Chapter Text
“Learn from me, if not by my precepts, at least by my example, how dangerous is the acquirement of knowledge, and how much happier that man is who believes his native town to be his world, than he who aspires to become greater than his nature will allow.”
― Mary Shelley, Frankenstein
Somewhere beneath Paradis University
April 1934
Isabel is lost.
She feels as if she has been running for hours, though it can only have been a few minutes. Stumbling over cracked, wet tile, she passes endless winding corridors lined with reinforced steel doors. She gave up on trying to open them when the first dozen or so were locked.
There is only one way to safety, and that is out of this wretched place. But for the life of her she cannot find an exit.
As she skids around another corner, tears sting her eyes. She should have listened to Levi. They should never have come here tonight. She shouldn’t have left Farlan, no matter how he had screamed at her to run, run. A coward. That’s all she is, all she has ever been.
She slows, then stops. These halls are mostly dark, but a few electric lamps are set in the ceiling, and Isabel stands in a pool of flickering blue-white light. She turns on the spot. Toward her pursuer, whose footsteps have silenced, as well.
She breathes heavily through her nose. Chemicals and decay.
Isabel is no coward. Not anymore.
“Hey!” she screams into the darkness.
Her voice echoes back along the tiled walls, a Greek chorus of Isabels.
There is no response.
But from the prickling of the hair on her arms, she knows her pursuer is there, just down the corridor, standing in the darkness. Watching.
Fury bubbles in Isabel’s chest.
“What do you want?” she yells.
Her fingers curl around the pocketknife in her coat pocket, a gift from Levi. It warms in her palm.
At the end of the hallway, a figure moves among the shadows.
“What did you do with Farlan?” she demands.
The silence that meets her question only makes her bolder. Isabel swings the pocketknife out.
“C’mere and face me! Or are you too lily-livered to—”
The figure shuffles forward. Isabel’s blood freezes in her veins.
The person is naked and filthy. Stringy, matted hair that might once have been blond hangs over her face. Her head tilts to the side in an almost innocent gesture, like a curious puppy.
“Hey,” Isabel says, shocked that she can still find her voice, “w-what’s wrong with you?”
The girl takes another few slow, lumbering steps forward. She moves like her joints are too loose in their sockets. Like a puppet on tangled strings. The hairs on Isabel’s neck and arms prickle as though she’s been shocked.
Then between one blink and the next, the puppet-girl bends double at the waist and bolts straight ahead.
A scream tears from Isabel’s throat. The pocketknife tumbles from her fingers and skids into the darkness, but she doesn’t stop to look for it; she turns, and she runs, and she slams into the closest door she can find, which mercifully swings open. Isabel dashes inside and slams the door shut.
It’s pitch black, save for a square of blue-white light coming through a tiny window in the door. It gives just enough light for Isabel to see that she is in a room not much larger than a closet.
Footsteps slap over the tiles in the hall, stopping just outside the door.
A small, breathy sob escapes Isabel’s throat.
And all at once, Isabel realizes:
It’s not a person. It’s an it.
And it’s right there.
Is this what happened to all of them? Is there more than one of these things? What will it do if it reaches her? Eat her alive? And what had it done to Farlan?
On the other side of the door, there is slow, gravelly breathing. Sniffing.
Isabel’s trembling knees give way, and she slides down the door until she’s seated on the hard tile floor. She presses her spine against the cold metal so hard she feels the lump of each vertebra.
And then the thing—it makes a noise, it sighs, long and low and whispery, and if Isabel didn’t know any better, she would think it sounded satisfied.
She shivers against the door.
But then—
Footsteps.
Human. Brisk. Rubber soles on tile. They approach the door and Isabel is too frightened to shout, but as she listens, the footsteps slow, then stop.
The thing out there snorts. Then growls.
Isabel gasps as she hears the thump of two bodies colliding, the smack of a fist on flesh, and the thing, it—
It whimpers. Like a dog whapped on the nose with a rolled-up newspaper.
Isabel pushes to her feet. Lips quivering, she forces herself to speak.
“Farlan?”
No response. The footsteps resume, and a silhouette appears through the window, The door handle rattles. . It’s too dark to see any details through the glass, but whoever it is, they’re moving too normally to be that Thing. Warmth seeps slowly back into her blood: cautious hope.
The door sighs open.
“Levi?” she whimpers.
The person steps inside.
Not Farlan.
Not Levi.
