Captain Morris arrived every early in the morning.

William heard her before she appeared — the particular cadence of boots on corridor stone that moved with military purpose and didn’t adjust for the acoustic environment.

Captain Morris had spent enough years in situations where announcing yourself early was a liability that the habit had apparently become permanent.

She stopped in the doorway and took in the room in one sweep. Henrik in his bed. Three students arranged in the particular configuration of people who had been waiting and were trying not to look like it. The folder on the bedside table. The message crystal.

Her expression didn’t change.

"Henrik," she said.

"Elara," he said. "Close the door."

She came in and closed the door and stood with her back to it, which was either habit or tactical positioning and possibly both. She was a compact woman, not tall, with the kind of stillness that came from years of knowing she didn’t need to perform readiness to be ready. Her hair was gray at the temples in a way she had clearly decided not to manage, and her eyes were the particular shade of dark that absorbed more than they reflected.

She looked at the three students.

"Cross," she said. "Ashenheart." Her gaze settled on Kai with the quality of someone encountering a variable they’d noted before without fully accounting for. "Wraith."

"Captain Morris," Kai said.

"You were on the Thornvale expedition."

"Yes."

"I read the expedition debrief. Your name appeared frequently." She looked at Henrik. "What is this."

"A briefing," Henrik said. "Sit down, Elara. There’s more to cover than we have time to be comfortable about."

She pulled the second visitor chair to a position where she could see both the door and all three students simultaneously, which Seraphina noted without comment, and sat.

"Start at the beginning," she said. "The actual beginning, not the administrative version."

William started at the beginning.

He told it the same way he’d told Seraphina — factual, chronological, without editorializing. The gathering. Seraphine’s kidnapping. The mercenaries and what they’d told him under pressure. His mother’s investigation, the broker Darius, the unidentified visitors. The Hollow Court appearing at the top of the threat list.

Morris listened without interrupting. When he described the message crystal, she looked at it on the bedside table but didn’t ask to hear it yet. When he described his father’s absence and his mother’s careful phrasing around it, something moved through her expression that she put away before it fully arrived.

Then Seraphina described the expedition. Not her own perspective — she hadn’t been targeted directly and kept the focus on the structural picture. The Hollow Court’s second appearance. Kai’s conversation with the lead operative. The hand signal about unconfirmed primary target.

Then Kai.

Morris turned to look at him when Seraphina finished, and her attention had a different quality now — not hostile, but fully engaged, the way a professional looked at something they had categorized incorrectly and were recategorizing.

"The clearing," she said. "You talked them into leaving."

"Yes."

"The report described it as a confrontation that was resolved without further violence."

"That’s accurate."

"It described you as having demonstrated unusual combat capabilities earlier in the expedition."

"Also accurate."

"Unusual is doing significant work in that sentence." Morris looked at him steadily. "How unusual."

Kai looked at her for a moment with the particular quality of someone deciding how much of a locked room to open.

"I have cultivation strength and combat experience that exceeds what two years of academy training can produce," he said. "The mechanism behind that is complicated and I’m not going to explain all of it today. What is relevant for your purposes is that I’m not a security threat to this academy or its students, I have demonstrated that in practice, and the information I’m bringing you today is accurate."

Morris looked at him for a long moment.

"Henrik vouches for you?"

Henrik said, "I do."

"Cross?"

William said, "Yes."

Morris looked at Seraphina.

"I was there," Seraphina said. "I saw what he did. His priorities were exactly what he says they are."

Morris absorbed this. Her expression suggested she had significant additional questions that she was choosing to defer in the interest of getting through the immediate material. William respected that calculation.

"Continue," she said.

Seraphina put the risk assessment form on the bed where Morris could see it.

Morris read Henrik’s notation and the committee response. Her eyes moved to the signature at the bottom.

"Hale," she said.

"You know him," William said.

"I know his name and his position. We’ve interacted twice in committee contexts." Her voice was measured in the way that controlled anger sometimes was. "He cleared the expedition against the recommending instructor’s explicit objection."

"He also visited the broker we believe facilitated the assassination contracts," William said. He activated the crystal.

His mother’s voice filled the room again.

Morris listened with the same absolute attention she’d given everything else, and when the crystal went dark she was quiet for a moment, looking at the wall beside the window.

"Your mother compiled this independently," she said.

"Yes."

"In the time between your family visit and now."

"She’s thorough."

Morris looked at the crystal. "She identified the registration data transfer. That’s significant — the essence-signature profiles from competition registration are sealed administrative documents. If Hale accessed them and passed them to the Hollow Court, that’s a breach of treaty protocols governing inter-academy competition. The legal consequences alone would—" She stopped. "That’s not the immediate problem."

"No," Seraphina said. "The immediate problem is the target."

She set the enrollment list on the bed.

Morris picked it up. Read the full list first, which suggested she was looking for context before conclusion. Then her gaze moved to the six dropped names, which meant she had already identified what was significant about the comparison, which confirmed Seraphina’s assessment of her.

She stopped at the same name Seraphina had stopped at.

She read it once. Then again. 𝑓𝑟ℯ𝘦𝓌𝘦𝘣𝑛𝑜𝓋𝑒𝓁.𝑐ℴ𝓂

Then she set the paper down with the deliberate care of someone setting something down that they would prefer to put through a wall.

"You’re certain," she said.

"The profile fits," Kai said. "Family connection to research allocation records. Strategic value for whoever is trying to consolidate influence over regional cultivation development. Timeline consistent with a contract placed months ago with a long operational window."

"The student isn’t on your team," Morris said. "They’re registered for individual events."

"Which means solo venues," Seraphina said. "Predictable movement between events. Limited natural protection from peers."

Morris stood and moved to the window, which was what people did in this room when they needed to think, apparently. She stood with her back to them for a moment, looking out at the grounds.

"Hale is still in his administrative position," she said.

"As far as we know," William said.

"If we move on him before the competition, the people who placed the contract know their infrastructure has been identified. They may accelerate the timeline or change the approach in ways we can’t predict." She turned back around. "If we don’t move on him, he continues to have access to administrative systems and student information."

"Can you remove his system access without it appearing to be a security action," Kai asked.

Morris considered it. "I can flag his credentials for routine maintenance review. That’s a standard process that happens periodically — it wouldn’t signal a specific investigation. It would lock him out of sensitive systems for forty-eight to seventy-two hours, which gets us through the competition window." She paused. "After which we deal with the larger picture."

"Can you do it without him knowing it’s been done deliberately," Seraphina asked.

"If it’s processed through the regular maintenance queue, yes. The system generates automatic notifications that look identical whether the review is routine or targeted." Morris looked at Henrik. "I need authorization from a senior faculty member to initiate a credential review outside the scheduled cycle."

"You have it," Henrik said.

"I’ll process it today." She turned back to the students. "The target. They don’t know."

"We don’t believe so," Kai said.

"They need to know. Not everything — not the full operational picture, because that creates panic and behavioral changes that are visible. But enough that they’re not moving through the competition without awareness." Morris looked between them. "Who makes that approach."

Nobody answered immediately.

"It needs to be someone they have reason to trust," Seraphina said. "Someone who can communicate urgency without creating fear responses that are obvious to observers."

"That describes someone who knows them," Morris said. "Do any of you have that relationship."

William thought through his interactions with the student. Limited. Passing. Not enough to carry a conversation with the weight this one needed to carry.

Seraphina shook her head slightly.

Kai said, "No."

----

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