The Art of Magic / Alexander's backstory

Volume 1, Flashback 1: Take Your Hobby to Work Day

Eight years before The Event

First, I could think, so I was still alive.

Second, everything already hurt, so adding more pain came with diminishing returns.

Third, I had survived this much. I would survive whatever came next.

Fourth, I could still count, which meant my mind was still working and I could still rely on myself.

I picked myself up from the dented roof of the car I had just landed on.

My jump hadn’t been one of my best, but landing on steel that could buckle under my weight, unlike concrete—which definitely wouldn’t—had been a good choice.

Holding the backpack I had taken off in midair, I looked up at the roof of the building, now two stories above me. The van I had landed on was howling mercilessly, wailing into the darkness of the night like some kind of banshee and giving away my position to the people who had started chasing me the moment they realized what I had taken from them.

Groaning, I turned around and, grabbing the edge of the roof with both hands, carefully lowered myself down onto the sidewalk.

A few onlookers had already appeared with phones in hand and started taking pictures and recording videos of the scene.

Luckily, I was wearing a blond wig, makeup covering the freckles on my nose, a bandana hiding the rest of my face, a baseball cap, and a hood over all of it, so the chances of anyone recognizing me were practically nonexistent.

Unfortunately, suspicion lived right next door to impossible, so some of those watching were already raising their phones to their ears to report a teenager dressed like a thief falling out of the sky onto a car.

So I waved at them, smiling—though they probably couldn’t see it—and started walking away from my landing site.

“Stop! Where the fuck do you think you’re going?” shouted one of the bigger, braver men who had been watching the whole thing. The heroic type who would do anything to shine as long as it cost him as little as possible. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw him start toward me, waving his arms.

Ignoring the pain in my ankle, I broke into a light jog. A moment later, when he sped up into a run as well, the crowd gathering on the sidewalk forced me out into the street.

I ran just behind a passing car, stopped on the line between lanes to avoid a vehicle coming from the opposite direction and blaring its horn at me, then, seeing a stream of speeding cars ahead, started running along the line dividing the traffic.

Some of the oncoming cars definitely slowed down, but not all of them, so my would-be hero wisely abandoned his pursuit.

Unfortunately, the thugs whose weekly take I had stolen straight out of their car appeared at the edge of my vision, climbing down the ladder on the side of the building I had decided to jump from.

They were panting like hell, but they weren’t giving up.

When I reached the crosswalk from the street side, I quickly stepped onto it and ran across, only to be greeted by the awful sight of a police car directly ahead of me, its lights switching on the moment they spotted me.

The cruiser started moving a second later, but I darted into the still-open shopping mall and immediately began weaving through the people inside at full speed, heading for the escalators leading upward.

I shoved past a few of the more stubborn people who apparently thought their shopping was more urgent than my life, but one particularly oversized person was blocking the entire way up. The people chasing me had already appeared behind and were frantically scanning the area for any sign of me however, so I did the most reasonable thing I could and jumped onto the outside of the escalator.

Holding onto the railing and stepping along the narrow edge, I passed the heavier man, whose eyes went wide when he saw me jump back onto the escalator in front of him.

On the upper floor, I turned and ran along the railing overlooking the level below, then headed toward the stairwell leading out to the parking garage.

I ran inside without much hesitation and crossed the it toward one of the columns, where I quickly dropped my backpack onto the ground, took off my hoodie, bandana, and cap, and pulled a plaid shirt from the bag.

I tied the shirt around my waist by its sleeves, stuffed the things I had just taken off into the backpack, slung it over my shoulders again, and set off toward the cars at a calmer but still quick pace.

I studied their windows as I went, looking for an older model that someone might have accidentally left unlocked.

Unfortunately, I didn’t find one, and to make matters worse, the three men chasing me had just burst into the garage, shouting their threats at the top of their lungs. And because apparently things weren’t difficult enough already, I could hear a police car coming up from below.

So I calmly walked to the far end of the garage, where beyond a low wall and a short steel fence there was a street two stories below me.

I had already jumped from that height once today, but there was nothing stopping me from finding out whether the second attempt would go any better.

I quickly climbed onto the wall, squeezed past the edge of the steel fence, and stopped on the ledge for only a single breath.

Then I dropped down, twisting in the air and catching myself by my fingertips.

I swung for a moment and jumped, landing with bent knees on the ledge of the floor below. I flailed my arms to keep my balance and avoid falling backward when one foot slipped, then grabbed the metal fence with one hand and pulled myself closer.

I still had time to see the cruiser climbing higher up the ramp before I repeated the maneuver and dropped down to ground level.

As I landed, I pulled off the shirt tied around my waist, turned it inside out, and threw it over my shoulders. I quickly removed the wig as well, then stepped out onto the street looking like a completely different person.

An hour later, I was sitting in Mr. Penrose’s office, which looked partly like a gentleman’s study, with all those leather-bound books, a whiskey decanter, and a desk made of some kind of hardwood, covered with smooth red material that was pleasant to look at.

Part of the place, however, reflected the colder, more detached side of his personality. The entire warm space was surrounded by cold gray concrete, with square-based columns rising toward a high ceiling suspended about ten feet above the floor.

The columns themselves were chipped and damaged in several places, as though someone had struck them or fired high-caliber rounds into them, and all the broken debris lay scattered around their bases.

I took a seat in the worn green chair across from his desk and immediately ran my hand over the scratches I had made myself over the course of the last few years, during all the times I’d sat in front of him listening to what I was doing wrong and what I was good at.

He was the one who had found me in the orphanage when I was still a little kid and, in some way known only to him, decided that I had the talents necessary to become a good thief.

He turned to me with eyes sharp and appraising. He wore a three-piece gray suit with a burgundy tie. He was well into his sixties by now, but no one would guess it by looking at him. At most, he passed for being in his late forties. He owed that to constantly training both his body and his mind. Thanks to the guidance of him and his people, acrobatics and gymnastics had become part of my daily routine, and Penrose definitely practiced what he demanded of others.

His face was angular, weathered like the edge of an old coin, crowned with a head full of thick silver hair that matched his eyes—cool, calculating, and silver like the money he loved most in the world. He’d started wearing a beard recently too. It was immaculately trimmed, like everything else in his carefully curated life.

“…Third, it won’t cause Michelle any trouble. We’ll be delighted to arrange the meeting. Just tell me where and when…” he said into the phone, turning a coin between his fingers, letting it disappear into his palm only to deftly fish it back out with his pinky and roll it across the back of his hand.

Training my manual dexterity was the second most important thing I practiced every single day, whether with coins, playing cards, or lockpicking tools.

“No, nothing happened. See you then,” he said, and without even looking at the phone, ended the call with one finger and set the device down on his desk. “Alexander, good to see you. What do you have for me, my dear boy?” he said, pulling back his tall chair upholstered in red fabric before sitting across from me.

“I found those drug dealers Thomas mentioned during our last training session, the ones selling on your territory, and I thought I’d show some initiative,” I said, reaching into my bag for the bundle.

I grabbed it, intending to place it on his desk, but moved too quickly and accidentally knocked my sketchbook out of the bag. It hit the floor just as I handed Mr. Penrose the money.

“What’s this?” he asked, accepting the package and placing it near the edge of his desk.

His eyes were clearly fixed on what had fallen out of my bag, so I didn’t bother pretending not to understand.

“A notebook. I draw sometimes to train my hand, like you said I should. I figured it was another good way to do that… and, well… it calms me down when I’m stressed.”

“Are you stressed right now?” he asked, resting his chin on the basket formed by his interlaced fingers.

“Yes,” I answered honestly, bending down to pick up the sketchbook and handing it to Penrose. He took it with a quick motion and placed it in front of himself, opening to the first page.

“There’s no reason to be, my dear boy. The days when you got a beating for disobedience are long behind us, aren’t they?”

I nodded, but when he lifted his eyes from the page—where I had drawn the hallway leading out of the apartment I lived in, with a window overlooking the city and an enormous spiderweb stretched across it—I confirmed it aloud as well.

“Excellent technique. You’ve been hiding real talent from me. When did you start?” he asked, turning the page to a study of a hand I had been working on, trying to draw it in different positions.

“I don’t remember. I was always doodling something, even before my parents’ accident and before you took me under your wing.”

“I can’t believe this escaped my attention,” he said, continuing to flip through the pages, this time looking at sketches focused on different elements of the face—eyes, mouths, ears, whole faces, and the different expressions people made. “I see you focused on the most important aspects,” he added. Then he closed the sketchbook and put it into a drawer of his desk. “I’ll look through everything more carefully later.”

“I understand,” I replied with a nod.

Meanwhile, he reached for a letter opener and cut open the bundle of money. He picked up the bills once and let them spread into a fan, then, without counting them, placed everything back on the desk.

“I’ll think about how we can use your talents in the future. We can’t allow them to go to waste,” he said.

And I felt something inside me crack. Ever since he had entered my life, he had always been the one deciding what I should train, how I should behave, what I should learn.

Art was the only thing I did entirely for myself.

And now, on the very day I had done something using the skills he had taught me, but entirely on my own initiative, my reward was having the one thing that truly belonged to me taken away.

Volume 1, Flashback 2: Career Counseling, Penrose Style

Seven years and six months before The Event

“…if none of you have any more questions,” Penrose addressed the five men seated around the long table.

Besides the remains of the sushi he had served them for the meeting, one of his subordinates was also sprawled across it—a man who had possessed enough audacity to challenge Penrose’s authority.

Now bloodied, with his forehead split open, his nose probably broken as well, and a pair of metal chopsticks driven through one hand and pinning it to the table, he lay half on and half off the surface, unconscious.

“No, boss,” Arthur replied—Penrose’s right-hand man, and someone who devoted quite a lot of his time to training me in hand-to-hand combat, jujitsu, and all the other things that required breaking through the resistance to violence that society ingrained in people from childhood. “We know what to do.”

“Excellent,” Penrose replied, dismissing the men with a gesture.

Besides the six of them, each responsible for different operations with a fair degree of independence, five other younger men and I stood along the walls of the room. Every one of us was learning the trade, observing both how Penrose operated and how the men we served more directly conducted themselves.

“Mikeil,” Penrose addressed the one who approached his superior and began pulling the chopsticks from his hand so he could carry him out of the room. “Please leave Mr. Remoire exactly where he decided to take his little nap. I’ll still have something to discuss with him when he wakes up.”

“Yes, boss.” Mikeil nodded and stepped aside.

“Begone, all of you.” Penrose waved again, urging us toward the exit when we paused after hearing him address the man. “Everyone except Alexander,” he added, forcing me to remain in the room even though I was already one step from the door.

So I stood there and watched the rest of the men leave. When the door closed behind Thomas Torque, who was the last one out, he maintained eye contact with me until the very end. His square jaw, covered in blond stubble, was tense.

Without a word, I understood that he was wondering what exactly I had done wrong for Penrose to decide to speak with me alone, and how it might come back on him later.

I shared the sentiment, though I was thinking far more about myself than about him—my own skin was worth considerably more to me than his.

“Please, sit,” Penrose said, gesturing toward the seat Thomas had occupied moments earlier.

“Boss? Did something happen? Why did you ask me to stay?” I asked, driven by nerves, though I realized too late that it had been two questions too many.

“Alexander,” Penrose replied, drawing out my name as he leaned back in his chair, his hands resting on the armrests. “Did I not teach you that silence in a difficult situation will, sooner or later, force the other person to react?”

“Yes, that’s true,” I answered, but I didn’t lower my gaze. If an attack was coming, it was better to be aware of it than to let it catch me by surprise.

“At least your eyes are still watching me,” Penrose noticed immediately.

Then he suddenly pushed away from the table, his chair scraping across the floor. Pulling the bloodstained cloth from around his neck—the one protecting his suit—he walked toward the enormous glass window.

The cloth drifted calmly to the floor as he stopped beside the transparent wall overlooking the vast depths of the city.

“First of all, Alexander, you have nothing to worry about. As far as I know—and I know everything—you haven’t done anything that would give me reason to take action against you,” he spoke with his hands clasped behind his back, watching the traffic below. “Second, I had the genuine pleasure of attending a charity gala where they were raising money for children with leukemia or some other shit.”

He finally turned toward me, gesturing at the half-eaten sushi rolls lying in the middle of the table.

“Help yourself. If you don’t eat it, someone will eventually come in and throw it away.” He added that while looking at the man sprawled across the table. “There were, of course, plenty of influential people from our city and the surrounding area at that event, but one person in particular caught my attention.”

He stopped speaking for a moment when Remoire began muttering something, as though he were regaining consciousness.

I was just putting a good-looking piece of tuna sushi onto the plate Thomas had left behind.

“Boss?” I asked when the pause dragged on.

Penrose finally reacted. He walked over to the man, grabbed him by the hair, and lifted his head while bending down himself to check whether he was breathing, or perhaps whether his eyes were open. It was hard to tell.

When the man muttered something under his breath, Penrose straightened, then slammed the head he was holding into the table with one quick motion. Remoire lost consciousness again, and the impact caused his entire body to slide off the table, leaving only his pinned hand behind on its surface.

“Forgive the interruption. Mr. Remoire apparently still hasn’t learned when it is his turn to speak—or even to offer an opinion. Unfortunately, that is something he will have to learn before he dies.”

Penrose’s voice did not change in the slightest.

I was fully aware, however, that the end he had mentioned would probably come immediately after the lesson was complete.

“As I was saying before I was interrupted, I met a remarkably beautiful young lady there, wearing an even more splendid diamond necklace worth a considerable fortune. During the course of our conversation, I learned that, for her own amusement, she serves as the headmistress of a small school for artistically gifted young people.”

“Long con?” I asked, then immediately used the chopsticks to put another piece of sushi into my mouth. It was fucking delicious.

