Page 28 of Rage
Amy: Who is this? How did you get this number?
Unknown: Azriel and I have my ways.
I don’t know how he got my number.
I don’t know why any of this is happening to me, in this place that was supposed to be the first safe thing I’d ever managed to build for myself.
But I go to lunch. Because the alternative is sitting in a library corner searching dead ends for the name of a guy who sat behind me and breathed one word against my back and somehow made it feel like the most honest thing anyone has said to me in years.
And because I need someone to explain things.
And because…And this is the part I examine with the clinical detachment of someone who has been in therapy and knows the vocabulary. I am not as afraid as I should be.
My nervous system is running at about a seven. My sleep is destroyed. I have a note in my bag from a man I’ve never spoken to and a text on my phone from someone who shouldn’t have my number.
But underneath the fear is something else. Something I recognize, though I wish I didn’t.
I feel seen.
And that is the most dangerous thing of all because I’ve confused being seen with being safe before, and I know exactly how that ends.
I pick up my bag, and I go to meet Azriel, and I try very hard to remember that.
Saint
Azriel is meeting her at lunch. I know this because I have Azriel’s location in a shared app he doesn’t know I can access, and I know this because Azriel does things on a schedule he believes is unpredictable, but it isn’t.
I also know because I can see them from the second-floor window of the west side of the building, where I am sitting on a radiator eating an apple and watching the courtyard below.
She’s already there when he arrives.
She got there first, which means she wanted the advantage of seeing him approach rather than being seen approaching. You learn that kind of thing, or you grow up in environments that teach it to you involuntarily. She learned it the second way.
Azriel sits across from her with his careful face on. His telling-the-truth-but-not-all-of-it face. I’ve known this expression since he was seven years old and I was nine and already locked out of the life he was being groomed for. He would come to the place they kept me, sit on the floor outside the glass, and talk to me about his day at school because he didn’t yet understand that this was exactly the kind of kindness our stepfather wanted to stamp out of him.
He understood eventually.
He kept doing it anyway.
He’s going to tell her something true and something incomplete. He’s going to tell her that there are people on this campus who bear watching. He’s going to tell her to be careful without specifying what she should be careful of. He’s going to give her a level of information that feels substantial but leaves out the Order, the Prey list, the ledger, and the fact that her scholarship was selected rather than awarded.
And he’s going to tell her to stay away from me.
I watch her face while he talks. I’m too far to lip-read, but faces are their own language, and I’ve had years to study them in the one-way glass of Unit 9.
She listens like someone who is filtering, running what she’s being told against what she already suspects, looking for the places where the story has been sanded smooth.
She’s smart.
She knows she’s being told a partial truth.
I watch her say something that makes Azriel pause. She gestures toward the academic building, I think toward the literature classroom. Azriel’s expression goes careful in the way it gets when he’s managing information.
She’s asking about me.
I eat the apple and watch him not answer her properly, and I think about the thing she said in class this morning. About the mirror. About accuracy being more unbearable than distortion.
She said it like she knew. Not academically. Not as a student who’d read the text and extracted the thesis. She said it the way people say things that have happened to them.
