Chapter 3 Eighty-Four

Cael POV

Rowe asked me what I was writing about this morning, and I lied to his face without blinking.

I've been lying about this my whole life. It should feel easy by now.

It doesn't.

I'm walking into Harken Prep's main building, replaying the conversation in the hallway, the way he stood close enough that I could have counted his pulse, the way his eyes didn't let me go, the way he said you were writing about me without actually saying it. Like he already knew and was just waiting for me to confirm it.

I didn't confirm anything. I walked away.

But my hands haven't stopped shaking since.

I find my first period class, take the seat closest to the door, and pull out a blank notebook. I write nothing in it. I just need something to hold. Around me, kids fill in seats loud and easy, the way people act in places they belong. I watch the door instead of watching them. I'm good at watching doors.

A girl drops into the seat beside me so fast it startles me. She doesn't apologize. She uncaps a highlighter, opens a textbook to the wrong page, and then tilts her head and looks at me with the direct, unbothered energy of someone who has never once worried about taking up too much space.

Then she slides a piece of paper across the desk.

You look like you're planning a funeral.

I stare at it. Something loosens in my chest against my will. I look at her. She raises her eyebrows like well?

I write back: Working on it.

She reads it and presses her lips together, fighting a smile. She writes: Delphine. I'm harmless unless provoked.

I write: Cael. Same.

She nods once, satisfied, and turns to the actual right page in her textbook. No performance. No follow-up questions. She said a thing, I said a thing, and now we exist near each other without it being terrible.

I haven't had that in a long time.

For approximately four minutes, I think maybe this school won't be the worst thing that's ever happened to me.

Then the door opens.

Rowe walks in.

I feel it before I see it, this shift in the room, the way everyone recalibrates slightly when he enters. He doesn't do anything to cause it. He just walks to a seat two rows away, drops his bag, and sits down like he owns the floor his chair is on. He doesn't scan the room. He doesn't look for me.

But I look at him.

And the number is right there above his head.

Three days have passed since Sunday dinner. Three days burned off the back end of his life, and he doesn't know. He's sitting in English class two rows away from me with a pen behind his ear and eighty-four days left, and he looks completely, perfectly, devastatingly fine.

I look down at my notebook.

I write nothing for the entire period.

Delphine notices. Halfway through the lesson, she slides another note. You know him? She nods toward Rowe without being obvious.

I write: He's my stepbrother.

The look she gives me is so complicated and so fast that I almost miss it. Then she writes: That's either the best or worst thing that's happened to you this week.

I don't write back. Because the answer is both, and I don't know how to explain that yet.

The bell rings, and I'm up fast, first one to the door, because I need air. I need distance. I need to stop looking at Rowe Daltry like every second he breathes is borrowed time, because it is, and I can't fix it, and that is the truth I have been carrying since Sunday, and it is getting heavier every hour.

I make it to the hallway.

"Cael."

I stop. I turn around.

Rowe is leaning against the doorframe with his arms crossed and his eyes doing that thing that reading thing, that slow, careful taking-apart he does when he looks at me. The hallway is loud around us, and he talks right through it like none of it exists.

"You looked at me again," he says.

"We're in the same class."

"You looked at me the same way you did at dinner." He says it flat. Not angry. Worse curious. "Like something's wrong with me."

My heart is going way too fast. "Nothing's wrong with you."

"Then why do you keep staring at me like I'm already dead?"

The hallway noise drops away. I hear my own breathing. The words hit so clean and direct that for one second, I can't construct a single lie to put between us.

He sees it. I watch him see it in the half-second where my face doesn't cooperate, where the truth almost surfaces. His eyes sharpen.

"Cael"

"I have to get to class," I say.

I walk away fast. He doesn't follow. But I feel his eyes on my back the whole length of the hallway, and I don't breathe properly until I turn the corner.

I find a bathroom. Lock the stall. Sit on the closed lid and press my back against the cold wall, and do what I always do when it gets too loud inside: I count. Backwards from a hundred. Slow. Even.

I make it to sixty-three before I stop.

Because something just hit me that I should have thought about on Sunday and didn't, because I was too busy planning exits.

I know Rowe dies in eighty-four days. I know the number. I have always, every single time, assumed the number was fixed. Permanent. Something I carry and cannot change.

But I've never actually tried to change one.

I've always run instead.

What if the number isn't the end of the story?

What if it's a warning?

My hands are shaking again. I pull down my left sleeve and press the fabric flat against my wrist over the tallies underneath every person I watched die after seeing their number, every countdown I carried alone. There are too many marks. I stopped counting them the same way I stopped counting everything except the current number above the current person.

Eighty-four days.

The thought finishes itself before I can stop it.

What if this time I stay?

And then, like the universe wants to make sure I understand exactly how impossible that is, my phone buzzes.

A text from a number I don't recognize.

We need to talk about what you can do. Don't tell Rowe. S

S.

Silas.

He knows.