“I would prefer it to be more of a medium-length con, but yes—I want you to play the role of a student at that institution. Get into the woman’s good graces—and, as I have already taken the liberty of confirming, she tends to prefer younger lovers rather than older ones—and find a way to make sure that necklace ends up belonging to me, along with anything else you manage to take from her.”

“I will need to become her lover?” I asked, raising my eyebrows.

“Will that be a problem?” he asked, picking up a shrimp and slowly peeling away its shell.

“No, boss. It won’t,” I replied, swallowing.

My body had stopped belonging only to me a long time ago. My fists delivered someone else’s justice, my mouth told someone else’s lies, and my head figured out how to solve someone else’s problems. There was nothing stopping my dick from fucking for someone else’s pleasure too.

Nothing except the dignity I sometimes pretended I could still find when I stared at my own reflection.

“Good. That’s exactly what I wanted to hear. The fact is, though, that this is how I would do it—it seems like the easiest way into her estate, where she presumably keeps her little trinkets. If you find another way in, however, and don’t burn the access I’ve created for you, then, as they say, the road is yours, Alexander. Just make sure she never finds out who ordered the hit, and that she doesn’t remain in possession of what rightfully belongs to me. I probably don’t need to mention that, do I?” He addressed me while finally biting off a sizable piece of the tiger shrimp.

“That’s right, boss. I know what I’m supposed to do.”

“Excellent.” He pulled a piece of paper folded several times from his suit jacket pocket and tossed it to me, then reached for another shrimp. “Take a look.”

He gestured toward the paper, and I stopped eating to pick it up. I unfolded it slowly and began reading the page, which contained every observation about the woman Penrose had managed to gather.

What she liked and disliked. Where she often went, with whom, and for how long. What she wore, with notes on her color and fabric preferences. What kind of music made her head move to the rhythm and what made her sigh in distaste. What she liked to eat and what disgusted her.

At the bottom of the page was me—my new persona, along with instructions. I had to shave my hair down to a military-style buzz cut, wear blue contact lenses, and cover my freckles.

“Julian Porter,” I read my new name aloud.

“Yes. That is my third point. You will be the son of a soldier who has already contacted Ms. Elise Harrow,” he said, using the full name of the woman I was supposed to rob. “Displeased to discover that your tendencies and your admiration for art make him look bad in front of his friends in the military, he wants to send you to a boarding school outside the city, where you can quietly pursue your passions without embarrassing him. Love and all that shit.”

As soon as he finished speaking, he bit into the shrimp exactly as he was holding it—still completely inside its shell—crunching it to pieces with his teeth and spitting out only the parts that actually bothered him.

“When do I start?”

“The day after tomorrow. The man I hired to play your father will pick you up from your apartment Thursday morning at five sharp and drive you upstate, where both the school and the boarding house are located. By then, of course, you’ll need to prepare yourself physically, memorize the details of your history, and be ready to leave.” He added that while getting up from the table and walking toward a smaller side table.

I stood up with him, abandoning the food and waiting to see what came next.

Penrose picked up a small stack of documents from the table, checked them one by one with his other hand to make sure everything was in order, then returned to the main table and tossed the stack in front of me. I went through it.

Inside were photographs of the woman, both wearing the necklace he had mentioned earlier and without it. There were also photos of her completely naked in the company of a young man and another stack with an equally young woman, all three of them nude and in positions that no longer suggested anything but made the nature of what they were doing perfectly clear.

Besides those, I found more than a dozen pages describing my supposed situation, my history, my family, and my general background, all of which I would have to memorize by tomorrow.

“As you can see, sex may prove to be the easiest way of getting to this woman’s secrets. The young man she was fooling around with when those photographs were taken doesn’t look like he has anything over you. You have your physical advantages, nimble hands, and a handsome face, Alexander. It’s time they started earning their keep in a more sophisticated way than simply lifting money off people in the street. Don’t you think?”

“Yes, Mr. Penrose. I won’t disappoint you,” I replied, disappointing myself instead.

I really didn’t want to do any of what had just been laid out before me, except for the theft itself. The prospect of planning and executing it filled me with the only real sense of optimism and excitement I had felt since coming here. Testing my abilities under difficult conditions was something I had discovered I absolutely loved doing.

“I know,” he replied, walking over and placing a hand on my shoulder. “The man coming to pick you up will have clothes, a phone, and the rest of the equipment you’ll need, including art supplies and tools that may prove useful in less exposed places. If it turns out you’re missing anything, however, don’t hesitate to call and ask for it.” His grip tightened on my shoulder, forcing me to look into those cold, steel-colored eyes. “As soon as you bring me that necklace, I think it will be a good time for you to take a position more suited to what you deserve,” he added, shifting his gaze toward Remoire.

I answered with nothing more than a nod, but that was enough to make Penrose smile and release me.

A moment later, he began undoing the cuffs of his shirt and rolling his sleeves higher. It hardly mattered, since they were already stained with blood anyway, but perhaps he wanted to feel it against his own bare, unrestricted skin.

“That will be all, Alexander,” he said, pointing toward the door.

Then he grabbed one of the wooden chairs and slammed it against the floor several times.

As I opened the door to leave, he was in the process of wrenching one of its loosened wooden legs free, his eyes fixed the entire time on the man who was now lying almost completely on the floor.

Volume 1, Flashback 3: Weaponizing Pretentious Pricks

Seven years and five months before The Event

The Common Room of our dormitory was a fairly large space, with couches arranged along the walls and so overloaded with comfortable cushions that most of them had slid onto the floor—a surface covered with wooden planks resembling mahogany.

Only a small area directly in front of the fireplace was paved with sandstone-like tiles, as was the fireplace itself. The logs burning inside gave the room a pleasant, warm atmosphere that most of the boys at the school completely ignored, spending their time on tablets or phones.

I decided to sit in one corner of the room, where I could calmly observe every one of them, and in my large sketchbook I drew the way they had spread themselves around the room and how they were behaving now.

I intended to use every opportunity I had to develop my passion while I was here—even though Penrose had taken it away from me. My intentions weren’t entirely pure, however, because this time I planned to use the pretentiousness and self-importance of the boys studying here to get into the headmistress’s good graces.

“Are you stupid, Bobby?” A tall, skinny boy whose parents were both Broadway actors stood in front of a shorter boy warming himself by the fireplace, phone in hand, talking about how he could have any girl in our school if he actually felt like it. “With that attitude, you couldn’t even get a boyfriend!”

“Fuck off!”

“Can you guys shut up?” another boy shouted. He was wearing headphones and watching some video.

The truth was that every one of them could have been sitting in his own room, where at most one other person would have been bothering him, but they chose to come here because each of them considered himself important enough that everyone else should accommodate him. Which led to a never-ending struggle for status within the group.

While the rest of them were busy arguing, another person entered the room, wearing a hoodie with the hood pulled over her head and loose jeans. She glanced at the ongoing verbal fight, sighed while shaking her head, spotted me sitting in the corner, and walked calmly toward me.

“Julian.” Her husky voice made the hairs on the back of my neck stand up, and even though I tried to play it cool, I still looked up at her pretty face, with its full lips and large green eyes. A strand of red hair had fallen across her forehead as she looked down at me, but she caught it between her fingers and gently tucked it behind her ear.

“Sasha,” I replied, dropping my gaze back to my sketchbook, drawing another line and glancing toward the situation developing in the room. “You’re not supposed to be here. I thought we already established that.”

“I told you, the girls are boring. At least you have some testosterone over here,” she replied, sitting down on a cushion beside me, crossing her long, shapely legs, and leaning back against the wall. “Of course, it would be better if it led to something more than verbal sparring.”

“You’d rather they actually fought?”

“Wouldn’t you? Arguments like this are pathetic. It’s just pretending to be someone, pretending you can actually do something. Relying on authority that doesn’t come from your own achievements, but from whatever our parents accomplished.”

“Is that why you’re here? You picked the wrong room, then. Despite all that testosterone you mentioned, the arguments here always look exactly the same, and everyone leans on someone else’s achievements because the truth is, they don’t have any of their own and probably never will.”

“Not everyone,” she replied more quietly than before, looking at me. Her breath was warm and sent another wave of goosebumps across my skin.

“I’m telling you. Every one of them is the same, just a different shade of fucking gray.”

“Show me.” She sighed and took the sketchbook from my hands. “Same thing again. People, rooms, gestures. Why do you always focus on the same things?”

“Did I do a bad job?”

“That’s not what I said. You have an eye for noticing specific behaviors, and a hand capable of putting them onto paper. I was asking why you don’t try something more abstract. Or open yourself up to nature.”

“My father…” I was thinking about both Mr. Penrose and Mr. Torque, not the fake father created for my role. The truth, however, was soft enough to be shaped convincingly in my favor. “My father,” I repeated with a sigh, “taught me to pay attention to what people do with their hands, how their faces and posture change, what happens in the corners of rooms, how things are arranged, where everyone is standing and where they might move next…”

“He taught you to look for threats?”

“He’s military. It’s in his nature,” I replied, taking my sketchbook back from her and continuing to draw.

“You know you don’t have to focus only on that. What you create is entirely up to you,” she replied. She pressed her palms against the floor, lifted herself, and settled back down closer to me.

“Let’s ask Julian!” one of the boys shouted, drawing my attention.

A moment later, all three of them came closer, prompting Sasha to pull her hood farther over her face and move away from me. It was unnecessary. Every one of those boys was focused exclusively on himself.

That was a constant in this place, and something I had been counting on while trying for about a week now to maneuver myself into a situation exactly like this so I could take advantage of it.

“Julian,” the tall, skinny one began as he approached me.

His name was Cory. Behind him stood the shorter one—Bobby—and Timothy, whose headphones now hung around his neck. Timothy had one finger twisted into his curly hair and looked the least confident of the three, shifting from foot to foot.

“Tell me, please… buddy, don’t you think they’re acting like complete idiots? Aren’t they distracting you from… what are you even doing?” he asked, noticing that I was looking past them into the room while drawing more lines across the page.

“My assignment for Ms. Constanzza’s class tomorrow.”

“What?” Bobby asked, stepping closer, bracing one hand against the wall behind me, and glancing down at my sketch. “She’s going to fail you. It was supposed to be nature.”

“She won’t fail me. I’m so good I can draw practically whatever I want and she’ll still pass it.” With that simple, confident statement, I planted the seed of doubt, hoping it would soon sprout into an oversized beanstalk I could climb straight into the castle of my own personal giant—the headmistress. “And yes, I think every one of you is way too full of yourselves, considering there’s absolutely nothing behind it. Get out of my sight—you’re blocking the view,” I added, returning to the original subject so that the thought I had planted would come back to them later, when the darkness of night gave it more strength and allowed it to quietly rot inside their minds.

“What did you say?” Cory began, drawing out the words and immediately looking to the boys who had come over with him for support, glancing from one to the other. “Do you know who I am?”

“Hearing problems and memory loss can both be caused by realizing you have no talent,” I replied, making his anger rise another notch.

“I’ll kill you!” he shouted at me, pointing a finger and twisting his face into a snarl. “Hold me back, guys,” he told the others, bouncing lightly in place. “Hold me back, because I can’t be responsible for what I’ll do!” He repeated it when they failed to react the way he wanted and instead stepped away.

When Cory realized he had no backing, he withdrew slightly and calmed down, but he kept pointing at me and shouting.

“We’ll see who has no talent! I’ll destroy you for that insult! You’ll see who the talentless one is!”

Holding both my sketchbook and pencil in my left hand, I pushed myself up from my seat and stood.

The moment Cory saw me move, he recoiled so violently that if the boys behind him hadn’t been too startled to get out of the way, he would have landed flat on his ass. Luckily for him, he only stumbled into them.

I turned toward Sasha and held out my hand, tilting my head to show that I felt like getting out of there. Without exposing her face, she took it, and I pulled her to her feet.

With the shocked boys watching us, the two of us walked toward the hall leading out of the building.

“What was that?” she whispered, moving closer to me as we reached the exit, where the guard on duty—whose job was to make sure no girls sneaked into our dormitory—was watching something on a laptop sitting on his desk.

I wasn’t surprised by how lax he was about it. Aside from Sasha, who made an effort to dress as inconspicuously as possible, no other girl wanted to set so much as a little toe inside this place.

So we walked right past him as if nothing were out of the ordinary and stepped outside into the warm early-autumn air.

“It’s just an example of how little the boys here differ from the girls, Sasha. Your hopes of seeing a fistfight are going to come to nothing,” I finally replied, heading away from the courtyard connecting the two dormitories, where several girls were walking around taking pictures of themselves and talking, and in the opposite direction from the school.

Behind the trees separating us from the fence surrounding the entire estate, there was an old abandoned building attached to the stone wall, its windows and doors boarded up.

“That’s not true. I saw that you had control of the situation. Cory was practically shaking with anger, but he was too scared to make any move toward you,” she replied, lowering her hood once we reached the worn path between the trees.

The wind caught her hair immediately and threw it across her face. She gathered it in both hands, swept it back, held it together in one fist, then pulled a green hair tie with a plant pattern from her pocket and slowly tied the unruly strands into a high ponytail.

“Are we going to those ruins? Or do you have some indecent thoughts involving me?” she added, making me visibly flustered, a faint blush rising to my face as my eyebrows lifted.

“No… it’s not like that…” I began, scratching the side of my neck. “I come here from time to time when I want to be alone.”

“So you want me to get lost?” she replied, stopping, drawing her brows together, and pouting.

“No, Sasha. I like you… probably more than anyone else in this whole place. I thought you wouldn’t mind seeing it with me.”

My answer clearly brightened her mood.

“Are you kidding? Of course!”

We walked a little farther, both of us staring at the yellowing and reddening leaves of the trees, slowly drifting down here and there onto the forest floor, while rays of sunlight broke through the still-dense branches, giving the whole place an almost magical look.

