The Fate Intercessor

Chapter 2: Someone Else’s Bruises

The first thing I felt was a locker handle digging into my cheekbone.

The second was a hand on the back of my neck, pushing.

I hadn’t decided to be here. One second the door had swallowed me, and the next my face was mashed against cold metal and the hallway smelled like floor wax and wet sneakers and somebody’s drugstore body spray. Behind me, a kid was breathing through his mouth.

“Say it again,” a voice said. “I didn’t catch it.”

I opened my mouth to answer and realized I had no idea what it was.

That’s when the memories started coming in. It wasn’t like watching a movie. It was more like stepping in a puddle and having the cold reach your sock before your brain catches up. My name was Rian Delgado. I was seventeen. This was Ashford High, third-floor hallway, and it was Thursday. My mother worked nights at a care home across the river and slept until two in the afternoon, so I’d made my own breakfast, which was nothing, because we were out of cereal.

My stomach agreed. It had been empty since yesterday, and it ached in a way I’d almost forgotten. I’d known that ache at nineteen.

The hand let go, and somebody spun me around by the shoulder.

There were three of them. The two on the sides were nobody in particular, one with a bad fade and one with braces, both grinning like they’d been told to. The one in the middle was the problem. Marcus Hale, said the puddle in my head. He was a head taller than me, with the shoulders you get from a weight room your parents pay for, and a navy varsity jacket with a leather patch on the chest. He was good-looking in a way that would have made me dislike him on sight at thirty-four. But his eyes were wrong. They were red around the rims, the eyes of somebody who hadn’t slept properly in a very long time.

“I asked you a question, Delgado.”

“Let go of me,” I said.

I meant it to come out low and flat, the voice I used on drivers who tried to cut the line at the depot. What came out was a crack, a boy’s voice, high and thin. The kid with braces laughed out loud.

Right. I wasn’t in my own body anymore.

I checked it quickly, the way you pat your pockets. It was light. That was the first shock. I’d spent years hauling pallets, and this body felt like a coat hanger somebody had put a hoodie on. The wrists were thin enough that I could have circled one with two fingers. There was a duct-taped hole in the toe of my left sneaker, and I could feel the tape peeling when I shifted my weight. Somebody had hit me recently, below the ribs. It was starting to bloom.

Hale took my backpack off my shoulder like he was helping me with it. He unzipped it and turned it upside down.

A binder fell out. A pencil. A bus pass in a plastic sleeve. A sandwich in a baggie, two slices of white bread and something flat between them, probably the last of the lunch meat.

Hale put his heel on the sandwich and leaned.

It made a small, wet sound.

It’s strange the things that get through to you. I’d been dead for what felt like an hour, and I’d just watched a stranger’s kid fall out of an alternate world into a high school hallway, and none of that moved me. But the sandwich did. I knew exactly what it cost. I knew how long it took to make, and I knew that Rian had made it last night, at the counter, quietly, so he wouldn’t wake his mother.

Something hot went through my chest. And my first instinct, thirty-four years of it, was to put this kid through a locker.

I could have done it. I felt that for a second. The body was small, but I knew where to hit, and I knew about weight and timing. Rian didn’t. It would have been over in about four seconds.

Rian’s body didn’t go for it, though.

That surprised me, because I’d been expecting fear. I knew what scared looked like from the inside: dry mouth, bad knees, the urge to be somewhere else. This wasn’t that. My shoulders had come up, my eyes had gone to the floor, and what I felt underneath wasn’t he’s going to hurt me. It was closer to yes. This.

Like I’d been waiting for it.

Around us the hallway had gone quiet in the particular way a hallway does when everyone is pretending to be busy. A girl at a locker stared into hers like it held the answers to the test. Two boys by the water fountain had somewhere else to be. At the far end, a teacher in a gray cardigan glanced down the corridor, met my eyes for half a second, and turned into a classroom without hurrying.

“Friday,” a voice said in my head.

I knew it before I placed it. The grain in it, the tired landing at the ends of words.

What’s Friday? I thought.

“Where it breaks.” The Intercessor’s voice was faint, like it was coming through a wall. “That’s how long you have. After that, whatever you’ve done is all there is.”

Rian dies on Friday?

“I said it breaks. I didn’t say how.”

Then he was gone, and the hallway came back in full. The bell was about to ring. Dust moved in the light from the windows. The kid with the bad fade was bored now and checking his phone.

Hale stepped in close. Closer than the others could hear. His breath smelled of mint gum, and under it, something sour, like he hadn’t eaten either.

“You know what today is?”

I didn’t. I had no idea.

But Rian did.

I felt it before I understood it. All the warmth drained out of my hands, and my whole body went cold and still, the way an animal goes still when it hears something in the grass. A date I hadn’t known I knew was sitting in my head like a stone in a shoe.

Hale watched my face and nodded slowly, like I’d just confirmed something.

“Two years,” he said, quietly. “Two years today. And you still look at me like you didn’t do anything.”

The bell went off over our heads, loud enough to rattle the lockers. Everybody moved at once, and the hallway filled up with noise and bodies, and Hale and his friends were swallowed by the crowd without another word.

I stood there, alone in a stranger’s body, in the middle of a flood of people who didn’t look at me.

I didn’t know what Rian had done.

But my chest did. It was already apologizing.