Isabel backs hard into the opposite wall. Tears fill her eyes. She dashes forward, fists raised, but she is tired and terrified and there is a sharp, pinching pain in the side of her neck and as she claps a hand over the spot, the darkness reaches out, unforgiving, all-consuming, and pulls her in.
*
Mitras, “Underground” Quarter
Six months later
A wet, dreary autumn evening, and the windows of the Underground Youth Boxing Gym are fogged nearly white. True to its name, the gym sits under a red brick church, the space split between patched leather punching bags and tight-packed boxes of the Body of Christ. And Levi, dressed more for Sunday service than for exercise, dings a bell twice. The final bout of the night is over.
“Get up, Arlert.”
A low groan from the mat.
“I said, get the hell up.”
The defeated boy sits up with a muttered, “Sorry.”
His opponent rushes across the ring and squats beside his friend. “Are you all right, Armin? Did I hit too hard?”
Lifting the frayed ropes, Levi hoists himself nimbly into the ring. His dress shoes glint in the light from the bare bulb overhead.
“Jaeger.” The other boy jumps, looking up. “You were pulling punches.”
“But it’s Armin—”
“I don’t give a damn if it’s your dear old mother. You don’t pull punches in the ring.”
“But, sir, he’s my friend. I don’t want to hurt him.”
The other volunteer coach urges the boys outside the ring toward the curtain that serves as a makeshift dressing room. Levi folds his arms and glares at the two in front of him.
“Do you wanna get stronger, Jaeger?”
Jaeger helps his friend stand with a hand on his elbow. They’re just fifteen, but they’re both already an inch taller than Levi.
“Well, yeah,” Eren says.
“Then if you wanna get strong, you can’t let your personal feelings interfere with your focus.”
“It’s all right, Eren,” Armin says, ever the conciliator. “You’re never gonna get better if you hold yourself back.”
Levi dismisses them, telling Armin to stop by the nurse’s table before he heads home, and fetches a broom and dustpan from the closet. He says goodbye to the kids as they get dressed and file out, quickly sweeps the floor and wipes down the equipment, and soon it’s just him, the nurse, and the other coach left.
He feels Petra’s eyes on him when he comes back from dumping the pail of sudsy water in the gutter. She’s probably picked up on his uncharacteristic rush. Petra is too observant for her own good, and tougher than she looks. She volunteers on the nights the older boys train, because the younger ones rarely do enough damage to require more than what Levi or Gunther can handle. She’s tiny and red-haired and sweet, and Levi’s seen her break up fights between teenagers twice her size with a sharp kick to the knee. She does not share why she knows these things, and Levi knows better than to ask.
“Don’t you have your interview tomorrow, Levi?” she asks, tucking iodine and a roll of bandages into her bag.
So she thinks he’s nervous about his interview with the fellowship committee. It’s a bit of a relief.
“Yeah.” Levi upturns the dustpan into the trash.
“Are you going to do anything to celebrate?”
“Celebrate what? It’s not as if they’re giving me the money tomorrow. If they even decide to.”
“I’m sure they will,” Petra says breezily. “And I know you’ve been working so hard, surely you deserve—”
“She’s trying to get you to come to some birthday party tomorrow,” Gunther interrupts, emerging from behind the curtain dressed in a rain slicker. “She’s been begging all of us this whole week.”
Petra gives the other coach a glare that would drop a weaker man dead on the spot.
“I’m not going to know anybody there,” she says as Levi shoves the broom and dustpan back into their designated corner. “It’s just somebody Oluo knows from the veterans’ hospital, and they’re all going to sit around exchanging war stories while I’m stuck making small talk with the wives. But if you came with me—”
“Why would I show up at a birthday party for somebody I don’t even know?”
“Because it’s at Maria’s! I know you and Farlan used to go there all the—”
Petra’s eyes go impossibly rounder as they fall on something just over Levi’s left shoulder. He turns his head toward Gunther, who is innocently and intensely inspecting his fingernails.
Levi reminds himself that they mean well. They really do.
“I don’t think so, Petra,” he says, trying not to sound impatient. “I’m gonna be up late going over my notes tonight, anyway. Not gonna feel like partying after that.”
“Dean Jaeger’s supposed to be there.”
“So?”
“So? Isn’t he on the final selection committee for your fellowship?”
“So what, you think I’m gonna try to bribe the dean at some chump’s birthday party? I’m sure that’ll go over well.”
“C’monnnn, it’ll be good for you.”
