Chapter 313: A Stone in His Boot.
"Abram Nadez."
He said my full name and our eyes locked across the little room. The yellow bulb above us threw hard light down the centre of the floor and left the corners in soft, cobwebbed shadow. The chain at my ankle answered the small shift of my weight with a short metallic complaint.
"Who would ever have predicted," he said, "that you and I would end up with so much in common."
I worked myself up the wall until I was sitting rather than lying. The concrete was cold against my back. The chain gave me exactly that much and no more—enough to meet his eyes from a position that didn’t have me flat on the floor, not enough to stand. My bound wrists flexed once behind me and found the same unyielding rope.
Bagins stood in the middle of the floor with his arms folded across his chest and looked down at me. His men had stayed outside. He’d closed the door on them himself. The light caught the grey at his temples and the tired skin under his eyes and left the rest of his expression in careful shadow.
"Do you remember your second day at Hogsby?" A small smile started. It didn’t reach the eyes. "You were brand new. You and I stood outside the training room while my students worked inside. Trying to level up."
I remembered every second of that day.
That was the day May had told me I was going to sleep with a girl in my own room, and that was how Annabelle had ended up in my room.
The glass. The students hitting projected zombies. Bagins standing there with the particular brightness of a man who still believed the work mattered.
"I was a teacher trying to do the best possible thing for the students I had. I worked. I did not sleep at night, some weeks. I carried every one of their names in the back of my head at all times." He counted them off without effort. The names landed in the small room one after another, clean and absolute. "Mute. Isabelle. Wells. Mable. May. All of them. Every single one."
I let him talk. I had no idea yet where the road went and interrupting a man like that only makes the road longer. The cobwebs in the corners moved once in a draft I couldn’t feel and then hung still again. Trapper’s wet breathing continued in the far corner, low and uneven.
"Do you remember what I said to you that day?"
"No."
"I told you that you were smart."
I genuinely didn’t remember it. The day had held too many other things. The compliment, if it had been given, had fallen somewhere between the first real conversation with Sherry and the shape of an offer May had put in front of me.
"I saw two new students standing in my corridor and I was happy about it. I went home that night with both of you still in my head. I wanted to help you level up. That was all of it. That was the whole thought."
In the corner, Trapper started coughing his way back toward consciousness. The sound was thick, wet, the particular noise of a man whose nose had been broken with a stake and who was only now remembering how to pull air through it.
Bagins glanced sideways at him, unhurried, and came back to me. The interruption registered and was dismissed in the same second.
"I told Miss Brown that same evening that you were a wise kid. She was impressed. And you had done nothing at that point. Nothing at all." He shrugged one shoulder. The fabric of his jacket shifted. "I simply believed in you."
I still couldn’t work out why he’d left four armed men on the other side of a door to do this. The yellow light laid his shadow long across the concrete between us. The chain at my ankle sat cold against the skin.
"What do you want from me?" I asked, because one of us had to shorten it.
"Good question." He nodded slowly. The smile returned, thinner this time. "I’ll come to that."
He walked two steps toward the far wall and turned back. The movement was deliberate, the pacing of a man who had already decided how long this conversation was allowed to run.
"I want you to understand first that I loved my job. Genuinely loved it. I put everything I had into that school. And at the end of all of it, not one of those students has ever spared a single minute to think about me."
"You can’t know that."
"I can know it." The smile came back, and there was nothing behind it. The light caught the edges of it and left the centre empty. "Because one of them has become a stone in my shoe."
He let that sit. Trapper’s breathing continued in the corner, the only other sound in the room.
"You have become a small stone in my boot, Abram."
So there it is.
"You killed Mrs Rivers."
"I didn’t kill her."
"You stood in her house beside the woman who did." He said it without raising his voice at all.
The words landed soft and absolute, the particular quiet of a man who had already tried the sentence in his own head and found it satisfactory.
"Just as I loved my work at Hogsby, that same passion follows me now. I love this job. I love the people I work with." He took one step closer. The shadow between us shortened. "You killed President Rivers. You killed Kim. And tonight you killed Bezus."
Bezus.
The bearded man. I hadn’t known his name until this second, and now I was being sentenced for him. The net that had closed on his throat on the factory floor arrived again behind my eyes—the hard white light, the clawing hands, the water from the basin spreading dark across the concrete. The name settled over the image and made it permanent.
"Tonight you die, Abram Nadez."
He reached into his jacket and drew the pistol. The metal caught the light in a single hard point. The barrel was steady. The hand holding it was the same hand that had once gestured toward a training room full of students trying to level up. The distance between us was less than the length of the chain.
"Unless you give me a reason not to."
And there it was. The actual purpose of the visit, and the reason those four men were on the wrong side of that door.
He didn’t want me dead. He wanted me to hand him something, in private, with no witnesses to hear what it cost him to ask. The pistol was the shape of the question. The closed door was the condition of the answer. The yellow light held both of us in the same small, overexposed stage while the factory beyond the wall continued its organised noise without either of us in it.
"Yes," I said. "I do."
He smiled. The expression arrived slow and complete, and for the first time since he’d walked into the room it reached the eyes.