He was describing himself.
I stand.
“Thank you,” I say to Azriel. “For telling me.”
He nods. He looks like a man who has put something heavy down and is not entirely sure yet what his arms are for without it.
“Amy,” he says as I turn to leave.
I look back.
“He’s not simple,” Azriel says. “But nothing he has done has been without intention. I need you to know that. Whatever else is true. But being a Prey is a reality.”
“Okay,” I say. “But he still considers me Prey, right? I’m supposed to be hunted. And he chose.”
Azriel looks away and then back. “Yeah.”
I leave the dining hall.
I go find Saint.
Saint
She finds me on the roof of the east building.
Not many people know about the roof. There is a maintenance access door on the fifth floor that the facilities staff stopped locking two years ago, and the roof itself is flat and wide, giving you the whole campus spread out below: the quad, the fountain, the chapel, the dormitory wings. I have been coming here in the early evenings when the pressure inside the building gets too dense, and I need the relief of the open sky.
I hear the door before I see her.
I turn.
She stands in the doorway in her coat, the wind pulling at her hair, looking at me with an expression I have not seen on her before. Not the careful neutral one she wears when she is processing something.
Something else.
I don’t speak. I wait.
I don’t want to say the wrong thing that pushes her away.
She crosses the roof toward me. The evening light is going gold, and the campus below is doing its ordinary things, and she walks across the flat gray surface of someone who has decided what they came to say and is not going to lose it on the way.
She stops in front of me.
“You saw my photograph two years ago,” she says.
“Yes.”
“And the list?”
“That came later,” I tell her. “Three weeks before you arrived. The file. The index. The part where the Order turned your loneliness into a number.”
Her mouth tightens.
“But the photograph came first?” she asks.
“Yes.”
“Why remember me?”
