Then the world sped up again. A crimson stream of warm blood splashed across my face. Alexis’s body slumped, and I managed to extricate one arm from under him and wipe my eyes. When I opened them, everything was blurry, but looming above the figure of the philosophy teacher was the shadowy figure of Maxime, the blond hair, the Adidas tracksuit, the gray baseball jacket with red leather sleeves.

7.

Maxime had needed only a single stab, a quick thrust with a glittering blade no bigger than a scalpel that looked as though it had merely grazed Alexis Clément’s jugular.

“We have to call an ambulance!” I screamed, scrabbling to my feet.

But I knew it was too late. He was already dead. And I was covered in his blood. It was on my face, in my hair, on my shoes. There was blood on my lips, on the tip of my tongue.

For a moment, Maxime and I stood there, exhausted, drained, devastated. Unable to speak.

It was not an ambulance we needed to call. It was the police.

“Wait! My father might still be on campus,” Maxime said, snapping out of his daze.

“Where?”

“Down by the caretaker’s lodge.”

He raced out of Alexis’s apartment, and I heard him hurtling downstairs, leaving me with the body of this man we had just killed.

How long was I left alone? Five minutes? Fifteen? In the enveloping silence, I felt as though time had stopped. I remember standing by the window, my nose against the glass so I would not have to look at the body. The tremulous surface of the lake was now plunged into darkness, as though someone had flipped a switch. I tried to focus on something, anything, but I was lost in the iridescent snow.

This dazzling abyss was our future. I knew that our lives had been changed forever. I knew this was not a new chapter, not the end of an era—this was the gaping maw of hell blazing from beneath the snow.

Suddenly, I heard a sound on the stairs and a door slamming. Francis Biancardini stepped into the room; he was followed by his foreman and Maxime. Francis looked as he always did; his gray-streaked hair was disheveled, his paint-spattered leather jacket strained to enclose his barrel chest and potbelly.

“You all right, son?” he said, looking me in the eye.

I was in no fit state to answer. His hulking form seemed to fill the whole room, but his careful, feline steps contrasted with his thickset figure.

Francis stood in the middle of the floor and slowly surveyed the situation, his stony face betraying not a flicker of emotion. It was as though he had always known this day would come. As though this was not the first time he had dealt with such bloody carnage.

“Okay, from here on out, I’m in charge,” he said, looking from me to Maxime.