Shards of Memory [English - Under Revision]

Chapter 8: Broken Silence

London

The clock above the whiteboard kept time like an accusation: bright, indifferent, and entirely accurate. Each second dragged its fingernails down the back of my skull until I could feel them along the vertebrae. My tongue tasted metal from the tension in my mouth.

Lessons dissolved into a blur of syllables and diagrams the moment Vans's name flashed on my phone. I could hear Ms. Roque in the room, a thin, formulaic voice talking about algebraic proofs as if those numbers mattered. They didn't. The only data I cared about was the stream of small, deliberate updates trickling in from my network—footage, timestamps, who'd left the building and who'd lingered.

I folded my hand over my phone under the desk the way you cover a live animal. Vans had texted at seven-oh-seven that morning: Practice finished. He's still at the gym. Watching her again.

I closed my fingers hard enough to bruise the screen. Watching her again. Like a mantra. Like a verdict.

It was absurd to call it jealousy. I had better names for it—ownership, strategy, preservation. He had been mine in the way bargains become ownership after repetition: coerced compliance, nights traded for the promise of safety. I had secured him the way you secure a mercenary: press hard enough on the right places and he became the weapon who would not point his blade at you. That had been the deal. That's what civilized people called bargains.

But bargains fray in the dark.

Ms. Roque's footsteps paused by my desk. The woman loved small authority the way moths love light—feathered, hungry. Her smile was varnished prudence.

"Miss Dwayne," she said, close enough that I could smell her coffee and the tiny bitterness beneath it. "We have standards at Crystal. Your grades are slipping. Attendance? Not great. And attitude? Someone has to set an example."

I let the smile I'd been practicing slide into place: polite, slow, the well-groomed version of a blade. "Always instructive, ma'am."

She folded her arms with the satisfying finality of someone who loved verdicts. "Even Blaise Pollington—after two years lost to nonsense—has clawed his way back into the top ranks. Miss Skylane Gabriel remains number one. You, however, keep falling further behind. Maybe you'd learn discipline if you watched her."

A soft crack sounded like porcelain under pressure. She had said the name—Skylane—like a barb coated in civility. My breath narrowed.

The world rearranged itself to the feel of my pulse. Ms. Roque's lips moved and there was the scent of her breath—too hot. Then my hand was on her collar and the wall met her shoulders with a thud that echoed all the way down the corridor. Students' heads turned. A classroom that had been background noise exploded into a chorus of shocked gasps.

"You think you can talk to me like that?!" My voice went raw and unfamiliar, the sound of someone dragging old coal into the open.

Her eyes widened to saucers. "M-Miss Dwayne—"

"Say Skylane's name again," I hissed. "Say her name to my face."

She trembled, her hand going to her throat. The teachers who moved to step between us were slow, the way people who've never faced a real threat find their reflexes delayed. Someone's phone erupted with a notification and it sounded obscene. The principal's voice boomed on the intercom—always a useful override.

"Don't let her out. Stop her."

That phrase was the match.

My fingers slipped into the depths of my bag and closed around the pistol with the comfort of a familiar instrument. The metal was cool against my palm. I did not raise it at the teachers; I merely let the presence of the thing rearrange the room. The air condensed, the way glass fogs before a storm.