She bounces a little on her heels, and in that moment, she is Isabel, begging him to come along on deliveries, insisting that he teach her how to swing a knife and shoot a Gat, all with an eager grin splitting her face.
Before he can answer, someone knocks on the basement window from outside, and Petra greets her husband with a wave.
“At least think about it?” she asks.
He purses his lips. “I’ll think about it.”
Petra grins and bounces out.
When she’s gone, Gunther says, “I hate to say this, but she might be right.”
“Right about what.”
Gunther shrugs. “It might be good for you to get back out to Maria’s. Start…making new memories there. We’ve just been worried about you, you know. I’m still ready to help out whenever you want to clean out your apartment.”
Levi pulls his suit jacket and coat from the rack near the door. “Yeah. Thanks. You’ll lock up?”
It’s still pouring when he emerges onto the sidewalk, collar turned up and hat pulled down low over his eyes. Perhaps he should have asked Gunther to come along. He’d been Farlan’s friend, too, along with Eld and Petra—Perhaps they deserve to know his suspicions.
Perhaps they do. But then they would insist upon becoming involved, and Levi cannot allow that. His failures had already cost him his family. He wasn’t going to lead his only remaining friends to their doom, too.
*
December 14, 1911
Rose College, Paradis
My dear and unfortunate successor —
If you are reading these pages, then I am likely dead or worse. But you, my unknown friend, are the one whom I pity. I pity you because of the choices you will have to make upon reading my account, and because of the choices you have made that have put you in this position to begin with.
I am writing this account in part, I think, for the sake of my sanity. It cannot be for my soul, for that is already long past saving. But perhaps yours is not. I only pray that whoever you are, you are braver than I have been.
—L.S.
*
Levi walks first to the city graveyard. He feels it as a cold stripe down his chest when he steps out of the Underground and into the city center, like crossing an invisible barrier. And there is an archway that he passes under, wrought iron topped with a shield bearing Athena’s likeness in profile, but its gates are so old they’ve rusted in place, forever open. As a boy, he’d stood beside the arch in his patched knickers and handknit mittens, scrabbling with other children over coins dropped from the pockets—purposefully or not—of the bureaucrats as they came in and out.
Now, he walks through the threshold like he belongs there.
The rain has turned sharp as pins against his cheeks. He adjusts his bag on his shoulder, turns away from the gilded dome of City Hall and toward the squat municipal office buildings. During the day, the city government complex shines like a beacon, all marble columns, intricate scrollwork, and sandstone bricks. But night has fallen, and in the orange light of the gas lamps the buildings sit in blocky shadow.
Levi squelches across the manicured lawn. Dressing up was a mistake. Who the hell was he dressing up for? Now his only nice pair of shoes are going to be ruined the night before he has to prostrate himself in front of the heads of his department and beg for money.
At the very end of a row, a cloth-covered rectangle rises ghostlike out of the dark earth. Levi stands in front of it, rain dripping off his coat and the edges of his hat, and gathers the fabric in a fist. He pushes the cloth back until it crumples to the ground. Normally, he supposes, people do this with a group of mourners, like a second funeral. Perhaps he thinks coming alone will make reality sink in. He still walks into the apartment they shared expecting to smell Farlan’s cooking, still pauses when he sees a bird in the university quad so he can tell Isabel about it. But instead he comes home after long nights in the library or the gym or the bank where he picks up a few shifts working security, and he makes tea and reads until he’s tired enough to catch a few hours of fraught sleep. It is an untenable life, and yet he feels fastened to it like a train to its rails.
Levi digs into the pocket of his suit jacket for the stones he’d collected months ago. He places them atop their shared headstone, where the rain darkens them. Without the stones, he expects to feel lighter. And he does, but it’s an untethered sort of lightness, a balloon with too much air.
He speaks, and the rain swallows up his voice until even he can’t hear himself. “I’m sorry, guys. I’m gonna find them. I promise.”
*
“Cover your tracks, runt.”
Levi stills, looks over his shoulder, but the floor behind him is just as polished as before he slipped across it. What do you mean, he wants to ask, but Levi doesn't speak much.
A cuff across his ear. By now, Levi knows better than to flinch.
Kenny points to the adjacent wall. In the dim light from the streetlamps, a figure flickers: his own shadow, full of motion and life.
Stepping into the light so that another, bigger shadow appears on the wall beside Levi ’s, Kenny forms his fingers into a gun and holds it to shadow-Levi’s head.
