She had to escape. For four days and counting she had been followed, every one of her footsteps echoed in duplicate. Hands reached for her unbidden. Her skin tingled from the charged air at the tips of their fingers, but she always pulled away just before contact.

They would be waiting at the front steps of Thorn. Audrey and Kenya. Her two bodyguards. For Audrey it was like returning to an old job she had only left reluctantly, and she had returned with gusto. Were she physically capable, she would pick Joanie up and carry her through the rain like a baby while Whitney Houston sang Dolly Parton. For Kenya it was more of an obligation, though one that she accepted willingly, as a parent does the care of a wayward child. But Joanie would rather stab herself in the eyes than see them again today.

No one could take this much concern. This much love.

When Dr. Dade finally dismissed her Modernism class, she didn't join the masses heading for the exits. She waited for the second floor to clear, and when no one was looking, she snuck into the custodial closet to go to her secret place.

You find it the first week of school and never tell anyone else about it, not even Kenya. Before you left, your mom told you it was important to be social and meet new people, but it was just as important to find a place where you can be by yourself and be yourself. This place is exactly that.

There's an elevator in Thorn Hall - the oldest elevator in Georgia, in fact, but almost no one knows about it because it's hidden behind unmarked doors on each floor that everyone assumes are custodial closets. But the elevator is there, and it still works, and it goes to places in Thorn that the stairs don't. The sub-basement, for instance, which houses Anthony Delmonico's collection of rare documents, now forgotten and mildewing.

But what you're most interested in is the highest point on the elevator's dial: the roof. The elevator terminates in the pedestal of the massive statue of Howard Thorn that watches over the Milligan Pass. The tall merlons of the battlement that extends around the roof shield you from the view of passersby. This alone makes it an ideal spot to escape the bustle of campus life.

The roof, however, is not only attractive for its seclusive qualities, but also for the mysteries of its decoration. The surface of the roof is covered in tiles, each a miniature masterpiece of glass mosaic depicting a scene from the life of Anthony Delmonico. When read in a clockwise spiral from the northwest corner of the roof, they tell in pictures his entire life story, from his inauspicious birth to his ignoble death.

The brass needle shuddered as the cage rattled roofward. The elevator lurched to a stop, and the needle flatlined on the right side of the dial. An ancient bell issued a sad, rusty clank. End of the line. Joanie pushed open the rusty grate and stepped out onto the roof. She took ten long paces and reached the edge. She stood on a tile depicting Anthony, as a young man, climbing the tallest tree in his village, and she leaned out over the edge through a gap between the merlons. Directly below her, Audrey and Kenya were still waiting on the steps. Joanie could call out to them if she wanted. She could spit on them or drop a handful of change on their heads. But she was content to watch. They were arguing – about her, no doubt. Let them worry. Let the needle of their worry swing toward 180 degrees.

After a minute, Kenya threw up her hands and left. Audrey hesitated on the steps for a moment, then went back inside Thorn. If she was looking for Joanie, she wouldn't find her.

Joanie had two hours until her next class. They would find her then, most likely. They would be waiting outside Salley Hall, looks of concern on their faces to mask their suspicion. They wouldn't want to ask the question, but it would still lie there, expectant, the snake in the tall grass of their innocuous small talk: did you take gunpowder? That was the real reason Kenya and Audrey were following her everywhere: to keep her from falling. From succumbing. As if she was some junkie who couldn't help herself, who would shovel whatever she could find up her nose the second she was alone. As if Kenya wasn't the one who introduced her to gunpowder in the first place. As if Audrey wasn't experimenting with god knows what. No way she could hang around those twins for that long without developing a taste for something.

She wasn't addicted to gunpowder, not any more than Kenya or Sarah were. She had a legitimate need for it, the same way all the Creatures did. If she took a lot of it the other night – if she took too much of it – she must have had a reason. She must have needed to talk to Anthony pretty bad.

She just couldn't remember what she needed to talk to him about. If she had some gunpowder she could ask him right now.

If she had some gunpowder.

