Chapter 3: He Would Never Betray Me

Lyra's POV

The ringing in my ears wouldn't quit. My temples were throbbing hard, the way they always did when I'd pushed the ability too far. Sometimes it also meant insomnia. Sometimes it meant nightmares. I pressed the back of my head against the seat, closed my eyes, and tried to go blank.

It didn't work.

The old memories came anyway. I have a bad habit I've never been able to shake—I go back to the worst of it on purpose, turn it over slowly, let it hurt. Not because I enjoy the pain exactly, but because the pain does something useful. It keeps two things sharp: my mother's death, and the name Ronan. The day I stop feeling those is the day I stop being careful.

I was wearing old sneakers.

Not falling-apart old. Just worn. A shallow crease across the toe box, a strip of white scuffed off the sole near the heel. The kind of thing nobody notices unless they're already looking.

There was a boy who sat two rows behind me and one seat over, round-faced, always working through a bag of chips in the middle of class. He said it out loud, in front of everyone, in the easy tone of someone who had no idea there was anything wrong with saying it: "Why don't you just buy new shoes? You've been wearing the same two pairs."

I froze.

I felt my feet. They pulled back under the desk—this small, involuntary thing, like flinching from a hand you didn't see coming. I didn't look down. I didn't answer him. I kept my face exactly where it was, the way you do when someone's talking about a person you've never met.

But I felt every set of eyes that swept over me in those two seconds.

It was a private school. I was there on a scholarship. The kids in that building cycled through sneakers the way most people go through paper towels. I knew what my shoes were worth. I just thought nobody would say it out loud.

That month had a two-week break. I went back to the house where I was staying and asked for a new pair of shoes.

Lena, my foster mother, was eating dinner. She put her fork down on the table hard enough that the sound carried, and my younger brother looked up at me for a second and then looked back down at his plate.

She went for the rest of the afternoon.

I didn't get the shoes. I wore those same two pairs through the rest of the semester.

I was sixteen.

The deprivation had gotten into my bones. I carried it around like a second skin, this low-grade shame that had no bottom to it.

There was a day the class rep collected money for everyone's meal cards. When he got to me I said I'd forgotten mine.

He didn't say anything. He just looked at me for a second—not mockery, not even pity, just this brief, thoughtful pause—and then wrote down the next person's name.

That look made me feel about two feet tall. Not because of anything he did. Because he did nothing. One look, and I wanted to disappear through the floor.

This kind of thing had been happening since I was ten. I stopped counting a long time ago.

But one time it was my own fault.

I thought I'd found a real friend. We talked easily, ate lunch together in the hallway, and she'd check in when I was going through something hard. I believed it. So I told her I was adopted. I told her about the house.

By the next morning the whole school knew.

She cornered me with a few other girls in front of everyone. "Broke-ass," she said. "Motherless bitch. Who'd want to be your friend?" Then she removed me from her contacts and let everyone know the real reason—the boy she liked had been too close to me, and that was what this was actually about.

I didn't cry. I stood there and took every word, one at a time, all the way to the end. Then I went and found the boy she liked.

I thought he'd take my side.

He didn't. He was wearing new sneakers—branded, clean, laces tied like he'd measured them. He looked at me once and said: "Sorry. You're not worth anything without money."

One sentence.

I've kept it ever since.

So I worked it out. Once graduation hits, the student label disappears and everything underneath it goes on the table—family background, job, connections, money, all of it. The wealthy boys get set up with dates their parents approve of, and by then I wouldn't just be competing with those girls, I'd be up against family name and modeling contracts and a hundred thousand Instagram followers. But the guys still inside a campus still believe in love. They haven't been fully trained yet. The window is exactly this wide, and I have to get it done inside it.

There's something else I've thought through even more clearly, clearly enough that it sometimes makes it hard to breathe: if I just drift through, graduate, get a job, rent a small apartment in some city and grind until I'm forty—then my children start from that same place. Same road. Same holes in it. You can work your whole life and still own nothing. The machine keeps running and you're just one of the parts.

So I have to find my child a good enough father. Give them a head start I never had. Break the cycle here, at me, so it doesn't go any further.

After that I stopped letting people in. Only interests.

Except Elias.

He's the only exception. The only person I've never once had to guard myself against. We grew up on the same street, shared the worst of the same years—the cold, the hunger, all of it. He tutored me for two years. Took me from that street to a scholarship at a private high school—without him there's no St. Jude, no any of this.

He would never betray me.

The driver said we'd arrived. I opened my eyes.

My temples were still going, but lighter now.

I looked down at my shoes. Black leather today, heels, a shine on the toe. I bought them myself, with my own scholarship money. Didn't take a cent from anyone for them.

No crease across the toe box. No scuffed white edge.

I am never going back to that.