“Somebody sees you, they can figure out where you are if they ain’t a complete idiot. BANG!” he shouts, and Levi recoils, heart thudding in his chest. Kenny laughs, low and rough. “Do it again. ‘Til you get it right. Go!”
*
The records room inside the police headquarters smells of dust and old paper. Levi hugs the corridor wall, soft-soled boots silent on the wood floor, and doesn’t encounter another soul as he slips inside.
Rows of wooden filing cabinets stretch farther than he would have expected; this single room appears to take up almost all of this side of the third floor. At least the Mitras police department seems to be serious about their recordkeeping.
They’d been found in the river, he’d been told. Officially ruled an accidental drowning. Identification on both of them. He’d been handed their belongings in a paper sack that smelled of mud. The bodies would be unrecognizable, he was told. Closed caskets, quick burials. No next of kin, but certainly, Levi could pay to have them interred in the city graveyard rather than the pauper’s hill outside of town. Never mind that he’d been with Farlan since they were sixteen, or that they’d found Isabel as a bony half-starved urchin and fed and clothed her until she was well enough to join the business. He wasn’t their next of kin, so he had no right to the reports detailing their deaths.
Bullshit. Levi knew what they were doing that night. And he knew that what they were doing would lead them nowhere near the river.
He shudders when he finds the files bearing their names, typed neatly upon the tabs: CHURCH, FARLAN and MAGNOLIA, ISABEL. This, this, should make it feel real, even if the headstone didn’t, and yet still feels as though he’s going to open the files and find—what? Old copies of their schoolwork? Notes scribbled to him explaining where to find them?
He’s losing his mind, Levi decides.
He takes both files to a wooden desk cluttered with fountain pens and coffee mugs. He does not open them. He stands above them, palms planted flat on the desk, and considers for the first time that he may not want to see the contents of these files. They might contain descriptions, or even, he realizes with cold horror, photographs.
He has not thought this through. Not beyond his own need for vengeance. Which must mean he truly is losing his mind. He wouldn’t have spent almost four years as Mitras’s biggest bootlegger without always being ten steps ahead of everyone else, and yet here he is facing the sudden wild urge to flee back through the window he’d snuck in through, to leave the city center, to leave Mitras, and never look back.
Except that’s weakness. And Levi is not weak.
This is why he’s here. For proof that his family did not die by accident.
What he does with the proof is a different matter. Levi could find Kenny’s gang without much issue—he still has connections in the Underground, even though he’s been out of the business for nigh on a year. He could find them, could kill the ones he believes are responsible. Could kill Kenny, even. But Levi does have a few scraps of a conscience left, and he hates the thought of needless bloodshed. He wants to be sure. And then, once it’s been long enough that they think they’ve successfully gotten away with their revenge—then, he will kill them.
He grits his teeth and opens the files.
Atop both are identical sheets of paper containing their personal information. A photograph is clipped to Isabel’s: a mugshot from an arrest before she’d even met Levi. She is hollow-cheeked and glassy-eyed, her hair cropped short and uneven, so unlike the bright-eyed, pigtailed young woman she’d become after a few steady weeks of baths and solid meals. Seeing her face again has Levi’s throat prickling.
He flips through both files simultaneously, skims past Isabel’s arrest report. The next few pages of Farlan’s seem strange: employment records dating all the way back to his time in the thread factory as a thirteen-year-old; medical information down to their blood types. But he finds no incident report from the night of their deaths, no investigation. Finally, Levi reaches the last page, and a small breath sneaks past his lips: Medical Examiner’s Report.
He scans the pages.
They are blank.
Or rather, not entirely blank. In the top corner of both pages, a stamp in brown ink: the letter D encircled by what appears to be grapevines. At the bottom, a signature in black ink.
Attending physician: Dr. G. Jaeger.
Levi’s pulse quickens. Dean Jaeger is a general practitioner at the university hospital. Surely there are other G. Jaegers in Mitras. Other doctors named G. Jaeger. Other doctors named G. Jaeger who are medical examiners who would sign off on a blank report.
He flips the pages over, but there is nothing else. He closes the files and shakes them out, hoping to jostle something loose, but the contents simply scatter over the desk and onto the floor. His hands connect with the top of the desk with a slap. If the fucking cops are in on their murders—If they’re working with Kenny’s gang—He’s far from surprised that the cops would be in league with a gang, but if that’s the case, then finding their murderers is going to be even harder. How had he managed to piss off so much of this city from one shitty interception—
“Is somebody in there?”
