Ficorpio
Chapter 1
Claire Sterling lost her memory.
I found out while I was lying on the enormous bed in her estate basement.
The climate control kept the room pleasantly warm. I lay on a thick velvet mattress, with a cabinet beside the bed packed full of my favorite chocolates and potato chips. An old superhero cartoon played on the tablet across from me.
Honestly, except for the chain around my ankle being a little too short, I was pretty comfortable.
Claire’s sister came to the estate to pick something up and found me by accident.
She dropped her ice cream.
Then she started screaming like a kettle about to blow.
“Claire Sterling, you little psycho! What the hell did you do to him?”
She rushed over and unlocked the velvet-wrapped restraint chain around my ankle, her fingers shaking so hard she could barely work the clasp.
Then she threw her arms around me and burst into tears.
“Please don’t call the police. Please, please don’t call the police. My sister has always been messed up in the head, and now karma’s caught up with her. She was in a car accident. She’s barely alive.”
She pulled back, tears streaming down her face.
“Please, kid. She’s in such a terrible state. Don’t report her, okay? Tell me what you want. I’ll compensate you for anything.”
That was how I learned Claire had hit her head.
She had selective amnesia.
She remembered everyone except me.
At the hospital, one of her closest friends brought in a fruit basket and hesitated at the edge of her bed.
“Claire, you really forgot Ethan Bennett? The guy you went through all that trouble to win over?”
Claire’s forehead was wrapped in heavy bandages. Bruises marked the corners of her eyes and mouth, and a neck brace held her rigid. Her expression was cold and distant.
“Who is he?”
“If I don’t remember him, I don’t have feelings for him. Tell him we’re done.”
Her friend made a face, looking deeply unwilling.
“I’m not doing that. What if you get your memory back and murder me?”
Claire seemed annoyed by the stalling. She picked up her smartphone from the bedside table and sent me a message herself.
Let’s break up. I lost my memory, and I won’t fall for a man I don’t know.
Take the money and leave. Don’t let me see you again.
I was standing in the hallway when my phone buzzed three times.
There were her two idiot messages.
And a bank notification.
A transfer from Claire Sterling: five million.
I stopped with one foot raised, just about to walk into her room.
I stared at my screen, blinked, and quietly shoved the baseball bat I had half-pulled from my bag of oranges back inside.
Together with the five million her sister had already given me, that made ten million.
Ten million.
It meant I could pay off the debt Daniel and Margaret Bennett had left behind. It meant I could get through four years of university without worrying about money.
I pinched my cheek, which had somehow gotten rounder rather than more gaunt during my captivity.
Ow.
It hurt.
Not a dream, then.
Chapter 2
I took out my phone and typed quickly.
Thanks. Goodbye forever. Want an orange?
The instant I hit send, a bright red exclamation mark appeared on the screen.
I paused.
From inside the hospital room came Claire’s smug little laugh.
“If I block him fast enough, he won’t be able to cling to me.”
Furious, I opened the bag and crouched outside her door, eating eight juicy, sweet-tart oranges in a row.
Maybe it was the oranges. Maybe it was something else.
But suddenly, my chest felt tight.
Memories from the past rose up like acid, soaking through my heart until it felt sore and soft.
I pulled out my phone and booked a train ticket to Capital City.
Goodbye forever, Claire Sterling.
I met Claire Sterling during my sophomore year of high school.
She was a new transfer student with fair skin, striking features, and a wealthy family. Wherever she stood, she looked like the one white swan among a flock of ugly ducklings.
And then there was me—a Small-Town Exam Striver so broke I could barely keep food on the table. All I had going for me was a spot in the top ten of the provincial rankings, which was the only reason I’d been admitted to St. Alden’s Preparatory School.
Aside from the daily grind of practice problems and memorization, I spent every weekend buried under part-time jobs.
Under normal circumstances, Claire and I would never have crossed paths.
That changed the day I realized I was being stalked by a complete psychopath.
I rented a run-down resettlement flat with terrible security, barely any cameras, and more than its share of strange neighbors.
Every night, usually around midnight, the building came alive. A middle-aged couple downstairs would scream at each other like they were performing at a funeral, while reckless teenagers roared past on motorcycles.
Worse, the elderly woman next door was a shameless pervert.
Every time I came home, opening the rusty apartment door lock took a minute or two. That was always when she would stick her greasy body out of her doorway and let her slick gaze crawl over me.
“My daughter just sent us some fresh crab,” she would call. “Why don’t you come over and have some, handsome?”
I could only answer with a dry, humorless laugh.
Once I made it inside, Mrs. Edith Collins would creep over and press herself against my peephole, squinting through it.
She couldn’t see a thing, of course.
Still, having one enormous black eyeball blocking the other side of my door felt like a terrible omen.
Chapter 3
So I dug out the firecrackers my boss had given me when I worked at a fireworks shop over Lunar New Year. I lit one, opened the door, and tossed it outside.
The hallway instantly erupted with festive pops and bangs, followed by Mrs. Collins’s shriek of agony.
For a while, life was simple and almost cozy.
Then the psychopath appeared, and all of that turned to ash.
I couldn’t say exactly when it started. Every night after work, a pitch-black figure began trailing me home.
She was wrapped from head to toe, tall and broad-shouldered, like some kind of human bear.
Whenever I turned around, she vanished with startling agility.
Once I got home and switched off the lights, I would hide behind the curtains and watch the street below.
Sometimes she stood in the shadows beyond the reach of the streetlamp.
Sometimes she crouched beside the trash cans.
I had to admit, I was getting scared. If she ever decided to hurt me, my baseball bat probably wouldn’t stand a chance against her.
I took out my smartphone and tried to photograph her so I could call the police. Unfortunately, the few-hundred-dollar phone’s camera was fully worthy of its budget price. The pictures came out looking like they’d been painted on a cave wall.
The psychopath kept getting closer.
At first, she followed from a distance. Then, little by little, she began to close the gap.
Sometimes I could even hear her heavy breathing behind me, carried on the wind.
At night, I tossed and turned until dawn. The next morning, dark circles hung beneath my eyes, and I couldn’t concentrate in class. I couldn’t even follow my favorite subject, math.
With no other choice, I went to Claire Sterling and asked whether she would walk home with me after school.
I offered her the tremendous sum of ten dollars per trip.
Our homes were in the same direction, and my desk mate had told me that Claire had once won the national youth championship in Full-Contact Chinese Kickboxing.
Apparently, she could take on five guys like me.
It was an autumn afternoon. Claire sat by the window, which had been left open. A breeze poured into the classroom and billowed the white curtains behind her.
She lifted her delicate eyelids and looked at me with cool indifference.
Just when I was certain she would refuse, the corner of her mouth suddenly curved upward. The frost melted from her brows and eyes.
“Sure.”
From that day on, I had someone to walk home with.
The tall girl wore her school uniform, her backpack swinging lazily from one shoulder as she walked beside me.
She glanced at me. “Ethan, your hair is pretty distinctive.”
“Like a golden snub-nosed monkey.”
I looked up from my vocabulary notebook and ran a hand through my soft, yellowing hair, the result of years of poor nutrition. Then I gave her an awkward but perfectly polite laugh.
“Thank you for comparing me to a national treasure.”
I don’t remember exactly when it happened, but one day Claire Sterling ended up at the school clinic with stomach pains.