Chapter 10
Saint
The thing they never account for, in all their clinical frameworks and their padded rooms and their attempts to map the interior of a mind like mine, is that I am not broken in the ways they think I am.
I am broken in very different ways.
I have an annotated list.
I cannot tolerate enclosed spaces for more than six hours without what Dr. Wick calls a “decompensation event” and what I call Tuesday. I have a nonnegotiable hatred of the color white that makes certain parts of this campus feel like a personal provocation.
When I am very tired, the walls sometimes breathe, which is annoying but not dangerous.
I have not slept more than three consecutive hours since I was sixteen.
I experience rage the way some people experience weather.
It moves through me, and I have learned to read its patterns the way a sailor reads the sky.
And I fuck one of the nurses twice a week.
She takes what I give her and in any hole I want.
Hard. Which is not an option at the moment.
None of this makes me incapable.
It makes me differently capable.
The dorm hallway outside her room is empty at two fourteen in the morning. I walk it slowly, the way I’ve walked every hallway since they let me out of Unit 9, relearning the physics of unconstrained space. How much room I actually have. How far the walls really are.
Azriel keeps the floor below hers, which is the Order’s idea of a monitoring system, but Azriel sleeps between midnight and seven, and his monitoring has gaps you could drive a van through. And lately, he’s gone back home.
I stop outside her door.
She’s awake.
I can hear her moving. I could knock, but I don’t.
Knocking changes things.
Knocking requires a face-to-face that I’m not yet prepared to give, and she’s not prepared to receive. She’s still in the stage where the right answer feels like running, and running would be the wrong choice. I would rather she arrive at not running on her own terms than have me force the issue.
I stay for thirty-two seconds. I count them. Then I walk back down the hallway, take the stairs to the floor above, and sit on the window ledge of the common room with my feet hanging four stories above the courtyard, watching the quad.
Victor Sokolov’s man came onto campus this afternoon. I spotted him near the registrar’s office at a quarter to three.
A stocky man in a gray jacket who spent twelve minutes pretending to consult a campus map before photographing the dormitory wing with his phone. Amateur hour.
Sokolov Senior would have sent someone better. This is Victor improvising, which means he’s moving faster than his father would sanction and making sloppier choices, which makes him more dangerous, not less.
My phone goes off.
Valen: We need a meeting. A strategy.
I sent back two words.
Saint: Not yet.
I’m watching.
I need to understand Victor’s pattern before we move on to him because the worst thing you can do with someone impulsive and angry is to corner him before you know which direction he’ll break.
Push him wrong and he goes for the leverage points immediately, and his leverage points are the girls on that list. The ones with no safety net.
The ones the Order has already identified as manageable. The ones he can take.
She’s on that list.
She’s been on that list since before she arrived. Her scholarship wasn’t random.
The Order selects.
They’ve been selecting for generations, identifying the bright, isolated, resource-poor students who will come here hungry and grateful and without the family connections to make noise if something goes wrong.
The scholarship is a net. A maze of opportunity inside a web of lies.
I think about that. About the way she gripped her orientation paperwork on her first day and the way the words scholarship student had pressed into her face like a bruise she was trying not to show.
She thinks it’s a gift.
She thinks she earned her way into safety.
She earned her way onto a list.
This makes me want to put my fist through a window, which would be loud and unhelpful, so instead, I breathe through it as I head to my room. Four counts in. Hold. Eight counts out. Dr. Wick’s technique, which I use not because I have any goodwill toward Dr. Wick but because it works.
In.
Hold.
Out.
The quad is empty. The campus sleeps. Somewhere below me, she is lying in the dark, wondering about footsteps.
She locked her window after my text. I checked from the courtyard below. Her light was on for forty-three minutes after I sent it, and when it went off, the window latch was in the down position.
Good.
She listened.
This is more than most people give me.
I have a class in six hours that I am obligated by the Order to attend.
Advanced Literature, which strikes me as an almost funny cosmic joke, that the man they locked in a padded room for years for being too dangerous, too loud, too alive in his rage is now required to sit in a room and discuss the symbolic weight of language.
I find, to my own surprise, that I’m not opposed to this.
Words are the only weapons I was never stripped of.
In Unit 9, they took everything.
Shoelaces.
Anything with an edge.
Any object that could be a projectile.
Privileges were stripped and restored on a schedule I learned to game by year two. But they couldn’t take my voice. Couldn’t take the thing I did in the dark for three years, building my mind from the pieces I had, and the body like a form of strength into a work of art like a clay sculpture.
Now, the face of a girl I’d seen once. A voice I’d heard mentioned. A story assembled from fragments, from the things Azriel let slip when he forgot I was listening.
I built the image of her from nothing.
I named her before I knew she’d be real.
She’s not what I built. She’s smaller. More tired.
The damage is different from what I imagined, quieter, less visible. The girl I built in the dark of Unit 9 was harder. She had to be, because the dark requires hard things.
The real Amy is soft in places that weren’t supposed to survive.
That’s the part I can’t account for.
That’s the part that keeps me on a window ledge at two in the morning instead of in my room running the perimeter security patterns the way Valen wants.
I pull out the folded piece of paper I’ve been carrying since the first night.
I wrote seven drafts before I got it right. Not because I struggled with the words, but because I struggled with how much to give. How much to withhold. How to be honest enough that she feels found without being so direct that she locks the door and never opens it again.
She picked it up.
She kept it.
I know because I would have seen it in the hallway. Or in her trash if she’d discarded it, and it wasn’t there.
She’s carrying it. Right now, in whatever bag or secret place feels close enough to her chest that she’ll feel it when she breathes.
I know this the way I know certain things, not from evidence, but from the same place the rage comes from. The deep, pre-verbal place where I am most honest.
After three hours of sleep, I fold the paper back up and look at the empty quad.
First period literature is in twenty-one minutes. I know she registered for it. I made sure I’m in the same classes.
I wonder if she’s still awake.
I wonder, in the quiet, what she sounds like when she isn’t afraid.
I want to be the reason she gets to find out. Even if I break her, at least I would have the satisfaction.