CHAPTER 46
The only thing worse than fight-or-flight is the in-between, when you can do neither and just have to fucking take it.
—JACK CARROWAY
At the toll of the bell, Professor Hollings strides into the lecture room, his eyes narrowed beneath the brim of his boater hat.
He looks sour, as if he passed Headmistress Prew in the hallway and was told Cloning Theory is a waste of university funds.
His scowl deepens when a Pinkie takes his hat, and he moves with clipped steps toward the central holographic cube.
Rosamund slides off the table, flips her hair over one shoulder, and leans over the railing on the Blue level with her hand raised. “Professor Hollings. I wish to report a threat.”
Every head in the lecture room turns. Hollings looks up, frowning.
“A threat, Miss Prew?”
“Yes.” Rosamund extends her arm and points at me. “A threat made by Miss Waldsten. I believe it should be reviewed before the exam begins. You can check the message log on my tablet. I’ve already submitted the evidence.”
A current of shock ripples through the levels, whispers sparking from every seat.
Jack leans toward Charlotte and mutters something under his breath.
She rounds on him, her hand clutching the lapel of his jacket as she whispers fiercely back.
Then she pulls away and hurries toward me, her arms half-raised, as if she could shield me from what’s coming.
But it’s already too late.
Professor Hollings stares at his tablet, his brow furrowing deeper by the second.
I dive for my own device, fingers sliding over the glass as it wakes with a sync alert and a timestamp.
The tablet was accessed ten minutes ago, but not by me.
I flip to the private messages, and find a message sent from my account to Rosamund:
“Back off, you blistering bitch. Your cousin didn’t know better. But he should’ve.”
Beneath the message, there’s a video attachment with a grainy thumbnail so distorted it’s almost unrecognizable. But I know exactly what the footage shows.
Professor Hollings lifts his eyes, colder now, stripped of patience. “Miss Waldsten. What is the meaning of this?”
I rise slowly, standing tall despite my leg brace. Every gaze is pinned on me, but Edmund’s terrifies me the most.
“I didn’t send the message, Professor. It was sent ten minutes ago. I only just arrived.”
“Your credentials were used,” Hollings replies. “The message is time-stamped. The file is authenticated.”
Jack rushes to the railing and grabs Rosamund’s wrist. He leans in close, speaking so urgently that the veins in his neck swell. Rosamund raises a hand and runs her fingers teasingly through his hair before jerking away.
I turn to Edmund.
He’s only a few paces behind me, but it feels like miles. His body is taut, his weight pitched forward, as if he’s standing on a landmine and knows that, whether he lifts his foot or not, it’s going to explode.
“Edmund,” I say urgently. “I need to talk to you.”
Rosamund cuts in, her voice trembling with fear.
“I would like the video played, Professor. I wish everyone to see the threat for themselves.”
Professor Hollings shakes his head. “Miss Prew, this is neither the time nor—”
“Please.” Rosamund’s hand quivers as she presses it to her chest. “I fear for my safety. My life.”
“I request that we handle this situation in private, Professor.” My voice cuts cleanly across the room despite my panic. “The video in question was accessed from a legally sealed file. It must not be played publicly.”
“Yes, it can. And it will,” Rosamund insists. “Play it, Professor, or I shall report to Headmistress Prew that you ignored a direct threat against me.”
Hollings flicks his gaze between us, looking torn, but when it’s Blue against Green, I know the outcome is inevitable. He drags a hand over his face and exhales. “Very well.”
I turn and push toward Edmund, barely feeling the drag of my leg brace. I reach for him, ready to yank him out of the room, prepared to do anything to keep him from finding out this way.
“Don’t watch, Edmund,” I say, firm enough to border on command. “I want to tell you the truth myself. Please.”
He steadies me with a hand on my arm. His expression is all edges, but his worry is unmistakably for me. “All right, Loredana. We’ll talk outside.”
“No, Duke,” Rosamund rushes in behind him. “If you let her tell you herself, she’ll twist it—she’s been manipulating you for months.” Edmund tries to walk away with me, but she snatches his arm, holding him fast. “Watch. And finally see what she’s done… who she really is.”
The holographic cube in the center of the lecture room powers on with a burst of light. I whirl back toward it, my eyes burning as the video loads.