Fuck—he’s slipping. He is losing his mind. Levi ducks beneath the desk as the door to the records room creaks open.
Silent, deep breaths. A flashlight beam passes overhead, settling briefly on one of the pages that had fluttered to the ground before moving on. Nothing to do about that now. He needs to be gone. In all likelihood, the cops will find the open files and figure out who was here, but at least if he can get out undetected, have enough time to come up with an alibi—
“I know I heard something,” a nasal voice says. Footsteps approach, then soften as they travel toward the cabinets.
Levi peers around the desk. There’s a clear line of sight to the door from nearly everywhere in the room. Someone else might be in the hall, but he won’t be able to see them until he reaches the threshold.
There is a window at the opposite end, though. He came in through a different window, but this one looks exactly the same: same catch, same sash. He won’t be able to retrieve his sodden suit and dress shoes from where they sit in a utility closet, but no one will be able to tell they’re his.
Cover your tracks, runt.
The clothes were probably ruined, anyway. He’ll wear some of Farlan’s old things to his interview.
The nasally voice echoes through the filing cabinets. “Miche, if this is another prank, it’s really not funny.”
Levi eases toward the window, staying low, hugging the shadows. He manages to release the latch silently and push open the sash—
Which releases a lengthy, high-pitched screech.
Brilliant.
“Who’s there?”
Footsteps start thudding across the room, and Levi gives up on silence, shoving the window the rest of the way up and swinging a leg over the frame. He glances around for holds, finding few, which will be even worse in the freezing rain still beating down. He’ll take it over the alternative.
But the cop is either fast or wasn’t as far away as Levi had thought, because as he leans out of the window a hand closes hard on his ankle.
“Stop—!”
Levi kicks out, and his foot connects with the narrow jaw of a bearded man; then he pushes out, into the rain and the waiting ground below.
*
“Levi.”
“Yes, Ma.”
“Promise me something.”
He ’s at the sink, drying dishes after dinner. He stands on a chair to put the plates away.
“All right.”
Kuchel sits in the other chair, coughing through a haze of cigarette smoke.
“You listenin’, little man?”
“Yes, Ma.”
“You stay in school. No matter what anybody says, you finish high school and you go to college. You stay in school for as long as you possibly c-c—”
She breaks down into another coughing fit. Levi lifts a stack of plates onto the shelf.
“…As you possibly can, right?” Kuchel’s throat sounds like pumice over sandpaper. She’s thin as a skeleton and almost as gaunt. Levi is eight, and thinks that’s just how people look.
She looks at him then, his proud mother, gray eyes sharp as needles. He feels pierced in his heart. He ’ll do whatever she says.
“You’re gonna get outta here one day,” Kuchel says. “You’re too smart to stay Underground all your life. I know you can do it.”
He ’s not sure. But she seems to believe it, so he believes her.
“All right,” Levi says.
She smiles through cracked lips. “You promise?”
“Yes, Ma.”
“Make me proud?”
He gets down from the chair and wraps his arms around her bony shoulders.
“Yes, Ma.”
*
The next afternoon, Levi limps through the doors to Fritz Library, wearing shoes a size too big and a pair of slacks with the hems pinned up, and finds a seat outside the lecture hall to await his interview.
The library is the centerpiece of Paradis University, a spiked crown atop a golden head. Its twin spires are visible from everywhere on campus. If you get lost, he’d been told on his first day, just head toward the library. It is the school’s crown jewel and its beating heart, and Levi has managed to avoid stepping foot inside ever since the night Isabel and Farlan died. For fear of what, he isn’t sure. Their ghosts, perhaps.
It’s silent back here, save for the steady ticking of a wall clock. One would think that a library would always be silent, but Levi’s spent enough time in them by now to know that even libraries make sounds like a living thing. There’s the soft pulse, thump-thump, of books being opened and closed, and hushed whispers like breath. But those noises are for the stacks on the floors above him. Levi sits in the corridor beyond the entryway, beneath twin stone staircases, far from the beating heart of the library.
He tries to review his notes, but he can’t get the words on his notecards to stay still. All night he’d lain awake thinking about Isabel and Farlan’s missing records, about G. Jaeger and that D stamp. Levi is right. He must be right. Someone had killed them. And there’s only one person who hates him enough to murder his only family.
Thump.