When we reached the old two-story building, its white paint peeling away and its windows boarded up, it looked out of place in what was otherwise a completely natural setting. And yet, in some way, it was clean and untouched. Despite the damage caused by time, there was no trash lying around, no loose boards torn away—only plants that had decided to reclaim it as their own. Grass grew from the cracks between the broken concrete slabs leading up to the building. Moss covered the walls, making them look more green than white, and vines poked out here and there from between the boards.

“Why did you humiliate him?” Sasha stopped walking. “Was it because of me? Were you trying to show off in front of me? I was thinking about it the whole way here, and it doesn’t seem like you.” She tapped her finger against her lower lip, and when she finished, she stopped and looked at me with her eyes wide open.

“I wanted him to realize that he’s at a school for the talented, and that maybe he should try once in a while. It irritates me that they spend so much time on pointless arguments instead of focusing on their work,” I answered, partly telling the truth about what I thought of those people, but hiding my real purpose. I was hoping to turn one of their pretension and self-importance against them, and that one of them would also try to paint something that didn’t fit the assignment.

“I get it,” she nodded, then turned her eyes to the building. “How do we get in there?”

“Come on, I’ll show you,” I said, and grabbing her by the wrist, I pulled her toward one of the side walls of the building, where a long plank leaned against the wall, leading up toward a window whose boards were loose enough to push inward and make an opening big enough to climb through.

I let go of her and quickly demonstrated how I climbed, gripping the plank with both hands and jumping the last bit to catch the outside windowsill, then pulling myself up, shoving the loose boards inward with my head, and slipping into the room.

Inside there was only a ruined white floor, once-white walls partly stripped bare by the claws of time, and a cracked ceiling from which water still dripped. The only door leading outside was blocked from the other side by something very heavy, something I had never managed to loosen or move despite my many attempts.

I grabbed the rope I’d managed to steal a few days earlier from the supply closet of the groundskeepers and bring here. I tied it around my waist and walked over to the window, intending to toss the other end down to Sasha, when she suddenly burst through the loosened boards, repeating the maneuver I had used earlier and crashing into me with full force.

I landed flat on my back with her sprawled across my chest, grinning from ear to ear.

“You thought I couldn’t jump that far?” she asked in a breathy voice that made the hair on my neck go erect along with something else much farther down my body. Then she rolled off me and got to her feet.

The moment she stood inside, she started looking around with her mouth slightly open, while I sat, waiting for the emergency to pass.

“This is an awesome spot. You’ve got so much wall space—you could paint them a little.”

“With what?”

“What do you mean, with what? Haven’t you heard of graffiti?”

“Of course I’ve heard of it,” I answered, scratching the back of my neck again. “But I’ve never done it.”

“No problem, I’ve got a few cans with me, back in my room. Next time we’ll bring them here and I’ll show you what to do with them.” She finished spinning around and stopped, her gaze landing on me, finally standing up with a rope dangling between my legs. “Unless there won’t be a next time? You’ve got that cord or something, and we’re out in the middle of nowhere, locked inside an abandoned building… did I make a mistake coming here with you?”

“I don’t know,” I answered. “Earlier you mentioned indecent thoughts. Maybe I’m reading the signals you’re sending me wrong, but would you want me to have them?” I asked directly.

“Julian, this isn’t exactly a romantic place to be asking questions like that,” she replied, walking back over to the window. “I don’t feel safe with my answer.”

“So, that’s a no,” I said, stepping back to give her room and create some space where she wouldn’t feel cornered.

“That’s not what I said,” she looked at me. “There’s something about you that I like, but I don’t think that it’s enough to risk whatever might happen here.”

“In that case, nothing will happen,” I said, pulling out the sketchbook I’d been carrying folded inside a deep pocket and holding it out in front of me together with a pencil. “Will you help me design that graffiti?” I asked.

Volume 1, Flashback 4: Nature Is Apparently Open to Interpretation

Seven years and five months before The Event

Ms. Constanzza’s class took place in a fairly large room where, in addition to a desk and seat, each of us had access to painting tools stored inside it and a canvas on an easel. This time, however, every one of us handed in the assignment we had prepared beforehand as we entered. The subject had been how we saw nature.

I gave her the painting I had made based on the sketch I’d prepared earlier, depicting the boys arguing in the common room. I expected her to fail me, but I was hoping she would notice the way I had shown the wildness of the heart, born from human nature, creeping into a space completely separated from nature in the literal sense. And in that sense her failing me, would be in truth her failing to see the truth.

Whether that actually happened didn’t matter all that much to me. What my mind was focused on, and what I was waiting for, was now also in other people’s hands, but not only theirs.

After taking my seat, I looked around the room, where the other students waited intently for the verdict. My gaze settled in turn on Bobby, Cory, and Timothy, hoping that at least one of them had decided to test whether straying from the assignment would earn criticism or praise. And yet, despite everything I had been taught about controlling my emotions, my eyes kept searching until they found Sasha Vale sitting diagonally across the room, a few desks away from me.

This time she was wearing a light summer dress with a small coat over it, and the outfit left very little to the imagination, fully showing off the advantages of her figure.

Yesterday, we had spent two hours in the sanctuary I had shared with her, and despite my completely failed attempt at flirting, I thought we’d had a good time. Afterward, I had walked her back to the entrance of the girls’ dormitory, and the graffiti design we had created together had actually turned out pretty damn good.

Today, however, she hadn’t spoken to me even once. And it was occupying far too much of my attention.

Ms. Constanzza started with straightforward works that approached the subject in the most basic way. Flowers. Grass bent beneath the pressure of the wind. A river winding through a mountain stream. A wall of rain churning the surface of the water.

She analyzed each of those works, pointing out mistakes in technique, approach, or perspective, but not once did she criticize the shallow interpretation of the essence of the assignment. Quite the opposite. When it came to that aspect, she seemed to have nothing but praise.

And finally, she reached a piece that made her eyes widen, along with her mouth, which whispered some kind of curse.

“Cory?” she asked lightly, getting up from her desk as she had with every other assignment. She turned his work around and hung it on the board with four magnets—one in each corner. “I hope you understand that I can’t give you a passing grade for this?”

She pointed toward the painting, which showed Cory himself lying on a bed and covered with something resembling an animal skin.

His musculature was heavily exaggerated and enlarged, but thankfully, he had shown enough restraint not to paint anything below the waist.

All the girls giggled except Sasha, who turned her gaze away and lowered it toward her desk.

“Why?!” Cory practically jumped out of his seat, slamming a hand against the desk. “The proportions are perfect, the lighting is fantastic, the linework is outstanding, not to mention the colors. Everything you were praising in Caroline’s work just a moment ago is here in mine too, except mine is actually done well. What’s wrong with it?”

He was so worked up that droplets of spit flew from his mouth onto Bobby, who was sitting in front of him. Bobby grimaced and began wiping it from his neck while shifting slightly to the side.

“Cory. What was the assignment?” Ms. Constanzza asked, standing there with one foot tapping against the floor and her arms crossed over her chest.

Her long pencil skirt, sweater over a collared shirt, and slender frame, combined with the posture she had taken, made her look like an exclamation point waiting to explode.

“Well… something about nature…. Oh! How we see nature,” Cory muttered under his breath.

“And this is how you see nature? Your own body covered with a cowhide? What exactly is that supposed to symbolize, Cory?” she began, spreading her hands, but quickly brought them back together and waved one finger through the air in a dismissive gesture. “No, actually, I’m sorry. I don’t want to know, Cory—your work is completely off-topic. Sit down, unless you have something else to add.”

“No,” he said through clenched teeth and sat down, glancing over his shoulder at me only once.

I gave him a mocking, patronizing smile, which made him boil even harder, but unfortunately those feelings still didn’t spill over. Something more was needed to push the situation further.

“Maybe next time someone will appreciate your imagination,” I whispered just loudly enough for him to hear.

“Or maybe yours?” he replied at full volume, turning toward me.

“Excuse me?” the teacher said as she was returning to her desk for the next assignment.

“Julian Porter seems to think my work isn’t good enough, ma’am. Funny, I know. Maybe we could see his work, since he’s so clever?”

“We’ll get to Julian’s work in due time.”

“No! Please, ma’am. I need to know what he painted.”

I watched Constanzza glance between me and Cory, who was getting more worked up by the second, and in an effort to defuse the situation, she began going through one assignment after another until she apparently found mine.

“Fine. We’ll make an exception this time,” she replied, standing and hanging my work on the board in the same way she had his.

Whispers immediately rose and spread through the room.

“Quiet, please,” Constanzza said, looking at my piece. “A very interesting approach, Julian. Definitely the most unusual of everything we’ve seen so far.”

She studied the painting, which did indeed depict our common room with the boys arguing inside it, but the colors I had used and the way I had layered them over the dark outlines of the figures and the room created the impression of looking at a mountain landscape, with trees across the lower portion and a stormy sky above, lightning striking directly at the point where the argument was taking place.

“Maybe next time your parents can get you into modeling school,” I whispered to Cory while the teacher discussed my style and what she liked about it.

And that was the match that finally ignited the fire of jealousy already burning inside him.

Cory shot out of his seat like he’d been burned and came at me swinging.

At first, I went down to the floor and let him attack, protecting my face and blocking his punches with my forearms bent at the elbows.

But once I heard the teacher shouting at him to stop, I made one quick move after a block and drove my elbow straight into the center of Cory’s nose, knocking him off me.

“Get up! Both of you! You are to report to the headmistress’s office immediately! This kind of behavior is unbecoming of students attending our distinguished institution!” Constanzza shouted, standing over us and wagging a finger.

I shoved Cory off me, watching as he crawled away dazed, clutching his nose, and glanced only briefly toward Sasha, who finally smiled at me.

This time, I didn’t return it. Instead, I got to my feet and, bowing slightly to the teacher, apologized.

“A security guard will come for you in a moment and escort you there,” she added. “I am deeply disappointed by this behavior.”

I spent roughly the next half hour waiting outside the headmistress’s office, rubbing my shoulders and waiting for my turn to speak with her.

The reception area was decorated as though we were inside a modern art gallery. Steel mixed with bare, pale walls and glass, while the walls themselves were covered with examples of modern art—nothing that could be clearly tied to any specific concept in reality.

Just mixtures of shapes, colors, and lines that were supposed to reveal their true nature only once someone really studied the piece. I thought there might be something artistic in that, but personally, I preferred art that revealed at least one familiar face at first glance and then showed you its second self once you looked deeper. When the first impression showed nothing but chaos, it didn’t speak to me at all.

My thoughts, focused on the artwork, were interrupted by the movement of the door opening. Cory stepped out first, followed a moment later by a beautiful thirty-nine-year-old woman with golden-blond hair pinned into a bun and lips that had clearly been artificially enhanced.

Her cheekbones stood out slightly, and her blue eyes were observant yet warm. She had a shapely figure emphasized by a tight cream-and-black dress that clung closely to her body. Had it not been somewhat forced upon me, I probably wouldn’t have minded ending up in bed with her—my body’s reaction made it perfectly clear that the idea would bring me undeniable pleasure.

For a moment, as she let the other boy leave, she fixed her gaze on me and lightly bit her lower lip.

“Julian Porter?” she asked in a voice slightly too high-pitched to match her appearance.

I nodded without smiling, stood, and walked over to her.

“That’s me, Headmistress,” I replied, looking directly into her eyes and maintaining eye contact until she finally turned and gestured for me to come inside.

Her office was decorated in a style similar to the reception area, but instead of artwork, photographs of her were everywhere.

I noticed that in the pictures where she appeared in more official, formal settings, she wore her hair down, while in more private photographs, as well as at school, she kept it tied up. That struck me as somewhat strange.

After she indicated the chair in front of her desk, I sat down, while she slowly walked around to the other side at the limited pace allowed by the dress constricting her legs, then took her seat across from me.

“I’ll get straight to the point. I received a report about the incident and spoke with the boy who started it. Is it true that you verbally provoked him?” she asked, leaning closer, presumably to draw more attention to her cleavage.

If she was already trying to charm me, then the information Penrose had given me—how to behave, what color shirt to wear, which cologne to use, what hairstyle and posture to adopt—was all actually beginning to work.

“That’s true, Headmistress.”

Hearing my answer, she raised her eyebrows.

“You realize there’s no way to confirm that?”

“I’m confirming it. I have no intention of hiding it. I think Cory is a mediocre artist and doesn’t deserve to be here.”

“I like your honesty, but in that case you will have to be punished,” she replied, placing the tip of her index finger against her lips before shuffling through some papers on her desk.

“I understand. I’ll accept any punishment that doesn’t involve making me stop painting.”

“Admirable dedication. I can see I’ll have to familiarize myself with your work, young man.”

“Good to hear,” I replied as coolly as I could, even though her gestures and appearance were having a very stimulating effect on me. “What will my punishment be?”

“We have zero tolerance for physical violence, so the student who carried out the attack will be expelled from the school. Your case is different, however, so you will receive one week of detention.”

“So during that time I won’t be allowed to attend classes. Is that right?”

“Yes. Since you did show a certain degree of civic courage, however, I will personally prepare some extracurricular activities for you that might interest you. What do you think? Would you like to take part in something like that?” she asked, leaning back slightly while maintaining eye contact with me the entire time.

“If they’re related to art, absolutely. I don’t want to waste my time.”

“Excellent,” she added, clasping her hands together and looking me over once more from head to toe. “Report to my office tomorrow at eight o’clock. That will be all for today.”

“Yes, Headmistress,” I replied with a nod in her direction.

Volume 1, Flashback 5: A Practical Lesson in Being Impractical

Seven years and four months before The Event

Leaning with my back against a tree, I was painting her portrait from memory when she finally appeared in my field of view.

Sasha walked with a spring in her step, dressed in cargo pants and a long hoodie, carrying a backpack. She wasn’t looking around in any obvious way, probably so she wouldn’t draw attention to herself. As students of the school, we were allowed to move freely across the entire grounds, but leaving the dormitory around dusk could still be seen as suspicious behavior.

