We walked back to the mansion in silence.

The young man went inside with the drum. Vapour stretched with the satisfaction of someone who had completed a normal morning’s work. I stayed where I was and looked at the trees and thought about what had stepped out of them.

He came back with two silver cards. Handed one to each of us.

It was heavier than it looked. Cold and smooth, no markings I could read, but it didn’t feel like money. It felt like something else. Permission, maybe. Or membership to something I hadn’t applied for.

I slipped it into my pocket.

I looked up. Celestine was on the balcony.

Standing fully in the shade despite the morning sun, which was not an accident and had never been an accident anywhere on this property.

Same face as last night. Same calm expression. No sign of the thing that had pinned me to the ground eight hours ago. Except in her eyes.

We found each other across the distance. No surprise on either side. No confusion. Just recognition, clean and mutual, the specific acknowledgment of two people who have already been introduced under difficult circumstances.

Her gaze moved briefly to my neck. Then back to my eyes.

A faint smile. Not friendly. Not hostile. The smile of someone who has found something interesting and is deciding what to do with the finding.

Make sure we don’t meet, she had said.

We had met again approximately eight hours later. On her family’s property. In her family’s shade.

She didn’t look away first. Neither did I.

Then Vapour nudged me and started toward the gate and I followed, and I didn’t look back, but I could feel it the whole length of the driveway.

She was still watching.

***

The classroom was cloudy before I reached it.

Not weather cloudy. The specific atmospheric heaviness that I was beginning to recognize as Vince Vale’s presence before I could see him. Like the air around him ran different rules and the classroom had adjusted accordingly.

Students were scattered without purpose, no teacher at the front, the disorganized energy of a class that had learned not to start anything until it had permission.

Vince was in the front row beside the redhead. Harmione, I noted. I filed the name and kept moving, scanning the room as I walked.

Isabelle caught my eye from across the room and her face did the thing it had been doing since the campus steps, the specific warmth of someone whose attention had found a new direction and was still getting used to it.

[LEWD LEVELING SYSTEM]

[Charge insufficient for the mission. Prioritize today.]

I know, I told it. I see the room.

At the back, Azure was in her usual seat with her usual book, reading or performing reading, and when she saw me heading toward her the look she gave me covered everything she didn’t say out loud.

What do you think you’re doing. We talked about this. Don’t.

I sat next to her anyway.

She didn’t look up. "I told you, Abram."

Her voice was quiet. Controlled. Too controlled, the voice of someone keeping something from reaching the surface.

"Relax," I said.

She turned a page she hadn’t been reading.

"You shouldn’t sit here." Softer this time.

I leaned slightly closer. "You don’t have to listen to him when you’re with me."

That made her look up. Not angry. Not afraid. Something more complicated than either, the expression of someone who wants to believe something and doesn’t yet know if they’re allowed to.

"You don’t understand how this place works," she said.

I met her eyes. "I’m starting to."

The red stripes were barely visible in the daylight, just suggestions beneath the blue, the faintest pulse of something running underneath. At night they glowed. During the day she wore them quietly, like a secret she kept even from herself.

At the front, something had shifted between Vince and Harmione. The body language of a disagreement that hadn’t become words yet, both of them facing forward, the specific charged stillness of two people not looking at each other on purpose.

"Who is she?" I asked, gesturing toward Harmione without pointing.

"Harmione," Azure said. The name of someone she knew and had feelings about that she wasn’t going to share.

"Does she know what he is?"

Azure considered not answering. Then: "Not a thing."

Vince stood. Not dramatically. He simply stood, the way things stand when they have decided a room has served its purpose. Then he looked back.

His eyes found Azure. Not me. Azure. Directly and without searching, like he always knew where she was in any room without needing to look.

She felt it. I could see it in how she held the book, the knuckles, the slight tension across her shoulders. She lowered it slowly until their eyes met.

He said nothing. He walked out.

"I’ll be back," Azure whispered.

"Wait," I said.

"I’ll be back." She was already standing.

She walked out after him without looking at me again, which was its own kind of answer to a question I hadn’t asked yet.

I sat at the back of the class and looked at the empty seat beside Harmione. Nobody was going to sit there. The whole class understood that seat was occupied by an absence and absences belonging to Vince Vale were not things you filled.

[Charge insufficient. Mission in four days.]

[Harmione: Ability hidden. First encounter candidate.]

[The seat beside her is empty.]

I looked at the front of the room. Then at the empty seat.

Nobody is sitting there. Nobody is willing.

...which means I can.

Vince’s girlfriend, sitting alone, while Vince is somewhere doing whatever he does to Azure in private corridors.

If I want him to come to me, that’s where I sit.

I stood up. I walked to the front. No one stopped me. No one spoke. But I could feel it—the shift. The room adjusting. Watching.

I reached the empty seat beside Harmione. She looked up. Curious. Not afraid.

Good.

I pulled the chair back and sat. The sound was louder than it should have been.