when I stare at it a little longer, I realize that the strobing light isn’t random. It isn’t random in the slightest.

  It’s Morse fucking code.

  The same short burst of Morse code, repeating itself over and over again. I wait for the cycle to pause for a second, indicating the end of the message, and when it starts up again, I do my best to keep up with the flashes.

  Dot dash dash dot. That’s a P.

  I miss the next part. Whoever’s standing in the pissing rain, sending covert messages to another student in this building, is signaling too fast for me to keep up.

  I wait, biding my time until the message begins again.

  P, and then dot, dash, dash. That’s a W. The last letter, dash, dot, dash, dot, is a C.

  PWC?

  Anyone with half a brain cell and a father in the military knows what PWC stands for: Proceed With Caution.

  Hmm. Some kind of lover’s tryst? An invitation? A warning? It’s warm in my bed, as well as considerably dryer in here than outside. On any other night, I’d be so curious about the message and what it meant that I wouldn’t be able to stop myself; I’d have to sneak out and see what kind of salacious meetings were taking place inside the maze, but tonight my own self-preservation instincts tell me that I’m much safer right where I am, protected from flying debris, gale force winds, icy rain, and hypothermia.

  About to try my breathing technique again, my eyelids flutter…and the light starts flashing again, with a whole new message:

  A…R…E

  Y…O…U

  A

  C…O…W…A…R…D

  S…T…I…L…L…W…A…T…E…R

  ?

  The light goes out, and this time it stays out.

  What the hell? I launch myself out of bed. The rain’s so bad, even worse than before, rolling across the window in sheets, that there’s no way I can see the maze anymore. All I see is the gauntlet thrown down, the challenge of someone waiting out there in the dark. For me.

  “Nooooo,” I groan. “You have got to be kidding me.”

  * * *

  Thanks to Colonel Stillwater’s rush evacuation from Tel Aviv, I didn’t have time to go shopping for new clothes before I was bundled onto that personnel carrier. I have no coat with me. Not one that would provide any sort of protection against the gale that’s blowing outside. As I step out of the front door, I tighten my light, too-thin bomber jacket around me, thankful that at least my feet should stay dry inside my Doc Martins. The rain hits me square in the face, ice cold and shocking, forcing a string of curse words out of my mouth as I duck my head, forging forward, out into the maelstrom.

  The wind rips my hood down and whips my hair up around my head. I don’t have to worry about it flying around my face for too long, though. By the time I’ve reached the corner of the building, it’s soaking wet and plastered to my skull.

  “This is fucking insanity,” I hiss, jogging along the perimeter of the school, doing my best to keep my footing as I skid in the bog of mud that was once the border of the rose garden. Each second feels like a minute. The distance from the wall outside Doctor Fitzpatrick’s room to the entrance of the maze stretches out, increasing with every step I take instead of growing shorter, and I question whether I’ve lost my goddamn mind.

  This is not a good idea.

  This is a horrible idea.

  No one knows where I’ve gone. I decoded a fucking Morse code message in the middle of the night, cast onto my bedroom wall, and like a stubborn idiot I decided to prove I wasn’t a coward rather than stay where it was safe and warm. Who fucking does that?

  Dumb girls in horror movies, my father’s voice informs me. The stupid ones who wind up dead, with their body parts strewn across the lawn.

  “Didn’t ask for your opinion, thanks, Dad,” I growl, gritting my teeth as a freezing cold gust of wind pelts droplets of rainwater into my face.

  At the mouth of the maze, I consider turning back. For a long second, I give myself the opportunity to turn around. To return to the relative protection of my room. Then I remember that knife sticking out of my bed, and I scoff at that idea. My room isn’t safe. And I’m already drenched to the bone. My calves are covered in mud. And someone’s waiting for me in this maze, likely the person responsible for wrecking my belongings, and I want to face them. I want to face Wren, because I already know it was him who sent the message.

  If I face him, I can nip this whole thing in the bud. I’ll be tackling the situation head on, and isn’t that what my father taught me? Never run from the enemy, Elodie. Never show them your back. Any sign of weakness will be your ultimate downfall. The most remarkable generals in history always met force with force.

  Still. I’m aware how ill-advised this is. I should have left a note, requesting that something pithy and deprecating be engraved on my heads
tone: She lived recklessly and died the same way. God grant her the wisdom to make better choices in the afterlife.

