Release Me (Stark Trilogy, #1)(82)

She snatches the photocopy from his hand and it makes a snapping flutter and the professor pauses in his lecture and glances upward and catches her in the doorway. “Ms. Robinson?” he says, his voice booming through the high-ceilinged room.

She freezes on the steps, not only because she didn’t know he knew her name, but also because everyone has turned in their seats to stare at her. Jackets rasp and desks groan with shifting weight, and though she keeps her head down she can feel the pressure of their eyes. Reprobus says, “Would you mind staying after class?”

She nods and finds the nearest empty seat and waits for the lecture to continue and the students to return their attention to the front of the room before unzipping her backpack and withdrawing her notebook. For several minutes she is too upset—alternately despising her roommate, her TA, and her professor—to tune in to the buzz of the lecture or write down anything except for the black hash marks of what must be a jailed window or a game of tic-tac-toe that will never be played.

Then her face snaps up and her pen tears through the paper at the mention of a name, Balor.

She has missed the context, but the professor is talking now about the lycans—or skinwalkers, as they were known—among the nineteenth-century Native American population, and how they refused to acknowledge the U.S. occupation of the American West. The raids on settlements and presidios, the thousands killed or bitten, the use of the media to spread terror, the flamboyant acts of violence against soldiers and civilians alike, the scalps woven into blankets, a young girl half-eaten and hung from a tree by a meat hook. “In many ways,” Reprobus says, “very little has changed, the tactics of Geronimo repeated in the tactics of sixties revolutionaries like Howard Forrester and modern-day freedom fighters like Balor.”

Her father. Howard Forrester. Her pen falls to the floor with a clatter and her professor’s eyes flit toward the noise and settle on her for a long moment. She has her hand over her mouth and tries to feign a yawn. She feels like a fool. His involvement in the Resistance is no surprise—it’s just so surreal hearing about him in the context of a college classroom. She needs to be more careful. Her only excuse is her lack of sleep. The professor is still watching her, his mouth open. He seems on the verge of saying something to her but doesn’t.

A hand goes up near the front of the room and distracts him. “Yes?” he says. “What is it?”

A boy in an Oxford shirt with a carefully parted head of yellow hair straightens in his seat. He says he’s interested in the professor’s choice of words. “You called Balor a freedom fighter.”

Reprobus tugs at his beard. “I should have said so-called freedom fighter.”

“I know you were involved with the Resistance in the—”

Reprobus dismisses him with a wave of his hand and talks over him. “My history, outside of my academic credentials, has no place in this classroom.” He continues his lecture as if it were never interrupted. The boy with the parted hair raises his hand again, but after he goes unacknowledged for a minute, he drops it and slumps into his seat.

Claire feels headachy and distracted and can’t keep her eyes off the clock hanging above the emergency exit to the right of the stage. The long hand winds its way to the top of the hour and the professor excuses the class and the students rise in a rush and the room is noisy with zipped backpacks and cell phones chiming with texts. Claire waits for the students to swarm up the stairs and then makes her way down them, to where Reprobus squares a pile of paper before fitting it into his leather satchel. She has never been this close to him and is surprised to discover they are the same height. “Oh yes, Ms. Robinson. Did I embarrass you? Calling on you like that?”

She shrugs and tries to keep her expression impassive.

“You seemed surprised,” he says, and she isn’t sure what he refers to, the moment when he pointed out her tardiness or the moment he spoke her father’s name.

He smiles at her and his beard and teeth are yellow from coffee or the pipe tobacco that she can smell puffing off him. His jacket hangs on the back of a chair. It is horribly outdated, suede with leather fringe hanging from the arms. He pulls it on with some difficulty and throws his satchel over his shoulder and says, “You’ll be on time from now on, I trust?” and when she nods, he says, “Good, good. Because there are things about your history you don’t want to miss.”



*



Jeremy Saber does not know how much time has passed since his arrest. He has no clock, no calendar, and his fourteen-by-fourteen cell has no window, so he cannot keep track of the hours, the days, the weeks and months, all of it a maddening blur punctuated by the occasional cold shower and meal of tacky oatmeal or chicken and rice drowned in gray gravy. He knows, because of his mental fog and his inability to transform, a strong dosage of Volpexx must be ground and mixed into the food. He has tried not to eat, tried to hold out, but eventually his hunger possesses him. The lights remain on day and night and music pipes in at top volume so that he cannot sleep or think. His room is featureless except for a steel slab of a bed anchored to the wall and a stainless-steel toilet that sits in the corner. There is no sink and the lid of the toilet cannot be removed without a screwdriver, and he has on more than one occasion cupped his hand into the bowl and drank greedily when it seems as if days have passed without any food or water and the pit in his belly had to be filled.