There are things Azriel won’t do, things the Order won’t sanction, lines he won’t cross.
I don’t follow any of those.
My phone buzzes.
Valen: Viktor made contact with three of Sokolov’s campus liaisons this morning. He knows the ledger is gone. He’s not going to wait.
I pocket the phone without responding.
Across the courtyard, I watch her come out of the side door of the academic building, moving fast. Moving like someone who just needed to get out. She stops near the south wall and breathes.
I watch Azriel approach her from the colonnade.
I watch him give her the card.
I watch her take it, and I watch the careful blankness on my brother’s face that means he is performing calm for her benefit when he’s actually worried.
He should be.
I let her have the courtyard. I let her have the walk back to her dormitory and the afternoon and the evening and the measured safety of another night behind a closed door. I let Azriel play his part.
I’m not in a hurry.
I have nothing but time.
Amy
Ilook up his name because I can’t not.
I’m sitting cross-legged on my dorm room floor with my laptop open and my cold coffee from this morning beside me. I’ve already tried to do my reading for Professor Harlan’s class twice and gotten exactly nowhere both times because every time the page goes quiet, my mind fills back up with the back row of that lecture hall. With that stillness. With the sensation of being found.
Azriel.
He didn’t give me a last name. The campus directory isn’t helpful. I can’t find any Azriels enrolled. I narrow it by year and then by program, and I end up on a page with no photograph that tells me almost nothing.
Azriel Vikiar, third year, undeclared major.
Vikiar.
Something about that name snags on something. I’ve heard it before, or seen it, in the way you sometimes recognize a word without being able to place where it came from. The campus chapel has a plaque. The new sciences wing has that name.
Old money, the permanent kind that outlasts whoever earned it, the kind that gets engraved in stone and stays there.
I close the laptop.
This is exactly what Dr. Osei used to call hypervigilant pattern recognition. You take unrelated data points, and you build a threat out of them because your nervous system is still calibrated for a threat that no longer exists.
A man warned you.
A note appeared.
A stranger watched you in class. These are three separate incidents, and your brain threads them together into a conspiracy because that’s what trauma does: it makes you a very fast and very inaccurate detective.
Except…Except the man who warned me mentioned the back of the lecture hall. Which I hadn’t told him about. Which he couldn’t have known about unless… Unless he’d been there too or knew who was watching me.
I open the laptop again.
I search for Vikiar and find what I expected—old family, old money, the kind of family whose name is on buildings. And then, almost by accident, a name in an archived student newspaper article about an Order of Alumni gathering three years ago.
