Page 4 of The Shape of my Scar (The Unbroken #1)

F aolan

There was always a low light in Faolan’s room.

It flickered sometimes, casting strange shadows that danced like ghosts on the walls. She imagined they were little ninja assassins, here to do her bidding as their jōnin . She knew what a jōnin was since she used to like watching manga with Callum.

Fortunately, the light never went out fully. Thane always complained he couldn’t see much of her, which was because his room was always brighter.

She liked it that way.

She liked that he couldn’t see how her skin was covered with bruises some days, how her cheeks felt thin and pulled in or how she curled around herself like an origami swan too close to the fire.

“Did I tell you I used to play rugby?” Thane asked once, his voice casual through the hole in the wall.

She shook her head and then realized he couldn’t see her. “No.”

“I was really good, ya know. Fast, but I wasn’t just fast. Dad said I could read the game. Coach said I had eyes like radar, like I could predict what the other players would do,” he boasted.

Faolan didn’t reply. She was tracing the words in her book again.

After a long pause, she murmured, “What’s radar?”

Thane chuckled. “Ask your book. Doesn’t it know everything?”

She turned a page. The corner of her mouth lifted in the hint of a smile, but she didn’t stop reading, even as he began to explain how a radar worked.

Thane

“Trust me, I'm a genius,” she read one night, her voice slow, careful, the syllables shaped around sleep and pain.

It was from Artemis Fowl.

Thane let the silence stretch after that. They had taken him away, and he had come back quiet. He didn’t put his finger through the hole; he did not look at her with his rainbow eyes.

She kept reading until suddenly, he interrupted, “Lirian used to live on the same estate as I did. On the other side of the park. He was one year ahead of me in school. St. Brendan’s, it was. We used to walk together.”

She didn’t answer, but he knew she was listening.

“He took down a bully once. He was a big lad, the other one. Nobody thought he’d do it. But he said something about his mom, and Lirian just went after him, slamming the kid into the lockers like he’d been waiting to do it.”

“They both got suspended because he broke the guy’s nose and his front teeth went flying. It was funny, like a cartoon.”

“There were posters when he went missing,” Thane whispered through the wall. “His mom…she kept going to the police station and coming to school.”

Another pause.

“He’s different now; he is scary quiet. But when they come to get him…it’s like he flips. He goes completely still. Then suddenly, he’s just bonkers. They don’t come near him as much anymore.”

Faolan drew her knees up and pressed her forehead against them. “He’s smart,” she whispered.

“Yeah,” Thane agreed. “But not lucky enough.”

Lirian sometimes shouted through the walls—usually angry, but once he laughed too loud and sounded a little mad.

Zel always had ideas. Plans. He planned to kill them all.

Maro rarely spoke at all. His voice, when it came, was like the chill you’d get when someone was watching you and you couldn’t see them.

Sometimes Dorothy’s voice sounded like it was full of life as she read. Sometimes it was lighter than a breeze.

And then, like a tide turning, it would go flat. Or absent.

One night, she didn’t read at all.

She didn’t even come to the wall.

Thane heard the electronic number lock at her door beep after they had dumped her in the room. He could hear her stumbling around the room. She tripped over the mattress. Her limbs were loose, and her breath sounded like she had been running.

Thane whispered, “Dorothy?”

No answer.

Later that night, long after the drip of the shower had stopped, he heard her crying.

The sound filled the room like ice-cold water. Chills travelled down his spine at those eerie whimpers. It was like the sounds you hear in horror movies before bad things happened.

He pressed his face against the wall. He poked at the cardboard she had left to hide the hole. “Hey,” he whispered. “You don’t have to talk, but I’m here.”

Still nothing.

“It wasn’t your fault, you know. This is not your fault.”

He knew she didn’t believe him. But the whimpers stopped, and he could hear her breathing slow.

The other boys were silent, their faces angry.

“We will get them,” said Zel.