Doomed

Everyone at EdgeHurt knows to move when I walk.

Dawn comes up gray over the gates, and the courtyard fills the way it always fills, in currents. Students pour through in their navy blazers, crests catching what little light the morning bothers to give, white shirts, striped ties, bags over shoulders, voices low because nobody is awake enough to be loud yet. The current has a rule, and the rule is me. It splits ahead of my shoes. It closes behind my back. Nobody decides to do it anymore. Feet just know.

I've been the weather at this school for two years.

A first-year steps into my path because he is reading something on his phone, and his friend takes him by the sleeve and pulls him clear without looking up from his own. The boy glances at me, then at the ground, and keeps his eyes there. Smart kid. He will do fine here.

People call it respect when they talk about me in the dining hall, in the low voices they use for weather and ghosts. It isn't respect. Respect gets offered. This gets paid, in advance, by everyone, every morning, and I never have to ask for the receipt. I built it out of small things. A look held one second too long. A name said quietly in a corridor, once, so the whole corridor heard the quiet. A senior boy, two years ago, who decided the new kid with the tattoos was a story he could tell his friends, and who transferred out before spring with his arm in a sling and his story unfinished.

I don't raise my voice. I've never needed the volume. Volume is for people who expect to be ignored.

My reflection crosses the glass doors ahead of me as I reach the entrance hall. Black hair swept back, undercut clean. Pale skin, blue-grey eyes, the scar near my left one that people pretend not to stare at and always stare at. Hoops in my ears. The thorn-vine work climbs out of my collar and down both forearms, over the backs of my hands, and the silver chain at my throat catches the light, and the rings on my fingers catch it after. I look like a warning somebody paid for. Good. That is the entire point of the face I wear out of my room. Under the blazer, along my ribs, last week's bruise has gone the color of old coins, and my shirt hides it the way my shirt hides everything. Some things are mine. That one is mine and my father's, and the school gets neither.

The hall takes me in. Lockers. Stairwells. The smell of floor polish and rain that has not fallen yet. Another day of ruling a kingdom I am going to leave in a box.

I take the east stairwell because the east stairwell is empty at this hour, and empty is the only place I am ever honest.

The cough starts on the second landing.

It starts small, a hitch low in my chest, and I know its rhythm the way you know the rhythm of a song you hate. I get my handkerchief out before it climbs. I get my other hand on the rail. Then it takes me, and for a moment the whole of me is just the cough, shoulders jerking, eyes watering, the sound of it bouncing off concrete in a stairwell built to carry noise. It sounds like something tearing, slowly, in a locked room.

When it lets go of me, it lets go all at once. I stay bent over the rail and breathe through my nose until the breath comes back steady. My hand is shaking. I look at it with real irritation, the way you look at a servant who has started stealing. Everything else about me obeys.

Then I open the handkerchief.

One petal. Black as a closed eye. And a spot of blood beside it, bright, almost cheerful, the rudest color in the world.

I stand there and look at what my body has mailed me this morning. A petal a day, some days. Two, on the days that want to make a point. They come up out of my chest where the Ingrowth has taken root, and the Ingrowth has taken root in all the places my family keeps its heirlooms. My lungs. My mother's lungs, before mine. It runs in the blood, mother to child, down the whole line of us. Inherited, the doctors said, in the voices they use for weather. Incurable, they said, in the same voices, a year later, when the medicine stopped pretending.

My mother is on the fourth floor of a hospital across the city, in a bed I pay for in instalments, dying of the exact thing that just put a flower in my hand. She is further along. That is the phrase they use. Further along. I am on schedule, is what it means. I visit her after school and she holds my hand and asks about my grades, and neither of us mentions the petals, because she coughed up her first one at nineteen and she knows what is sitting in my pocket better than I do.

I fold the handkerchief once, twice. Petal inside. Blood inside. Whole inheritance, folded into a square of cloth. I put it in my blazer pocket and straighten my tie in the stairwell's dim window glass, and my face in the glass is calm, bored, faintly annoyed with the morning. My face is the best liar I own. It's never once told the truth in public, and it isn't going to start on a Tuesday.

