Page 34

His head whips up. His eyes open. They’re empty. Not white, not black, just voids, an absence the mind refuses to read.

“They’ll smell the blood on you,” he says, and then his head drops, eyes closing, and it’s like he never spoke at all.

Trina stares at him. She’s trembling. Then she lets out something like a sigh, but harder, and she walks through the gate.

I stay with him another moment, waiting for him to open his eyes, to speak. I watch him breathe. In-out. In-out. He’s alive, he’s real. He’s part of this place. Until now we have been separate from the road; it has been a dream unfolding around us. On some level it felt like we were real, that it wasn’t, and the gap between real and unreal was a protection of sorts.

But now I see that gap can vanish. Is vanishing.

“Sara,” Anthony says. They’re all on the other side now.

I step through, and the gate shuts behind me, leaving Isaac behind.

EXHIBIT F

Page torn from a notebook belonging to Becca Donoghue

Text is written in blue ballpoint pen. Some text adheres to the lines of the page. Some is crooked or written sideways across the page. Approximately one-third of the page is filled with a rough sketch of a wrought-iron gate.

THE LIAR’S GATE

Darkness/Thirteen steps (the game // the Game)

Lie/deception/disguise

RULE NUMBER TWO don’t let go

The town (BG?)—#2 (SINNER’S GATE)

It’s never empty

Don’t talk to them

What do the words mean?

DAHUT

Guilt / confession

“the toll”

Pass through seven times, and you’ll be free.

I can hear her more clearly now.

I can almost tell what she’s saying.

10

WE WAIT UNTILwe’re out of sight of Isaac before we stop. The trees are dense around us, their leaves silvery and shuddering faintly in the breeze, making the woods seethe and whisper with conspiratorial sound. It smells of damp and rot—the smells of late fall with leaves moldering on the ground, not springtime like it should be.

I get out Becca’s notebook, and we cluster around it as I page through, turning our backs on the trees as if to hide the notebook from them.

Some of what Becca wrote makes more sense now. Most of it is still hints and riddles, like seeing the shadow of something you don’t know the shape of yet.

“‘It’s never empty. Don’t talk to them,’” Trina reads over my shoulder, turning her head this way and that. “More rules?”

“I don’t think they’re rules. More like—tips,” I say.