Chapter 28
Amy
Three days pass.
They are not easy days. I don’t pretend they are.
I go to class, I eat, and I do my readings.
I sit with Rose in the evenings, who asks me nothing and gives me the companionship of someone who understands that sometimes presence is the only useful thing, and I sit with the envelope in my bag and the rage in my chest. I let both of them be what they are without rushing them toward something more manageable.
Saint doesn’t come to my door. I’m not sure if I feel relief or disappointment. He’s mentally ill, I tell myself. I don’t even know him. Been on a date. And I let him do things that question my own sanity.
He is in almost every one of my classes.
He sits where he always sits. He watches me the way he always watches me.
But he doesn’t cross the distance, and he does not leave notes.
He doesn’t appear in hallways or libraries or the dark at two in the morning, and his absence is its own kind of presence.
It’s loud, exactly like the space he usually occupies.
He’s giving me what I asked for.
I also know that knowing it does not make the three days shorter.
On the fourth morning, I find Azriel.
He is in the smaller dining hall, alone.
I sit across from him without asking, and he looks at me with the expression of a man who has been waiting.
“I need you to tell me everything,” I demand. “Not the version that keeps me safe. Not the version that keeps me from running. Everything.”
He holds my gaze for a long moment.
Then he tells me.
It takes forty minutes. He does not spare himself. He names his own role, his presence at the selection meeting, the calculation that he was kinder than the full truth, and the inexcusable wrongness of it.
He tells me about the Order, its structure, its history of using scholarship students as leverage in its political economy. He tells me about Victor Sokolov, his father, the ledger, and what it contained.
He tells me about Saint, about Unit 9, about the years, about the night they broke him out, about the conditions of his release, and what it means that he is here at all.
He tells me what Saint said to him the night he came to Azriel’s room to arrange my scholarship transfer. Before I arrived. Before any of it.
I sit very still through all of it.
When he is done, I look at my hands on the table for a long moment.
“He chose me,” I say. “Not the Order. He chose.”
“Yes,” Azriel says quietly. Before he had ever spoken to you. He saw your photograph, and he chose. I was assigned to you, and it doesn’t mean I don’t care about you or Rose. I do.”
I think about Saint. About a man in a white room with four padded walls choosing something in the dark. Carrying it for years. Released on a campus for the first time and sitting in the back row of a lecture hall and watching a door.
I think about the note slid under my door on my third night here.
Some of us are very good at handling monsters. And some of us prefer them already broken.
He was not threatening me.
He was describing himself.
I stand.
“Thank you,” I say to Azriel. “For telling me.”
He nods. He looks like a man who has put something heavy down and is not entirely sure yet what his arms are for without it.
“Amy,” he says as I turn to leave.
I look back.
“He’s not simple,” Azriel says. “But nothing he has done has been without intention. I need you to know that. Whatever else is true. But being a Prey is a reality.”
“Okay,” I say. “But he still considers me Prey, right? I’m supposed to be hunted. And he chose.”
Azriel looks away and then back. “Yeah.”
I leave the dining hall.
I go find Saint.