25.

Indy's father has woken up from his nap.

He appears, still groggy-eyed at the top of the staircase as Indy is making her way down, and calls out as if to a ghost: "Indigo?"

She turns. He's in a stained sweatshirt and a pair of matching sweatpants, and she has seen her father in business wear only for so long that it takes a second for her eyes to adjust. "Hey, Dad."

"I didn't know you were visiting." He sounds disappointed, like he's mourning a lost chance.

"I didn't know either," Indy says with a rueful smile. She climbs up a few steps, lets him take her shoulder and squeeze it. "I should head back before it gets too late, though."

"Oh," he says, and rubs his eyes, scrubs a hand through the salt-and-pepper scruff at his chin. "Do you want me to drive you?"

"It's okay. Sterling's gonna take me."

Another mournful look Indy does not know what to do with. Somehow she knows, even before he opens his mouth, what guilt-driven thing he is about to say.

"I've been planning to call you, visit you more," he says, and Indy sighs. "There's just this project at work, and I've been trying to get ahead on it."

Indy finds herself retreating, sinking further back down the stairs, as if her legs are moving without her mind. "I know," she says. "I'll talk to you later, Dad."

He wants to say something else; Indy can see it on his face. But then Sterling is there, swinging his car keys around his finger in a perfect arc, asking her if she's ready. And she leaves him, and this house, and this place, behind.

Sterling pulls his car to a stop in a parking lot just to the side of the football stadium, its shadow looming larger than life above them. Indy mumbles a thank you and places her hand on the door handle, but Sterling says, "Indy, wait."

Indy doesn't want to wait; she's not even sure what she's waiting for. But with something like a sigh of defeat she shrinks back from the door again, folds her hands neatly in her lap.

It still takes Sterling a moment to speak. He rubs the thin temples of his glasses, worrying at them like a piece of grain between the pads of his fingers. "I had another trip scheduled after Nepal. I was gonna make a pit stop in Amsterdam."

Indy is too busy wondering how that at all qualifies as a "pit stop" to find any response to that.

"But I got a call from Mom that was worrying, to say the least," he says. Indy notices that though he is speaking to her, his eyes aren't on her: trained instead at the towering brick wall outside the stadium. His profile looks like their father's, even more so with the beard at his chin. The high forehead, long slope of the nose, jaw always tensed.

Indy leans her head against the glass, watching a throng of students pass by ahead of them, a group of guys all inexplicably wearing shorts despite the fact the high today is in the forties. "What are you trying to say, Sterling?"

"I think she's lonely," Sterling says. "With both of us out...doing stuff, and Dad at work all the time, I don't think she'll admit it but I think she's lonely."

Indy shifts her gaze towards the floor, counting the scuff marks on the end of her shoes. The felt mats beneath her feet are entirely clean, without a single particle of dust or crumb. Everything orderly, scrubbed clean, characterless. "I don't know what I can do about that, Sterling. I have dinner with her often enough, but outside of that I have—I have a lot of other things going on. I can't just abandon all of that."

"I'm not telling you to abandon anything. I just think if you—if both of us, made more of an effort, then maybe—"

"Why?" Indy asks. "Why do I have to make more of an effort when Mom and Dad barely do?"

The silence fills the car slowly, creeping in like a mist, and the two siblings let it.

Suddenly all Indy wants to do is escape, get out of here before anything else can be said, before her mood can sour any further. "Thanks for the ride," she tells Sterling, and he says nothing, doesn't even look at her as she steps out and grabs her things from the trunk and gets away as quick as she can.

She is late to Clover's class the next day because she spends so much time debating whether or not she should go. She's not sure if she's ready yet—to face Percy, yes, but to face any of them. Like a tiny parasite, Percy's words have buried underneath her skin and familiarized themselves with her body; she has come to worry that they're true, that she has dragged everyone into this to fuel her own ego, and they all know it, too.

Yet when she walks into the lecture hall, all eyes shifting towards her—Clover giving a quiet nod before he continues on with his lecture—she doesn't find Percy's eyes at all. He isn't here.

Gatz and Sylvia are in their usual spot. She's unsure whether or not to approach, until Sylvia waves her over, and with a silent nod of thanks she takes the seat next to her.

Gatz whispers at her from behind a risen hand: "We decided to leave the Mitchells' place not long after you. Neither of us have seen or heard from Percy since then."

