Chapter 8
Saint
She sits in the middle.
I noted that the second I walked in, the third seat from the aisle, sixth row from the front, was angled slightly toward the left so she could see both the board and the door without being obvious about it.
She doesn’t realize she does it.
It’s instinctual.
The body mapping the exits before the mind consents to the fear.
I know this because I used to do it too. Before they took away rooms with doors.
The chair in the back corner of the lecture hall is undersized for me. My knees press against the seat back in front, which is empty, because no one sits directly in front of the man who materialized in that row this morning like something the campus exhaled.
I heard the whispers.
New student.
Transfer.
Doesn’t look like a student. Maybe an athlete. Looks like he’s done things to people.
That last one is accurate.
But I am not here for any of them. I am here for the girl in the sixth row who holds her pen too tight and takes notes like she’s afraid that if she stops moving her hand, the world will close in on her. Like staying busy is the only thing keeping the walls from pressing in.
Victor Sokolav is just collateral damage. I have zero fucks to give when it comes to the Order.
She doesn’t look back for twenty minutes. I’ll give her credit for that.
Most people last about eight. The awareness of being watched is a biological fact. The human nervous system picks up sustained attention the way skin picks up heat, and she feels it.
I can tell by the way her shoulders draw together by degree, the way her pen slows without stopping, and the way she breathes too carefully.
She’s been taught to ignore the warning signs.
I wonder who taught her that. I think I already know the answer.
People train you to distrust your instincts by punishing you for acting on them. You learn to question the alarm system until it goes quiet. I just don’t know exactly why…yet.
When she finally looks, I don’t look away.
Most people would. Most people caught staring perform the social theater of sudden interest in the middle distance.
I watch her find me in the back of the room, and I watch her flicker of recognition before she knows what she’s identifying, and then she snaps her eyes forward like a hand snapping back from a hot surface.
Good.
She felt it.
She doesn’t know what it is yet, but she felt it. The reason she is the center of someone’s full and absolute attention.
The lecture focuses on obsessive thought patterns. The professor is a soft-spoken man in a beige cardigan, using a pointer to tap his slides like a metronome. He talks about intrusive ideation. Compulsive cognition. The neurological loops that form around unresolved emotional stimuli.
I lean back in my chair and listen carefully.
Not because I’m a student.
Because he is, unintentionally, describing me in clinical terms that I find useful to understand.
The unresolved stimulus becomes the organizing center of the obsessive pattern. The mind returns to it not only from pathology but also because the loop was never given a conclusion. Resolution isn’t the goal. Proximity is.
I write this down.
The first thing I’ve written that didn’t come from the dark recesses of my mind since I was sixteen.
I leave before the end of the lecture, before she can notice.
I need her to be the one who goes out into the air and breathes relief into her lungs and believes she’s put distance between herself and whatever she felt in that room.
Relief is a useful thing to give someone. It makes them feel safe enough to stop watching so closely.
This is not cruelty. This is patience.
I take the south stairs and come out on the colonnade, which runs along the east side of the main academic building. It’s cold. The kind of cold that is wet and ancient, the stone itself seeming to exhale it. I pull my hood up and walk.
Being outside during the day is still strange. After years in Unit 9, the sky feels like a provocation.
Too large.
Too open.
The first day they released me, I stood in the courtyard of the sub-level for eleven minutes before I could make my legs move toward the stairwell. Azriel had to come back for me.
He didn’t mention it. That’s the thing about Azriel. He pretends not to see certain things. It’s the only kindness I’ll acknowledge from him.
I find a bench near the central fountain and sit. I take the photograph from my hoodie pocket. It’s the one I pulled from Sokolov’s desk last night.
Looking at it in the daylight, I can see it’s just a girl with similar coloring, the same dark hair, and the same slight tilt to the shoulders.
But it doesn’t change what I know. It doesn’t change the fact that, like many, she’s one of them.
Victor Sokolov will be moving on campus within days. His father is incapacitated, humiliated, and burning for retaliation.
Victor is twenty-two, stupid with inherited power, and was already running parts of his father’s operation before I walked through that warehouse door.
He knows which students on this campus have no safety net.
He knows who can disappear without a paper trail.
He knows how the Order keeps certain people quiet.
He just doesn’t know about me.
I let a hard breath as I move my shoulder. The bullet went straight through, but I have enough meds in my system to numb the pain. I didn’t let them bandage it properly last night. I didn’t care that the doctor said to give it a few days until I’m healed.
I sat in the back of the van while Zero talked too much and Azriel stared at his hands, and I pressed my palm over the wound and thought about the note I’d slid under her door.
The night I’d been standing in the hallway of her dormitory floor for forty-five minutes, listening to the building settle, and heard her instead.
She tries so hard to be quiet.
I imagine the way she presses her face into the pillow. She controls her breathing in long, deliberate intervals. I know this technique. I used it too, in the early years of Unit 9, when I didn’t want the orderlies to hear that I was awake and afraid.
But she didn’t quite manage it. And in the silence between her controlled breaths, she made a sound that I don’t have a clinical term for—the sound of a person who learned that no one would come, and still, after all that learning, can’t stop hoping.
I slid the note under her door and walked back to the room they’ve assigned me three floors above hers.
I didn’t sleep.
I thought about the sound instead. I turned it over in my mind the way you turn a stone in water, feeling all its edges. I thought about what makes a person sound like that. I thought about the file Valen pulled for me last week.
A girl named Amelia Torres, who came from nothing and had nowhere else to go.
I thought about the photograph now in my pocket.
I replay the way she’d looked in the courtyard on her first day, gripping her bag strap like it was the only solid thing in the world.
The way she’d said “I’m fine” too fast to someone she didn’t know.
The way her eyes had swept the space before she answered, the automatic inventory of exits and threats that nobody does who’s never needed to.
She thinks she came here to be safe.
She doesn’t know that being safe here isn’t a place.
It’s a person.
And right now, whether she understands it or not, whether I’m the thing she should want or the thing that should terrify her, I am the only one on this campus who knows every predator within a two-mile radius and has the skill set to fuck them up.
Azriel is sworn to protect her. He’s good at it. He’s clean and careful, and he follows the Order’s rules, and he will stand between her and Victor Sokolov when the time comes.
But the Order has rules about how protection works.
Boundaries.
Protocols.
There are things Azriel won’t do, things the Order won’t sanction, lines he won’t cross.
I don’t follow any of those.
My phone buzzes.
Valen: Viktor made contact with three of Sokolov’s campus liaisons this morning. He knows the ledger is gone. He’s not going to wait.
I pocket the phone without responding.
Across the courtyard, I watch her come out of the side door of the academic building, moving fast. Moving like someone who just needed to get out. She stops near the south wall and breathes.
I watch Azriel approach her from the colonnade.
I watch him give her the card.
I watch her take it, and I watch the careful blankness on my brother’s face that means he is performing calm for her benefit when he’s actually worried.
He should be.
I let her have the courtyard. I let her have the walk back to her dormitory and the afternoon and the evening and the measured safety of another night behind a closed door. I let Azriel play his part.
I’m not in a hurry.
I have nothing but time.