“Hey!” she shouted when she got closer, waving at me and smiling broadly.

I liked her smile, because whenever I saw it, I forgot why I had come here and was left with only her.

“Hey, Sash,” I replied, glancing at my watch after closing the sketchbook and putting it into my own backpack. “Fashionably late?”

“I was waiting for the guard at my dorm to stop staring at the wall by the exit, which apparently wasn’t written in the stars today,” she replied, holding out her hand to me.

I took it, and she helped me to my feet before we started toward the abandoned house.

“So I had to give fate a little help and convinced a few girls to go running.”

“Running? You were supposed to meet me, and you went jogging?”

“Do you see me running anywhere? I convinced them to go and then backed out. But when they left the dorm dressed… in workout clothes, the guard’s eyes followed them, and I was able to slip out unnoticed.” She told the story grinning as though she had just outsmarted the devil himself.

“Good thinking,” I replied, bumping my shoulder lightly against her arm, then immediately gritting my teeth when I wondered if I might have hurt her.

She took it without complaint, though, and even turned toward me and nodded.

“My thinking is always at least good, Julian.” She walked in silence for a moment after that, lost in thought. “You’ve been gone a lot in the afternoons lately.”

“Yeah,” I replied, stretching the word as far as I could and adding a sigh so she would know I would rather be doing something else. “Not a lot, but yeah. After the headmistress punished me last month for getting involved in that fight and made me help her choose pieces for an exhibition for a week, I apparently caught her attention so much that now, from time to time, she takes me to her estate so I can help her decorate it.”

Sasha gave me a suspicious look.

“It’s nothing special. Usually she sits me down in her ballroom, because yes—she has a ballroom, because why wouldn’t she, right?”

“I wouldn’t, even with that kind of money. Balls aren’t really my thing,” she replied, lifting her nose slightly. Maybe it was jealousy, but with her it was hard to tell.

“Right. Anyway, I sit there and go through catalogs full of different pieces, choose what I think would work best in her house, and then, under the supervision of her staff, I walk around and point out where I think each one should go. So far—and I’ve already been there five times—she’s followed exactly one of my suggestions, so I’m not entirely sure what the point of any of it is,” I said that even though I knew perfectly well.

On NovelPhoenix, this chapter is published by its author. The text here was taken without their permission.

Elise Harrow was grooming me, making sure that in the future it would be easier for her to hold power over me.

“Just be careful, please.”

“What do you mean?”

“She’s a woman, and people generally don’t suspect us of things like that, so it’s easier for us to stay in the shadows while doing things we shouldn’t.”

“You mean something predatory?” I asked, wanting to find out what she knew about that subject.

“I mean you should be sensible, that’s all. Boys and their hormones…”

“What’s that supposed to mean? You think that if she made a move on me, I’d just throw myself at her?”

“I think it’s better not to fly too close to the sun if you don’t want to burn your wings,” she replied as we reached the plank leading up to my white room. This time, she climbed first, and I found myself watching the way she moved as she made her way up.

“You’re absolutely right. I’ll be careful,” I replied, following right behind her.

The moment I came through the window, I rolled forward and quickly got to my feet.

Sasha was standing directly in front of me, her backpack dropped onto the floor, her eyes fixed on mine.

The light of the setting sun streamed through holes in the ceiling and fell across her vivid green irises, making them shimmer like stars submerged in jade. Her lips parted slightly, and I felt her warm breath against my face.

I was just raising a hand toward my mouth when Sasha suddenly stepped closer, took my cheeks in her hands, tilted her head to the side, and pressed her lips to mine.

Caught completely off guard, I stood there like an idiot for a moment while she kissed me, her tongue searching for mine. Undeterred by my lack of response, she gave my lip a light bite, and the shiver that ran through me was the spark I needed to finally kiss her back.

I placed one hand against the middle of her back and pulled her closer.

We stayed like that for several heartbeats before she finally pulled away, looked closely at my face with trembling lips, then rested her head against my shoulder and leaned into me.

“That was nice,” she whispered.

“I wasn’t expecting that after the way our last conversation about this went in here.”

“Don’t imagine anything more is going to happen,” she replied, still pressed against me as though she didn’t want to pull away. “Not yet. Maybe never. Maybe someday. But not now.”

“I understand. Why did you do it?” I asked, and she finally pulled away from me, taking my hand and moving it away from her.

“I felt like it,” she replied, crouching beside her backpack and opening it. “I usually try to take what I want when the opportunity presents itself.”

She dumped most of the contents onto the floor. Along with the rolling cans, candles of various sizes scattered across the floor. She set the spray cans away with a swipe of a hand and started gathering the candles up.

“What if I hadn’t wanted to?” I asked without thinking, crouching beside her and helping clean up, setting the cans upright and collecting the candles as well.

“That would’ve been pretty awkward, wouldn’t it?” She gave me a roguish smile and began arranging the candles across the floor a bit closer to the wall opposite the window, lighting them one by one so they would cast some light into the room.

“I don’t know why I asked that. Maybe my brain wasn’t getting enough oxygen, huh?” I joked, but she gave me a patronizing look.

“Come on. I’ll show you how it’s done.”

In the light of the dancing candle flames, she picked up the spray can and drew the first line across the wall, painting something resembling a horizon. The line came out surprisingly even. The black paint stood out against the white wall in a broad stripe with slightly ragged edges, and Sasha finished the motion before stopping her hand completely. I quickly realized that this kept a darker blotch from forming at the end.

“First rule,” she said, shaking the can. The metal ball inside rattled so quickly that the sound blended into a single continuous clatter. “Don’t treat it like a pencil, or even a brush. Those touch the paper or canvas directly. Here, between you and the wall, there’s air, pressure, and paint that has a mind of its own.”

I turned the can over and read the warnings printed in tiny letters on the back.

“You do realize our lighting involves open flames?” I asked, smiling at her.

Sasha froze for half a second, then looked at the candles.

“Okay. Point for you.”

She blew them out one by one, leaving us with only the remnants of daylight coming through the holes in the ceiling. Then she pulled a small flashlight from her backpack and placed it on the floor, angled toward the wall.

“I was trying to set the mood, not blow us up. If you start feeling dizzy or your throat starts burning more than it should, we take a break.”

“Romantic,” I muttered, teasing her a little.

“The kiss was romantic. The candles were supposed to be… Never mind. I was complaining about hormones, and apparently mine are playing tricks on me too, huh? This is a lesson and apparently for both of us. Focus, Julian.”

“I am focused, but maybe you need to relieve a little more tension?” I folded my arms across my chest, enjoying the opportunity to turn the question back on her.

She stepped closer to the wall, ignoring my comment with a sigh, and pointed at the line.

“Distance changes everything. Close to the wall, you get a narrower, sharper line, but you have less time before you put down too much paint and it starts to drip. Farther away, you get a wider, softer cloud and more overspray. The speed of your hand matters too. Too slow—it drips. Too fast—the wall shows through. And if you change the distance halfway through the motion, the line gets thicker and thinner even if you’re using the same cap.”

“Cap?”

She smiled as though she had been waiting for that question. From a side pocket of her backpack, she pulled out a small plastic bag filled with colorful nozzles.

“Tip. Nozzle. Cap. Different openings give you different flow rates and different spray patterns. A skinny cap is for thinner lines and details, a fat cap is for filling larger areas. There are ones in between too. But even the best cap won’t do you any good if you don’t know how to control the can.”

She removed the nozzle from her own can, snapped on a different one, and made three short lines beside the first.

The first was thin and relatively sharp. For the second, she pulled her hand farther back, and the same motion left a wider, softer mark. She deliberately made the third one too slowly. After a few seconds, a drop formed at the bottom and began to run.

“That part I could probably manage without any training,” I observed.

“I believe in you. Now try a straight line.”

I stood in front of the wall, held the can maybe four inches from the plaster, and pressed the nozzle. A dot appeared first, then I started moving my hand.

“Stop.”

I released the cap at her comment.

“Already wrong?”

“Already. Start moving first, then give it paint. And release the cap a little before the end of the motion. Otherwise every beginning and ending will have a lump. Lead with your arm, not just your wrist. For a longer line, your elbow and shoulder should maintain the speed. Save your wrist for small corrections.”

I tried again, deeply excited both by what had happened earlier and by the advice she was giving me. This time, I started moving my hand before pressing the nozzle and released it before finishing the motion. The line still wasn’t perfect, but it was definitely better.

“Now one more. Don’t look at the nozzle. Look where you want to finish.”

I knew that rule. Penrose and Torque had drilled it into me countless times during different physical exercises. When jumping, you didn’t look at your feet, but at where you wanted to land. When throwing a knife, you didn’t watch your hand, but the target.

That unwanted thought immediately spoiled some of my enjoyment. Sasha must have noticed something, because she stopped looking at my line and looked at me instead.

“What?”

“Nothing.”

“You lie better at school.”

“That’s not very flattering. And what exactly is that supposed to mean?” I asked, irritated and scared that she had seen through my persona.

“It wasn’t meant to be. I know that at school you act like the same overconfident asshole as every other boy… and girl, if I’m being honest. But unlike most of them, you actually care about being here and learning something.” She held my gaze for a moment, then waved one hand. “Come on. I’ll show you stencils too.”

She pulled out a piece of thin cardboard with several lines cut into it, forming a symbol shaped like a fox’s head. Narrow bridges had been left inside a few of the shapes, connecting otherwise separated sections of the material.

“If you want to repeat the same symbol or need a really clean edge, you make a stencil. You can use cardboard, plastic, thin film. Anything that holds its shape works. You just have to remember the bridges, because the middle of an O or an A isn’t going to float in midair,” she added, but stopped explaining when she saw the look on my face. “Okay, you get it. Sorry. You press the stencil against the wall, keep the can more perpendicular, and use several light passes instead of flooding the whole thing at once. If you put down too much paint, it bleeds under the edge and all that precision goes to shit.”

She held the stencil against the wall to demonstrate, but after a moment lowered her hand.

“You’re not going to use it?”

“I could. But why?” She put the cardboard away. “A stencil gives you repeatability. In exchange, it takes away some of my freedom. If I start freehand and halfway through decide the line should go higher, I can take it higher. I can change the proportions, add a flare, a shadow, widen the outline, use a crack in the wall. A stencil tells me in advance where I have to end up. I don’t like doing what I’m told by nature… I’m definitely not going to start creating my own restrictions too, right?”

She said the last part with a smile, but despite how lightly she delivered it, the words stayed with me for the rest of the evening, weighing on my mind.

Sasha returned to her horizon. She brought the can closer for sharper edges, pulled it farther away for shading, and when filling a larger area, she moved in parallel passes with a slight overlap between them. She didn’t try to achieve full coverage in a single pass, but instead built it up in layers.

“Your turn. Paint something.”

“What? The thing we designed earlier?”

“No, first just whatever comes to mind. It’s practice.”

I looked at the wall.

“You don’t know what to paint?”

“I could do a hand study.”

“You do that all the time.”

“A face.”

“All the time too.” She looked at me with what seemed like either embarrassment or disappointment. “Julian, what you paint doesn’t have to serve some function. Hands train precision. Faces help you remember people. You paint rooms like you’re always wondering where something waiting to get you is hiding. Don’t treat art like a tool.”

I didn’t answer, because she was right, which was exceptionally irritating.

“Paint something useless. Something you want only because you’d like to see what it looks like, when it is freed from the prison of your own mind.”

For a moment I just stood there. The first thing that came to me was a hand. The second, a face. The third, a window. The fourth, the arrangement of rafters above us that might come in handy for climbing. Everything had a purpose.

At last I looked at Sasha’s black line dividing the white wall in half. I placed my can a little above it and started drawing upward—first straight lines converging at a single point to suggest perspective, but then I began connecting them to each other until they started to resemble a spiderweb.

I let my mind, unprompted by any conscious thought, guide my hand, and in that way I created something entirely new.

Sasha just watched as I reached for blue and began sketching a sky that partly covered the web, then white, and clouds. Then a spider emerging from behind them, wearing a mask that only faintly resembled a human face—just two black eyes on white porcelain. But it still didn’t feel quite right to me, so I started coloring one of the eyes, changing the colors one after another until the iris looked like a rainbow.

I stepped back. I wasn’t practicing perspective. I wasn’t trying to memorize any place. I wasn’t creating an escape plan or a tool for deception. The image wasn’t going to bring me money, praise, or an advantage over anyone. It was completely, wonderfully useless.

“Well?” Sasha waited, watching my face for an answer.

I stared at the wall much longer than I needed to.

“I want that spider rising from behind the clouds to look like a flaming sun,” I said, reaching for orange and red.

“Then add it.” Sasha’s smile returned immediately, and it drew the same response from my focused face.

For the first time in a very long while, I wasn’t thinking about what use I could make of what I was learning. I just wanted to see that damn spider, shining with sunlight, in my sky crisscrossed with webs.

Volume 1, Flashback 6: Leaving Evidence on Purpose

Seven years and three months before The Event

As I walked toward my refuge, I thought about the previous afternoon I had spent at Elise’s estate.

For the first time since she had begun inviting me over, she had left me completely alone and unsupervised, allowing me to wander through almost the entire building except for a few rooms—her bedroom, two others reserved for guests, the main bathroom, and the basement.

So I walked around and studied both the hallways, paying attention to the placement of the cameras, and the individual rooms she never used, decorated only so they could serve as parts of the larger artistic installation that was her home.

She had a music room with a grand piano, a small stage, and numerous instruments hanging from wall mounts, each separated from the others like trophies in a hunter’s collection.

She had a game room with a pool table, dimmed windows covered by thick curtains, and for some reason a faint haze of smoke that always seemed to hang in the air. Everything in there was covered either in cheap leather or other second-rate materials.

She had several rooms like that, each existing only to give the eye something to rest on rather than to actually be used.

