12.

Indy stares at the words until they start to blend together on the page, and she can barely read them anymore. By then, Jude is leaning against the door of his car and giving her a funny look.

She pretends not to notice him as she fishes her phone from her bag and thumbs in the address. Immediately a tired sigh escapes her mouth. It's on precisely the other side of town, maybe half an hour away by car. There goes any chance of walking there.

"Indy," Jude says. "Are you going to tell me what's going on?"

She doesn't want to. After today she'd been thinking her involvement with the drummer would be over; she would no longer need him for anything, and he never needed her in the first place. Telling him this, however, involves him in things far more than she or anybody planned. The implication is a lump in her throat, making it hard to breathe. The second these words leave her mouth, there's no going back.

"Jude, I have to tell you something."

"I figured."

"But you can't look at me like you're looking at me right now."

"Like I'm—" He clears his throat, adjusting his stance. "Like how, exactly?"

"Like I'm crazy."

"Indy," he says, in a way that somehow verbally encapsulates the feeling of receiving a pity laugh. "I don't think you're crazy."

"Your face does," Indy says. "Change it."

He exhales, nibbling at the ring in his lip. The concerned look on his face hardens into something that resembles focus. It's exaggerated, terribly so, but it'll do.

Indy nods her head at the car, and the two of them hop inside, Indy waiting until the doors are shut and they're closed in the car's cloudy darkness before she speaks. "The journal isn't mine," she tells him. "I found it in Elizabeth Dobbs's place."

She pauses to give him a chance to react, to squawk and bug his eyes like her friends had done when she'd presented the journal to them on DuBois's dusty top floor. Jude does neither of these things, however. All he does is raise his eyebrows and whistle a breath out through his teeth. "I won't ask what you were doing there. Frankly, I don't wanna know. But there's gotta be a good reason besides all that that you didn't turn it in, right?"

Indy draws her legs up into the seat, folding them underneath her and poking a nail into the runs in her tights. She stares at her nail as it wiggles underneath the elastic, instead of at Jude. "Elizabeth Dobbs is leaving me notes. She told me that Lamar Pine was innocent, and now I think, with this address—she's telling me where to go to find proof."

"Hm." Jude rakes his fingers back through his hair, only for it to flip right back over into his eyes, tousled now. "That is—huh. Hm."

"Jude."

"No, I mean, you're right. That's a good reason to hold onto it."

"You don't have to believe me," Indy says, resting the journal on her lap again and flipping through it until she finds the freshly inked page. She runs her fingers over the ghostly words, tracing every loop and dot and curve. A part of her wonders at the mechanics of how one writes from another world, but the other part of her is happy just to fall in love with the mystery, the magic of it. "Just drop me off at this address, okay? I need to check it out."

Jude says "Hm" again and Indy worries she has broken some integral part of his brain.

Then he yanks his car keys from his pocket with a harsh jingle and starts the car, the engine coughing and sputtering like a pneumonia patient as it starts. He was right. Dog does make a lot of weird noises.

"I believe you. I don't know. I've always sort of felt like there was another plane of existence, but it's like—I don't fucking know. A shooting star? You have to be in the right time at the right place to see it. It barely peeks through," Jude says. He runs his thumb, black nail polish chipping, along the gearstick before he shifts it into reverse. "That and it would be supremely not gentlemanly of me to let you go on your own."

Indy swallows, but doesn't allow herself to breathe easy just yet. "Are you sure?"

The question weighs so much more than it looks. Jude just smiles. "No. That's the beauty of it."

At first glance she's worried the ghost of Elizabeth Dobbs has brought them to a prison.

Gravel pops and twangs beneath Dog's tires as Jude pulls up to a wire gate, the squat building beyond it barely visible behind a copse of ageless evergreen trees. Indy hops from the car, the unpaved path crunching beneath the beaten soles of her tennis shoes. The air has a strange, chemical tang to it, like old batteries or gasoline.

An arc of bright light flashes across Indy's eyes, making her cringe. It comes from Jude's cell phone flashlight.

"What?" he says, gesturing at the thick tree cover. "I figured we might need it."

"Turn that off," Indy tells him. "We don't know we're alone yet. You're really just gonna tell everyone exactly where we're at?"

Indy steps forward to examine the gate, leaving Jude behind her, but she can still hear the smirk in his voice. "You watch a lot of horror movies, don't you?"

"A normal amount."

"Okayyy."

Indy ignores him, stepping forward to experimentally nudge the gate. It sticks, more or less as Indy was expecting it to, but on closer inspection she finds no obvious padlock or other locking mechanism. She shoves her shoulder against it, pressing her full weight into the wires, and with a creak and a groan the gate grits against the dirt and at last falls open.

Neither Indy nor Jude move for a moment, the trees silently beckoning them forward. A leaf crunches beneath Indy's foot as she starts to follow their call, and Jude is right beside her, flicking his flashlight on again. "It's dark as hell under all these trees," he says before Indy can protest. "This is smart. This is a smart thing to do."

