The Fate Intercessor

Chapter 10: Paid in Full

Rian came up through me the way a swimmer comes up from deep water: slowly at first, then all at once.

I was sitting on the Hales’ couch in a living room that smelled like lemon cleaner and old coffee, with Mrs. Hale across from me and Marcus’s father standing at the window with his arms folded. A cup of tea cooled in my hands. I’d been talking for maybe two minutes, telling it clean and in order the way I’d practiced on the walk over. Then my throat locked up, and it wasn’t the old lock. It was softer than that. It felt like a hand on my shoulder.

I’ve got it, somebody said, very small and very far off.

I knew the voice. I’d been wearing it for three days.

You sure?

No, Rian said. But it should be me.

I let go. It was the strangest thing I did in that whole job, harder in a way than holding Hale over the edge: I stopped steering. My hands stayed where they were, but they were his again. His breath filled his chest. His voice came out of his mouth, a little cracked, a little too fast, and it wasn’t mine anymore.

I stayed in the back of his head and listened.

He told it better than I had. He didn’t dress it up. He said I was scared instead of I panicked, and I could have jumped in instead of there wasn’t time. When Mrs. Hale made a sound and put her hand over her mouth, he stopped, and he waited, and then he kept going. Mr. Hale never unfolded his arms. At the end his jaw was working in the same way Marcus’s did, and he turned his head toward the window so nobody would see his face.

Nobody screamed. Nobody threw anything. When Rian finished, the quiet in the room had a different weight to it than the quiet in the gym had, like a held note finally letting go.

Mrs. Hale got up and crossed the room, and for one moment I thought she might hit him. Instead she sat down next to him on the couch, close, and took the tea out of his hands.

“Thank you,” she said, “for telling me where my son was.”

Rian cried then. I felt it go through him. I stayed out of the way and let him have it.

Detective Pearce took the new statement on Monday. Kyle Brandt cracked in an hour, and Jonah Pike held out for a day. By Wednesday the school had found out and the hallways did their usual thing, which was go quiet when Rian walked through. But Owen Pruitt nodded at him at his locker, a small stiff nod with a lot of effort behind it, and Dre Waller looked the other way and kept walking. Marcus took the seat beside him in chemistry without a word. They didn’t talk, but the desks were pushed together, and nobody said a thing about it.

Carmen found out Saturday night. She stood in the kitchen doorway in her scrubs for a long time. Then she crossed the room and held him until the kettle boiled dry.

I felt all of this from behind a pane of frosted glass, which is how it works at the end. By Sunday night the glass had gotten thick. The edges of the room had started to go white.

I was lying on Rian’s narrow bed, looking at the ceiling, when I felt the pull. It wasn’t painful. It was the same tug I’d felt coming in, only now it ran the other direction, a gentle hook behind the breastbone.

I think that’s me, I said.

Oh, Rian said. A pause. Okay.

You’ll be fine.

I know. He sounded surprised by it. I think I actually do.

I wanted to say something, and I didn’t have anything better than what I’d said at the trestle. So I said it again, the only thing that had ever been mine to give him.

Take care of your mom.

Yeah, he said. I will.

The ceiling went white.

The floor was warm.

I lay flat on it for a while, staring up into a dark that had gone almost comfortable. The walls kept up their slow, enormous beat. After three days in a body that ached and needed food, being nothing in particular felt like stepping out of a tight shoe.

“Eight in the morning,” the Intercessor said. “Rian Delgado went to his first counseling appointment on Monday, and he hasn’t missed one since. His mother got a day shift. The Hales have asked the school to put a bench by the track.” He paused. “It’s a decent ending. Most aren’t.”

I sat up. “What did I earn?”

“Full.” He held out his palm, and the dark above it clouded and cleared, and forty slivers of pale glass came drifting down out of nowhere like the first snow of the year. They hung in a loose ring and turned slowly. Each one carried a thread of light inside, and when I reached out, they slid toward my chest and sank in, one after another, with a feeling like sipping something cold.

Forty. Out of seven hundred. I did the math before I could stop myself.

“The Memory’s separate.” He tipped his hand, and one more shard rose from it, a little darker than the others, almost smoke-colored. “The thing Rian had to learn to get through that door. You’ll know how it works when you need it.”

It touched my forehead and went in.

For a second I stood in a hallway I’d never walked, with a lock on a door in my throat, and my hand moved without asking. I felt the words I’d been holding go loose. It was gone in a breath, but I felt the shape of it left behind, a place in me where saying the hard thing was somehow possible.

Then something else came with it.

I hadn’t expected it. A kitchen, narrow, yellow under a single bulb. Radiator knocking. A woman’s voice from the next room, close to the edge of tired, saying over a running tap, “Eat something. You’re no good to me hungry.”

No face. Just the voice and the light and the sound of water.

Then it was gone, and I was standing in the dark with my hand pressed to my chest, and the floor had gone cool under my feet.

“That one’s free,” the Intercessor said quietly. “It comes with the first. I’d hold on to it.”

I said nothing. I didn’t trust my voice.

He watched me for a moment, or seemed to. His outline wavered, and for the length of a breath I thought I saw his shoulders drop, like a man setting down a bag.

“That was a good job, Cal.”

Cal. He’d said it again. I knew by now that it wasn’t a slip. I opened my mouth to ask him why.

What came out instead was, “The streetlight.”

His head came up.

“It went out before the car. I told you that. You said lights fail in the cold.” I kept my voice even. “It was snowing, not freezing. It was twenty-four degrees. I remember the number on the bank sign.”

The room stopped.

The walls went still in the middle of a beat, and the warm floor went cold in one long ripple that ran up to my ankles. For two or three seconds I stood in a silence so complete I could hear my own pulse.

“Next assignment,” the Intercessor said, and the rhythm of the room started again, a little off, like a heart that had skipped. “It’s urgent. A man named Victor Lang. Forty-seven. He’s standing on a roof.”

A new door was already opening behind him.

I looked at it, and then at the place where his face should have been. I didn’t ask again.

But I’d seen his hand when I said it. The left one. It had closed, just for an instant, over the scar on his thumb.