After Phillip gave him some sleeping pills, Liam lost track of what were dreams and what was reality. The film strips turned into black vines that slithered across the floor and coiled around his limbs. Daniel’s soft lips shushed him as he changed the dressing on Liam’s shoulder with nimble musician’s fingers. Pitr’s mouth wrenched open in a silent scream, hand stretched forward as blackness surrounded him.

Maybe it was neither dream nor waking. Maybe the behemoth in the shadow world had finally caught him, and was mirroring all his fears and failings as it waited for him to break. Maybe the faceless figures in the chamber room had caught him at last, and it was time for him to be judged.

“Daniel,” he whispered once, or thought he did, reaching out to that dour face. “Please don’t go.”

Daniel gave him no answer. Maybe it was just the sleeping pills talking, sleep grasping for him again with bloody arms and too many memories. Maybe Daniel wasn’t there at all.

Liam’s mind tumbled downward, the past tugging him back.

After he and Pitr had embarked on their research, the end of the semester came all too soon, and Pitr went back to Czechoslovakia for the summer while Liam continued their work. They parted on uncertain terms at the end of spring. Pitr promised he’d keep researching while he was in “the old country,” as he put it, with a heavy roll of his eyes. He was going to show Liam’s diagrams to other researchers he’d been corresponding with while Liam tinkered around with frequencies, wavelengths in his lab.

Unspoken but heavy between them was the question of what they were. Liam yearned to belong to Pitr, for Pitr to belong to him. But Pitr still held him at arm’s length, a secret for the library’s darkened corners. He understood why. He just wished Pitr wanted more, too.

Liam’s third year at Princeton was going to be the hardest yet. He was on track to finish his bachelor’s degree by the next spring, just short of his eighteenth birthday, but among his studies, his mother, his many jobs, and his new project with Pitr (and Pitr himself), he barely had a moment to breathe. He brought dinner home for his mother and kept their room tidy so the landlady wouldn’t complain, but it was too much penance for his lapsed Catholic sensibilities to bear. His mother would stare at him from her good eye, her face, her silence, her everything a screaming indictment of his failure. He hadn’t been able to stop his father. He hadn’t been able to protect her. As far as Liam was concerned, he might as well have wielded the tire iron itself.

There had to be a way to keep it from ever happening again.