Thankfully the outcropping of trees is as dense as it looks, which is not very dense at all. With little effort they find themselves standing at the edge of the tree line, facing the long, dark shadow of what looks like an old warehouse, its windows boarded with wood planks and the lawn overgrown and thick with brambles and jungle-like weeds. A pebble driveway curves from around an obscure corner to meet the warehouse's mouth.

Jude dims his flashlight slightly, and nods his head, a silent, After you.

She goes to move and finds her body won't—it refuses to, that some indescribable bout of fear like sludge in her veins has frozen her in place. She reminds herself of Dobbs's note, of Lamar Pine, sitting lonely in a cold concrete prison cell built for someone else. She will go. It doesn't matter if she wants to. She has to.

The front doors—two heavy iron ones that remind her of the ones in a high school gymnasium, are locked by a heavy padlock with a code.

"Do you know what it is?" Jude asks.

"What?" Indy whispers back at him. "No. Why would I know what it is?"

"I don't know. I thought maybe the dead lady—Dobbs? I thought maybe she left it as a note for you."

Indy goes quiet, realizing it's a fair assumption to make. She's been carrying the journal around for days now and she still doesn't know all the rules of what Dobbs knows and when and how she comes to share it with Indy. "I don't know," she says to Jude, leaving the front doors behind and touring around the sides instead. "We're going in through a window. Think you can do something with these boards, big guy?"

Jude huffs. "I can try."

He climbs up on top of a generator with tiny green leaves growing through its grooves, and tries prying the wooden boards free with his nails at first. That proves futile, or at least Indy assumes it does when he curses and shakes out his palm like he's cut himself.

"Jude?"

"Better idea."

His better idea is kicking it in with his foot. The wood splinters and falls inwards. It is in fact a better idea.

"I did tae kwon do when I was a kid," Jude says, clamoring inside, turning to offer his hand down to Indy. "Knew it would come in handy one day."

The sun is not yet fully beneath the horizon, but the remaining boards have blocked out all trace of it, and Indy jumps down into a pit of dusty, turpentine-scented darkness. Her nose automatically crinkles in a sneeze, tears gathering at the corners of her eyes. She hears Jude take a step beside her but she takes quick hold of his arm, stopping him. She listens. Listens for breath besides her own, for voices, for footsteps—any indication that they have walked into a trap.

Only when she doesn't find any does she let Jude go.

He lifts his flashlight, sweeping the room from corner to corner. It's shockingly empty, except for gatherings of ornate cobwebs in the corners and an open graveyard of dead cockroaches and centipedes. Indy points at an exit out to what looks like a railing. Jude follows her.

They step out onto a mezzanine, an entire floor opening below them. Indy suppresses a gasp. The floor is covered, inch to inch, in paintings.

At least she assumes they're all paintings; some are boxed up in cardboard supported by stapled wooden beams, but others are exposed, leaned up against themselves or against the walls. Painting after painting, story after story. Their cloying, heavy oil scent hangs in the air, and it entices Indy. She wants to get closer, to run her fingers over the signatures and figure out what all these are doing here, but Jude grabs her hand before she can even begin searching for the stairs.

"Indy." He sounds alarmed.

"What?"

"There's—"

She hears the rumble of tires against the gravel path, sees the headlights split the air. There was another path on the other side of the gate, one they must have missed.

"Holy shit," Indy curses. "Someone's here. Go. Go go go!"

And they are tearing back the way they came, Indy scrambling up through the window—pausing briefly with a grimace when a splintered edge of wood digs into her skin and slices through—pulling Jude out after her. The two of them tumble into the grass, and then Jude is taking her hand, cursing, tugging her into the safety of the trees.

Percy is sure he failed his calc exam; what he'd studied beforehand had turned to a senseless mush of numbers and symbols as he stared at the page below him, and he moved through the exam in a misty haze, all logic reduced to a scent merely coasting by his nose. Someone asked him what he put for section 3 question a and he just stared at them blankly.

The haze follows Percy as he steps out onto the Commons again and is assaulted by the flaming colors of the setting sun—the sky the color of blood oranges, aptly named as the color bleeds all around him, into the clouds and between the naked branches of the oak trees. He's thinking of her—although he hates to—slicing them in the middle of the summer, the way the knife hit the granite with a thunk of finality. Like the start of something new. Like the end of the world.

Percy's hands have grown shaky as he lifts his phone from the pocket of his jeans and calls Indy. He wishes he'd gone with her, calc exam be damned.

"Percy?" She sounds out of breath, but relieved to speak to him, at least. "Hey."

"How'd everything go? Did you find anything? Why do you sound like that?"

A pause; he hears a warbled male voice in the background he assumes must belong to Jude. Indy asks, voice clear and sweet: "Is your calc exam over?"

"Yeah. I fucking bombed it."

"Aw, Perce."

"Don't aw Perce me right now. Where are you? Are you okay?"

"Meet us in DuBois in fifteen minutes if you can," Indy says. "And Percy? Promise not to be mad."