Indy's stomach twists into a knot. She has to sit up very straight to breathe around it. "This is my fault," she exhales. "He's right."

Sylvia offers a weak smile, placing a gentle hand over Indy's. "I don't know if it that's simple," she says. "It's not bad to want something. Especially if that something will benefit someone else."

"However we got here," Gatz adds, "we can't abandon Pine now. At least I can't."

Dr. Clover loudly clears his throat, startling the trio into silence. The knot in Indy's stomach loosens, just a little. She slumps down into her seat.

"There is something else just as important in journalism as finding passion in the story you're telling," the professor continues then, his gray-rimmed eyes faintly shadowed by the brim of his fedora. He sweeps the room with his gaze. "Feeling that sense of importance, that sense of the people need to know, so to speak, is a significant part of good journalism. But so is knowing when you've bit off more than you can chew."

And his eyes shift, settling on Indy.

At first Indy thinks it is a fluke, but his eyes don't move.

"Being a journalist isn't like being a firefighter or a soldier or any other job considered dangerous—but there is still danger to it," Dr. Clover continues. "It's in our best interest as journalists to quit while we're ahead, or else face the consequences. Does everyone understand?"

There is a murmur of confused agreement from the crowd, but Indy says nothing. Only then do Dr. Clover's eyes leave her own.

Indy turns to her friends immediately, the rest of the professor's words lost to a drone of background noise now. "Sylvia, did you see—"

Indy's phone buzzes against her leg. Percy? she thinks, but the name flashing up at her belongs to Jude.

"What?" Sylvia says. "What is it?"

Indy doesn't know why it matters so much—whether it's the fact that he's never called her, that he always sends those enigmatic texts instead, or whether it's just plain curiosity. Whatever the reason, she tells Sylvia, "I don't know, but I think it's important," and jogs out into the hall, avoiding Dr. Clover's eyes as she does.

She picks up. Thank God, she picks up.

She doesn't answer with Hey or Hello or What's up, any of the usual responses. She says his name, "Jude?" and it is a relief, a brief one in this moment of apprehension, that he is so grateful to have.

"Indy, hey. Are you...are you back from your trip?" Jude asks. He's standing outside the laundromat just down the street from his apartment, his back against the glass, the faint whirring of the laundry machines still audible even on the other side of it.

"Yeah, I got back yesterday. I texted you."

He wouldn't have seen it. He was too busy trying to remind himself how to breathe. "Oh, my bad."

"Jude, is everything okay? I mean...you just. You don't usually call me. And you sound worried."

How easy it would be to lie. To play it off like he was perfectly calm about the situation, like things were falling apart, but he had a plan. He's gotten so good at doing that, at pretending like he knows anything at all. It's not a skill he ever really wanted to have.

"I am worried," Jude answers, tugging at the loose threads in his ripped jeans. "It's Lamar Pine. His execution date has just been moved up."

A pause. Then a sound, as much a distillation of horror as it is a word: "What? How do you know? To when?"

Of those two questions, Jude can only answer the second. "Next month."

"Oh my God. Oh my God, Jude." Her voice sounds further away, like some tether bringing her to Earth has just snapped. "What do we do? I don't know if we can—what do we do?"

"We've already found so much, Indy. We can do this. We just need to focus," Jude says. Even in the cold the phone is uncomfortably warm against his ear; sweat begins to bead on his skin. "Where are you right now?"

"Campus," Indy answers, "but my class doesn't get out for another hour."

"Can I meet you after that?"

"Of course, but Jude, do you really—"

He has no need to hear the rest of her question; he knows the sound of doubt's voice well. "Yes," he tells her. "Besides, it's not really a question of can we. We just have to, right?"

He expects to hear fear in her voice; knowing they must do this doesn't erase the way the problem looms, monolithic and seemingly impenetrable, ahead of them.

Yet there is no fear. Indy's voice is remarkably steady as she says, "Right."

Indy swallows her pride, leaves three urgent voice messages on Percy's phone, as well as a strongly-worded text. Still, by the time she's managed to corral her friends to the top floor of DuBois once again, Percy has yet to show up. There's a blank space where he should be, a pause that his voice should fill. They have fought like this before, countless times before—like young trees growing on the same plot of land, they were bound to bump into each other eventually. This does nothing to abate the worry, the worry that this time will be the last.

