Of Dreams and Destiny by Sandhya Menon

Author:Sandhya Menon
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Simon & Schuster Books for Young Readers
Published: 2023-09-19T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 26

DE

DE felt sick as they rounded the corner to Leo’s dorm room. There was a gaggle of students at the entryway, and even more spilling out into the hallway. They were all talking at the same time, the air thick with sentences she caught only snippets of:

“—wake up—”

“—poisoned?—”

“—infirmary—”

She pushed her way through the crowd, vaguely aware that Xander was right behind her, a solid, if silent, presence.

When she got close enough to see Leo’s bed, with Will, Jaya, Grey, Caterina, and Rahul clustered around him in a tight circle, the first thing DE felt was a wave of relief. He was lying peacefully in it, tucked under the covers, both hands folded over his chest. His eyelids fluttered lightly as if he were in a tranquil dream.

But then she realized the absurdity of the situation. With all the chaos in his room, why would Leo be asleep?

A hand grabbed her by the elbow, and she spun to face Jaya. Jaya’s face was drawn, her mouth in a tight line. “Oh, thank god you’re here,” she said in her clipped English accent. “I was worried something awful had happened to you, too.”

“What’s going on?” DE asked as Will knelt by Leo’s bedside and smoothed back his hair, looking frantic. The rest of her friends were in a similar state, all of them talking animatedly together. Rahul, especially, looked incredibly anxious; he and Leo were like brothers. Grey, too, looked uncharacteristically shaken, his mouth drawn into a hard line. No one except Jaya had noticed her arrival. “What’s wrong with Leo?”

But even as she asked the question, faint alarm bells were going off in DE’s head. Because there was something awfully, eerily familiar about the way Leo looked: skin waxy pale, his form deathly still, much too still to simply be asleep. In a flash, it came back to her—Paul. She’d seen him being carried by his friends after the party, and he’d looked just like this. Wrong.

“We don’t know.” Jaya shook her head. “Will came by ten minutes ago and Leo was like this. None of us have been able to wake him up. We just called the infirmary; the medics are on their way.”

“Was he acting sick at all last night?” Xander asked, and DE suddenly remembered he was there.

Will looked up at them, shook his head. “N-no, not really. I mean, I guess toward the end of the night, he was acting a little… zoned out. He had this faraway look in his eye, and he wasn’t as animated as he usually is. But that was all of us!” He looked around at the friend group for confirmation and got several nods. “We were all tired; we didn’t leave the party until two in the morning.”

“Yes, Leo was acting lethargic, but well within the normal bounds of his behavior. This should not be happening,” Rahul put in, and DE could tell he was trying hard to maintain his usual state of factual logic. His voice trembled, though, giving him away.

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