No. Not like this. Not in front of everyone. It’s already horrible enough.
Around me, students lean in, their gazes fixed on the screen. The image flickers into view, and when the video starts—
It’s a lie.
There’s no locker room door creaking open as I stand half-dressed. No Charles charging in, his brown curls plastered to his skull, fury in every stomp of his boots. No fists slamming into my head or hands crushing the air from my lungs. That part is cut away, erased.
What the class sees begins with blood. My blood. It’s slick across the tile, streaking my thighs and soaking the shredded hem of my silk slip. I’m on my feet, saber already in hand, one leg twitching with a sharp, reflexive jerk I can’t control.
Across from me, Charles clutches his broken nose, blood pouring down his chin and onto the narrow wound in his arm where I’ve already slashed him.
He holds a jagged locker door like a shield, angled defensively, while I stare at him, wild-eyed and panting through a knot of bloody hair.
My chest heaves as I pitch forward and lift my saber, braced to strike.
This isn’t the me I remember. This isn’t how it felt. But I know exactly how it looks. Charles has no saber, no real weapon. I look like the one who came for blood.
In the lecture room, several low-citizens spring to their feet.
One mutters in shock, almost awe, before a chair tips and crashes to the floor.
Above, on the fourth level, a dozen Blues surge to the railing, crowding it like beating-winged hawks.
Beside me, Charlotte argues with a Pinkie, demanding the robot shut off the video.
She’s the only one who knows the truth. When the Pinkie refuses, she turns back and reaches for me.
But just before our hands meet, hers fall to her sides, trembling, as if she understands.
She can’t reach me here, even if she touches me.
I bite down hard on a scream.
The projection crackles, and Charles charges. He closes the gap like a bull, angling the jagged locker door to shield the wound I’ve already cut into his shoulder.
I wait, knees bent, ready. Then my arm snaps out, and I strike.
The saber smashes into the locker door with a burst of sparks.
It jolts from his grip and skids across the tile.
Charles falters for only an instant, but it’s all I need.
My next blow lands clean at the top of his exposed shoulder.
A brutal, splintering crunch echoes through the room as the blade cleaves through skin, muscle, and bone.
Charles reels back, blood spraying in an arc that spatters across the lockers.
It should have ended there.
But it didn’t.
Panic claws at my throat. The noise in my head is deafening. All I hear is the pounding rush of blood, and all I feel is terror that I haven’t done enough and that he might rise again.
So I pivot, ground my weight, and haul the saber up one last time. My arm burns from the effort, but I swing anyway, with a full-bodied, final touch. The blade catches above Charles’s collarbone and glides through in a seamless stroke that severs clean through the neck.
His head lifts. Then drops.
All the way to the floor.
The body stays upright a beat too long, swaying like a flowerless stem before buckling and crashing to the tile in a spurt of blood and broken sound.
A scream rips through the lecture room, swallowed an instant later by a groundswell of screeching chairs. The crowd pours forward like a tide, students jolting to their feet in volleys of stark, recoiling horror.
On the screen, I’m still there, drenched and shaking. My nostrils flare, and my limbs twitch with a wild, electric current hissing through every vein. I don’t cry. I don’t drop the saber. I don’t fall.
I roar—a full-throated, feral sound that saws through my teeth. In that final, frozen frame, I don’t look like a girl who was nearly strangled moments earlier. I look like a Green who executed a Blue.
The video cuts.
The holographic cube goes dark.
And the room explodes.
Blues tear away from the railing, saber hilts drawn, voices rising in a volcanic roar of rage.
I turn toward them and stand at my full height, trying to muster the same fierce resolve I showed in the video.
Charlotte barrels into me, shielding me with her body, but the Blues are already demanding arrest and execution.
Through the blur of bodies and noise, I catch Professor Hollings racing up the emergency stairs to the Blue level, fighting to push through the chaos.
Beyond him, by the railing, Rosamund watches me with thin, burning eyes. Rather than triumph, I see only pure, seething hatred. The kind that wants to crush me until there’s nothing left but flesh beneath her heel. And she might’ve done it.
Her gaze slides past me. I don’t need to follow to know where it lands.
My vision tunnels, and the air vanishes in a single, staggering pull. I close my eyes, even though I know it won’t stop what’s coming. Edmund is behind me. And I have to turn.