The ballroom was the center of the entire house—spacious and enormous, with a chandelier made from so many individual pieces that it was difficult to count them, and staircases curving away in both directions toward balconies that surrounded the entire floor below.

Most of that hall, which opened directly from the main entrance of the house, remained completely empty and only filled up during the parties she hosted, with both people and the paintings and sculptures she displayed in spaces prepared for them beside the columns supporting the first-floor balustrade.

The cameras appeared only occasionally, usually in the corners of rooms and hallways, positioned so they could cover as much space as possible.

Interestingly, there were none in the corridor leading to her bedroom, and I assumed I wouldn’t have found any inside the bedroom either. Presumably, she didn’t want anyone recording her excesses, which made the material Penrose had obtained very interesting.

During the first few times she brought me there, I had managed to memorize the arrangement of the windows across the exterior of the building, and because of that I was certain that, unlike the two guest bedrooms, her own room connected to two additional spaces.

I had worked that out from both the placement of the doors in the hallway and what I had seen from outside.

One of those rooms could have been her private bathroom, the other perhaps a dressing room, but either one could also have been where she kept her valuables—and I was almost one hundred percent certain she kept them close to herself.

Once I reached my safe haven, I quickly climbed inside to look over the work Sasha and I had left there over the past two weeks.

I slowly illuminated one part of the room after another with the flashlight I pulled from my backpack.

My burning spider lurked among the clouds above the black horizon line, which now ran unevenly around the entire room, separating the lower half from the upper. According to the design we had come up with on the first night we’d spent here, the lower portion was supposed to remain untouched by our hands, symbolizing how our art lifted us above what was human and mundane.

On her wall, Sasha had begun painting a fantastical forest where a red fox the size of a large tree had wrapped herself in her enormous tail and watched with curiosity as a man tried to intrude upon her domain.

For the time being, I had left my spider alone and started drawing characters reminiscent of my favorite looney-tunes cartoons, cheating the laws of physics with their own paintings. Rabbits dropping horseshoes onto wolves. Fake holes painted onto mountain walls for charging coyotes to smash their heads into.

“I’m here!” Sasha called from below, somehow trying to make herself loud enough for me to hear without letting anyone else hear her. The thought of her as a whispered shout amused me. It suited her perfectly. “You here already?” Another whisper in that husky voice made the hairs on my arm stand up.

I didn’t make her wait any longer. Pushing aside the boards blocking the window, I took the rope and jumped down first onto the plank serving as our improvised ladder, then pushed off from it and landed on the ground.

“Excited?” she asked when she saw me, sweeping the beam of her flashlight from my feet upward until she briefly blinded me, laughing under her breath.

I instinctively swatted at the air as though I could shove the light away with my hand.

She switched her flashlight off anyway, leaving only mine, pointed toward the ground, to give us any light on that cold, moonless autumn night.

“I still don’t understand why you’re so determined to paint somewhere outside, but yes, I’m always excited to see you.” That worried me a little too. Over the past few weeks we had spent together, I had grown attached to her, and I was beginning to wonder how I would deal with those feelings once I was forced to leave the school.

“Julian,” she drew out my name with a sigh. “Graffiti is defiance. It’s rebellion! Painting in a hidden room is fun, but doing it somewhere you might actually get caught and punished is part of the spirit of the whole thing,” she spoke as she walked toward the wall separating the school grounds from the suburbs beyond.

The house where our shared oasis of peace was taking shape had one wall built directly against that barrier, so I grabbed the plank we used as a ladder and leaned it against the outer wall.

“Me first,” Sasha said.

She climbed the plank, gripping it with both hands and sticking her shapely ass out toward me. It was becoming increasingly difficult not to think about her when I lay alone in bed at night. It wasn’t just her mind and passion that attracted me—her body appealed just as strongly to my male instincts.

I watched as she climbed onto the top of the fence, where she straightened on the narrow ledge and moved sideways along it with no trouble, catlike, before turning and crouching to wait for me.

I repeated her maneuver, grabbing the metal bars set into the top of the masonry, their spikes intended to discourage us from climbing out. I placed my feet on the same narrow ledge she had crossed and, crouching down, began tying the rope around one of the bars, arranging the free end so the coil rested on the outside of the metal barrier.

Once I was ready, I nodded to her, switched off my flashlight, put it into my backpack, and the two of us squeezed between the spikes to the other side.

Holding onto the ledge, we dropped down onto the street below, which was empty of both pedestrians and passing cars.

Immediately urged on by her movements, I broke into a light, steady run, trying to put as much distance as possible between us and the walls separating the street from the school.

There was a small park on the other side of the road, which we crossed quickly, jumping over some bum lying asleep on the ground along the way.

Then we emerged from the far side and stopped beside the last row of trees to take a look around.

“There. We’re going to paint there.” Sasha pointed toward a building with police cruisers parked outside.

“Isn’t that a police station?”

“Let’s hope so,” she replied, smiling at me.

She grabbed my cheeks and pulled me in for a kiss. A moment later, she pushed me gently away and stepped out from behind our hiding place at an even pace. Despite my brief surprise, I quickly followed her.

“Scared?” she asked without turning toward me.

“No. But I think it’s an unnecessary risk.”

“No risk, no fun. Don’t worry. Like they say, ‘the best place to hide is right under your nose’.”

She kept her eyes on the building. Lights glowed behind the windows, but no one stood near the entrance or by any of the cars parked outside.

“Look.” She nodded toward cameras mounted on nearby poles as we crossed the street. “There are cameras here, but in the dark no one will recognize us.” Both of us wore dark clothes without any logos, baseball caps, and hoods pulled over them. Neither of us looked upward either, keeping our faces hidden. “They’ve got a camera right above the entrance, but there’s an alley on the left side that leads farther back. They probably have some kind of storage area or something back there. We go in, turn on our flashlights, and quickly paint whatever the hell we feel like on the station wall. If we finish without anyone interfering, we leave our tags on the front wall too and get the hell out of there.”

“And if they spot us earlier, we run immediately,” I finished for her.

What we were planning to do was stupid, but it was exciting too. Because of her, I felt that the art Penrose had taken from me by treating it as just another thing he could use could also work in the opposite direction.

I could take every skill he had taught me—avoiding cameras and watchful eyes, observing my surroundings, creating escape routes, and actually escaping if it came to that—and use them to do something no self-respecting thief should ever do. I could leave proof that I had been there. Sign my own work.

“I like it.”

“Good,” she replied as we approached the steps leading up to the station doors. “In that case, a small change of plans.”

That made my eyebrows shoot up.

“We’re going up there like we’re about to walk inside, and as soon as we get there, we paint directly on the doors.”

“Alright,” I answered, breathing out. There was no point arguing, because I knew she’d do exactly what she said. That girl was an adrenaline junkie, and I liked that about her too.

A moment later, we reached the doors. Through the glass, we could see several men moving around inside. One was walking along with a cup of coffee, his beer belly sticking way out in front of him. Another, a little better built, yawned as he carried a stack of files. A third leaned back in his chair at his desk, phone in one hand, tossing a baseball into the air and catching it over and over.

Right there on the steps, we crouched down, dropped our backpacks, grabbed our spray cans, and shook them a few times to wake the sleeping spirits of discord inside. Then we pressed the caps and started painting the front doors.

She went straight into making her tag—a big word in bold, thick letters arranged like a sleeping fox in the woods. Using orange and green, she painted her artistic name: Foxy.

I started differently, with reds, oranges, and yellows, painting flames spreading outward from a single point in every direction, like a web woven from fire.

“You’re giving them hell?” Sasha whispered, and I nodded as I kept going. “Did you decide what your tag’s going to be?” she asked, adding fox eyes into the letter y, which was shaped like the animal’s snout.

“Yes,” I answered.

Then, in bold letters shifting from dark purple through blue into green so the whole thing would stand out against the flames underneath, I wrote the name I had chosen for myself: Appolonsi. Half of the name came from Apollo, the god and patron of artists, and the other from Anansi, the African spider deity and trickster.

Unfortunately, I hadn’t finished writing it when both of us heard rapidly approaching footsteps from the inside, that sounded less like someone coming over to see what was happening and more like someone breaking into a run straight toward us.

So we grabbed our tools of the crime, each of us vaulted over the outer railing on opposite sides of the stairs, and started running between and behind the police cars as we fled from the officers who came charging out of the station.

They looked around, exchanged glances, and abandoned the chase.

Volume 1, Flashback 7: My Memory Needs Better Reference Photos

Seven years and three months before The Event

The white room was no longer white. At least, not to the same degree as when I had first brought Sasha here. Sasha’s black horizon still wrapped around the entire room. Above it, my spider emerged from behind the clouds like a sun, and nearby a rabbit had painted a hole in a wall that a charging coyote was about to run straight into, fully convinced that the laws of physics were merely suggestions. Farther along began Sasha’s forest, where an enormous fox watched an intruder between the trees.

There were smaller things too. The print of her hand in green paint. Several attempts at my tag before I finally settled on Appolonsi. A row of faces I had drawn from memory after classes to see how many details I could preserve without looking at the model again. And two empty places for the faces I could no longer draw.

I sat beneath the wall with a pencil in my hand and my sketchbook resting against my knee, staring at yet another attempt to recreate my mother’s nose. The problem was that every version looked right. One had a straighter nose. Another had a slightly wider one. I had given the third a rounder face. The fourth had higher cheekbones. I knew every one of them, yet recognized none of them.

I lowered the pencil and rubbed my eyes with my thumb and index finger.

For years, I had been convinced that I remembered my parents. Not every day, and not every detail, but enough. But in truth all I had were insignificant details—fragments of isolated memories blurred by fog. Some table where I sat swinging my legs underneath it, trying to kick my father in the knee. Light coming through some window and passing through a glass onto my plate, casting a rainbow. Someone’s warm hand resting on my head. Laughter that belonged to my father in my memory, although whenever I tried to actually hear it, all I got was my own idea of what it should have sounded like.

The most frightening part was that I couldn’t tell when I had started forgetting. I hadn’t woken up one morning with my mother’s face suddenly gone from my mind. No one had ripped it away from me. I had simply lost one small detail with every passing year, then another and another still. And I hadn’t even fucking noticed.

The plank scraped outside. I snapped the sketchbook shut and tucked it beneath my leg before Sasha appeared. She still thought my father was alive and in the military, and that everything I had told her about myself was true. Unfortunately, those lies were becoming heavier and heavier to carry.

A second later, Sasha stuck her head through the window.

“You here?” she asked, then spotted me sitting beneath the opposite wall, directly below my spider, and answered herself. “You’re here.” She squeezed between the boards and dropped to the floor, adjusting the backpack hanging from one shoulder.

Her red hair was tied high with a green hair tie patterned like vines. A few shorter strands had escaped and stuck to her cheeks after the climb. Those loose strands stirred my imagination, somehow making her seem both more mysterious and closer to me at the same time.

She looked at me, then at the sketchbook protruding from beneath my leg.

“Keep your little illustrated secrets. I’m not interested at all,” she said. Then she dropped her backpack beside our window entrance, walked over to me, and used both hands to push my knees apart.

My heart immediately started beating faster, and my eyes widened. I moved the sketchbook I had hidden beneath myself, while she, in complete disagreement with where my rapidly developing imagination had gone, turned her back to me and quickly sat down, nestling into the warm space she had made for herself against my body.

“Put your arms around me,” she demanded.

So I wrapped my arms around her and held her.

“Did something happen?”

“No. Why?”

“I think this is the first time you decided to cuddle up to me like this, so I thought—”

“Never mind,” she interrupted, pushing my arms away and standing up. “You couldn’t just sit there quietly for a minute, could you?”

“I don’t know what you—”

“The moment’s gone, Julian.” She interrupted me again, sitting down beside me with her back against the wall and staring at the ceiling. “Want to show me what you were sketching?” Not understanding what I had done wrong, I shrugged with a sigh, reached for the sketchbook, and handed it to her without a word.

She flipped quickly through the first several pages because she already knew most of them. She stopped only when she reached the new faces.

“Who’s this?”

“People I used to know.”

“Is this supposed to be the same woman? I can see some things they have in common, but there are a lot of differences too.”

“She’s supposed to be.”

She looked at me instead of the paper.

“You’re not sure?”

“I’m sure I’m trying to draw the same person. Everything else is debatable.”

She turned a few more pages. Farther on were my attempts to recreate my father. In his case, it was even worse. I remembered the line of his jaw. Or I thought I did. I had drawn his hair three different ways because each version had seemed right at the time.

Sasha stopped turning the pages.

“I can see some resemblance to you in both of them. Are these your parents?”

According to the documents Penrose had created for me, Julian Porter had parents. I had even met one of them in person, although it was difficult to call a few hours in a car with a con man Penrose had hired any kind of family bonding.

Alexander May had once had parents too. The difference was that those couldn’t simply be hired again, and as it turned out, I couldn’t even remember them properly anymore.

“Yes,” I finally answered.

I didn’t know whether she had ever seen the man pretending to be my father, but I thought it was unlikely. I had never shown her any pictures and hadn’t told her much about my supposed home, but Sasha wasn’t stupid. She had to know something was wrong if I couldn’t properly draw the face of the man who was supposed to be my father.

She didn’t try to fit it into Julian’s story, though. She didn’t catch me in contradictions or demand explanations.

“Why so many times?”

“Because I don’t remember which version is real.”

She moved one finger half an inch above the paper without touching it.

“Maybe none of them are.”

“Thanks. Extremely helpful.”

“That’s not what I mean.” She bumped her shoulder against mine. “Maybe you’re trying to draw a photograph that was never taken. Memory doesn’t work like that.”

Sasha flipped back to the first portrait of the woman.

“Maybe you don’t remember the exact shape of her nose. So what? Do you remember the way she looked at you?”

I opened my mouth, but no answer came.

“Or what she did when she was happy? How she sat? How she held a cup? Anything.”

“A little.”

