The ink on the back of my hand was still wet when the guard shoved me out of the hall, so I wiped it on my jeans before it could set.
I wasn't going to wear their mark like it meant something.
The corridor outside emptied fast. The ones with a pack claim walked past me the way people walk past a wet floor sign.
I've had a lot of practice at being the person nobody's eyes land on. That's not a brag. It's just a fact.
Then a hand caught my elbow and pulled me behind a pillar, and my heart went straight up into my throat.
Jory: Don't scream. It's me. And you look like you're about to fall over.
Maeve: I'm not going to fall over. I'm going to throw up. Very different.
Jory: Sit down anyway. You look like shit, and I say that with love.
He pulled me into a little doorway alcove that smelled like dust and old wood, and for the first time all day nobody could see me.
Jory: I've been hunting for you since the courtyard. Nobody would tell me where they put the humans.
Maeve: They marked me unclaimed. Right in front of my father.
Jory: I know. Word travels fast in a place like this.
Maeve: He didn't say one word. He just let the pen do it.
Jory's jaw went tight, the way it does when he's deciding whether to say something.
Jory: If that paper had a line for friend, I would have signed it so fast the ink caught fire.
Maeve: That's the nicest thing anyone's said to me this month.
Jory: Close your hand and don't argue.
He pressed something into my palm, folded small and warm from his pocket.
A bus ticket. One way, dated tomorrow morning, and the town written on it was mine.
Maeve: Jory. How did you even, this is, how?
Jory: I sold the bike. Don't make it a thing.
My eyes went hot and stupid, and I had to stare at the ceiling so I wouldn't cry in a hallway like a loser.
Maeve: You loved that bike.
Jory: It's a bike. You're not.
Jory: Side gate by the laundry. Two guards, but they switch at four. Be there at four and don't look back.
Maeve: And then I'm a waitress with a cheap room and nobody up there knows my name.
Jory: That's the plan. It was always the plan.
Then I remembered the rest of my night, and the ticket in my hand got heavier.
Maeve: I still have to stand at that table first. Gray dress. All of them looking at me.
Jory: One night. You've survived twenty two years of Roderick. One night is nothing.
Jory: Keep your head down tonight. And for fuck's sake, if the prince starts looking at humans, don't be the one he sees.
Maeve: A prince picking a human. Sure. And tomorrow I'll grow wings.
He didn't laugh at that, which wasn't like him at all.
A man in the king's colors came down the corridor with a scroll, and he stopped in front of me like he'd known where I'd be.
He read my name off the paper and said the high table wanted me. Now. Not after I fixed my hair. Now.
Jory stepped back a pace, and I watched him make himself small, because a stable hand doesn't stand between a king's man and the person he wants.
Jory: Four o'clock. Don't do anything brave.
Maeve: Brave isn't on the menu tonight. I promise you that.
I slid the ticket into my boot next to four hundred and twelve dollars of the old plan, and it felt like hiding a heartbeat down there.
Then I walked toward the high table with a king's man at my back, and every step felt like it was wiping out the one before it.
The girl with the quiet plan was still back there somewhere in that corridor, and I already knew I wasn't going to find her again.