Page 58 of Rage
I’m smiling, and I do not make any effort to stop.
Amy
Rose finds me at lunch with the expression she gets when she has information she is deciding how to deliver.
She sits across from me. She sets her tray down and looks up.
“You look different,” she says.
“I feel different,” I say, truthfully.
She nods slowly, studying me. “Good different or complicated different?”
“Both,” I say. “In that order.”
She picks up her fork. “Garret came to find me this morning,” she says in the unembellished tone of someone reporting a weather event, the emotion managed somewhere she has put it for later. I think she mentioned that he watches her, but I know there’s more to it.
I look up. “The mysterious one.”
She nods.
“Is he a threat?” I ask.
“I genuinely cannot tell,” she says. “And that is the most unsettling part.”
I think about what I know of Garret. Very little. His name circulates on campus, arriving in conversations like the weather, unavoidable and atmospheric. Wealthy. Valen’s world, whichmeans Kenyan’s world, which means nothing is simple and nothing is what it appears to be.
“Ask Azriel,” I say.
She’s been going to tutoring sessions with him at the library.
She looks at me. “He doesn’t say much.”
“He might if you ask the right question,” I say.
I stop.
Rose watches me stop. “What question?”
“Prey,” I say carefully.
She’s quiet for a moment. “You know about Prey?”
“I know enough,” I say.
We eat in silence for a while.
Then she says, quietly, without looking at me. “Does he know you know?”
I think about the library. About a conversation in a quad in the dark. About a note on a pillow.
“Maybe,” I deflect. “Which is not the same thing as all of it.”
“Is that enough?”
I think about that honestly. “I’m not sure, but for now,” I say.
She nods again. She understands that, for now, it is not a yes-or-no answer, but the only answer that is true and survivable at the same time.