Levi startles, and his notecards go spilling out over the checkered floor. Down the hall, some kid picks up the book he’d dropped, then runs to catch up with his friends. There’s a group of them in the grandiose entrance hall, lolling against the massive marble bust of some Classical thinker or hero. It’ll hurt them if they knock it over.
Levi pushes the image out of his head: blood smeared on tile, a stone head cracked in half, rubble and dust. He tastes iron in his mouth.
On the way in he’d nearly slipped on the gingko berries that have turned to slurry on the tree-lined path. He must have bitten his tongue. Just another ache to add to the growing litany. He is cold and sore. The pins in his trousers are pricking at his legs and he has at least five or six new blisters on top of the dull, throbbing pain in his left ankle.
Tick. Tick.
Thump.
Scowl deepening, he looks up, but the kids in the entrance hall are gone. He appears to be alone. He collects his scattered notecards and sits down again.
Levi glares at the clock on the opposite wall. His interview was supposed to begin five minutes ago, but the other semi-finalist is still in there with the panel. He hears their voices, the staccato beat of questions between longer, mellow-sounding answers. Occasionally there will be a murmur of laughter.
Levi crosses his arms and shifts in the uncomfortable wooden chair outside the room. He doesn’t really make people laugh. Not most people, at least. Isabel thought he was funny, but Isabel has the brightest, easiest laugh of anyone Levi has ever known.
Had. Isabel had. The thought goes through him like a sword.
He sits up straighter in his chair, has a bad habit of slouching like he wishes to disappear. The electric lights reflect off the polished tile of the floor. He feels a headache coming on. If they go on much longer, Levi will have to cut his own interview short, or else be late for his shift at work.
Thump.
He feels it this time. Through the soles of his—of Farlan’s—shoes. From the floor.
This is ridiculous. He’s being ridiculous. It’s probably just somebody moving a table in one of the study rooms upstairs, rattling through the…through the thick stone walls that surround him.
We ’ll get you some, big brother, then you won’t have to worry—
What do I care what it ’s for? I’m just doing my job—
Levi. Promise me something—
He has the sudden, wild urge to run out of the library, past the quad and out through the main gates, where the stink of Mitras will at least remind him that not everyone is—
Dead.
Thump.
He’s on his hands and knees before he can think twice, ear against the cold tile, waiting, listening—
Without warning, the door to the interview room bursts open on another wave of laughter. A man leans out from the threshold, blond and broad. He’s wearing a wine-red sweater over a collared shirt and looking around as though searching for someone. There’s a bland sort of smile on his face. It’s the kind of smile that’s practiced until it’s empty.
A pair of blue eyes lands on Levi. The smile wavers as the man gives him a once-over. Likely judging his ill-fitting suit.
“Are you all right?”
And Levi realizes that he’s still kneeling on the floor, face nearly pressed to the ground. He jumps to his feet. He does not know who the hell this is, but he’s not part of the mathematics faculty.
“We…” The man clears his throat, as though also choosing to ignore what he’s just seen. “We thought you’d knock when you got here.”
Levi’s stomach drops through the floor.
“I thought you were still interviewing.” It comes out sharp-edged, his tongue a knife.
The man looks back into the interview room and gestures a goodbye before pulling the door almost shut at his back.
Wait. This is the other semi-finalist? The mathematics department is small enough that Levi should recognize nearly everyone. Levi has never seen this man before in his life. What is he doing applying for a fellowship in Levi’s field?
“How the hell was I supposed to know to knock?” Levi asks. His cheeks burn with shame. What a way to leave a great first impression on the people with the power to decide whether he eats next year.
A slight pinch appears between the man’s thick brows. Levi is reminded unexpectedly of the busts in the entrance hall, of Apollo and Achilles in marble.
“I’m so sorry—?” As if the slight lift at the end wasn’t clear enough, he extends his hand.
Still angry and humiliated, Levi eyes him for a moment before shaking it. “Levi.”
That bland smile is back. “Erwin.”
“That a first or a last name?”
He laughs and releases Levi’s hand without answering. Levi watches him retreat down the checkered hallway. His posture is immaculate, shoulders back and spine straight, hands in the pockets of his chinos.
Levi doesn’t know why someone who’s not even in his cohort is suddenly interested in this fellowship. He doesn’t know why the selection committee would choose him as the only other semi-finalist, or why Erwin acts so confident.
But Levi wants to yank on the hem of that sweater until a thread comes loose. He wants to unravel him.