Down the stairs. Into the noise. Crown back on.

Bryson finds me outside the science wing. He always finds me. I've never once told him my schedule, and he's never once needed me to.

He has deep brown skin and short twists and freckles scattered across his nose and cheeks, and his eyes are warm in a way that makes strangers tell him things. Teachers trust him. First-years follow him around, looking safer just for standing near him. He has no tattoos, no scars that show, nothing on him that announces danger, and he falls into step beside me and matches my pace in under three strides, and the corridor makes room for two now instead of one.

"You good?" he says.

"Always."

He looks at me sideways. He doesn't look at my pocket. Bryson never looks at the pocket, and I've never once caught him doing it, and that's one of the thousand small reasons he's the only person on this earth who knows.

He knows about the diagnosis. He knows about the hospital, and the bills, and the night shifts at the warehouse by the river that pay for both, and he knows about my father in the way you know about a dog behind a fence. He has known since we were sixteen and I coughed a petal into my sleeve in his bedroom and he picked it up off his floor and held it out to me on his palm and said, what is this, and I told him the truth because lying to Bryson has always felt like lying to a mirror. It insults us both.

"Eat breakfast?" he says.

"Define breakfast."

"Coffee isn't breakfast."

"Coffee is a food group."

"That," he says, "is the saddest sentence ever said in this school, and a boy cried in assembly yesterday."

Something in my chest that isn't the Ingrowth unclenches, a quarter turn. This is what he does. He stands next to the worst fact in my life and talks about breakfast, and the fact has to share the room with him, and it gets smaller. He'll never know what that costs him in my accounting. I keep a ledger of debts I intend to pay. His name has its own page, and the page is full, and I'm running out of time to settle it, and some mornings that arithmetic is worse than the cough.

"Library after school," he says. "We have the history thing."

"I have the hospital after school."

"I'll start the history thing. You come when you come."

"Fine."

He peels off toward his classroom at the next junction, and the corridor narrows back to one man's width around me, and I let my face go back to its public setting. It's easier to wear with practice. Everything's easier with practice. Dying included. That is the part nobody puts in the brochures.

The car arrives at the second bell.

I see it from the long windows on the first floor, where I've stopped for no reason I would admit to. A black car, long and low, sliding up the drive with the kind of slowness that isn't caution. Money does not hurry. Neither does the thing money is afraid of. The car stops at the front steps, in the space the school keeps for board members and ministers, and a driver gets out and opens the rear door, and the whole courtyard goes quiet in a way I've never once been able to make it go quiet. My quiet is fear. This quiet was curiosity, and it was instant, and it belonged entirely to him.

Raphael Moretti steps out of the car.

Dirty blonde hair. Green eyes that come up to the school slowly, the way a man reads a menu in a restaurant he has already decided about. He's my age, give or take nothing, in the same navy blazer as the rest of us, and somehow the uniform looks like something he's wearing as a courtesy. His tie is perfect. His face is calm, held, deliberate. He looks at the gates, the towers, the crest over the door, the whole expensive machine of EdgeHurt International Academy, and his expression does not change by a single degree. He does not look impressed. He does not look nervous. New boys arrive impressed or nervous. There's no third option.

On the steps below him, the morning is rearranging itself and nobody has noticed yet. Two board members' sons, boys who have never waited for anything in their lives, step down out of his way to let him pass, and do it without a word exchanged, and then look mildly confused at their own feet. A girl by the fountain stops mid-sentence. The driver closes the car door and stands with his hands folded, watching the boy go up the steps with an expression I know very well, because every member of my father's household staff wears it. The expression of a man employed by something much larger than the job description said.

The boy carries his own bag. Boys who arrive in cars like that one don't carry their own bags, as a rule. Boys who arrive in cars like that one have never been told no by anyone who mattered, as a rule. He breaks both rules before he reaches the front door, and he does it without seeming to notice there were rules at all, and my interest, which I keep on a very short chain, sits up.

Until today, apparently.

