Chapter 5: Communicate

The rain never paused. It tapped insistently against the window like thousands of tiny, patient fingernails, drumming through the whole night without mercy or variation. Grace Elowen Maris stood motionless outside Cassandra’s apartment door, pressing the bell for the third time. Silence answered—only rain. She glanced at her phone again. The last message she had sent at nine the previous evening still sat unanswered: “Cass, I made your favorite ginger tea. Come find me in the morning, okay?” Read at 9:14 p.m. No reply.

Her thumb hesitated over the screen, then slipped into the side pocket of her bag and closed around the spare key. Cassandra had pressed it into her palm three months earlier with that small, self-deprecating half-smile: “Just in case I ever bracket myself inside Husserl so deeply I can’t find the exit.” Grace had never used it before tonight.

The lock clicked softly. The door opened into warm, heavy air thick with the mingled scents of cooled sweat, rain-soaked cotton, and something else—faintly sweet, faintly metallic, like copper dissolved in honey.

“Cassandra?”

Grace kicked off her shoes without looking and hurried through the dim living room into the bedroom.

Cassandra lay on the hardwood floor in a loose, broken curve. Her sleep-shirt was soaked through and plastered to her skin, outlining the delicate ridges of ribs, the shallow dip of her waist, the long graceful line of thigh. Dark hair clung in damp strands across her forehead and cheekbones; her lips were parted, breath shallow and uneven. Beneath one hip a half-dried pool of clear fluid caught the faint streetlight filtering through the blinds, glistening like spilled mercury.

Grace’s heart seized.

She dropped to her knees beside her friend, fingers immediately finding the pulse at the slender throat—present, thready but steady. Relief came in a single sharp breath. Without hesitation she slid both arms beneath Cassandra’s shoulders and knees and lifted. The body was startlingly light, almost weightless, as though fever and exhaustion had already begun to hollow her out. Grace carried her to the bed and laid her down with infinite care.

She peeled the drenched shirt away, exposing skin still flushed from whatever storm had passed through it. With a clean towel warmed under hot tap water she gently wiped Cassandra’s face, her throat, the damp hollows beneath her breasts, the insides of her thighs where the residue clung in thin, …