The Fate Intercessor

Chapter 7: The Edge of the Tie

“He’d have been thirteen in March,” Hale said.

He still hadn’t turned around. His voice carried back to me across the trestle, flat and quiet, the voice of a kid reading something off a card.

“He wanted a drum set. My dad said no because of the neighbors. I told him I’d help him get one anyway.” The wind pushed at his jacket. “I used to think about that a lot. Stupid, right? That’s what I thought about. A drum set.”

I stepped onto the first tie. The wood gave a little under me.

“Marcus.”

“Don’t.” He turned then. His face was wet and blotchy, and the red rims around his eyes had gotten worse, like something had been rubbed raw. “Don’t say my name like we know each other.”

“Okay.”

“You were there.”

I didn’t answer. I couldn’t. The words were sitting right behind Rian’s teeth, and every other muscle in this body was clamped down on them.

“Kyle told me.” Hale laughed, short and ugly. “Not on purpose. He was wasted at a party in April, and he said something about Rian Delgado looking at him funny, and I asked what he meant, and he just sort of stopped. His face went white. Like he’d walked into a wall.” He took a step toward me. Then another. “Everyone said Theo was alone. They said he got there by himself. Nobody was at that park. And you looked at a cop, you looked a grown man in the eye, and you told him you never saw my brother.”

“I—”

“He wore a watch.” Hale’s voice cracked down the middle. “Every day. He wasn’t allowed to take it off because it was my grandpa’s and Mom said he’d lose it. They found him with no watch. And I asked and I asked, and nobody ever knew where it went.”

My hand found the pocket of Rian’s hoodie before I could stop it. The shape was there, small and hard, wrapped in a sock. I’d taken it from the shoebox that morning without really deciding to. It had felt wrong to leave it in a closet.

Hale saw the movement. His eyes dropped to my pocket, and I watched understanding hit him all at once.

He came across the ties in three long strides.

I didn’t see the first one. It caught me under the ribs, right where the old bruise was, and the air went out of Rian’s chest in a single ugly rush. I folded. Gravel and wood and sky tipped over each other, and then I was on my back on the ties with Hale kneeling over me, both fists in my hoodie, his face a foot from mine.

“You took it?” He was shaking. “You stood there and watched him go in, and then you took his watch?”

That’s not what happened. I knew exactly what had happened. Rian had been the last one to leave the trestle, and the watch had been lying on the rail where Theo had stood, and some insane, shattered part of a fifteen-year-old brain had picked it up. He hadn’t known why. He still didn’t. It had just been there, a small thing that belonged to somebody, and he couldn’t leave it.

But that was a story. And Hale didn’t want a story.

He hit me again, across the cheek this time, and my head snapped sideways. I tasted blood. Somewhere behind my eyes I could feel all of it lining up, the way a fight does. The weight on my chest was distributed wrong, and his left side was open. He was bigger, but he was crying, and a man who’s crying doesn’t guard anything. I could roll him. I could get a knee between us and reverse it in two moves, and then I’d be the one on top, with a fist cocked and nowhere to put it but down.

I knew how it would feel. Clean. Final. Deserved.

The reward’s cut if you do it the quick way.

That wasn’t what stopped me. I want to be honest about that, because I’ve told myself it was. It wasn’t the Fragments. It was the way Hale’s hands were shaking. A boy who wants to hurt you doesn’t hold on like that. He holds on like he’s afraid you’ll vanish if he lets go.

He was drowning. He’d been drowning for two years, and I was the first thing that had floated by.

I let my hands fall open on the ties.

“Do it,” I said. It came out thick, through the blood. “If it helps. Go ahead.”

Hale froze with his fist back.

“I mean it.” I kept my eyes on his. “I’m not going to stop you.”

“Shut up.”

“I’m not going to fight.”

“Shut up.”

But he didn’t swing. His arm trembled in the air, and the line of his jaw worked the way it had at the podium, and for a long, long moment the only sound on the whole trestle was the creek, very low, a long way down.

And then the tie under his knee gave way.

It wasn’t dramatic. The old wood was just rotten. It split with a dry crack, and Hale’s weight went with it, his left leg dropping through into empty air. He yelled. His hands let go of me and clawed for the rail, and the rail was wet, and his fingers slid.

I moved before I decided to.

I don’t remember getting up. I remember Rian’s body doing it, fast and clumsy, and I remember my hands closing on the back of that navy jacket, the leather patch rough under my fingers. His weight dragged me forward. My knees hit the ties. My shoulder screamed. For a second the two of us hung there, half over the edge, with the creek looking up at us and the tie splintering in a slow, thin crackle.

“Don’t let go,” Hale said. He wasn’t talking to me exactly. He was talking to everyone. “Don’t let go. Don’t let go.”

“I’ve got you.”

It was a lie. I didn’t have him. I was a hundred and thirty pounds of tired kid, braced on a rotten board. But my hands didn’t open.

I heaved. Something tore in my shoulder. Hale kicked, found a tie, got his elbow over, and then we both went over backward onto solid wood in a tangle of arms and breath and gravel dust.

We lay there.

The sky was going orange above us. Hale’s chest heaved against my arm. He didn’t push me off.

“Why,” he said, finally, to the sky.

I’d gotten a good look at his face in the fall. Not a mean kid. A tired one.

The tie where Theo had gone in was ten feet away. The watch was in my pocket, ticking against my hip.

“Because I should have,” I said, and Rian’s whole body locked up around the words, “two years ago.”