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I

Metal rattles on metal as the train slides through the dark.

She doesn’t want to think about him, so instead, she thinks of Lottie.

Or Charlotte. Whatever her name really is.

Wonders how the hell she’s supposed to find a stranger in a city of more than half a million, a girl she knows fuck all about beside the fact she clearly isn’t human.

If she’d been a fellow student maybe, but Alice doesn’t think she is, which means she has a Post-it Note and a single blurry party photo and she can’t exactly post the two online with the caption Do you know the girl who killed me?

Alice groans, and grips the backpack tighter as the train pulls into South Station. The doors open, and two get off, and four get on, and she finds herself searching the strangers’ faces, as if Lottie might suddenly walk back into her life as easily as she walked out of it.

There’s a kind of logic to that, right?

Sure, the odds are a million to one, but then again, when you stop and think about it, what were the odds of Alice meeting Lottie in the first place?

How many times did she think of bailing on the party at the Co-op?

More than once while getting ready, a handful on the way, and even after she was there, how many times did the path split?

How many choices did she make? If she had gone back early.

If she’d turned right toward the front door instead of left toward the hall.

If the line for the bathroom hadn’t been so long.

If she hadn’t gone past it to the bedroom?

If they’d never met. If they’d never danced. If she hadn’t taken Lottie home.

If, if, if, and she knows that way lies madness but once she starts, she can’t stop her mind from going down the hundred ways it could have ended instead of how it did.

If, if, if, the road branching so many times—if she had been assigned a different suite, gone to a different school, if she hadn’t left Scotland—has taken so many turns she might as well be a different Alice, living a different life, and she can’t even remember why she’s gone down this road, has to turn around, pick her way back through the splitting paths until she finds the place it started.

Odds.

That’s right.

The odds of Lottie stepping onto the train she’s on right now are slim to none, but it doesn’t stop Alice from hoping every time the T comes to a stop, doesn’t stop her from staring at the doors every time they open with that low hydraulic hiss, searching each and every face as the people pile on.

But none of them are Lottie.

Alice finds fragments of her—the tan skin, the brown curls, the bow-like bottom lip—but the first belongs to a guy twice her size, the second a girl of ten, the third a woman old enough to be Eloise. They’re tall and short and large and lean and most obviously, human.

They fill the car with heartbeats, like overlapping drums, and now Alice has another problem. She thought she’d be safe enough, taking the train, because she wasn’t hungry anymore.

But as the T slides into Park Street, Charles/MGH, Kendall/MIT, and the car begins to fill, she realizes that’s not exactly true.

The hunger is a pale shadow of itself, a whisper instead of a shout, but somehow it’s still there.

Not a capital H, the way it was before, not an all Alice can think of, teeth aching and tongue heavy, heart rattling like a can of loose change in her chest kind of need, but a quiet nagging, an emptiness, a well, and she can’t help but wonder what it would take to fill it up—

(which makes her think of Catty, the way she was always famished from running track, how everything she ate just seemed to burn away without ever sticking to her)

—and that makes Alice think of the time she and Catty got too stoned and she had the munchies so bad she kept forgetting the way food tasted as soon as she had swallowed, so kept going back for more.

And then Alice remembers the man in the suit in the sedan, remembers the heat of his blood spilling down her throat, remembers the iron taste as a woman and her little girl take the nearest seats.

And the hunger flares.

It sharpens like a knife, and Alice surges to her feet, fast enough that heads are turning.

She thinks of saying she’s not feeling well, but she’s afraid of what will happen if she opens her mouth, so she just clings to the pole nearest the door, closes her eyes and waits for the train to stop again, and as soon as it pulls into Central, she gets off, even though it’s one stop shy, and the sun is like a hammer, her skull a sheet of glass.

Alice forces herself up and out onto the street, braving the shivers and the headache for the last few blocks, cutting through campus buildings to keep the worst at bay.

She propels herself on with the promise of a darkened room, a heavy duvet blocking out the light, finally reaches the dorm and the third-floor suite feeling like Odysseus at the end of his long quest, limbs shaking and soul wrung dry.

All she can think about is her bed, the dark, but Alice knows the second she walks in that something’s wrong.

Lizbeth and Jana and Rachel are huddled together on the couch, the air around them slick with shock and sadness, and for a moment Alice thinks they know where she’s been, and what she’s done, that her crimes have somehow rushed ahead of her.

But then Lizbeth looks up, and frowns, and says, “Are those my sunglasses?”

“Sorry,” Alice answers, plucking them from her head. “I felt a migraine coming on.”

She drifts toward the couch, where Jana perches next to Rachel, rubbing circles on her back.

“What’s wrong?” she asks, and Rachel’s head swings up, eyes red from crying, opens her mouth only to snap it shut again as fresh tears come spilling down her cheeks.

“You haven’t heard?” says Lizbeth. “They found a student in the Yard.”

Her eyebrows arch in that knowing way, as if to say the word without saying it.

They found a student dead.

Alice’s stomach tightens, and she was right, wasn’t she? It was one of hers, just not the most recent one, and she really should have seen this coming, knew it was only a matter of time before they found the body.

“It was Colin, ” says Rachel between sobs, and the name ricochets inside her skull.

(“Come on, let’s get you home.”)

And she remembers, then, why he looked kind of familiar, where she’d seen him once, his arm slung round Rachel’s shoulders at the latest student mixer.

(“I’ve got you.”)

Why she’d trusted him enough to let him hold her up, walk her to the Yard.

Alice swallows. “Do they know what happened to him?” she asks, feeling a little dizzy, a little sick, and it might just be the sun but she’s always been a shite liar, the blood rushing to her cheeks (though she can’t help but wonder now if that’s still true, wants to reach up to touch her face and see, but that would probably look suspicious, so she doesn’t), and then to her relief, the girls all shake their heads, mismatching metronomes.

“No official cause,” says Jana.

“Which means it was an overdose,” adds Lizbeth. Rachel scowls, and she hastily adds, “It was probably an accident. Drugs these days are laced with god knows what.”

At which point, Rachel starts to cry again, her sniffles interrupted by half-hiccupped words about how nice he was to her, how he could have been the one, and Alice wants to lunge across the room, take Rachel by the shoulders, and say, I did you a favor.

But she can’t, so she leaves the girls to their grief, and instead slips into the welcome dark of her room, and crashes down onto the bed, and sleeps.