"I went to a party."
"You left the Tower when I told you not to." His hands are on either side of me, not gripping but present. Bracketing. "Alone. At night. On a campus where not everyone in it is friendly to you."
I open my mouth and close it. This is not the argument I was prepared for.
"Dimitri was at that party," he says.
A beat. I didn't know that.
"He was at the edge of the room when you walked in," Aleksei says. "He left when I arrived. If I'd been twenty minutes later—" His jaw tightens. "You do not understand, yet, the specific nature of what you are to him. What you are to all of them."
"Then explain it to me." My voice comes out sharper than I intend. "Instead of locking the door and sayingdon't.Instead of treating me like something to be contained rather than protected."
Something shifts in his face.
He doesn't answer immediately. He looks at me the way he sometimes does in the garage — like he's considering something he's not ready to say.
Then he steps back.
He says the thing he came to the cliff to say. And the thing he says, and what happens in the next hour, and what I carry back from the cliff in my body and my bones — that's between me and the November dark and the valley lights below.
I'm not going to record it here. Not because it's unspeakable, but because there are certain things you don't put into words until you understand them, and I don't understand it yet — not the full shape of it, not what it meant that he said it to me and not to a wall, not what it means that I answered the way I did. I'm writing around it for now. The shape of the withholding is its own information.
What I will say:rebellion has a price,he told me, and he wasn't wrong.
But neither was I.
The car ride back is silent.
Not the punishing silence. Something more complicated — two people sitting with what just happened and deciding, separately, what it means. The valley comes back up through the switchbacks and the McLaren engine drops to a murmur and the campus gates appear in the headlights.
I look at the window.
My boots are still in the grass somewhere. My feet are cold. The brand on my hip aches, though it's healed enough that the ache is a phantom now rather than a wound.
I think about Dimitri at the edge of the room. Twenty minutes.
I think about Aleksei counting to ten on a dark field, giving me a head start, which was not mercy exactly but was something, and I don't have a clean name for what it was.
"Mara was right," I say, to the window.
"About what?"
"She said I'd either sit in the room all night finding reasons it was fine, or I'd go. And that she was glad I went."
He says nothing.
"I'm still glad I went," I say. "Even with everything."
He parks at the service entrance. He gets out. He comes around and opens my door, which he has not done before, andwhen I step out onto the cold pavement in my socks he looks down at my bare feet for a moment.
"Boots are on the east lawn," he says. "Near the second oak."
"You know where I left them."
"I know where everything is," he says. "That's the point."
He goes inside. I follow. The Tower door opens and closes, and the lock engages, and I am back where I started — except that I'm not, and we both know it, and neither of us is going to say so tonight.
