The cold presses in around me. I don't feel it.
He gets closer. Close enough that I can see his face properly, the lines of it, the pale eyes that have looked at me through chain link more times than I can count.
I know this face.
I wait for it to know me back.
He gets close enough that I can see his face.
Something is wrong.
He's looking at me the way he looks at the fence. The way he tracks the perimeter — searching for something that isn't landing where it should. I watch his eyes move over my face and the recognition doesn't come. Not slow. Not building. Just not there.
I stand completely still.
His head tilts. The pull between us is real and present and it's reaching him and he cannot place it and he cannot place me. I watch him try. I watch the thing that should be recognition move through his face and not find what it's looking for and keep moving. Like a hand in the dark that keeps touching the same wall and not finding the door.
My hands tighten on the chain link.
"RJ." As quiet as I can.
The sound that comes out of him is low. Warning. The sound he makes for something at the edge of his territory he can't name.
"Step back," Stone says behind me. Quiet. Certain.
I don't move.
RJ's weight shifts forward. His eyes track me — still searching, still not landing. Trying to find the edge of something that doesn't have one anymore.
He doesn't find it.
I stand there and feel the wanting at my wrist pulling toward him. The bruise that has been patient and heavy since the first morning I arrived at Feral Academy, the thing that should have been a bond that wasn't yet, reaching across the chain link toward a man who is looking straight at me and cannot find me.
I don't move.
I don't breathe right.
My hands on the fence are the only thing keeping me in place and I hold the metal and I look at his face and I wait for something that isn't coming and I know it isn't coming and I keep waiting anyway because there is nothing else to do.
"Alex." Stone, again.
I can’t step back.
RJ holds — forward, alert — and then whatever he was tracking doesn't resolve and he turns. Goes back to the perimeter. Picks up the circuit where he left it.
He doesn't look at the south fence.
I stand there with my hands still wrapped in the chain link and watch him move. The same pace. The same pattern. The specific economy of him covering ground that has become the whole world. I watch him reach the far end and turn.
He doesn't look back.
The fence isn't me.
It's the edge. The circuit. The boundary of a world that's gotten smaller than it should be.
He's not waiting for me.
He's disappearing.