“Then paint that.”

“I don’t know how.”

“Then learn.”

She closed the sketchbook and pressed it against my chest.

“You’re always trying to paint people like you’re making a police composite. Sometimes that isn’t the most important thing. Sometimes what matters more is the feeling tied to the memory. A month from now, you’ll look different than you do today, and in ten years you might not even recognize yourself in the mirror. Does it really matter exactly how you draw your portrait, mine, or your father’s or mother’s? The details don’t matter nearly as much as why you want to preserve the memory.”

She stood up and started pulling spray cans out of her backpack when she noticed that her philosophical approach had hit me hard.

I looked at the open sketchbook, where I still kept returning to art that had some practical use, and then at the walls where I was trying to get rid of that need.

As my eyes moved along those walls, they finally stopped on her. She was standing by her forest, shaking a can. Her head moved slightly in rhythm with the metal ball rattling inside the container, and when she noticed me looking at her, she wrinkled her nose.

“What?”

I stood in response, still looking at her, wanting to hold on to the way I saw her right now for longer than just in my memory.

“Don’t move for a second.”

“Why?”

“Because I’m going to paint you.”

“Am I supposed to pose? Don’t be ridiculous.” She answered with a quiet laugh and went back to painting her section of the wall.

“You’re right. Stillness doesn’t suit you at all,” I answered, finally understanding what she had meant when she talked about feelings tied to memories.

When I think of Sasha a few years from now, she’ll be a beautiful girl I used to know—and then it won’t matter that I liked her legs and her ass and her pretty face, those eyes I could have stared into for hours, and that hair she had such a hard time controlling.

What I’ll remember then is that she was beautiful, and that she could never sit still, that she chased emotion in everything she did, that she could see through the veils of surface appearances.

So I picked up a piece of charcoal we used to mark out the layout of bigger works and walked over to an empty stretch of wall between my spider and the forest.

I didn’t try to create a perfect portrait. I didn’t fix the strand of hair that had fallen across her face. I left the oversized hoodie bunched up at the shoulder. I marked the smear of paint on her finger. I drew the green hair tie more carefully than was really necessary. I spent the most time on her eyes, because I wanted to remember their color. I wanted to remember the way she narrowed them when she was planning something, and how unnaturally wide they got whenever my lack of experience with something she considered obvious genuinely surprised her. I wanted to remember her exactly like this.

After a few minutes, by which point I had long since set the charcoal aside and started painting with spray cans, she realized I was no longer looking at her.

She walked over to me and stopped in front of the image.

“Why did you paint me? You haven't fallen in love with me, have you?”

The charcoal nearly slipped from my fingers. Luckily I still had my back to her.

“No, of course not,” I lied. “It’s just that one day I won’t be here anymore.” Then I added the truth.

“What?” Sasha turned her head.

“Or you won’t. Or this room won’t. Everything disappears eventually, just like the image of those people disappeared from my memory, Sash.”

“That’s not exactly a revelation. We’ve basically been talking about that since I got here. Why me?”

“I don’t remember my own mother’s face. Or my father’s. When I try to draw them, I end up creating people I recognize only because I want to recognize them.” I shrugged. “I still remember you very clearly. I’d like that to always stay that way—exactly the way I see you now.” When I looked at her again, all of her usual confidence was gone.

“Julian…”

“Please, don’t make a big scene out of this. Another second and I’m going to start regretting that I said something honest.”

Sasha lowered her gaze. Then she reached out, took my fingers, and squeezed them lightly.

“I won’t.”

“Excellent,” I lied, because deep down, I wanted a scene.

I wanted something more than stolen kisses and uncertainty about her feelings. I felt like I was just another part of her chase after new, exciting experiences, and I wanted more than that—even though I knew that even if she wanted it too, it would never really be ours to have.

“But I like it.” She pulled me out of my brief thoughts.

“What?”

She nodded toward the painting.

“That you wanted to preserve me.”

I didn’t know what to say, so I looked at her for as long as she allowed me to.

Eventually, though, she smiled faintly, let go of my hand, and went back to painting her part of the room.

A few hours later, I was sitting alone in my dorm room. The lights were off, the curtains drawn, and beneath the blanket I held the phone Julian Porter didn’t use—and whose existence Julian Porter absolutely should never have revealed to anyone.

I went through the material on Elise. After several weeks of visits to her estate, I already knew far more about her than I had when Penrose first handed me the file. I wanted to compare everything he had gathered with what I had learned myself.

I started with the photographs showing her with and without the necklace, at the gala and in more intimate situations. And one of those photographs caught my attention for longer. Penrose had shown it to me when we first discussed the target, together with the rest of the obviously private material. Back then, I hadn’t known the person beside Elise, so I had remembered her only as another piece of information about the target.

Now I knew her face. I knew it so well that I was doing everything I could to make sure I never forgot it.

“Fuck,” I whispered, and for several seconds I simply stared. Then our earlier conversations began returning to me one after another.

She’s a woman, and people generally don’t suspect us of things like that.

Just be careful, please.

It’s better not to fly too close to the sun if you don’t want to burn your wings.

Her reactions whenever I spoke about Elise, her questions about my visits to the estate and the way she had tried to warn me without saying anything outright. Until now, I had taken it for jealousy or suspicion. Now I realized it might have been neither and my first instinct was to go to her. My second, however, was to remember everything Penrose had taught me about first instincts.

First reactions belonged to emotion. Second ones were supposed to belong to me.

I didn’t know when the photograph had been taken. I didn’t know why Sasha had been there with Elise. I didn’t know exactly what had happened between them, or how much of it Sasha herself had wanted.

What I did know was who Elise was. She was an adult woman running a school full of young people, someone who was already trying to push my boundaries step by step as well. So the simplest explanation was also the one I least wanted to consider—Sasha might have been one of her previous victims.

I felt my fingers tighten around the phone.

I could find her that same night, show her the photograph, and demand the truth. But if I was right, I would be doing exactly what I hated most when done to me: taking control of the situation away from her and forcing her into a conversation on my terms simply because I possessed information she had chosen not to share with me.

So I put the damned phone away and decided not to do anything about it. I would continue with my plan instead. If anything, it only strengthened my desire to take away what Elise loved most.

Volume 1, Flashback 8: Flattery Is a Professional Skill

Seven years and two months before The Event

After class, I sat in the reception office while Elise went through images of works that had caught her attention, and I was supposed to prepare a list of the ones I thought would look good in her home.

Another boring assignment meant, in her mind, to bring her closer to me.

I did it only superficially, focusing instead on what she was doing. She kept moving between her office and the reception area, passing something along to Ms. Miriam, who worked there, at least once every two minutes.

At that moment, she was heading back toward her room when she noticed me. She brushed some hair back and gave me a radiant smile, consciously or unconsciously lifting her ass slightly beneath the light leather skirt wrapped tightly around it. Besides that, she wore a fitted corset matching the skirt, flaring slightly toward the bottom.

She looked good and was definitely an attractive woman, and I knew she genuinely had a passion for art because over the past few weeks she had placed works in my hands that, in one way or another, stirred my imagination and sparked my creativity.

But when she finally turned away from me and headed toward the door to her office, she stopped beside it and, for the second time in the last ten minutes, turned sideways to her reflection, adjusted the collar of her corset, lightly wiped beneath one eye, and tossed her hair back while studying herself in the steel door.

“Miriam, my dear,” she addressed her subordinate, one hand resting on the door handle. “I almost forgot. Please let Cooper Union College know that I will, of course, honor them with my presence at their December exhibition. Just make sure beforehand whether Isobel Galifanakis will be attending as well.”

“What do you mean ma’am?” Miriam asked, lifting her head from the stack of documents.

“I mean that if she intends to be there, I won’t be. That woman has a tendency to latch onto me and bask in my glow,” Elise added, glancing toward me to check whether I was listening.

I made a point of watching her only through reflections in the steel and glass surfaces facing away from her.

Apparently, she didn’t notice, because her expression tightened slightly before she turned her attention back to Miriam.

“I don’t like seeing her in photographs with me. She ruins the overall composition and atmosphere.” With that, she finally opened the door. “Julian, when you’re finished, please come see me,” she added on her way out before stepping inside.

That entire conversation, combined with the way she had been admiring herself in the door earlier, revealed her greatest flaw to me once again. The woman was her own biggest fan, and that vanity manifested in the belief that she herself was God’s greatest gift to humanity.

I had no intention of dragging out the tedious review, and since a plan had already formed in my head for how to twist what Penrose wanted from me to my own advantage, I decided to wait only five minutes.

Then I set aside the works I had been looking through, stood up from the table, knocked once, opened the door, and stepped into her office.

Elise was standing by the window, looking out at the now-bare black trees surrounding the school and dormitories, and at the beginnings of the city just beyond the fence.

When I entered, she turned toward me and pulled on a cord, hiding the outside world behind a pale curtain.

“Close the door behind you, please,” she said, gesturing toward it with one hand.

“All right.” I closed the door behind me, careful not to let the latch click.

I heard her footsteps—the high heels striking the floor—for only a moment. When I turned around, she was standing closer to me, leaning back against her desk as she bent one leg to remove her shoe.

“You’re a talented young man, Julian. I’ve been following your progress and the work you create with great pleasure.”

I nodded, watching as she repeated the motion and removed the shoe from her other foot.

“You also have an eye for beauty, don’t you? You know how to recognize something extraordinary when it’s standing right in front of you?”

“Yes, ma’am. I think I’ve demonstrated my value well enough in deciding what should go into your home, and with the discretion you required,” I replied, playing along with her tune.

She tilted her head to the side like a predator studying its prey and stepped closer, tapping the index finger of her right hand against her lips, parting them slightly with every touch.

“What do you think about me?”

“Honestly? Everything.”

“Everything?” she asked, surprised as she moved closer.

“I try not to, but you occupy every thought I have. Your face is the only one I see when I close my eyes, and the only one that appears in my dreams—both the ones I have asleep and the ones I imagine while awake,” I replied, thinking about Sasha.

“Really?” She leaned back slightly. “That’s not good. A student shouldn’t have thoughts like that about his headmistress, should he?”

“I agree. I’m sorry, but I can’t seem to control it. One look at you and my eyes want more. One word from you and my ears ache when the silence comes back. One movement of your hand and all I can think about is what it would feel like against my skin. I know it’s inappropriate, and I know it’s wrong, so maybe it would be better if we stopped working so closely togeth—”

She stepped closer and pressed one finger against my lips, cutting me off.

“Let’s not exaggerate. You’re practically a grown man, and I’m a beautiful woman. You can hardly blame yourself for reacting to that.” She moved closer still, lowering her voice. She was so close to me I practically felt her lips against mine already. “Now, hypothetically, if I were to indulge these feelings of yours, you understand it would have to remain our little secret, don’t you? We wouldn’t want the other students pointing fingers at you and claiming that everything you’ve achieved was only because of me.”

“Yes,” I whispered and a moment later, she crossed the remaining distance between us and kissed me, inserting her tongue deep into my throat. I hated how easily my body responded to her, and while I returned the kiss, I imagined Sasha instead.

After a moment, Elise pulled away with a smile.

“I liked that,” she said. “You don’t have to control yourself quite so much around me anymore.”

Then she took my hand and guided it toward her, putting it on her ass, and forcing me to squeeze.

“You’re uncomfortable doing this at school. That’s understandable, but don’t worry. Tonight, we could spend some time alone in my bedroom. What do you think?” she asked.

And just like that, she gave me an opening to abandon the plan that was making me disgusted with myself and use what I had learned about her instead.

“Elise,” I whispered. “I want you to see me as a man.”

“Of course I do. What do you think all of this means, if not exactly that?”

“You love art, don’t you? Beauty?” I asked, drawing her a little closer. She giggled.

“Yes. Very much.” She wrapped her arms around me and looked into my eyes.

“So do I. Just like I care about what you think of me. And I want you to see me as a man and as a real artist before anything else happens. I know you deserve someone who is appreciated for what he creates.”

“What do you mean?”

“Please organize an exhibition for me. It should include the other students too—at your house, in that beautiful hall, where we can share our work with the world and show the people you respect what we’re capable of. Show your school at its very best.”

She stared at me with mild disbelief, but she was still clearly interested, so I continued.

“But let me—just me—paint something live in front of everyone. Make it a performance. I want to show the world my art before I show my world what I can do,” I finished, drawing her attention fully back onto the idea.

“Live? I like that,” she said, removing my hands from her ass and back and stepping away toward her desk.

The idea I had planted in her mind was already beginning to sprout. I could practically see her imagining herself shining at the center of that room.

“I am a patron of the best young talent, aren’t I?” she asked, looking for confirmation, so I nodded.

“Yes, yes… yes. I like this. I had an eye for you. My instincts never fail me, and my desire only draws me toward the very best,” she said, biting her lip. “We’ll do it. Fuck Cooper Union. I’ll organize a competing exhibition at my place. One so impressive those pretentious assholes will go green with envy and start wishing they were the ones invited into my circle.” She perched on the edge of her desk, looking at me again. “Oh, how I would fuck your minds out, right now. Men and their need to prove their worth.” She added with contempt.

“I really need this, Elise,” I said, drawing out her name.

“I already said—we’ll do it. But right after that, that same evening, you and I settle what we started. Clear? I will fuck you so hard, you will not be able to look at another women anymore.”

“All I’m thinking about already is you… and the art,” I replied with a smile, stepping closer. “When can I expect it?”

“I’ll give you an exact date later.” She hopped onto the desk and crossed one leg over the other, picking up a small planner from the surface. “About a month from now. No sooner. We need time to prepare properly.” She moved through the pages.

“Excellent,” I said, moving closer, taking the planner from her hands and leaning in for a kiss.

“Oh no, you don’t,” she replied, pushing me away this time, which let me breathe a quiet sigh of relief. “No affection, no intimacy before the event. I need to stay focused on myself until then. Now go.” She waved me away. “Train. Practice. Think about what you’re going to paint. It needs to be a true masterpiece.”

