Too large.
Too open.
The first day they released me, I stood in the courtyard of the sub-level for eleven minutes before I could make my legs move toward the stairwell. Azriel had to come back for me.
He didn’t mention it. That’s the thing about Azriel. He pretends not to see certain things. It’s the only kindness I’ll acknowledge from him.
I find a bench near the central fountain and sit. I take the photograph from my hoodie pocket. It’s the one I pulled from Sokolov’s desk last night.
Looking at it in the daylight, I can see it’s just a girl with similar coloring, the same dark hair, and the same slight tilt to the shoulders.
But it doesn’t change what I know. It doesn’t change the fact that, like many, she’s one of them.
Victor Sokolov will be moving on campus within days. His father is incapacitated, humiliated, and burning for retaliation.
Victor is twenty-two, stupid with inherited power, and was already running parts of his father’s operation before I walked through that warehouse door. He knows which students on this campus have no safety net. He knows who can disappear without a paper trail. He knows how the Order keeps certain people quiet.
He just doesn’t know about me.
I let a hard breath as I move my shoulder. The bullet went straight through, but I have enough meds in my system to numb the pain. I didn’t let them bandage it properly last night. I didn’t care that the doctor said to give it a few days until I’m healed.
I sat in the back of the van while Zero talked too much and Azriel stared at his hands, and I pressed my palm over the wound and thought about the note I’d slid under her door.
The night I’d been standing in the hallway of her dormitory floor for forty-five minutes, listening to the building settle, and heard her instead.
She tries so hard to be quiet.
I imagine the way she presses her face into the pillow. She controls her breathing in long, deliberate intervals. I know this technique. I used it too, in the early years of Unit 9, when I didn’t want the orderlies to hear that I was awake and afraid.
But she didn’t quite manage it. And in the silence between her controlled breaths, she made a sound that I don’t have a clinical term for—the sound of a person who learned that no one would come, and still, after all that learning, can’t stop hoping.
I slid the note under her door and walked back to the room they’ve assigned me three floors above hers.
I didn’t sleep.
I thought about the sound instead. I turned it over in my mind the way you turn a stone in water, feeling all its edges. I thought about what makes a person sound like that. I thought about the file Valen pulled for me last week.
A girl named Amelia Torres, who came from nothing and had nowhere else to go.
I thought about the photograph now in my pocket.
I replay the way she’d looked in the courtyard on her first day, gripping her bag strap like it was the only solid thing in the world. The way she’d said “I’m fine” too fast to someone she didn’t know. The way her eyes had swept the space before she answered, the automatic inventory of exits and threats that nobody does who’s never needed to.
She thinks she came here to be safe.
She doesn’t know that being safe here isn’t a place.
It’s a person.
And right now, whether she understands it or not, whether I’m the thing she should want or the thing that should terrify her, I am the only one on this campus who knows every predator within a two-mile radius and has the skill set to fuck them up.
Azriel is sworn to protect her. He’s good at it. He’s clean and careful, and he follows the Order’s rules, and he will stand between her and Victor Sokolov when the time comes.
But the Order has rules about how protection works.
Boundaries.
Protocols.