Chương 3: “The Bully”

School was smaller than he'd expected and louder and lit with the almost aggressive brightness of fluorescent tubes, which he found spiritually offensive. He spent the morning in the pencil case cataloguing the classroom. Twenty-three students. One teacher. Four windows, east-facing, useful in the afternoon. Two exits. The boy three rows back who watched June too steadily and too often. His name was Bodie.

Eleven years old, two years above her, solidly built, and only recently aware that being bigger than other people was a kind of power. At lunch he took June's lunch and tipped it in the bin. He did it while his friends watched. He did it with a particular smile, not a mean smile, which Vorrath would have understood, but a performative one, a smile that was really for the audience and only incidentally for June. She went very quiet. Stolen novel; please report.

She ate half of someone else's sandwich, which they offered. She said it was fine. She said it happened a lot. Then something happened in Vorrath that was not rage. This was beyond rage. The shivering of a being that had been keeping careful accounts for three thousand years and had just made a new entry. He began, in a methodical way and with no urgency whatsoever, designing a floor of his dungeon specifically for Bodie. Just in case the binding ever broke. He asked June why she didn't tell a teacher.

She couldn't hear him. She would have explained, patiently, the actual mechanics of telling a teacher, which were that nothing changed and the telling became its own problem. He was three thousand years old. He understood power structures. He had never understood them from the bottom before.