  Something about the view of the maze from my bedroom window gave me the creeps. I didn’t like looking out at it, but I did force myself to map out a vague route to its center. Left, left, right. Straight, left, right, right, then the hairpin, then, left, then one last right. My teeth chatter, clashing together violently as I try and follow the directions I have committed to memory. The walls of the hedges are high, though, sinister and imposing; it feels like there are arms reaching out at me from within them, hands grabbing for me, pulling at my clothes, trying to yank me into the sharp, dense walls of the labyrinth. It’s just rogue branches and twigs, catching on my jacket and the thin knee-length cotton of my pajama bottoms, but I can’t shake the awful panic rising in me that I won’t make it out of this godforsaken obstacle course alive.

  Soon, I’ve gotten so turned out that I have no idea which way I’m supposed to be heading. I can feel my father’s disappointment radiating all the way from the Middle East. He wouldn’t have gotten lost in this nightmare place. He’d have bulldozed his way through the fucking walls, armed and ready to face whatever danger awaited him at its heart.

  I’m not too worried about having lost my way. I know if I just keep turning in the same direction, over and over again, I’ll eventually reach its center point. So that’s what I do, turning to the left at every intersection or fork in the path, the soles of my boots crunching on the gravel, and I work on calming my nerves.

  Panic will kill you quicker than anything else.

  Panic will kill you quicker than anything else.

  Panic will kill you quicker than anything else.

  That’s what my old surfing instructor used to tell me, back when we lived in South Africa. I repeat it over and over like a mantra, driving the words into my brain, making them feel true. I just need to stay calm.

  “Fuck!” A rumble of thunder crashes directly overhead, and I nearly jump straight out of my Docs. The force of it vibrates inside my body, resounding in the hollow of my chest. Lightning rips across the sky—giant forks of brilliant, piercing light that shoots from left to right. I try not to picture what it would feel like if one of those fearsome fingers of light were to strike down and make contact, using my seventeen-year-old dumb ass as a conduit to the ground. It’s enough to know that it would really fucking hurt.

  I keep on walking, head bent, shoulder constantly into the wind, which doesn’t seem right since I change direction every few seconds, but it appears the wind is just as trapped inside this maddening network of pathways as I am. It skirls and eddies around, around, around, and no matter how quickly I hurry, I can’t get ahead of it.

  Just when I’m about to give up and look for a place to shelter, another hand reaches out and grabs hold of me, fingers closing tightly around my upper arm.

  I scream.

  Jesus, do I scream.

  I hate that I react so dramatically, but in the moment, it feels so fucking real that I believe it. I know with a terrifying certainty that some unknown specter has emerged from the eye of the storm, taken me by the arm, and is about to drag me down into the darkest pits of hell. I’m not cut out for hell. I’m more of a cotton candy and endless backrubs kind of girl. An eternity of damnation does not sound go—

  “Jesus, Stillwater, quit screaming. You’ll wake the fucking dead.”

  Startled, I close my mouth, my teeth making a sharp crack as they snap together. Not an unknown specter, it turns out. I’m familiar with this demon, with his raven black hair and his shockingly green eyes. Even in the rain and the darkness, Wren Jacobi’s eyes look too, too vivid. He smirks, his hair arranged in artful, wet curls that flick up around his ears, rivulets of water coursing down his handsome face, and I almost let out another blood curdling scream.

  My maternal grandmother told me stories about the devil sometimes. She told me that he was the most beautiful of all the angels. That God gave him a countenance that made women sigh and curdled men’s hearts with jealousy. The last time I saw her, at the tender age of eight years old, she warned me, “Elodie, child. Be extra careful of the handsome ones. They’ll trick you with their beauty, but it’s all a façade. Their eyes may peer into your soul, and their mouths may leave you breathless, but beneath their pleasing exterior lies a wickedness bestowed by Saint Nick himself. All good-looking men have been tapped on the shoulder by evil.”

  I assumed it was just the ravings of a mad old woman, but looking at Wren now, standing in the rain like he’s out for a stroll on a balmy summer’s day, I’m beginning to think she might have been right.

  “What the fuck are you doing?” I rip myself free of his grasp. “You think this is some sort of game? People die from exposure in this kind of weather.”

  He laughs—a soft huff of amusement down his nose, like I’ve just said something fucking funny. “Prone to hyperbole, Stillwater? You’ve been outside for five whole minutes. I doubt you’ll catch hypothermia from a bit of wind and rain. Unless you have a weak constitution?”

  Weak constitution. I’ll give him weak fucking constitution. I’m gonna tear him a new one.

  Wren’s dark eyebrow arches, the right corner of his mouth lifting up as he makes a show of slowly offering his hand out to me, palm up. “I know the way,” he says darkly.

