Chapter 12
Saint
Azriel is meeting her at lunch. I know this because I have Azriel’s location in a shared app he doesn’t know I can access, and I know this because Azriel does things on a schedule he believes is unpredictable, but it isn’t.
I also know because I can see them from the second-floor window of the west side of the building, where I am sitting on a radiator eating an apple and watching the courtyard below.
She’s already there when he arrives.
She got there first, which means she wanted the advantage of seeing him approach rather than being seen approaching. You learn that kind of thing, or you grow up in environments that teach it to you involuntarily. She learned it the second way.
Azriel sits across from her with his careful face on.
His telling-the-truth-but-not-all-of-it face.
I’ve known this expression since he was seven years old and I was nine and already locked out of the life he was being groomed for.
He would come to the place they kept me, sit on the floor outside the glass, and talk to me about his day at school because he didn’t yet understand that this was exactly the kind of kindness our stepfather wanted to stamp out of him.
He understood eventually.
He kept doing it anyway.
He’s going to tell her something true and something incomplete.
He’s going to tell her that there are people on this campus who bear watching.
He’s going to tell her to be careful without specifying what she should be careful of.
He’s going to give her a level of information that feels substantial but leaves out the Order, the Prey list, the ledger, and the fact that her scholarship was selected rather than awarded.
And he’s going to tell her to stay away from me.
I watch her face while he talks. I’m too far to lip-read, but faces are their own language, and I’ve had years to study them in the one-way glass of Unit 9.
She listens like someone who is filtering, running what she’s being told against what she already suspects, looking for the places where the story has been sanded smooth.
She’s smart.
She knows she’s being told a partial truth.
I watch her say something that makes Azriel pause. She gestures toward the academic building, I think toward the literature classroom. Azriel’s expression goes careful in the way it gets when he’s managing information.
She’s asking about me.
I eat the apple and watch him not answer her properly, and I think about the thing she said in class this morning. About the mirror. About accuracy being more unbearable than distortion.
She said it like she knew. Not academically. Not as a student who’d read the text and extracted the thesis. She said it the way people say things that have happened to them.
The mirror doesn’t lie. That’s the point.
I wonder what she sees in hers.
I wonder what she’d see if I told her what I see when I look at her across a room.
A person who survived things she shouldn’t have had to survive and came out the other side angry in all the quietest ways.
Not broken.
Not even close to broken. Bent deliberately, systematically by people who needed her to take up less space.
She’s fighting her way back to her original shape.
I recognize this too.
The way she is trying to find peace in the dark, where everyone has failed her.
Zero calls at two in the afternoon.
“Sokolov’s man came back,” he says, and I can hear him typing while he talks, which he does constantly, which I find less irritating than I probably should. “Spent forty minutes in the registrar’s office. I don’t know what he pulled, but I can guess. He’s looking at the scholarship recipient list.”
“How many on the current list?”
“Twelve first-years with no family connections and clean backgrounds. Seven are women.” A pause. “She’s the only one in the first-year dorms who’s alone. Most of the others have roommates.”
“How long before Victor makes a move?”
“Given how sloppy he’s been? Days. Maybe less if he’s rattled enough about the ledger. Valen thinks he might go for leverage and not an outright Prey situation. Something that gives him a bargaining chip with the Order.”
“He’ll go for her directly, then.”
“That would be my read, yeah. She’s alone, and who would snitch?”
I hang up. I stand in my room, the one they assigned me, adequate, impersonal, three floors above hers, and I look at the wall, and I breathe through the thing that is building in my chest, which is not quite rage and not quite fear but lives in the neighborhood of both.
Victor Sokolov is twenty-two years old, inheriting his father’s operation and his father’s list, and he’s going to look at Amy and see a resource. An angle. Something to be used.
I understand predatory instinct better than most. I live with a version of it.
But there is a profound difference between wanting to consume someone and wanting to use them, and Victor is the second kind—the worst kind—the kind who will take something apart to leverage it without caring what’s inside.
I was in Unit 9 for years, partly because I put the man who hurt my mother through three walls. And partly because my stepfather convinced the Order that my existence was a liability and because the rage is real and a threat, and I have not always been precise about where it lands.
I am going to be very precise about where it lands this time.
I open my laptop and pull up the campus scheduling system. Zero gave me access last week through channels the registrar definitely didn’t sanction. I find Amy’s course schedule. Then pull up his.
I find Victor Sokolov’s known pattern from the surveillance files Valen compiled.
There is a gap on Thursday evening. She has a free period at six. The library closes at five thirty. She’d have nowhere to go between the end of her last class and dinner with consistent foot traffic.
Thursday. I got two days.
I close the laptop.
I am going to need to be in that gap.
Not behind her in a classroom. Not leaving notes under her door. Present. Between her and the asshole who’s coming.
Whether she wants me there or not.
Whether Azriel gives me shit about it or not.
I don’t do this because the Order asked me to. I don’t do it because Valen’s plan requires it.
I do it because somewhere between a photograph that looked almost like her face and the sound of her trying not to cry through a dormitory door, the unresolved thing I’ve carried for years finally found its shape.
And it looks like her.
I will burn this campus to the ground before Victor Sokolov puts his hands on it.