Chapter 34 THE BOY IN THE RUINS
POV: JOEY
He didn't move after she left.
Just stood in the dark with the cigarette burning down between his fingers and the sound of her boots on the stones fading until there was nothing left of her but the impression she'd left on the air.
He'd done this carefully. Getting her here. The text had to be exactly right — sharp enough to be a dare, casual enough not to seem like he'd been planning it, which he had, for three days, the wording of a single text message, which was the most ridiculous thing he'd done in a while and he'd done some genuinely ridiculous things.
She'd come.
He'd known she would. Not because he was arrogant about it, though he was arrogant about most things, but because he'd been watching Lena Garcia for long enough to know that she responded to dares the way she responded to everything else her family told her not to want — with the specific hunger of someone who had been told no so many times the word had started losing its meaning.
He dropped what was left of the cigarette and pressed his boot over it.
Her hand.
He kept coming back to her hand.
She'd raised it. He'd felt the shift in her before he'd seen the movement, the moment where the decision was made somewhere underneath the composure. And then she'd stopped herself. Let the hand drop. Controlled it back into place like she was filing something under not yet.
Not never.
Not yet.
He sat down on a chunk of fallen stone that had probably been part of the original chapel wall and looked at the sky through the broken arch above him.
Elias Thornfield. The annex file open on the reading table, the names, the dates, the word resolved appearing next to entries that the official record had called accidents and transfers and medical withdrawals.
He hadn't told her any of that.
He couldn't. Not yet. Not without something more solid than photocopied documents and a theory about what the word meant. If he handed her the annex file right now she'd either not believe him or believe him and move toward it too fast and visible and that was how you ended up with your name next to the word resolved.
What he could do was get her into the ruins. Let her feel the place. Let her understand on a level below conscious thought that Thornfield had a before that the school's official history had decided not to keep.
Let her start asking why.
He'd been asking why for two years.
He'd found the annex by accident, looking for a practice room his freshman year, following a map that turned out to be twenty years out of date. Found the door unlocked. Found the folders. Spent three weeks convincing himself he was misreading what he was looking at before he admitted he wasn't.
He'd told one person.
His brother, freshman year, in Jasper's room, the door closed, both of them speaking quietly because even then he'd understood that the wrong walls had ears.
Jasper had listened to the whole thing. Had asked three precise clarifying questions. And then had said, in the careful tone he used when he was trying to manage something he couldn't fully control: Be careful, Joey. Some things you can't unknow.
Which was true and also not the point and also exactly the response of a boy who had decided that the system was safer to work within than to dismantle.
Joey loved his brother.
He also understood that they were different in a way that went deeper than personality. Jasper had looked at the information and chosen the careful path. Joey had looked at the same information and started building a list.
He picked up a small piece of stone from the ground and turned it over in his fingers.
He thought about the branch.
He'd heard it too. Different from the random creak of old trees at night. Specific. Close. The sound of weight shifting on purpose, deliberately controlled, almost silent. Almost.
He'd tracked the direction with his eyes without moving his head. East side of the ruins, behind the broken apse wall, a space that had been empty when he'd arrived.
Someone had been there while they were talking.
He didn't know how long.
He looked at his phone. No messages. He hadn't expected any. The people he needed to worry about didn't announce themselves.
He looked toward East Hall across the quad.
Third floor, second window from the left. Lena's room. The light was on.
He thought about her counting steps. He hadn't been able to see her face on the walk back but he'd watched her hands from the distance and he knew what pressing your hands flat against your sides meant when your hands wanted to do something else. He'd done it himself enough times to recognize it instantly.
She was further from the performance than she thought she was.
That was good.
That was also the thing he was most worried about. Because people who were close to the edge of their performance were the people the machine noticed. The people it moved to address before they became a variable it couldn't manage.
He needed to move faster than that.
He stood up.
Looked at the ruins around him for a moment. The broken arches. The hollow windows. The place where something was built and then burned and then left here specifically so that people would walk past it every day and never ask what happened.
He walked away from East Hall.
Not because he didn't want to stay.
Because patience was the only tool he had right now that the machine couldn't predict.
He'd use it.
Even if it felt like it was going to cost him something he couldn't get back.
Author's Note: Joey Valdez brought her to the ruins on purpose. The ruins are connected to everything. The branch cracking matters. And the word resolved in the annex file is going to be explained eventually and none of you are going to like what it means. Drop a like if this chapter broke something in you. Save this one. Joey's arc is just getting started. — J