Under the dispassionate bronze eye of Howard Thorn, Joanie duckwalked over to the center of the roof, to the series of tiles at the end of the spiraling biography. The final three panels depicted the planning and construction of Anthony's house. It was supposed to be his greatest achievement, "grander than a thousand Monticellos" (Anthony had a one-sided feud with Thomas Jefferson, whom he claimed "deliberately upstaged" him with his designs for UVA), though it burned to the ground, with Anthony inside, before it was completed.

In another place, though, the house was finished, down to the last nail. Anthony still lived there, holding court in his cavernous study. And those who had need of his counsel – those lucky few chosen to continue his work – could visit him there, and receive his wisdom.

That's why Joanie took the gunpowder. But she didn't remember visiting his house or talking to him. She only remembered two things from that night. Two exposed frames on an endless reel of black film:

The word "sanctuary" in black on a field of red, like an inverted neon sign.

And the boy in the tunnel. Tim. After a year of anticipation and speculation, he had appeared. A boy, in a tunnel. The one under the Founders' Garden, Audrey said. Joanie had freaked out when Audrey told her that, right after she woke up. She didn't remember that either, but she didn't doubt it. When she thought of the boy, or the tunnel, or simply the words "the boy in the tunnel," a cold knot tightened in the base of her skull, and a voice that was hers but not hers said You're not supposed to be in here.

A movement on the tile caught her eye. The shadow of a branch stirred by a breeze, maybe. Whatever it was, it vanished as soon as she saw it. But there was something in the image on the tile – something she had never noticed before. Anthony was on his knees, as always, engulfed by flames in the burning house. But there were two figures behind him, barely visible amid the pieces of red, yellow, orange and black glass that made up the flame and smoke. One was thin, the other broad. Maybe they'd always been there, and she just hadn't noticed them. Or maybe her eyes were just grasping for meaning in the abstract shapes of the smoke.

Joanie reached into her backpack for her Handbook, to see what it had to say about this – it did have a pretty thorough description of all 144 tiles on the Thorn roof, though she'd only skimmed the first dozen or so. But her fingers couldn't find the familiar textures – the tight weave on the front and the smooth glass on the back. She opened the zipper wide, flipped through the notebooks and the Norton Anthology, the paperback copy of In Our Time, the calculus textbook. She dug in the bottom of the bag, finding only the everyday shrapnel that was impossible to fully discard.

Her Handbook was missing.

The thought was insane at first, impossible, but as she accepted the truth of it, the thought took on dimensionality and form until it became not thought but fact, hard and dark, sharp-edged and glittering. A thing that should not be.

Joanie mentally retraced her steps. She had the Handbook this morning, even though Kenya had been hinting since Friday that maybe she should hold onto it, so that Joanie wouldn't read anything about, say, the boy in the tunnel and freak out again, or so she wouldn't be tempted by that mirror on the back, a tool begging to be used. But she remembered putting the Handbook in her backpack. She took the Green Line to Thorn. She tried not to look at the tunnel under the Garden. She went to Dade's class. He talked about Hemingway and Pound and that river and the swamp, his impossible moustache twitching with delight. She took the elevator to the roof—

The elevator's bell clanked, a dull, tuneless sound.

Someone was coming to the roof. Joanie didn't want to be seen up here. It was against the rules, maybe, she didn't really know. She just didn't want to be seen. The only place to hide was an A/C unit toward the north end of the roof. Joanie grabbed her bag and sprinted for it, scrambling behind it as the elevator's occupant stepped out onto the roof: Dr. Burton.

He strolled toward the edge of the roof and lit a cigarette. He leaned against the battlement and took a drag. He looked up at the statue of Howard Thorn and studied it for a moment. Then he turned toward Joanie. She ducked below the rim of the air conditioner.

"Joanie?" Dr. Burton said. "I can see your hair."

Her cursed genes would always betray her. Joanie stood up and tried to look both apologetic and insouciant. "Busted."

Dr. Burton held up his cigarette. "Ditto."

