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Closing around me, catching me before the floor can, wrapped in a scent of woodsmoke and worn leather and warm iron that my fading body knows even as my mind lets go.

He got to me.

The thought arrives soft and absurd and almost sweet, the last clear shape in a dissolving world: he actually got to me in time.

I never feel the ground.

In fact, I feel nothing but numbness as my consciousness fades into the first wave of seizures.

CHAPTER 9

~Riot~

Ihave known panic exactly twice in my life.

I am, it seems, about to be handed a third lesson, and I resent the curriculum.

The first time, my mother died in my arms.

I was small enough that her weight should have been impossible and somehow wasn’t, because a body emptying of itself goes terribly light. She bled out slow against my chest on a kitchen floor that smelled of copper and the dinner she’d never finish, and instead of screaming, instead of cursing the man whose work it was, she spent the last of her breath being gentle with me.

Whispering.

Telling me what I’d become—the things she swore she could already see in me, the man I’d grow into, all of it spoken in the soft certain voice of someone who would not live to be proven wrong.

She made me promise.

Made me vow, with her blood going tacky between my fingers, that I’d stay a kind boy in a world that had just shown us both exactly how kind it intended to be.

I broke that promise comprehensively. But I have never once forgotten the shape of the panic—the helpless, clawing, useless animal terror of holding something precious while it leaks away through your hands and learning, in real time, that there is nothing on this earth your strength can do about it.

The second time came years later, and it was quieter, and it lived entirely behind my own eyes. It was the half-second before I pulled the trigger and redecorated a wall with the inside of my father’s skull—the panic not of the act, which I’d rehearsed in my head ten thousand grateful times, but of what came after it.

Who I’d be on the far side. What kind of thing a boy becomes the moment he proves his dying mother’s last wish wrong with a single deliberate squeeze.

I felt the future yawn open under me like a grave, and I stepped into it anyway, and I have been falling, more or less contentedly, ever since.

Two panics.

That’s the whole ledger.

After the second one I sealed the account, because a man who feels that twice and survives both decides, sensibly, never to keep anything precious enough to be worth a third.

And then a woman in an orange jumpsuit, a creature I have known for the grand total of a handful of days, a thorn lodged so deep in the soft emotional side I’d sworn I’d cut out of myself that I can’t breathe around it—drops to a cafeteria floor like the plague itself reached up and claimed her.

I want it on record that I tried not to let her in.

I am very good at not letting people in; it’s the one skill I’ve honed past all the others, the careful art of being a closed and bolted house with the lights off. But she didn’t knock and she didn’t pick the lock.

She skipped across a room everyone else fled, drank my beer, told me it tasted better than piss, and put glass to my throatwhile she smiled—and somewhere in that she walked straight through a wall I’d spent twenty years pretending was load-bearing. I didn’t feel the breach until it was done.

That’s the trick of the truly dangerous ones.

You never feel the cut.

You just look down, eventually, and find you’ve been bleeding for a while.

I was already moving before any part of me filed the decision.