A few hours later, I stood outside Elise’s estate, which I had reached after sneaking off the school grounds. Night was slowly approaching, and it was getting dark enough that I would soon be able to move closer. While waiting for the taxi that had brought me there to leave, I pulled out my special phone and dialed Mr. Penrose.

“Julian?” he asked when he picked up.

“It’s me, Mr. Penrose. Things have finally started moving, and in about a month I should be able to carry out the theft. I’ll need a few things to make it work, though.”

“And what would those be?”

“A jacket—I’ll send you the model I have in mind in a moment—but I’d like it to have a hidden pocket inside each sleeve.”

“Done. You’ll have it next week. Your father will come for a visit. What else?”

“The second thing might be more difficult…” I explained what I needed, lowering my voice and covering my mouth because someone happened to be walking nearby.

After Penrose confirmed that my second request would also be taken care of, I ended the call and followed the fence surrounding her property until I reached a spot where I knew the cameras would have trouble seeing me because a gardener’s shed stood on the other side.

I vaulted the fence easily, landed on the other side, then used a crowbar from my backpack to pry open the window and slip into the shed.

Inside, I pulled a gardener’s uniform over my black clothes without removing either the bandana covering my face or my hood. I put on the baseball cap the gardener usually wore, tossed pruning shears and a few other tools into a bucket, then simply opened the door, placed the bucket outside, and went back for a folding ladder.

I threw it over one shoulder, picked up the bucket again, and walked toward the side of the house where there was a bathroom window on the same floor as Elise’s bedroom.

The guards on duty noticed me, but they didn’t react. They simply went back to smoking cigarettes and talking to kill time.

I quickly reached the spot I had chosen, where a tree also grew beside the house, and leaned the ladder against it. I climbed up with the pruning shears, moved out along one of the branches, and started trimming the pieces that stuck out the farthest.

After about five minutes, one of the guards walked over to take a look at what I was doing. Once he had satisfied himself that gardening-related things were, in fact, happening, he returned to his post.

I had only twice had the chance to be at Elise’s house after seven in the evening on a Thursday, but both times she had been away at that hour, and when she returned, she had carried a gym bag. So I assumed that time was reserved for something sports-related.

When, from my elevated position, I saw the main gate open and a car pull out at fifteen minutes to seven, I put my plan into motion.

I took a running start along the thick branch and jumped toward the window, landing against the wall and catching the ledge beneath it. I pulled myself up and positioned my body so that I could brace one hand against a decorative architectural ridge above while using the other to open the window.

First, however, I reached for a device that emitted interference designed to disrupt the alarm system.

I switched it on, placed it beside the window, then used a thin metal pry tool to force the window upward. I immediately climbed into the bathroom, bringing the jammer with me.

I moved closer to the door and listened for footsteps. Once my ears convinced me that no one was moving around nearby, I stepped out and made my way through the corridors to the point where the security-code console was located.

I opened it and checked that the system was armed, which meant no one should be entering the house without triggering the alarm I was currently jamming. So I quickly headed for the door leading to Elise’s bedroom and opened it with a simple press of the handle.

Volume 1, Flashback 9: Nothing Is Permanent, Apparently

Seven years and one month before The Event

Standing in front of my closet, I thought through the plan I intended to carry out tomorrow.

Elise had prepared everything exactly as I had requested, and the very next day, three other students and I—including Sasha—would have the opportunity to present our work, then mingle with the crowd and talk about art, the school, and whatever else came to mind.

Thanks to my evening trip to her estate, I had managed to confirm that behind a small walk-in closet in her bedroom there was another room where she presumably kept her most valuable treasures.

The door was made of steel and secured with an electronic keypad lock. I had sent Penrose the specifications, however, and along with the things I had asked for earlier, I received a decoder that, once connected, would crack the lock and open the vault for me.

Thanks to my jacket, I would be able to keep the decoder conveniently concealed just behind my wrist.

While searching her room, however, I had also noticed sex toys hidden inside a drawer beside the bed, suggesting that she definitely enjoyed sex with women as well, which made it impossible for me to get the image of Elise fucking Sasha out of my head.

Because the universe clearly had it out for me, it was Sasha’s voice that came through the open window when my thoughts once again ran toward her.

“I know you’re in there!”

I looked out and saw her below, grinning from ear to ear. My heart immediately started beating faster, while my mind sank into mourning, because however tomorrow went, this was going to be the last evening we spent together. And that was exactly why I hadn’t wanted to be the one to initiate anything.

“I don’t have time, Sash. I need to prepare.”

“Don’t lie. Whatever you had to prepare has probably been ready for two weeks already, maybe longer. Don’t make me beg.” She said it in that whisper-like shout of hers.

“I’ll be down in a minute,” I replied, closing the window.

I stopped in front of the mirror, though, and looked at myself—or rather at Julian looking back at me. My real hazel eyes were hidden beneath blue contacts, my usually longer hair had been cut short, and makeup covered the freckles that had run across my nose for years. I had gotten used to the visual lie by now, but before this meeting—the one I had been trying to avoid—it weighed on me. A lot.

“Fashionably late, Julian?” she asked, tapping her wrist and parodying something I had done before when I finally appeared downstairs, warmly dressed in a coat and wool hat.

“I had to powder my nose properly,” I joked, thinking back to what had just been going through my head.

“No point. No amount of makeup is going to help you.”

“If you wanted to roast me, you could’ve warned me in advance. I would’ve known to bring a bucket of water—we could see what you look like without yours.”

“I’m not wearing any,” she replied, straightening up and gesturing toward her smiling face with both hands, palms open toward me. “Hard to believe, I know. Come on. Let’s hang out at our place.” Then she hooked her arm through mine and started pulling me toward the trees.

“It’s really not that hard to believe,” I replied, swallowing hard both the spit and the embarrassment rising inside me, trying to stop it from keeping me from saying what I intended to say. “I didn’t want to see you today.”

“I know,” she replied, catching me off guard. “I didn’t want to see you either. At least not at first. I’m stressed about tomorrow night. Because of you, I have a chance to show the world what I’m actually capable of—to prove that all the time I’ve spent at this school wasn’t wasted. So right now, I should probably be focusing on myself more than anything.” She stopped, turned me toward her by grabbing my forearms, then pressed one outstretched finger into my chest. “But unfortunately, there’s also you. Julian. Julian, Julian… I like you.”

“I like you too,” I answered. “I just thought that, to you, everything we’ve been doing together… those moments… were only for fun.”

“For fun?” she asked, surprised. “Nothing like that. Maybe this is hard to believe too, but opening up to other people doesn’t come easily to me. I’m a pretty reserved person. So I figured that, despite everything, seeing you might actually be the best thing for my nerves.” With that, she took me by the arm again and pulled me deeper between the trees, toward our secret room.

“Thank you. It’s nice to hear that,” I said, drawing her closer.

“Do you already know what you’re going to paint during your show?”

“I do.”

“Secret?”

“Yes.”

“So another study of a face and a hand, I assume. Or maybe a floor plan of Ms. Harrow’s house?” She laughed.

“Obviously.” I joined in. “I wouldn’t want anyone thinking I actually learned anything at this miserable school. Anything besides not taking art so seriously. Or myself. Or you.” As I spoke, I tried to catch her eye, but she kept looking straight ahead. Her expression gradually shifted from calm to worried—her brows drew together, her eyes narrowed, and her lips flattened into a straight line.

“Look!” she shouted in that husky voice of hers, making the hairs on my back stand on end.

I followed her finger toward our sanctuary.

“No…” I breathed, disappointment hollowing out my voice. Between the official preparations for the gala and the less official ones, I hadn’t had time to come here. It had probably been two weeks since my last visit. “Who… how… how could they do this to us?” I finally managed, staring at the boards that had been removed from the windows and the fresh tiles patching the holes in the roof. Cracks in the outside walls had been repaired, and everything around the building had been cleaned.

“They’re renovating it,” Sasha whispered, staring at the devastation spread out before us. “I can’t believe it.”

Someone had left tools beneath tarps along the walls. Ladders leaned against the building, and nearby stood pallets stacked with bricks, bags of cement, roof tiles, and other construction materials. One of them held several boxes of paint.

“Fuck.”

I pulled away from her and strode toward the building. I ignored the way we usually entered and simply walked through the front door. The walls inside were covered in fresh plaster. Some had already been painted, but I didn’t care about any of them. I headed straight for the staircase at the end of the corridor, hearing Sasha following behind me.

Upstairs, I quickly oriented myself and found the passage that had always been blocked before. I stepped through it into our room. Into my sanctuary. And the moment I crossed the threshold, I dropped to my knees.

“No…” I whispered.

Everything we had painted was gone.

“Julian…” Sasha murmured as she entered behind me.

I forced myself back to my feet and walked toward the place where my spider pretending to be the sun had been. I dragged my palm over the new layer of plaster and paint, searching desperately for even the smallest trace bleeding through. Having found nothing I moved to my Looney Tunes characters—or rather, to the white stretches of wall that had swallowed them. And finally to the place where Foxy’s portrait had been. The way I wanted to remember her.

At first, I scratched frantically at the wall with my fingernails. When that did nothing, I stopped and began striking it with the bottoms of my fists, one hand and then the other, again and again, until finally I rested my forehead against that patch of white defeat.

I stayed there until I felt Sasha’s hand on my shoulder, gently pulling me away.

“I’m furious too, Julian.”

“You don’t understand.” I turned toward her. “I know this place was never mine. Not really. But somehow… it was, too. The things we painted here were the first pictures I ever made just because I wanted to paint something. They didn’t need to mean anything. Just like you taught me.” I looked around at the empty walls. “And now there isn’t even a trace of them.”

Deep down, I knew I could never have taken any of it with me anyway. Tomorrow, after everything was over, I would have left this place behind regardless.

And yet it felt as though someone had taken something from me. Something that mattered.

“Believe me, I understand.” She grabbed me and turned me around until I was facing her. “So what if they painted over it? You and I know what was here. I’ll always remember what we did in this room.”

“But—”

“No buts, Julian. Art doesn’t have to last forever to matter. Think about our tags on the station’s door—I bet good money that it’s gone now. Think about actors in a play. Every night, they create the same thing all over again for a different audience. We can do that too. I witnessed what you painted. You witnessed what I painted. The fact that it isn’t here anymore only makes what we saw and created more precious, because it existed for just one tiny fraction of eternity, and only for us to witness.” She whispered and I was overwhelmed with feelings.

“I love you,” I said and I didn’t even know why. It simply felt like something I needed to say.

Sasha looked away with her whole head, but her eyes escaped first, moving to the side.

“I suspected as much,” she replied, then wrapped her arms around me.

“You don’t feel the same?”

“I didn’t say that.” She held me tighter. “I don’t know what I feel, Julian. I need more time to figure that out. I know that every moment I’ve spent with you is going to stay with me for a very long time. That counts for something too, doesn’t it? What we have here seems ephemeral to me, and like the art that was taken from us, it’s all the more precious because of that.”

“If you asked me how many times I’ve let you into my heart, I’d tell you—only once, Sasha. Just once. Because you’ve never left it since.” I kept talking, testing her, trying to find out what she truly felt. I needed to know what place, if any, I took in her mind, even though I already knew I would never see her again after tomorrow.

“That’s beautiful. You might become a poet too, my little artist.”

She buried herself against me without falling for my little emotional trap, so instead I simply put my arms around her and held her as though the two of us were one person, if only for that brief moment.

“Will you paint me again someday?” she asked quietly. “Not now. But one day, when you feel like this again. When I am all that you need to exist. When you want to remember how good we were together.”

“Were?” I repeated, clinging to that single word as though I hadn't already decided how tomorrow would end. “Not how good we are together? Are you planning to break up with me? Are we even a couple?”

“Oh, you know what I meant. I’m not planning to,” she replied, looking deeply into my eyes.

I looked back into that green bottomless voids, searching for some answer to feelings I didn’t know what to do with.

“But you never know what the future might bring, right?”

“That’s true.”

“Then look at all this as a new beginning.” She glanced around at the blank walls surrounding us. “They painted over the old memories so we could start making new ones.”

And I simply held her in my arms, unwilling to let go.

“I’m shit at feelings, sorry,” I told her. “I don’t have much experience opening myself up to what I feel. Hell, I don’t even have experience feeling the way I do now.”

“Quiet.” She pressed a finger to my lips. “Just hold me this time and don’t say anything else.”

We stayed like that forever and nowhere near long enough.

I didn’t know whether she could sense that I would disappear the following evening, or whether she had seen through me and my plan, but I was afraid to ask. I was afraid of ruining that last evening, so I did what she asked and held her for as long as I could, until eventually we pulled away from each other and slowly, silently returned to our rooms.

Volume 1, Flashback 10: Everyone, Please Look This Way

Seven years and one month before The Event

The ballroom was packed, with people drifting from one display to the next, champagne glasses in hand, admiring my work and that of the other students.

I stood off to the side, watching the parade and wondering how much of it was genuine appreciation for art and how much was simply people puffing themselves up in front of others by pretending to possess knowledge and interest.

Sasha, dressed in a dark two-piece suit, had passed through my field of vision only a moment ago. It was difficult getting used to seeing her dressed like that—not in one of her flowing dresses or tight jeans, and not in cargo pants, a hoodie, and a beanie or baseball cap. Even though she looked almost nothing like herself in the elegant outfit, whenever she appeared, I still had trouble pulling my eyes away from her.

I needed to look interested primarily in Elise, though, so I kept my attention on her as she moved from one guest to another, pretending to care about what they were saying, laughing at their jokes, and pointing out pieces while explaining to the less knowledgeable guests what the art on display was supposed to convey.

Still, like any proper thief, whenever I had the chance, I stole glances at the girl who had already stolen my heart.

