Alexander had promised his mother he'd call every Sunday, and he'd kept that promise for three weeks, even on the Sunday after the Market Floor, when he could barely keep his eyes open.On the fourth Sunday, he almost didn't.He sat on the edge of his bed in the attic with Theo's spare phone in his hand, because his own was still broken from the mountain, and stared at his mother's number for twenty minutes without pressing it. He was suspended from classes. He was confined to his room. In five days, seven old men were going to vote on whether to throw him out of Aldermoor, and he had no witnesses, no evidence, and no idea where to find either. And somewhere in this castle, a student with a forged name had been waiting for him for three years.None of which he could tell her.He pressed the button.She picked up on the first ring, the way she always did, as if she'd been holding the phone in her hand all day."Alex?""Hi, Mom.""Hi, sweetheart." He could hear her smile. "How are you?

The vote to expel Alex Reed failed six to one, and the only governor who voted for it was Conrad Ashcroft.The vote that followed it, to place Damien Ashcroft on disciplinary probation for the rest of the year and strip him of every club leadership position he held, passed six to one as well. Kurt Brenner's father announced, in a stiff voice, that he would be withdrawing his lawsuit. Felix Aubert, the boy in the bow tie, was given two weeks of kitchen duty for running an illegal fight club, which he accepted with the air of a man who knew he had got off lightly. And Chief Keller was seen, for the first time anyone could remember, smiling.Conrad Ashcroft walked out of the paneled room without a word to anyone, including his son. Damien sat alone in the front row for a long time after the room had emptied, staring at nothing. When Alexander walked past him on the way out, he looked up, and his face was white with a hatred so intense that it was almost frightening."This isn't over," Da

The Swiss evening news ran the story at nine o'clock that night, exactly as Lena had said it would.Alexander watched it on Theo's laptop in the attic, sitting on the end of his bed with the volume turned down low. It was a short report, less than a minute long, wedged between a story about a train strike and the weather. A man's body had been recovered from the lake near Chur. He was thirty-four, a Croatian national with a long criminal record, and he had been dead for about two days. The police were treating the death as suspicious. The reporter mentioned, almost in passing, that the man had a badly broken nose.Theo stared at the screen, then at Alexander."That's him," he said. "Isn't it? That's one of the guys from your bus.""It's him.""And the Ruby girl knew about it before the news did." Theo rubbed his face with both hands. "Reed, I'm going to be honest with you. I'm starting to think coming to this school was the worst decision my family ever made, and my family bought a Po

Zara finished bandaging his hands without another word, and then she packed up the first aid kit and stood."Go," she said. "She almost died. She wants to say thank you.""Zara...""I'm not angry." She smiled, but it didn't quite reach her eyes. "I'm a kitchen girl, Alex, and she's Isabella Moreau. I know how this works. I've always known." She picked up the kit. "Just be careful. Rich girls don't say thank you for free."She walked out of the boot room before he could answer.---The lodge library was on the second floor, a long room paneled in honey-colored pine, with tall windows looking out over the frozen lake and the dark mountains beyond it. By ten o'clock, the rest of the lodge had gone quiet. The only light came from a huge stone fireplace at the far end, where a fire had burned down to deep orange coals.Isabella was sitting on the rug in front of it.She had her back against an armchair and her knees drawn up, and she was wearing a thick cream sweater that was far too big f

The Swiss police came up the valley in three cars and a helicopter, and by noon, the Founders' Weekend was over.They sealed off the ridge above the lake with yellow tape and covered the dead waiter with a gray sheet. They took statements from everyone in the lodge, one by one, in a small office off the main hall, and when they got to Alexander, they kept him there for two hours.He told them the truth, or most of it. He told them he'd recognized the waiter as one of the men who'd attacked his bus above Chur. He told them he'd followed the man up the path, and that the man had confessed to being paid to trigger the avalanche, and that the man had been shot in the head before he could say who'd paid him. He did not tell them about the stone whale in his boot, or about the Founders, or about the computer in the East Tower library. He did not tell them his real name.The detective who interviewed him was a tired, gray-haired woman named Inspector Haller, and she listened to the whole sto