CHAPTER 9

     The cafeteria at noon was a specific kind of noise — the accumulated percussion of a hundred conversations layered over the sounds of cutlery and chairs and the industrial hum of the serving counter. It was a noise that normally passed over Kai without registering; he had trained himself to eat in it without hearing it.

     He was registered in this noise on a Wednesday in the third week of November when it suddenly changed.

     Ria's voice — and he had never in his life heard Ria's voice at that volume, in that register. Ria, whose mornings were measured in deliberate quiet, whose love expressed itself in the pressure differential of nearly-closed doors, whose anger (if she had it) he had never actually witnessed as anger. The voice that cut through the cafeteria noise was hers but translated — something in it that had been held under pressure for months and had found its own exit point.

     "Stop tormenting him." Her voice was even, which was somehow more alarming than shouting. "You don't know what he's been through."

The cafeteria made its adjustments — the particular kind of human silence that is not quiet but is directed. Forty, fifty conversations suspending themselves to attend to the thing that had risen above the ambient noise. Cutlery pausing.

     Jia sat across from Ria at the end of a long table, her tray pushed to one side, her posture the studied ease of someone who has decided, as a matter of principle, never to look like anything has touched her. She looked at Ria with the expression she deployed on people she regarded as beneath serious engagement.

"And you do?" she said. "He comes home. You cook for him. You leave trays outside the door." A pause, timed with awful precision. "You're his caretaker. That's all. Nothing more."

The specificity of nothing more was not an accident. Kai watched Ria receive it — watched something in her face take the hit and then compose itself, the way a person responds to a strike by going very carefully still. Her eyes had gone bright in a way that was not pride and was not anger, exactly.

                                                                                       * * *

     "Choose," Jia said. She looked at Kai now. "Caretaker or classmate. Which one actually knows you?"

It was a trap with two sides, and Kai understood this with perfect clarity and simultaneously found himself completely unable to navigate out of it. He looked at Ria — at her composed face, her bright-edged eyes — and then at Jia, whose smirk was in place but whose jaw was set in the slightly too-rigid way it got when something was working below the surface.

He said nothing.

Silence in the cafeteria, which is the most articulate kind of silence.

     Ria turned away first. She turned away with control, deliberately, and the control made it worse. She picked up her tray. She left the cafeteria at a pace that was not quite walking and not quite something else. Through the glass doors and gone.

     Jia's smirk was still in place. But Kai was watching the edges now and he could see what was happening at them — the very small fault line that ran through the center of the performance, where the held expression was doing more work than it should have needed to do.

     Her smirk faded. It didn't collapse; it didn't dissolve into something dramatic. It simply stopped being there, the way a lamp stops being bright. What was underneath was not what he would have predicted. Not satisfaction. Not nothing. Something raw and unguarded and gone almost immediately — the expression of someone who has just done something they needed to do and are now alone with the fact of having done it.

"Good," she said, to no one. And left.

                                                                                        * * *

     Kai sat at the table in the receding noise of resumed conversations. He looked at his tray without seeing it.

That night he sat in his room with Summer's pendant and tried to do math. Ria, who had been there every morning before light, who had held him on the floor while his breathing failed. Jia, who knew the word, who had sat beside him in the gap between the wall and the festival. Lilith, who dreamed of vanishing girls without knowing why.

     He didn't have the arithmetic for this. He had the arithmetic for loss; it was the only subject he had been studying with any consistency since the platform. Gain was a different discipline and he had not taken the prerequisite.

     He whispered Summer's name. The room returned it to him, slightly changed, the way echoes always return things slightly changed.

     Both Ria and Jia were fighting for pieces of him. He understood this with the same cold clarity with which he understood most things. What he did not know was whether the pieces they were fighting for still existed. Whether the self they were both reaching toward was a real thing or a memory or a shape they had each invented in response to their own need.

     He pressed the pendant to his sternum and felt his heartbeat against it and wondered if Summer, wherever she was, was thinking about him. If she was thinking at all.

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