Page 25 of Rage
They’ve been selecting for generations, identifying the bright, isolated, resource-poor students who will come here hungry and grateful and without the family connections to make noise if something goes wrong.
The scholarship is a net. A maze of opportunity inside a web of lies.
I think about that. About the way she gripped her orientation paperwork on her first day and the way the words scholarship student had pressed into her face like a bruise she was trying not to show.
She thinks it’s a gift.
She thinks she earned her way into safety.
She earned her way onto a list.
This makes me want to put my fist through a window, which would be loud and unhelpful, so instead, I breathe through it as I head to my room. Four counts in. Hold. Eight counts out. Dr. Wick’s technique, which I use not because I have any goodwill toward Dr. Wick but because it works.
In.
Hold.
Out.
The quad is empty. The campus sleeps. Somewhere below me, she is lying in the dark, wondering about footsteps.
She locked her window after my text. I checked from the courtyard below. Her light was on for forty-three minutes after I sent it, and when it went off, the window latch was in the down position.
Good.
She listened.
This is more than most people give me.
I have a class in six hours that I am obligated by the Order to attend. Advanced Literature, which strikes me as an almost funny cosmic joke, that the man they locked in a padded room for years for being too dangerous, too loud, too alive in his rage is now required to sit in a room and discuss the symbolic weight of language.
I find, to my own surprise, that I’m not opposed to this.
Words are the only weapons I was never stripped of.
In Unit 9, they took everything.
Shoelaces.
Anything with an edge.
Any object that could be a projectile.
Privileges were stripped and restored on a schedule I learned to game by year two. But they couldn’t take my voice. Couldn’t take the thing I did in the dark for three years, building my mindfrom the pieces I had, and the body like a form of strength into a work of art like a clay sculpture.
Now, the face of a girl I’d seen once. A voice I’d heard mentioned. A story assembled from fragments, from the things Azriel let slip when he forgot I was listening.
I built the image of her from nothing.
I named her before I knew she’d be real.
She’s not what I built. She’s smaller. More tired.
The damage is different from what I imagined, quieter, less visible. The girl I built in the dark of Unit 9 was harder. She had to be, because the dark requires hard things.
The real Amy is soft in places that weren’t supposed to survive.
That’s the part I can’t account for.
