The nightmare doesn’t come for the first time in three weeks.
And I don’t know what to do with that.
Saint
The thing they never account for, in all their clinical frameworks and their padded rooms and their attempts to map the interior of a mind like mine, is that I am not broken in the ways they think I am.
I am broken in very different ways.
I have an annotated list.
I cannot tolerate enclosed spaces for more than six hours without what Dr. Wick calls a “decompensation event” and what I call Tuesday. I have a nonnegotiable hatred of the color white that makes certain parts of this campus feel like a personal provocation.
When I am very tired, the walls sometimes breathe, which is annoying but not dangerous. I have not slept more than three consecutive hours since I was sixteen. I experience rage the way some people experience weather. It moves through me, and I have learned to read its patterns the way a sailor reads the sky. And I fuck one of the nurses twice a week. She takes what I give her and in any hole I want. Hard. Which is not an option at the moment.
None of this makes me incapable.
It makes me differently capable.
The dorm hallway outside her room is empty at two fourteen in the morning. I walk it slowly, the way I’ve walked everyhallway since they let me out of Unit 9, relearning the physics of unconstrained space. How much room I actually have. How far the walls really are.
Azriel keeps the floor below hers, which is the Order’s idea of a monitoring system, but Azriel sleeps between midnight and seven, and his monitoring has gaps you could drive a van through. And lately, he’s gone back home.
I stop outside her door.
She’s awake.
I can hear her moving. I could knock, but I don’t.
Knocking changes things.
Knocking requires a face-to-face that I’m not yet prepared to give, and she’s not prepared to receive. She’s still in the stage where the right answer feels like running, and running would be the wrong choice. I would rather she arrive at not running on her own terms than have me force the issue.
I stay for thirty-two seconds. I count them. Then I walk back down the hallway, take the stairs to the floor above, and sit on the window ledge of the common room with my feet hanging four stories above the courtyard, watching the quad.
Victor Sokolov’s man came onto campus this afternoon. I spotted him near the registrar’s office at a quarter to three.
A stocky man in a gray jacket who spent twelve minutes pretending to consult a campus map before photographing the dormitory wing with his phone. Amateur hour.
Sokolov Senior would have sent someone better. This is Victor improvising, which means he’s moving faster than his father would sanction and making sloppier choices, which makes him more dangerous, not less.
My phone goes off.
Valen: We need a meeting. A strategy.
I sent back two words.
Saint: Not yet.
I’m watching.
I need to understand Victor’s pattern before we move on to him because the worst thing you can do with someone impulsive and angry is to corner him before you know which direction he’ll break. Push him wrong and he goes for the leverage points immediately, and his leverage points are the girls on that list. The ones with no safety net. The ones the Order has already identified as manageable. The ones he can take.
She’s on that list.
She’s been on that list since before she arrived. Her scholarship wasn’t random.
The Order selects.