I know his name because names are currency here and I make it my business to be rich. Arriving mid-term. Family money, old and foreign. Transferred from somewhere that doesn't appear in the school bulletin, which is itself information, because the bulletin prints everything. Nobody has told me anything about him that I didn't already know. And standing at the window with my hand resting on the frame, watching him take the steps at an easy pace with his bag in one hand, I feel the thing I trust more than any file or rumor. Wrongness. Not danger. Danger I understand; danger has a shape and a price. This boy has a stillness I recognize, and I've buried enough secrets to know what that kind of stillness costs to keep.

Raphael Moretti, I think. The boy nobody checks.

He passes under my window without looking up. The courtyard current, my current, the one I built out of two years of careful weather, does something it has never done.

It doesn't split for him. It just watches him walk through it, like he is the one it was keeping the path clear for all along.

I take my hand off the window frame. There's a half-moon mark on my palm from my own nails, and I don't remember making a fist.

It happens in the main hallway between periods, in front of perhaps sixty witnesses, which is to say it happens in front of the entire school by dinner.

I'm crossing toward the east wing with my eyes on nothing, moving at the pace that makes people step aside in time, and he's simply there. Standing at the junction where the notice boards are, reading the board with his books under one arm, standing exactly where the current runs fastest, like a stone that wandered into a river to see what the river would do about it.

My shoulder checks his.

Not hard. Not an accident either. A calibration. The hallway is mine and he is in it and there are rules for that, and the rules get explained once, physically, so they never have to be explained again. His books go down. Hardcover, notebook, a paperback with a cracked spine, scattered across the tiles in a fan, and the sound they make is enormous in the sudden hush. Sixty people stop breathing in the particular way I have trained them to. Bags freeze mid-swing. Somebody's laugh dies in their throat.

He does not flinch.

He does not flinch, and he does not step back, and he does not look at his books. He looks at me. Green eyes, level, patient, taking my measure the way I took his from the window, and there's not one drop of fear in them. Annoyance, maybe. Interest. The expression of a man who has been bumped into by weather before and found it mostly boring.

"Watch where you're walking," I say.

"I was standing still."

His voice is quiet. It carries anyway. The whole junction hears it, the whole school will hear it by dinner, and I stand there in the middle of my own hallway with my shoulder still warm from the contact and I feel the floor of the world move one inch to the left. Nobody talks back. That isn't modesty. That's a census. In two years, in this school, no one has answered me in front of witnesses and kept eye contact while they did it. It isn't done. It's never been done.

Something in my face wants to change. I don't let it. I look down at his books instead, at the fan of them on the tiles, and I think about stepping over them and walking on, which is what the king does. The king does not apologize. The king does not explain. The king certainly does not stand around negotiating with transfer students in front of sixty people.

I step over his books and I walk on.

The current closes behind me, softer than it should. I can feel it. I can feel sixty people recalculating something, and recalculation is the first crack in any wall, and I walk faster so nobody sees me notice.

I don't see him again until last period, when I pass the library windows and stop, again, for no reason I would sign my name to.

He is at a corner table with his books stacked in a neat row, the paperback open, reading like the morning never happened. Like I never happened. Sunlight comes through the high windows and does kind things to the whole room and he sits in the middle of it, calm, unbothered, entirely at home in a building he entered six hours ago.

As if he feels the weight of it, he looks up. Straight at the window. Straight at me, through glass, across forty feet of library, like he knew where I would be standing before I stood there.

Raphael Moretti gathers the last of his patience into a small, private smile. Not mocking. Worse than mocking. Friendly. The patient little smirk of a man shelving a problem for later.

"See you around, then," he says. Too far away to hear. I read it off his mouth anyway, and I hate that I can, and I hate the smile more.

I picked him because he looked like nothing. New boy, no name anyone feared, no crew, no history, standing in my hallway like furniture. I picked him because a king needs to make an example on a schedule and he was standing in the example spot with his books in his arms and his calm, unreadable face, and I thought: him. He will do. He will be easy.

I've been wrong about many things in my life. I have a disease in my chest keeping a list of all of them, and it adds a line every morning.

Standing at that window, with the petal folded in my pocket and that smile still on his face, I had no idea who I had picked.

Tell me, my loves: who picked the wrong target in that hallway — Fersion, or Raphael?