The blade has already struck. Now I have to watch the wound bleed.
I brace for rage, for grief, even for hatred.
But when I finally turn, what I see is worse.
Edmund is looking straight at me, but it’s like I’m not there.
His face is vacant, shell-shocked, as if he’s watching something collapse on top of him in slow motion.
Beneath the stillness, though, I see fractures forming—tiny, hairline cracks spidering through his expression.
His eyes flick between the now-dark cube and my face, back and forth, back and forth, as if he’s trying to overlay two images and force them to match.
His expression keeps shifting, appearing adrift and unmoored, until at last I see the exact moment the truth hits.
From the way I begged him not to watch to the way I’m standing here now, trembling…
He knows I knew.
Worse, he probably thinks I always did. He thinks I entered his life carrying this secret, that I took my place beside him, held him, touched him, kissed him, and let him tell me that he loves me, all while knowing I killed his cousin.
Around me, the shouting hardens into snarls, and the words twist into threats. I barely notice until several Blues rush toward Edmund.
“She’s a Blue-killer, Prew,” one growls.
“You want to keep her after that?” another spits.
“Give her to us. I’ll reclaim your honor myself.”
They crowd in, bold and bristling, with one even shoving at his shoulder.
Edmund’s head slowly turns.
“Lay your fucking hand on me again,” he says, “and it’ll be in challenge.”
The hand drops. The Blues recoil a fraction, but their faces remain warped with fury, teeth bared, bloodlust mounting with each second.
Edmund doesn’t look at me again. His eyes stay fixed on Professor Hollings, who’s still fighting his way up the emergency stairs toward the fourth level. When he finally reaches us, flushed and panting, he stops beside me.
“Professor?” Edmund asks, with the question in his tone: Are you in control?
Hollings nods curtly, his voice cutting through the noise. “Stand down. This classroom is under my jurisdiction. Anyone who refuses to comply will be removed from the premises and barred for the remainder of the exam period.”
The Blues glare at Hollings with open contempt, as if picturing him falling mysteriously from a high ledge after the exam. Still, with bitter reluctance, they part enough to clear a path.
Through the gap in the crowd, I catch a glimpse of Edmund already at the elevator. The doors glide shut before I can take a single step toward him.
“Miss Waldsten,” Hollings says, his voice carrying across the entire room. “In light of the message submitted to Miss Prew and the disruption caused, you are hereby dismissed from this examination. The Coppers have been notified, and a formal inquiry will follow.”
I hear the words, but the fear in his eyes reveals something else. He saw how the video started, cut mid-fight and stripped of context. He knows it was staged. If the video were anything else, if I’d truly murdered Charles in cold blood, I would’ve already been arrested and executed.
But Hollings can’t say that aloud. So he’s giving the Blues a pound of flesh to pacify them. He’s throwing me out, which means I’ll receive an incomplete mark for the course.
But I live.
I nod, then turn and move past the elevator. I take the emergency stairwell instead, each step jolting up my spine through the brace. Charlotte rushes after me, ready to leave, too, but I stop her.
“No, Char. Take your exam. Meet me at the hospital afterward.”
She starts to argue, but I’m already gone, forcing myself down the stairs as fast as I can.
Below, the low-citizen levels are hushed.
Greens, Oranges, and Purples stand in their rows, watching me.
Their eyes lift to meet mine as I pass, lit with a quiet, burning pride.
The kind that hides in silence, in survival, in the moment one of their own does what they’ve always dreamed: striking back.
And they’re holding it like a banner between them.
I can’t bear it.
I push through their stares and step into the corridor, where Edmund is already ahead. The elevator must’ve just let him off. His strides are long and steady, with no sign of shock remaining.
“Edmund.” My voice cracks as it echoes down the hall.
He pauses for a moment, his hand tremoring. Then he clenches it, faces me, and says, “Loredana, I need time.”
He turns and keeps walking.
“Edmund,” I cry again, louder now, limping after him with all my strength. “Please—stop.”
When he rounds the bend, my chest caves. My brace catches on a groove in the floor, and I fall hard, my knees slamming against the marble.
“Please,” I cry.
But he’s already gone.
My head drops, and the sound that tears out of me is broken.