"How did I get here?" I asked.
Daphne sat on the edge of the bed where I was lying, and I could see she had sowhere to be, duties waiting, the normal rhythm of her day already running. She sat anyway.
"A woman," she said. "Mid-thirties. Dark hair. Knocked on my door late last night." A pause. "You know I was still awake."
Mary Stam, I thought. She had promised to find if she made it. She made it.
She had tracked through the mark she’d put on my spine during the capital chase, followed it across the city and into the forest and then across the campus to a teachers’ apartnt she had sohow identified as the right door to knock on. That was how Mary Stam operated. Quietly and completely and without waiting for acknowledgnt.
"What did she say?" I asked.
"That you had sent her to ." Daphne said it with a particular quality, the quality of soone who found aning in being the na a person produced when they were dying.
She didn’t press for details about how I had gotten into the state she had received in. She bent down and kissed my forehead. Then she looked at .
"What do we do?" she asked. "Tell what you need."
She wanted instructions. She understood this was trouble and she wanted to know the dinsions of it before she decided how to carry it.
"First," I said, "find a girl called Azure. Bring her here quietly. Tell nobody else about this."
She nodded. "I’m eting Miss Brown first. Then I’ll get Azure."
I had Azure’s number in my watch but I didn’t want to call her. Not on a communication device that connected to CGI infrastructure. Everything needed to stay off air.
"Hogsby closed yesterday," Daphne said, moving toward the door. Informing . Not waiting for a response.
Miss Brown had made her decision and the institution had closed behind her. Whatever call she had made to Daphne the night we were last together had been the beginning of her exit. Now the exit was complete.
I tried to push myself up on my hands. The attempt lasted approximately one second before my body explained, in very clear terms, that this was not going to happen yet.
Daphne ca back from the other room carrying a plate of rice.
"Hungry?"
My eyes answered it before I could.
She helped my head onto the pillow and sat beside and fed , and I looked at her face while she did it and sothing moved in my chest that I didn’t imdiately have a na for. The care in the specific way she held the spoon. The patience.
She reminded of my mother.
Not in how she looked. In how she was present. The specific quality of attention that ans soone is here because they want to be, not because they have to be.
She finished feeding and left for school. I lay in her bedroom and looked at the ceiling and started thinking through what needed to happen in the next twenty four hours.
I had one day. Tomorrow evening I would be whole enough to move. The mission was in two days.
Vince Vale was dead or dying in a forest outside School Central. A mber of a family the governnt was in business with, gone. Questions were coming. They were already forming.
I needed not to exist for those questions.
***
Azure ca in without knocking, which ant Daphne had told her to.
She stopped in the doorway. Her eyes moved over before they found my face, reading the damage with the specific thoroughness of soone cataloguing an injury rather than just reacting to it. Then she walked to the bed slowly and sat.
I smiled. Not because I felt like smiling. Because she needed to see that I was still in here.
"How are you?" she asked. Her voice already knew.
"Fine," I said.
She pulled the sheet back from my legs. Her face did not perform the reaction. She absorbed it quietly, the way she absorbed most things, with the stillness of soone who had learned that visible emotion was a luxury she couldn’t always afford.
"That monster," she said. Then: "Is he dead?"
"I’m alive," I said. Which answered it.
She smiled. Small and real, the rare one. Her hand found mine and held it.
"Thank you." She said it twice. Thank you. Thank you. Not because she had run out of words but because two felt more true than one. lying here broken was the price of her freedom.
She looked at my hand in hers. "Did you—"
She didn’t finish it.
"A stake through his heart," I said.
She gripped my fingers. The joy in her eyes was the kind she had been keeping sowhere private for a long ti, not sure it was ever going to have a reason to co out.
"What do you need?" she asked. "How can I help?"
It was the only reason I had called her here.
"I need you to stand in for ," I said.
She nodded once. No questions. She had already understood the full shape of it.
"Nobody will know you disappeared." she said. "I’ll cover every appearance."
She was going to shapeshift. She was going to move through School Central as , attend whatever needed attending, be visible in whatever spaces required visibility, while I lay in Daphne’s bed and let the system rebuild what Vince had broken.
Even if the Vale family began investigating their son’s disappearance, I would not be the person missing at the sa ti.
"How long?" she asked.
"Tomorrow evening," I said. "I’ll be whole by then."
She kissed my forehead. Stood. Then stopped.
"Help call May," I said.
She pressed my watch, dialed, and walked out. I lay in the quiet of Daphne’s room and looked at the ceiling.
One day. I needed the probability to be high that no administrator required my presence before I was functional again. I needed them to hold the shape of things while I healed.
May, I thought, listening to the dial tone. If anyone can arrange the odds, it’s her.
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