The Fate Intercessor

Chapter 3: Two Years Today

Chapter 3: Two Years Today

I got through the rest of the day on instinct and bad coffee.

Not coffee, actually. Rian didn’t drink coffee. I got through it on water from the fountain by the gym, which tasted like a penny, and on the free lunch line, where I took a tray of rubbery chicken nuggets and ate them standing up in a stairwell so nobody would have to decide whether to sit with me. Nobody tried to. Hale didn’t show again. That worried me more than if he had.

By the last bell I had a rough map of Rian’s life, assembled the way you learn a new route at the warehouse, by getting it wrong in small ways until the wrong turns stopped. Locker 314, combination in his head, not on paper. Chemistry with a teacher who called him Mr. Delgado like it was an insult. A bus that left from the corner of Ash and Delaware at 3:12 and would not wait. Nobody said goodbye to him, and he didn’t say it to anyone.

The apartment was on the second floor of a building that had been yellow once. The stairwell smelled like other people’s dinners. I got to the door, and my hand went to the wrong pocket for the key before the right one found it, and I stood for a second with my forehead nearly touching the wood.

This was the part I’d been dreading, if I’m honest. Not Hale. Hale was a problem with a shape. This was somebody’s mother.

“Mijo? That you?”

“Yeah,” I said. It came out in Rian’s voice, and it was easier than I expected. “It’s me.”

She was at the kitchen table in her scrubs, tying her shoes. Carmen Delgado was small and tired and had her hair twisted up in a clip that had lost a tooth. There was a plate in front of her with a single fried egg on it, and a second plate across the table with the same.

“Sit. Eat. I have to be on the 4:40.” She didn’t look up. “There’s tortillas in the foil.”

I sat. I looked at the egg for longer than I should have. It was clearly the last two eggs in the house, and she’d split them down the middle without saying so, and I knew, from the part of me that was still Cal, that if I ate mine fast she’d pretend not to notice.

So I ate it slowly, and I said thank you, and she glanced up at me for a second with something unreadable in her face.

“You’re being polite,” she said.

“Am I not usually?”

“You usually say okay.” She finished the knot and sat back. “How was school?”

Here it came. I felt Rian go under me like a trapdoor, the whole body pulling inward, the answer sitting ready on his tongue. Fine. I’d have bet money on it. Somewhere in the past two years that word had become a locked door he’d learned to stand in front of.

“Fine,” I said.

She nodded, slow, the way you nod at a thing you’ve heard too many times to argue with. Then she reached across the table and turned my chin toward the window, just for a second, and her thumb touched the edge of the bruise on my cheekbone.

“Locker door,” I said.

“Mm.” She let go. Neither of us said anything for a while. The refrigerator hummed, and a car went by outside with its radio up.

“There’s a call from the school on the machine,” she said at last. “About Friday. Some kind of assembly. They want students to say something.”

My skin went tight.

“What kind of assembly?”

“I don’t know. I didn’t listen to the whole thing.” She stood and took both plates to the sink, and I noticed her hands, the cracked skin, the nails cut short for work. “Rian. Is there something—”

“No.”

It came out of me too fast. We both heard it.

She stood there with her back to me, running water over a plate that was already clean. Then she turned the tap off, dried her hands, kissed the top of my head without a word, and left for her shift.

I sat there until I heard the street door close.

Rian’s room was a closet with a window. A single bed, a milk crate for a nightstand, a desk made from a door laid across two filing cabinets. The walls were bare except for a bus map and a school calendar from last year that nobody had taken down.

I went through his things carefully, like somebody else’s pockets. I wasn’t looking for anything in particular. I told myself that. What I was actually doing was trying to find the place where the boy kept whatever was wrong with him.

It took twenty minutes. It was in a shoebox on the closet floor, under a pair of winter boots he’d outgrown, and when I lifted the lid I almost put it right back.

There wasn’t much in there. A phone, an old one, screen cracked, dead. A watch with a leather strap, a boy’s watch, too big for Rian’s wrist, and not his. And a flyer, folded in quarters until the creases had gone soft as cloth.

I unfolded it on the desk.

A school photo, grainy from a copier. A kid of about eleven with a gap in his teeth and a cowlick that had clearly won the argument with the comb. Above the picture, in the blocky letters of a library printer: HAVE YOU SEEN THEO. Below it, a date in October, two years back. The same date as today.

I stood very still.

The room tilted. Not the way it does when you stand up too fast. This was the puddle again, the cold coming up through the sock, only deeper. For a second I was looking at the flyer, and for a second I wasn’t. I was somewhere dark and loud, and the loudness was water, and a small voice was calling a name over and over, and the name was Rian, Rian, Rian.

And then a different voice, closer, flat and steady, belonging to a boy I knew from the inside.

I didn’t see anything.

I came back to the room with both hands braced on the desk, my breath sawing in and out of Rian’s narrow chest. The dead phone sat in the open box. The watch ticked, faintly, which it had no business doing.

I’d been in this body for six hours, and I’d just found out two things.

The first was that Marcus Hale hadn’t been lying. Rian had done something.

The second was worse. I understood now that Rian knew exactly what, and he’d spent two years teaching himself not to think it.

On the desk, the flyer’s corner lifted in a draft I couldn’t feel.

Friday, said a voice that wasn’t mine.