Page 107 of Three to Fall

I cleared my throat, forcing the full name I hated out of my mouth. “Alexander Key. Tell him he doesn’t know me. But he’ll want to speak to me.”

She raised an eyebrow but waved me off toward the waiting room.

I slunk down in a hard plastic seat and stuck an AirPod in one ear, leaving the other out so I could hear if the woman called my name. I pulled my phone from the pocket of my jeans and scrolled to the podcast app, sighing at the line of check marks against each episode title, indicating I had no new episodes to listen to.

There’d been nothing new since Josiah had been arrested. I’d already listened to all the older episodes at least twice each, but I randomly picked one anyway and let Josiah’s familiar voice fill my ear.

My heart rate lowered with every word, and the feeling of calm I always got when I listened to his teachings was a relief after the bitter disappointments of the last couple of days.

The last few months, really.

Nobody ever kept their promises. Not Riot. Not War or Hawk. Not every foster parent who’d promised to adopt me but then picked a cute little baby instead of the gangly preteen who nobody wanted.

Not Tulip.

Alice.

Her betrayal was the one that had hurt the most.

“Alexander Key?” a guard standing by the door called.

I stood quickly, shoving my headphones in my pocket. “He agreed to see me?”

The man nodded. “Yes. But he hasn’t earned the right to visitation in the main room. You’ll have to make do with the phones. Booth seven, right down the end.”

“Thank you.”

I didn’t care how I got to talk to Josiah. Just that I did.

Nerves shook my fingers as I approached, and I gave myself a mental slap in the face, trying to be cool. I didn’t want to come across as some sort of groupie, all starstruck and unable to speak clearly when face-to-face with a celebrity.

I sat in front of the thick, clear screen, scratched and nicked and smudged with fingerprints. An old-school phone with a cord hung on a hook to my right. A door on the other side opened and a guard led the prophet into the room.

Despite myself, my heartbeat picked up, racing fast. My leg bounced like it had a mind of its own.

Josiah scowled at the guard, saying something I couldn’t hear, and limped toward the booth, walking with the slow, shuffling movements of someone who’d been recently injured. His lips moved in rapid succession that could have been curse words as he sat and stared at me.

He didn’t look like the pictures I’d seen of him on the Ethereal Eden website. I was used to seeing him all in white,his hair long, beard neatly trimmed. It was a stark difference from the bright-orange jumpsuit with black numbers and letters stamped across the front of it. His long hair was greasy and unkempt, scraped back into a messy ponytail with strands falling loose everywhere.

I picked up the phone warily and put it to my ear.

A second later, Josiah did the same.

“Who are you?” he asked.

He might have looked almost like a different person, but his voice was one I knew. One I’d listened to weekly ever since I’d first heard about Ethereal Eden.

My nerves drifted away. “Alexander…Just Xan, really. Xan Key. You don’t know me.”

“Clearly.”

“But I know you. I’ve listened to all your podcasts. I have for a long time. I have to tell you how seen and heard I feel every time you have a new episode…” I trailed off at the bored expression on Josiah’s face.

His eyes suddenly sharpened, and he leaned forward, closer to the glass that separated us. “What’s that tattoo on your forearm?”

I blinked and gazed down at the arm resting on the little desk in front of me. I had a Slayers’ tattoo there that I’d gotten years ago when I’d first been accepted as a prospect. I held it up so Josiah could see it.

“You’re a Slayer?” He sat back, at least as far as his cuffs would allow. “Well, you suddenly got a whole lot more interesting.”

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