The Fate Intercessor

Chapter 4: Leverage

I didn’t sleep. Rian’s body kept falling out of it by itself, but every time it did I’d hear that flat little voice, I didn’t see anything, and my eyes would snap open to the ceiling. Around five I gave up and lay there making a list the way I used to at the depot, when I had forty stops and a van with a bad heater.

Hale was a problem. Hale was also not the problem. If I walked in swinging, I’d lose the reward and probably get this kid suspended, which would solve nothing. But I’d spent fourteen years around men who tested each other for sport, and one thing I knew for certain was that nobody holds a line alone. Somebody’s always holding one end of the rope.

So I looked at the ends.

By Friday morning I’d picked mine. The kid with the braces was named Owen Pruitt, and he laughed too soon. He laughed a half second before the others, every time, like a guy at a meeting checking the room to see if it was okay to. Rian’s memory had him filed under Hale’s shadow, harmless, worse when scared. The one with the fade was Dre Waller, who actually liked it. Owen didn’t. Owen just liked not being next.

I went in early. The stairwell by the gym was where they usually caught me, because there was a blind spot above the second landing where the camera cable had been cut years ago and nobody had ever fixed it. I knew that because Rian knew it. He’d done the math on every hallway in this building.

I was sitting on the bottom step when they came down, and I let them find me.

“Look who’s early,” Dre said. “Eager.”

“Hey, Owen,” I said.

Owen’s smile stuck halfway. I hadn’t looked at Dre. I’d looked at him.

“What.”

“You took the bus the long way yesterday. Past the Ridgeway Pharmacy on Delaware.” I kept my voice level, the way I’d talk to a driver who’d claimed he never got the delivery. “You went in around 3:40 and came out about ten minutes later with your jacket zipped up to your chin. It was sixty-one degrees.”

Nobody said anything.

It was a gamble. I’d gotten it from a memory so small I could barely hold it: Rian on the bus, looking out the window, watching Owen walk out of a drugstore with a particular stiffness in his arm. Rian had noticed. Rian noticed everything, and told no one, which is its own kind of cowardice, but in that moment it was ammunition.

Owen had gone the color of paper.

“I don’t know what you’re—”

“It’s fine,” I said. “I’m not going to say anything. I just want you to know I could.”

Dre looked back and forth between us. “What’s he talking about?”

“Nothing,” Owen said. Too fast.

“What did you take, man?”

“I said nothing.”

I stood up. The body was light and my knees felt like loose hinges, but I’d learned how to take up space in a doorway a long time ago, and some of that came with me. I walked past Owen and stopped beside him, close enough that only he’d hear.

“Tell Marcus I want to talk to him at the assembly,” I said. “Just talk. Nobody gets hurt. And you two don’t touch me before then.”

Then I went up the stairs.

I got to the second landing before my legs started shaking.

It had worked. Nobody followed me. I heard Dre say something low, and Owen say something lower, and then the gym door banging. I put my hand flat on the cinderblock and breathed through my mouth.

It worked. That should’ve felt like something. A small win on a bad morning, a guy standing up for a kid who couldn’t. I told myself that, and I got about three-quarters of the way through believing it.

The other quarter had to do with Owen’s face.

I’d seen that face before. It was the one a new hire at the warehouse had worn once when a lead found out he’d been clocking in a friend. A man with a mortgage, standing there while somebody older held a thing over him. The look wasn’t fear exactly. It was the look of somebody finding out the floor had been a lie.

I’d known what I was doing. I’d picked the soft spot on purpose.

“Well,” the Intercessor said, “there’s the first one.”

He was standing on the landing above me, leaning on the rail like he’d been there for hours. His outline was clearer here, as if the light liked him better than the dark did. I still couldn’t have said what his face looked like.

“First what?”

“Mark.” He nodded at my chest. “You can’t see it. You can feel it, though. Hold still.”

I did. And I felt it, a slight drag under the breastbone, like swallowing something that doesn’t go down. Not pain. More like the sensation of a coat being buttoned wrong, and you can’t find where.

“That’s a stain?”

“A small one. You leaned on a frightened boy to get what you wanted. It’s not cruelty, exactly. It’s only convenient.” He shrugged. “A few of those, you carry. A lot of those, you don’t.”

“I didn’t hurt him.”

“No. You didn’t have to.” He said it without heat. “That’s usually how it goes.”

“It was the smart play.”

“I didn’t say it wasn’t.”

I stared at where his face wasn’t. Something about the way he stood, one shoulder up, weight on the left foot, looked so much like how I stood when I was tired that I looked away.

“What happens if I’d just told Hale I was sorry for whatever it is?”

“You don’t know what it is yet.” He pushed off the rail. “Which is the point. You’re still trying to win this, and the thing is, it isn’t a fight.” He started up the stairs and stopped without turning. “The reward’s cut if you do it the quick way, Cal. Not by a lot. But the ones that leave marks are the ones that cost you later.”

It was the first time he’d said my name.

I didn’t have time to ask how he knew it. The bell was going. Doors opened above me and below, and the stairwell filled with noise, and when I looked up he was gone.

I stood there with my hand pressed to my chest, trying to work out where I’d heard it before. The way he said it, soft on the first sound, like somebody who’d said it a lot.

Cal.

I’d had a name, I remembered. A hard sound at the front.

It still wasn’t enough to hold on to.