Indy has bribed Sylvia and Gatz into following her here by buying two full size pizzas—one mushroom, which is Sylvia's favorite, and the other sausage and pepper, which is Gatz's—and she watches them both tiptoe around the boxes, as if deciding whether or not to give in.

Indy gives up on waiting; she can feel time running out, like the air's slowly draining from her lungs. "I promise I asked you guys here for a good reason."

"I mean, pizza's a pretty good reason," Sylvia says with a sigh, and takes a slice, though she does so slowly, as if regretting every move.

"No, I mean—a better reason than that," Indy says. She nibbles at the pizza slice, afraid her stomach can't take more than that, as nervous as she is. "I talked to Jude."

"Jude?" Sylvia repeats. "Like Chernenko, Jude?"

"I wasn't aware he was still, like, around," says Gatz.

Sylvia narrows her eyes. "Me neither."

"That's not the point. The point is he told me Pine's execution date has been moved up to next month," Indy says, and watches the expressions on her friends' faces briefly contort into confusion, dim into despair. "We're running out of time, and fast."

"I'm sorry," Gatz says, folding their pizza slice in half and holding it as daintily as a teacup, "but how would Jude of all people know about this? Are we talking about the same guy? The basement drummer?"

"It's a garage," Jude says.

Indy turns her head, ignoring the rush of excitement or nervousness or whatever this frayed feeling is that rises inside her when she sees him at the mouth of the room. His hair is messy, even more so than usual, hanging in his eyes like threads of fire. The oversized sweater draped over his shoulders swallows his hands, and beneath the holes in his jeans his knees are ruddy from the cold outside.

"Garage," Gatz corrects, with only half sincerity. "My bad."

"Explain yourself, Nenko," Sylvia says, gesturing at him with her mushroom pizza. "How'd you figure this out, anyway?"

Jude makes an odd expression then: empty, vacant of its usual mirth, of its usual anything. Like a ghost wearing Jude's face. Bumping the attic door shut behind him and collapsing onto a wooden crate, he says, "It's a long story, and I can't give you all my sources right now. But I have the proof right here."

He tugs a tightly crinkled ball of paper from the pocket of his jeans, unfolding it unceremoniously until it reveals a wrinkled local newspaper. Without saying a word, his mouth a grim line, he hands it off to Indy.

"It's not even a front page story; most people who cared about this case either don't anymore or they're dead," Jude says as Indy scans the page, a sinking feeling settling in her stomach when she finds Pine's old mugshot, the bolded execution date beside his name. "I don't know who's responsible. I don't know why they did it, but—"

"It doesn't matter." Indy hands the page off to Sylvia, then turns, yanking at the zipper of her backpack, digging around until she finds the journal.

She notices, of course, the three pairs of eyes regarding the journal with mild disdain. She, too, admits there is something macabre about it—messages from the dead—but it's their best bet.

"Indy," Sylvia starts. "Don't tell me..."

"I got another message. Yesterday, before I got back," Indy explains, frantically flipping through the journal, her fingers gliding over the tarnished pages. At last she lands on the most recent one, her heart giving a begrudging surge of relief when she sees the words, like she was half-expecting it to have disappeared. "Here."

Gatz and Sylvia lean in to read it; Jude gets up from his box, joining them.

"Irene Meskill?" Gatz repeats. "Who the hell is that?"

"I don't know, but we're going to find out," Indy says. She reads the doubt on their face, but doesn't let it sway her. "It feels right, Gatz. Of course this isn't the news we wanted, but it can't be coincidence that it came at the same time this message from Dobbs did."

Sylvia sighs, her face washing with clarity.

"She wants this just as badly as anyone else," Indy says. "And I...we can't let her down."

She expects hesitation, but the moment for that, if there ever was one, has long since passed.

"I know," Gatz says.

"Have you mentioned this to Percy?" Sylvia asks.

Indy closes the journal over her finger, leaning her weight against the dusty window sill. "No. We haven't talked since the other day."

Jude blinks, clearly perplexed, but he doesn't ask.

"He'll come around," Indy says before Jude can get the chance to change his mind. "He always does."

The words are heavy with the weight of a wish, not a promise. They linger in the air a little, even moments long after they're spoken.