Of all the people who could have found her on the roof, Dr. Burton was probably the least objectionable. He'd looked out for her over the last year. He'd gone out of his way to help her. But since she returned, something was off. She'd noticed it yesterday morning, when she stopped by his office. He hadn't changed, but she got that same feeling she got when she thought about the boy in the tunnel.

"You know, I actually managed to quit for two months over the summer." He blew out a column of smoke and shook his head, chuckling. Joanie hadn't budged from behind the air conditioner. "Hey, I was thinking. If you can't take Creative Writing because of practice, maybe we could set up an independent study. Work around your schedule. Couple hours a week, tops. Seriously, one way or another, we're getting you to Iowa."

"Did we talk about this on Thursday?" The last thing she remembered before all of her missing frames was stopping by Dr. Burton's office. He was singing along to some old song – something like her dad would have listened to – and after that everything just went dark.

Maybe she had to talk to Anthony about Dr. Burton. Maybe that's why she took the gunpowder. Maybe if she had some gunpowder she could get to the bottom of this right now.

If she had some gunpowder. If she had her Handbook. Everything she had come to depend on was being taken from her, one by one.

"Sort of," he said. "We talked about why you couldn't take the class. I just thought of the independent study yesterday. What do you think?"

"Did I..." She could do this. She read enough Nancy Drew as a kid. She didn't need gunpowder to figure this out. "This is so stupid. Did I do anything... I don't know, weird the other day? Some of the girls and I, we got a little... festive Thursday night. There are a few missing hours in there."

Dr. Burton grinned. "College, huh? I do miss it. Sometimes." He stubbed out his cigarette and started sidling over to the air conditioner. "No, you didn't say anything weird. You dropped off those poems, and then you had to run to volleyball practice." He stopped, pulled out another cigarette and lit it. "Those must have been some festivities, though."

"Yeah, well." A breeze carried his cigarette smoke to her. The stale, dead smell announced his coming. "You know the volleyball girls."

Dr. Burton reached the air conditioner and cocked up a thigh to half-sit, half-lean on it. "I was really always more into field hockey players. There were rumors..."

"Surfer Rosa."

"Ten points to Miss McKittrick." It sounded so superficial, but that was one of the things she liked about him. They had reference points. He made her feel smart for knowing the same stuff he knew. That's what had thrown her on Thursday. She didn't recognize that song. And that album cover – the two women on a bed of foliage, dark nipples under sheer fabric. It was something he didn't want to share. It was shameful.

He tossed his cigarette butt to the roof and ground it with his foot against a tile showing Anthony spying on Tories. Joanie felt a twinge of anger. Anthony didn't deserve such treatment.

As Dr. Burton stood, something caught his eye. He peered, squinting, at Salley Hall, about forty yards to the northwest.

"What is it?" said Joanie.

"Do you ever feel like you're being watched?"

"What do you mean?"

Dr. Burton hesitated, like he wanted to reveal a secret to Joanie. Whatever it was, he decided against it. "Nothing," he said. "Think about it. The independent study. The paperwork has to be in by the end of drop-add if you want to do it." He waved goodbye to Joanie and crossed the roof to the elevator.

Once he had entered the cage and was descending, Joanie walked to the rear edge of the roof and looked out at Salley Hall. In the third window from the right on the fourth floor, she thought she saw a glint of light. It looked like the sun reflecting off the lens of a camera.

Joanie imagined she could see herself through the lens of that camera. She saw a gangly, absurd creature, a bird too misshapen to fly. The building that held her up flickered in and out of existence, until it disappeared, leaving her hovering fifty feet in the air. She was like Wile E. Coyote – sooner or later she would have to look down, and when she realized there was nothing supporting her, she would fall.

Her mental image was too vivid. Joanie staggered back, until the backs of her thighs hit the air conditioner. She slid down to the tiles, her legs jackknifed in front of her. Her knees framed one of the mosaic tiles: Anthony, just a boy, or the suggestion of one in bright purple and gold glass, discovering the entrance to a tunnel underneath the family estate. The entrance was a perfect circle of opaque black glass. Another lens. She crawled over to the tile and looked down into the black circle, hoping to see how deep the tunnel went, but all she saw was her own face.