Chapter 9
Amy
Ilook up his name because I can’t not.
I’m sitting cross-legged on my dorm room floor with my laptop open and my cold coffee from this morning beside me.
I’ve already tried to do my reading for Professor Harlan’s class twice and gotten exactly nowhere both times because every time the page goes quiet, my mind fills back up with the back row of that lecture hall.
With that stillness. With the sensation of being found.
Azriel.
He didn’t give me a last name. The campus directory isn’t helpful. I can’t find any Azriels enrolled. I narrow it by year and then by program, and I end up on a page with no photograph that tells me almost nothing.
Azriel Vikiar, third year, undeclared major.
Vikiar.
Something about that name snags on something. I’ve heard it before, or seen it, in the way you sometimes recognize a word without being able to place where it came from. The campus chapel has a plaque. The new sciences wing has that name.
Old money, the permanent kind that outlasts whoever earned it, the kind that gets engraved in stone and stays there.
I close the laptop.
This is exactly what Dr. Osei used to call hypervigilant pattern recognition. You take unrelated data points, and you build a threat out of them because your nervous system is still calibrated for a threat that no longer exists.
A man warned you.
A note appeared.
A stranger watched you in class. These are three separate incidents, and your brain threads them together into a conspiracy because that’s what trauma does: it makes you a very fast and very inaccurate detective.
Except…Except the man who warned me mentioned the back of the lecture hall. Which I hadn’t told him about. Which he couldn’t have known about unless… Unless he’d been there too or knew who was watching me.
I open the laptop again.
I search for Vikiar and find what I expected—old family, old money, the kind of family whose name is on buildings. And then, almost by accident, a name in an archived student newspaper article about an Order of Alumni gathering three years ago.
A partial list of attendees. And at the bottom, almost as an afterthought:
...the Vikiar family, represented as always by multiple members, was notably without their youngest son, who sources indicate is currently enrolled in an alternative academic program at the university’s discretion.
Alternative academic program.
I read it four times. I don’t know what it means. I don’t know why it makes the hair on my arms stand up.
My phone buzzes.
Unknown number. One message.
Unknown: Don’t open your window tonight.
— S
I stare at it for a long time.
Then I get up, walk to my window, and lock it. I pull out the card for campus security, but I put it away. If I attract attention, it might not be the kind I’m looking for.
I need to lie low.
For now.
Because as much as I have to be careful in here, Roman is out there.
Sleep doesn’t come, but I don’t expect it to.
I lie in the dark with my phone on my chest and my window locked and the card Azriel gave me on the nightstand, and I listen to the building.
Kenyan’s oldest dormitory, all the orientation materials say so with a kind of pride that I now find vaguely sinister, and it settles and creaks in a constant low conversation with itself. Pipes. Wind in the stone. The distant sound of someone’s music two floors up.
And then, at some point after two in the morning, something else.
Footsteps in the hallway.
Not the random scatter of a late-night return. Not the urgent shuffle of someone heading to the bathroom. These are deliberate.
Measured.
The footsteps of someone who isn’t trying to be quiet because they don’t need to be…Because they’re the thing that makes other things quiet.
They stop outside my door.
I don’t breathe.
One second. Two. Five.
Nothing.
No knock. No envelope. No sound at all.
And then the footsteps move on, slow and unhurried, and I hear the stairwell door at the end of the hallway open and close.
I lie in the dark for another hour, heart in my throat, trying to decide whether what I felt standing outside my door was my imagination or something I have no clean word for yet.
Something that felt—and this is the part I will not say out loud to another living person—like being checked on.
Like someone making sure I was still there.
The nightmare doesn’t come for the first time in three weeks.
And I don’t know what to do with that.