"Well, look who's here. Say you're sorry, new girl."
"My arm—""Okay. I'm sorry.""That's more like it."Some mornings start like any other. You wake up, you make coffee, you go to work or school or wherever life sends you that day. You don't know it's the last normal morning you'll have for a while.Ren Boone didn't know it either. She was 19 years old, new in town, three weeks into the auto trades program at Marian County Technical College. She wasn't there because she loved engines; she was there because her mother was gone and this was the only place left standing.Three weeks earlier, Ren had unloaded her whole life out of the back of her grandfather's truck: two duffel bags, a box of her mother's photographs, a record player that hadn't worked since the move. That was everything—all that survived the last two years. Marian County wasn't home yet; it was just the place she landed after home stopped existing.The technical college sat on the edge of town: low brick buildings and a gravel lot, the kind of school built for people who wanted to work with their hands instead of sit behind a desk all day. Ren liked that about it, liked the smell of motor oil in the hallways. It reminded her of the garage back home—the one place that had never once made her feel unwelcome.She kept to herself the first two weeks: ate lunch alone, answered questions in class, and nothing more. That's how you survive a new place—you make yourself small until you understand the shape of the room.Small didn't work forever. Not with people like Grady Voss around.He noticed her the second week: noticed she didn't laugh at his jokes, noticed she didn't flinch when he leaned over her workbench and told her she was doing the torque specs wrong just to see if she'd argue. She hadn't argued; she just fixed it quietly and moved on. Grady didn't like being ignored. Some boys don't. His father was a city councilman. Everybody knew it; Grady made sure of that.Tuesday morning, Ren carried a toolbox down the back hallway of the shop building: steel-toed boots on cracked linoleum, ponytail pulled tight, eyes down—the way you learn to walk when you're new somewhere and you don't want trouble.Trouble found her anyway. It always does in stories like this one.Four of them were waiting by the storage room. Grady stood in front: broad shoulders, letterman jacket even though this wasn't a school with football—just a habit he couldn't drop."New girl," Grady said. "You're in my seat in Diesel Systems."Ren stopped walking. "There's no assigned seats.""There is now."Behind him, three others laughed—the kind of laugh that isn't about anything funny. It's about power, about making somebody feel small enough to fit in your pocket.