Page 64 of Rage
My name is number seven.
Beside each name is a column of notes. Background check status. Family connection index, a numerical score. I understand immediately that it measures how isolated a candidate is. How likely they are to generate institutional noise if something goes wrong. How manageable.
Next to my name, the family connection index reads: 0.2.
The lowest on the list.
The photograph is of the meeting.
Eight people around a table I have never seen, in a room I do not recognize. I scan the faces. And I find Azriel.
Third from the left. His expression is the careful, composed one I know, the one he wears when he is managing information. He is looking at something on the table in front of him. He was at the meeting. The meeting where they selected me.
I fold the paper along its crease and put it back in the envelope. I put the photograph on top of it. I tuck the envelope into my bag, walk out of the administrative building into the cold morning air, and keep walking.
I walk for a long time.
The thing about finding out you were selected is that it re-contextualizes everything. This is how Azriel knew. How many others?
Not just the scholarship. Not just the meeting agenda. Everything.
Every moment since I arrived on this campus runs back through the new information and comes out the other side changed.
The courtyard on the first day. Azriel appearing. His warnings. His protection. His careful, partial truths and the things he left in the space between them.
The lunch where he told me enough.
I sit on a bench near the north perimeter wall where there are no cameras. I know where the cameras are now. I have knownfor weeks—another thing I learned without being watched. I take the envelope out and look at it again.
Family connection index: 0.2.
“Nobody is going to come looking for you, Amy.
Roman said it as a threat. The Order put it in a spreadsheet. Differently coded: she has no one, so she costs nothing.
I press my thumb against my forearm through my sleeve.
I think about the scholarship acceptance letter that arrived eight months ago, which I kept in the lining of my bag for two weeks because I was afraid that if I put it down, it would stop being real. I think about the night I got it, sitting on the floor. I read it four times, allowing myself, for the first time in years, to believe that something good could happen to me for a reason that had nothing to do with someone else’s agenda.
I think about how wrong I was.
Not about the something good. About the reason.
The rage arrives quietly, the way it always does with me—not a flash or the loud, combustive kind, but a cold that settles into my chest and stays there, hard-edged and patient.
I earned the grades. I earned every single one of them. My GPA is real, and my work is real. Nothing about what I have done here is a lie.
But the invitation.
The invitation was a net.
And I swam into it.
I put the envelope back in my bag. I walk toward the east academic building because I have a class in twenty minutes, and I need to attend.
I did not survive my father and Roman and a drugged drink in an alley to let a committee meeting fourteen months ago be the thing that stops me.
But after class?