  I glare at his extended hand like it’s covered in a deadly bacterium. “To where?”

  “To warmth. Shelter. Unless you’d rather spend another thirty minutes out here, spinning your wheels in the mud before you figure this thing out. Up to you. Woman’s prerogative and all that. It’s all the same to me.” He tips his head to one side, both eyebrows rising now, and my Judas of a heart stumbles over itself. Damn, I want to punch him in his smug fucking throat more than I’ve wanted anything in my entire life.

  “I don’t need your hand. I can follow you just fine,” I snap.

  Another burst of thunder crashes, deafeningly loud right over our heads. Wren’s thrown into stark relief, shadows stretched out across his face, bleached black and white by the staggering display of lightning that chases on its heels. The moment is so surreal that I’m struck by the absurdity of my situation. Wren drops his hand. “Keep your eyes open, then! You’ll need to actually look where you’re going!” He shouts to make himself heard over the din. I watch the muscles in the column of his throat work, wondering if he’ll chase after me if I run from him.

  No. He won’t run.

  I’ll run, and I’ll stagger, and I’ll trip, and I’ll stumble, and Wren will calmly walk after me, untouched by the elements. He’ll capture me, and he’ll expend zero energy doing it, because that’s just who he fucking is.

  He turns around, his black shirt clinging to his back like a second skin, and he walks off, turning left into the maze.

  I’m left with no choice but to follow.

  * * *

  In five sharp turns through entrances I don’t even see until the very last second, Wren has us at the maze’s center. Amongst a riot of rose bushes, whose late blooms have been smashed and obliterated by the driving rain, their peach-red petals strewn all over the ground, a squat gazebo stands on a raised platform beneath the massive boughs of one of the giant live oaks that stands guard over the maze.

  I can’t see the structure from my bedroom window. From that vantage point, all I can see are the high hedge walls and not much else. Here it stands, though—a small, solid structure crafted out of wood and glass, small and utterly charming, painted white and blue. Inside, a warm orange glow promises light and protection from the cold.

  Wren climbs the steps that lead up to the enclosed gazebo’s entrance, pausing in front of the door, his pale hand resting on the weathered brass knob. “This place is off limits,” he says. “We’re not supposed to be out here.”

  “No shit.” I gesture up at the sky. “We aren’t supposed to be outside in general.”

  He laughs that laugh again, breathy and entertain
ed, as though everything about me is quaint and silly to him. “I assume you’re okay with breaking a few rules, Stillwater. If you’d rather toe the line, I can take you back to the academy. I’d just need a moment to grab my things.”

  He can’t hear me growling under my breath. I trust that he can read my annoyance from the scowl on my face, though. “Open the door, Jacobi. I’m turning blue, for fuck’s sake.”

  He seems pleased. It’s hard to tell with him, though. He could also look like he wants to murder me. I can’t really make up my mind. Twisting the knob, he shoves the door open, standing back and sweeping his arm in front of him, gesturing for me to go inside.

  I eye him suspiciously as I sidle past him into the gazebo.

  Grateful that I’m no longer being lashed at by rain, I lean against the wall, sighing with relief. The interior of the gazebo is surprising to say the least. I was expecting a couple of peeling wooden benches and some empty soda cans rolling around on the bare concrete, but I’m dead wrong. The décor—because the place actually has a décor—is stunning. Polished parquet flooring around the edges of the room gives way to a plush, thick cream carpet. A sofa and two overstuffed armchairs have been arranged in front of an unlit open fireplace on the far side of the room. Around the curved wall opposite the door, a low three-shelved bookcase bows under the weight of countless thick, heavy tomes with leather spines and gilded edges. Potted plants sit on every flat surface: vines, and ferns, and rubber figs, all jostling for space and light at the windows, which are patinaed with grime on the outside but clean from within.

  “What is this?” I whisper. This isn’t just some forgotten place. This is someone’s hideaway. A secret, well-loved sanctuary.

  Wren kicks off his muddy boots, discarding them by the door. He isn’t wearing any socks, which makes me shiver for no good reason. The sight of his bare feet, as he pads across the thick rug toward the fireplace, makes me so unexpectedly uncomfortable that I don’t even have the decency to look away. He bends at the waist, grabbing a piece of chopped wood from a wicker basket next to the fire, and he looks down at it, turning it over in his hands. “It’s supposed to be for the faculty. We commandeered it when we first came here, though. Fitz is the only one who knows we come here, and he turns a blind eye.”