The Cut I Don't Remember Earning

The Gas Station

"You know you don't have to sit in the car like you're being detained," Nova said, watching me from the driver's seat with an expression that made it very clear she found me both amusing and slightly exhausting. "It's a gas station. Not witness protection."

"I'm aware."

"You've been staring at that door for like a full minute."

I had been. I made myself stop.

Cole had asked her to run me into town, said it like it was nothing. Nova's headed that way anyway, but I'd caught the look Priest gave him when he said it, and I was starting to understand that very little in this club happened by accident, including which seventeen-year-old ended up driving me to buy groceries I apparently needed but had no memory of a kitchen to put them in.

Not that I minded the company, once I got past the wariness of it. Nova talked the way people talk when they've been quiet around adults their whole life and finally found someone who wasn't going to shush them for it - fast, funny, a little too observant for her own good.

"So are you and my brother, like, official," she said, apropos of nothing, eyes back on the road. "Because everyone acts like you are, but nobody's actually said the word, and I feel like I'm the only person in this club who thinks that's weird."

"I don't really know how to answer that."

"That's not a no."

"It's not really anything yet." Which was true in a way she couldn't understand, and true in a way that had nothing to do with romance and everything to do with the fact that I still didn't know what I was to any of these people, only what they'd all apparently decided I was before I lost the two days that would've explained it to me.

"He likes you," Nova said, quieter now, with less performance in it. "Really likes you. I haven't seen him like that with

"She stopped herself, some door closing behind her eyes.

"With who?"

"Nobody. Forget it." She pulled into the gas station a little too fast, a tell I was starting to recognize; Nova drove faster when she wanted a subject to end. "I'll be like two minutes. You want anything?"

"I'm fine."

She disappeared inside, and I sat there in the quiet, the engine still ticking as it cooled, and let myself think about what she'd almost said. I haven't seen him like that before. With who. Somebody before me. Somebody the whole club apparently knew not to mention, the way you learn not to mention certain names in certain houses.

I was still turning that over when I noticed the man by the pumps.

He wasn't doing anything, technically. Just standing there, filling a tank on a car that didn't look like it needed him standing quite that still while it happened. But he was looking at me, not glancing, not the accidental kind of look strangers do, but looking, steady and unhurried, like he had all the time in the world, and I was exactly what he'd been waiting to find.

I looked away at first. Told myself it was nothing. Told myself a lot of things, actually, in the ninety seconds it took Nova to come back out, and none of them made the feeling in my chest go away.

He was still there when she pulled back onto the road. Still watching, even as we drove off, his head turning slowly to track the car the way you'd track something you didn't want to lose sight of.

"Are you okay?" Nova asked, catching my face in the rear-view mirror.

"Fine." The word came out automatically, the way it always does, useful and smooth and completely unconvincing even to me.

We were three blocks past the station when a car pulled up beside us at the light. Sleek, dark, out of place on a street full of pickups and minivans. I only glanced at it because Nova tensed beside me, her hands going tighter on the wheel, some instinct in her recognizing something I didn't have the history to recognize yet.

The window rolled down.

A man I'd never seen before, different from the one at the pumps, younger, sharper somehow, like a blade instead of a shadow, looked directly at me across the lane. Not at Nova. At me. Like he already knew exactly which face he was looking for.

He didn't say anything out loud. The light was red, we were close enough, and he held my eyes and mouthed something slow and deliberate, shaping each syllable, so there'd be no mistaking it even through glass and distance and the noise of two idling engines.

A name.

Not mine. Not Cole's. A name I had never heard in my life, not once, not in any conversation since I'd woken up wearing a ring I didn't remember choosing.

The light changed. Nova hit the gas hard enough that I felt it in my stomach, taking the next turn faster than the speed limit had any opinion about, checking the mirror three times in as many seconds.

"Who was that?" I said, and my voice came out steadier than I felt, which was its own small victory.

"I don't know." She was still checking the mirror. "I didn't recognize the car. That's not, that's not one of ours, and it's not one of the Vultures' either, not any I've seen." A beat, her knuckles pale on the wheel. "Cole's going to want to know about this."

"What did he say? The man in the car. Did you catch it?"

"No. I was driving; I didn't." She glanced at me, quick, worried in a way that made her look younger than she'd looked all afternoon.

"Did you?"

I had. That was the problem. I'd caught every syllable of it, clear as anything, a name shaped carefully enough that there was no chance of misreading it.

I just had absolutely no idea who it belonged to, or why a stranger in an unmarked car had gone out of his way to make sure I heard it.