Page 24 of Riot House

…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.