Page 122 of Legacy Elite

"You okay?" I say.

"Are you?"

I look down at my wrist.

Three dark curves, slightly apart, following a line that hasn't finished being a line. Luke. Torres. And now the man standing in front of me, who has apparently known since I said good morning to him with my mouth full and never said a single word about it.

I don't know if I'm okay. My arm hurts. My mouth still hurts. Ander's door is still swinging on the far side of the yard and I've got about nine things to be frightened of and one of them is my own life.

But I'm not sorry.

"No," I say. "I'm not okay. Ask me again on Friday."

Soren's thumb moves once, slow, against the inside of my wrist, below the new mark.

"Jessica."

I look up.

"I'm still here," he says.

Chapter sixteen

Jessica

The girl behind me in the coffee queue is doing arithmetic.

I can feel it. She's been looking at my left wrist since I pushed my sleeve up to get my card out, and I can hear her not saying anything to her friend, and I know exactly what's happening in her head because it's been happening in everyone's head since yesterday afternoon.

Three.

There were two. Now there are three.

She doesn't know whose. Nobody's published a list. But there were two for months, and now there are three, and she's currently working her way through the male population of this academy in order of interest.

I pull my sleeve down.

"Morning," I say, without turning round.

"Oh — morning," she says, in the voice of a woman who has just been caught reading someone's diary.

I take my coffee and go.

Ander is at the far end of the dining hall.

I see him about four seconds before he sees me, which means I get to watch it happen: the exact instant he registers I'm in the room, and the exact instant his entire body decides to be somewhere else.

He doesn't leave. That would be obvious. He simply turns forty degrees toward whoever he's sitting with and stays turned for the next fifteen minutes.

Soren, three seats down from him, does not do that. Soren looks at me across a hall of two hundred people and holds it for a second and a half, which for Soren is a public declaration set to music, and then goes back to his breakfast.

Luke isn't there. Luke's been in a room with the lawyers since seven.

I try once.

I catch Ander on the stairs at the back of the history building at eleven, coming down while I'm going up, and there is nowhere for either of us to go.

"Ander."