Tonight, Sasha wore her unruly hair tied back with her green floral hair tie—which, aside from the green eyeshadow, was the only color she had added to the blacks and grays of her outfit. And to me, she was still the most beautiful person in the room.

“May I have your attention, ladies and gentlemen!”

Unlike Sasha, Elise had let down the hair she usually kept pinned up at school, wearing it loose over her shoulders for the gala as she stepped onto the raised platform in the center of the ballroom and gathered the guests’ attention.

Only then did I realize just how much of Sasha’s opposite she was. Elise wore a pale-blue asymmetrical gown slit high along her right leg, exposing both her back and a deep neckline where the diamond necklace rested—the same necklace that had sparked Penrose’s desire to have me carry out this entire theft.

Her lips were red as rubies, her eyes accented with blue. Her nails glittered like the stones around her neck, matching the equally crystalline heels on her feet.

Where Sasha tried to remain in the shadows and show me the beauty in everything around us and inside our own minds, Elise wanted, at any cost, for everyone else to see only her.

“It gives me enormous pleasure to welcome all of you into my home on this extraordinary day.”

“The first of many!” someone among the guests shouted, followed by cheers and applause.

“Yes, the first of many. Without a doubt. I promise you, my dears, that I will devote at least a moment to each and every one of you during tonight’s celebration, so that no one leaves disappointed. For now, however, I invite you to witness something truly intimate.”

A whisper moved through the ballroom like a wave starting from several places at once.

“One of the most talented students at my prestigious institution will be painting for us live.”

The whispers gave way to silence.

“Please give him a warm round of applause for encouragement. Julian Porter!”

She called out my name, and I stepped out from my quiet place in the crowd and walked toward her.

At the same time, the staff were already carrying in an easel, a chair, and a table where the materials I would need would soon be arranged.

I swept my gaze across the applauding guests, smiling and nodding, but in reality I was searching for only one face among them. She was watching me, but I could not give into the temptation to held her gaze for longer.

“Tell us, Julian, can you reveal what you’ll be creating for us tonight?”

“Yes,” I answered loudly once the audience had fallen silent.

At first, I addressed the room in general, but then my gaze settled entirely on Elise.

“I’m going to take on one of the hardest challenges an artist can face and paint another human being.”

“A person?” Elise replied, raising one eyebrow. “Isn’t that a rather trivial subject?”

“We were created, alone on this Earth, in the image of God. To capture that likeness, that spark of divinity, in a way that allows others to see it through art is no easy task—but the artists who succeed are remembered forever. We have Michelangelo’s David, the Mona Lisa, Lady with an Ermine, Van Gogh’s self-portraits, and countless other examples proving that true beauty can be found in the ordinary and everyday.”

Someone started clapping, and others followed.

Elise looked at me first with surprise, then with growing curiosity.

“Will it be someone specific?” she asked.

I couldn’t answer directly. I had to bet on a sure thing and hope the horse didn’t break its leg.

“I think it would be best if the people gathered here decided which one of us I should immortalize in a portrait. Every one of us has a voice. Every opinion shapes the way we see the world, and through that, the way art itself is created.” I turned toward the audience. “So please, dear guests, tell me—who should I paint?”

“Elise!” the crowd kept chanting. It went on for several moments, but most of the voices fell into the rhythm I had hoped they would. This time, again, my gamble paid off exactly as I suspected it would. My instincts, however, kept reminding me that with every victory, I was moving one step closer to failure.

“Headmistress, would you do me the honor?” I asked, bowing and sweeping one hand outward theatrically.

“If that is what the people want, how could I refuse?” she replied and stepped in front of me, extending her left leg slightly through the slit in her dress. Her right hand settled on her hip, while the left disappeared behind her body. “I’m ready.”

I sat down beside the desk and easel, reached for a broad brush, and began with the general shapes.

Several dozen minutes passed. Every so often, Elise stepped away to speak with the guests, only to return later and resume the same pose. People occasionally approached to get a closer look at my work.

At one point, I stopped with my brush suspended in the air and leaned back from the canvas, looking from Elise to the painting and back again until my behavior caught her attention.

“Is something wrong, Julian?” she asked. “Can’t you find that spark of divinity in me?” She said it as a joke, and those listening laughed politely.

I furrowed my brow, making sure Elise saw it, and placed the brush on the desk. Then I looked at her as though searching for whatever was bothering me. She became so invested in my little performance that she placed one hand against her chest and parted her lips slightly. I walked over quickly and circled around her.

She followed me with her eyes, increasingly uneasy, until I finally stopped behind her, gently swept her hair aside with my left hand, and reached for the clasp of her necklace with my right. With one quick movement, I undid it and held it there for a moment.

“I hope I’ll be taking considerably more off you soon,” I whispered.

Then I removed the necklace completely and held it out toward the security guard who had already moved closer, alarmed by my sudden fondness for both the headmistress and her jewelry.

“Forgive me, my dear,” I told Elise as her man took the diamonds. “I’m afraid that if the necklace appears in the portrait, it will draw attention away from what matters most. You make a stronger impression without it.”

Her lips parted slightly at that, and she was clearly pleased.

Her guard, on the other hand, looked as though he wasn’t sure what he was supposed to do, so Elise finally addressed him.

“Take it to my safe place.”

The man walked toward the stairs, confirming my suspicions. He threw me one last glance as he left, wearing the expression of someone convinced he had just prevented a theft. He had no idea, of course, that the necklace was now exactly where I wanted it to be.

I reached delicately for my brush, holding my hand theatrically in the air, until it settled just right.

“Yes. Much better,” I said, then returned to painting and began adding details to the portrait.

An hour later, my work was finished. It didn’t portray her exactly as I saw her, because photographs existed for that. Sasha had taught me as much. And the memory of her, forced me once again to look for her familiar face among those of the strangers. I found her with my eyes across the room, a bag hanging from her shoulder as she removed her own pieces from one of the columns with a sad expression and disheveled hair falling over her shoulders. I couldn’t ask what had happened, though, because I was surrounded by people admiring my work. People who moved between us, breaking the gaze we had been holding and completely blocking her from my view.

I relaxed and turned my sight onto my art. Even though Elise had stood still for most of the sitting, I had painted her so that every part of her seemed to be in motion. Her eyes searched for someone in the room. Her lips whispered. Her hair was caught by an unseen wind. Her neck curved as though she was looking for something. One hand reached toward the empty place on her chest where something was missing. The colors blurred and flowed smoothly into one another, and it seemed to me that people genuinely saw what I had wanted to convey.

“It’s beautiful…” Elise said, wiping a tear from the corner of her eye.

Applause filled the room while I was doing my best to keep my paint-covered hands from touching the cuffs of my jacket. I raised them instead, and the weight of what I had hidden inside my sleeves, working together with gravity, caused them to slide down slightly as I held my arms in front of myself and bowed again and again.

When the audience finally turned away from me and began discussing Elise’s portrait, she approached and spoke, handing me yet another small victory.

“Go wash up, please. I want you looking impeccable later. You can use the guest bathroom upstairs.”

“No.” I held Elise's gaze. “I want to use yours. The rest of the evening belongs to you now. I’ll wait until you have time for me.”

“I like that. Go.”

She called over her security guard and whispered something into his ear. When she finished and the security guard turned toward me to escort me to her bedroom, I caught Elise’s eye one more time.

“Something else?”

“Some of the artwork is gone,” I said, pointing toward the places where Sasha’s paintings had been hanging. “Did something happen?”

“An ungrateful student was reprimanded and reminded who she owes this opportunity to. Nothing you need to concern yourself with. Go and prepare yourself properly.”

She turned away toward the guests, smiling and waving to them.

I nodded and followed the guard upstairs, while my thoughts immediately raced back to Sasha.

As I climbed behind him, I wondered whether Elise had sent away the person I actually cared about because of the affair she was planning with me, or whether it had been the exact opposite—whether Sasha had noticed what was happening, confronted the headmistress about it, and been dismissed because of that. I also didn’t know whether I was glad that whatever existed between them had been broken apart, or sad that Sasha had been forced to gather her work into a bag and leave with her head hanging low.

I didn’t want my last memory of her to look like that, but first, there was nothing I could do about it anymore, and second, maybe this was simply luck finally abandoning my immediate vicinity. Instead, I focused on what I could control.

After the security guard let me into Elise’s bedroom, where several things had been prepared on the bed that I definitely would not have agreed to, I quickly went into her bathroom and actually washed the paint from my hands.

Then I splashed some water over my face, rubbed my eyes, took a deep breath with both hands braced against the sink, and quickly returned to the bedroom.

I pressed my ear against the door to make sure no one was standing on the other side. Once I was certain I was alone, I reached into the inner pocket of my jacket and pulled out a thin drawstring backpack I intended to use for the loot.

Then, slipping my decoder out of my sleeve, I stepped into the walk-in closet, pushed aside the clothes hanging there, and froze when I saw the display indicating that the room was already open.

Once the shock passed, I pushed against the large door. It swung inward without a sound. Beyond it was a white floor, white walls, and an equally spotless ceiling. Along the walls, built-in shelves held rows of glass cases, presumably reinforced, their locks all open.

Every single one was empty. I rubbed my eyes to make sure it wasn’t some kind of illusion, then stuck my hand into one of the cases and felt around, once again finding nothing inside. I checked all of them, including the central pedestal. Its glass cover was open too, and the fabric-lined base beneath it was just as empty as everything else in the room. The indentation in the cloth suggested that a diamond necklace had once rested there.

Panicking, I turned back toward the door.

That was when I noticed the only object left in the entire room. I walked over and picked it up from the floor, from the spot where whoever had robbed Elise immediately before me must have dropped it.

“Can’t fucking believe it.” I whispered to myself. “Beautiful, just bloody beautiful.”

I slipped it into my pocket and hurried out, pulling the door almost shut behind me. I put both the backpack and the decoder back into my pockets, then, without wasting another second, opened Elise’s bedroom window and stepped out onto the ledge.

I moved along it toward the shared bathroom, then jumped from there onto the branch of the tree I had once used to get inside. I climbed down quickly. Ignoring the cameras, the security guards wandering across the lawn, and the guests outside, I sprinted toward the wall and the gardener’s shed.

Using the wall of the small building, I jumped onto it, pushed off with one foot, and caught movement from the security guards out of the corner of my eye as they started running toward me. I leapt for the wall and caught its edge. A moment later, I hauled myself up and dropped onto bent knees on the other side before immediately breaking into another sprint toward the black sedan parked across the street.

When I reached it, I pulled open the door and jumped inside, taking the seat beside Mr. Penrose as the car was already beginning to move.

“Alexander, good to see you, boy.”

“Likewise, Mr. Penrose,” I said, thinking of all the places I’d rather be and the person I’d rather be sitting with.

“No more suspense. Tell me—did it work, as I assume?”

“Partially, Mr. Penrose.”

“Partially? I don’t have to tell you that the assignment wasn’t to have sex with the headmistress Harrow, do I? Did you get her valuables?”

“I got the most important one,” I replied, reaching into a hidden pocket in the right sleeve of my jacket and handing Penrose a diamond necklace. “I switched it a long time ago. During the public painting.”

“She didn’t notice?”

“No. She was too busy thinking about sex and how she looked in front of everyone. Besides, her loose hair made the switch easier by concealing my hands.”

“Beautiful piece,” he said, examining the necklace in his hands and studying the diamonds. “I assume you have nothing else?”

“No. I was in her secret room, but unfortunately, another thief beat me to it and took everything that was there, including the replica you arranged for me.”

Penrose raised an eyebrow. “Surprising. Do you know who it might have been?”

“I have no idea,” I lied.

“No matter,” he replied, placing a hand on my shoulder. “You did an excellent job. Those stones are worth a fortune.”

“I’d like to rest a bit sir, if that’s possible.” I answered him and he waved me off, while admiring the thing I gave him.

I looked out the window and watched the city smear itself across the glass, one streetlight after another stretching into pale lines whenever my eyes lost focus. Her green hair tie sat curled in my palm. I rolled it between my fingers, tracing the little leaves with my thumb without looking at it, and suddenly I couldn’t remember a single moment with her without wondering what had been underneath it.

Sasha laughing when she knocked me onto the floor of the white room. Sasha kissing me before teaching me how to use spray paint. Sasha telling me not to treat art like a tool. Sasha warning me about Elise. Sasha looking at me as though Julian was the lie and she could somehow see Alexander beneath him.

How much of that had been her, I couldn’t tell. How much had been Foxy? Worse, did she know who I was and leave that hair tie in the secret room on purpose?

All of it was just another secret.

I knew how this worked. That was the part that hurt most. A con artist built a person out of whatever the mark needed: a smile here, an insecurity there, a story delivered with just enough hesitation to make it painful to admit. One had to let pieces of oneself show, because no lie could survive without something true at its core.

I had done exactly that with Julian. There had been moments when Alexander slipped through the paint, moments I hadn’t intended to give her—and now, staring at my reflection in the window, I found myself desperately sorting through every memory of Sasha, searching for the same mistakes.

Her temper. Her stupid jokes. The way she hated stencils. The way her voice changed when she talked about making something simply because she wanted it to exist.

I kept choosing little pieces of her and telling myself, That one. That had to be real. Then another part of me answered that I had made people believe exactly the same thing about me.

I closed my fist around the hair tie until its metal clasp bit into my palm. I wanted to be angry with her. Hell, I wanted that more than anything, because anger would have been simple.

Instead I realized that the first person I had allowed close enough to see through me had been wearing a mask of her own. And despite everything, some pathetic part of me still hoped that somewhere between Sasha Vale and Foxy, there had been a girl in a ruined white room who had kissed me because she wanted to, painted beside me because she loved it, and looked at me the way she had because, for a few moments, neither of us had been pretending.

I knew I would probably never see her again. I just wished I knew who it was I was never going to see, because with her I shared forever and yet it was nowhere near long enough.