I threw my empty bottle onto the dirt and slid another from the six-pack beside me, opening it with my apartment key in one swift move.

“Maybe you need to think about getting out of here. This place wasn’t good for any of us, Elizabeth. Maybe you need to start over, too.”

“I can’t bring myself to leave,” I finally admit. “I feel like leaving Eden is leaving Ruthie. And I just... I’m the reason she went in there. I have to get her out. I have to make this right.”

I looked down at the campus, getting brighter as the sun slowly fell behind the mountains and the sky went from blue to orange to purple to black.

“I also have this...” I stood up and moved around the car to the passenger’s seat, sticking my hand through the window and into the glove compartment until I pulled out a green fuzzy sock covering a digital camera.

“Oh shit,” Molly said when I handed it to her.

“Is this real?” Jess moved it around in her hand like it was a technological relic. Which, at this point, just four years later, it kind of already was. “Do you know what’s on it?”

“Pictures of us climbing up to the party,” I said. “Those are all I remember taking.”

“And some in the pool house bathroom,” Molly added.

“Can I take this?” Jess asked.

“I don’t want it anymore,” I said. “I never should have kept it in the first place.”

They say you can see Covenant University from a satellite in space. That’s something the student tour guides brag about when walking prospective families around. Our campus is so brightly lit, so safe at night, that astronauts can use it as a guide to tell which hemisphere they’re looking down on. Nothing bad happens here, because there’s no darkness, they’d claim. You can see our prayers from space.

Well, prayers don’t mean shit if they’re not followed by action.

“Okay then,” Molly said, standing between me and campus, looking at me with a wry smile on her face. “It’s settled. If you want to bring them down, you have to become one of them. We all do.”

TWENTY-ONE

Nothing and everything makes sense at the same time.

I tell them what Lorraine told me: that her barn collapsed. Mysteriously. Out of nowhere. Coincidentally. The night of the party. “And the Walkers, the heroes that they are, gave her family theirs.”

“They just gave them the barn? The whole thing?”

“Cleared the old site. Dug it up to size. Plopped a barn right...on top...”

They look at me, then each other. “What’s going on?” Molly asks, but I ignore her.