Saint
The last morning.
I watch her sleep for the final time in this room, and I think about the first time I stood outside her door, forty-five minutes in the dark, listening to a building settle, hearing her instead. The note I wrote in seven drafts. The decision I had already made before she arrived, before any of it.
I look at the room in the early gray light. The bare desk. The empty shelf. The gap in the curtain that has let in the same wedge of streetlight for the duration of everything that has happened in this room, which is considerable. Notes and nightmares and both hands on my chest and a library collection left open to a page, and the first time she said my name as I took her from behind.
I’m a different man from the one in the white room.
I’m not a simple man. I’m not a safe man. I’m not the kind of man who most people would look at and think, yes, that is what good looks like. I have broken things and people, and I have done it with an absolute absence of alternatives.
But I have also been the man who came back, and this is the part I’m still learning to hold without flinching.
She opens her eyes and finds me.
“You watched me sleep again,” she says, her voice with sleep.
“Always.”
She doesn’t tell me to stop. She never does. She just lets me have it, the watching, the way she lets me have a lot of things that most people would find excessive because she knows the difference between watching that comes from possession and watching that comes from something else, and she has learned to tell the difference in me.
“Ready,” she says.
One Year Later
The second time I walk through Kenyan’s gate, I’m not running from anything.
This is the difference I notice first. Not the buildings, which are the same cold gray stone. Not the ivy in its thick dark veins against the walls. Not the fountain at the center of the courtyard, running now, its basin full.
The difference is in my body. The way I walk through. No inventory of exits. No threat assessment. No invisible asterisk pressing into my skin. Which is a different thing entirely from arriving because you had nowhere else to go.
Rose is already there.
She stands near the fountain where I met Saint on my first day. She looks like someone who has learned something difficult and carried it well. She looks, I think, exactly like herself.
She sees me, and her face brightens as we close the distance. “You came!”
“You asked,” I say.
We pull back and look at each other in the October light. “How is it?” I ask, now that she is with Garret.
She considers the question. “Different. Better in the ways that matter. Still complicated in the ways that don’t go away just because an institution collapses. But you can feel it.”
The scholarship students moving across the quad don’t have the presence I remember. The low awareness of being watched and sorted and known in the wrong way. They move like people who came here to learn something and believe they will be allowed to.
The selection committee is gone. The Prey list is gone.
In its place is a governance board that includes the Consortium. The sons of Kenyan managing their respective estates.
“Tell me about the board,” I say.
“How is he?” Rose asks about Saint.
“Himself,” I say. “Which gets easier and harder in equal measure depending on the week.”
“The Crowned Families are not simple. Nothing about any of it is simple. But he is —” I find the word. “Becoming something powerful. It’s both liberating and terrifying at the same time.”
“And you?”
