I blink against a fresh wave of tears. Ellis’s thumb skirts up to brush one of them away; her touch lingers on my cheek afterward, her skin cool where mine now feels feverishly hot.
I suck in a shaky inhale. “You need to be more careful,” I tell her at last, my voice steadier than it was. “I’m not one of your characters, Ellis. If something happens to me, you can’t throw out that page and rewrite it.”
Ellis looks stricken, her pupils black enough they almost consume all the gray in her eyes. Her hand on my face quivers very slightly. “I know,” she says.
She strokes her fingers back through my hair, tucking a stray lock behind my ear. We’re too close, her hand too near my throat. She has a tiny scar on one of her eyebrows, one I’ve never noticed before; it’s mostly grown in but still visible, a hint of asymmetry in an otherwise ordered face. For some reason that’s all I can think about.
But then she moves away, out of reach. Her larynx bobs when she swallows and, belatedly, she leans over to pick the twine garrote up off the floor. “Well. That’s what it’s like, I suppose.”
Somehow I’d managed to forget this was an experiment.
Ellis retrieves a dove smoking jacket from the back of the chair and slings it over her shoulders, grabbing her satchel and a notebook. “I’m going to the library to write this down. I’ll see you at dinner later?”
She leaves me in her room, the door left ajar but all her personal effects still here lined up on their shelves and in their drawers as if awaiting my perusal. I almost wonder if she intends me to snoop. This feels not unlike an invitation, something very, very Ellis.
I catch my own gaze in the mirror. My nose is cherry-colored still, my face slick with sweat or tears or both. My hair looks the way it does after I’ve run six miles, a tangled blond halo. I don’t look a thing like Felicity Morrow.
I don’t snoop, but I do look at the things she has left out in the open: the row of poetry books lined up in alphabetical order on the shelf by her bed, the Montblanc on her desk, a teacup bearing not tea but a single white dahlia in full bloom.
There are no photographs of family or friends. No secret phone charger or even so much as an uncharacteristic paper clip, although there is a row of half-burned votives along her windowsill. For some reason it seems stranger to me that Ellis wouldn’t have finished each candle in sequence than that she’d own, say, a pair of headphones.
The impulse to start looking through her drawers is almost too much to bear. I escape while I still have the will to leave.
The next morning, I wake to find a note slid under my door. It’s written in Ellis’s handwriting: the coordinates and time for the next Night Migration.
But when I follow them that evening, they don’t lead to a copse in the woods or the peak of a black hill; they take me to a dingy rental car agency a mile down the road. Ellis stands out front under the flickering yellow lights, smoking a clove cigarette like a character from a noir film.
“Good, you’re here,” she says, and stabs the cigarette out on the plaster wall. “Let’s go in.”
I glance over my shoulder, half expecting to find the rest of the girls standing there, wearing impatient expressions. The lot is too empty, nothing but cars and puddles of oil where cars used to be. “Where’s everyone else?”
“Just us tonight,” Ellis says. “I thought we could have our own private Night Migration.”
The thought makes me uneasy; I can still feel the garrote cutting into my skin. Ellis saying she wouldn’t actually kill me doesn’t help matters as much as it should. I tug Kajal’s coat closer around my shoulders and stay in place. “Why?”
She fixes me with a tight look. “Why not? If you don’t want to come, you can always go back to Godwin House.”
I dig the heel of one shoe into the cracked sidewalk. The snow has melted, but the cold still reaches to the bone.
“Don’t be ridiculous. Of course I want to go.” It doesn’t sound nearly as persuasive as I’d like, but Ellis just smiles and leads the way through the swinging glass doors and into the fluorescent glare of the agency.
She orders us a plain, inconspicuous sedan. I catch sight of the ID she passes over the counter—it’s her photo but not her name.
“Your car’s in A-4,” the rental agent says as he gives Ellis the keys. “Enjoy your trip, Miss Breithaupt.”
Outside, in the parking lot, Ellis spends far too long adjusting the side-view mirrors and switching radio channels, the car idly puffing exhaust into the night air and the heat blasting.