Chapter 19: The Bureau Investigator Cornered My Ice Queen Roommate And I Can’t Do Anything About It?!

Joan took Selah out of class at nine-fifteen.

She didn’t make a scene about it.

She stood in the doorway of the basement classroom, said

"Miss Young, a moment please," then waited with her tablet against her chest while Selah picked up her bag.

Selah looked at Soren on the way out. One look, flat, controlled, the kind of look that said I know what this is without moving her mouth.

Soren watched her go because there was nothing else he could do.

Joan had asked for Selah alone.

Not Soren, not Grimm, not both of them. Selah. That was deliberate. Joan was separating them to see if their stories matched without coordination.

[DING! — Joan Sawyer has initiated individual assessment of bonded tamer Selah Young. Duration: unknown.]

Beck kept teaching.

Something about mana circulation theory that Soren couldn’t hear because the back of his skull was doing the thing it did when Grimm was trying to communicate through the Suppression Seal without enough force to break through.

He put his hand on Grimm’s head under the desk.

She pressed into his palm, then went still.

Forty-eight hours left on Joan’s review window.

Selah was sitting in a room with the woman who had a hundred percent case closure rate, trying to hold a lie together that Soren had given her twelve hours to memorize.

He needed to use the time.

◆◆◆◆

Maren was in the cafeteria eating rice with both elbows on the table, her tray pushed to the side so she could read something on a folded piece of paper she kept flipping over.

Soren sat across from her.

She looked up. "Anomaly kid."

"Soren."

"I know your name, just that anomaly kid is funnier." She put the paper away. "What do you want?"

"Conversation."

"About what?"

"About you."

She tilted her head.

The copper hair caught the fluorescent light in a way that made the red in it look warmer than it should have been under institutional lighting.

"Western Continental," he said. "What happened?"

"A Fracture."

"I know that part. I want the version you don’t tell the transfer counselor."

She looked at him for about three seconds, doing the same calculation he’d watched Selah do the first time he’d asked her a question she didn’t want to answer.

Then she leaned back in her chair.

"It was night," she said.

"Second semester exams. The Fracture opened in the gym at two in the morning when nobody was supposed to be there except the night-shift custodian. By the time the alarm went off, the whole east building was inside the breach zone."

"How many students?"

"Forty-six in the dorm block. Eleven made it out." She picked at her rice.

"My beast was a fire fox. Cute thing, small, sat on my shoulder and loved sweet potatoes."

"You said she died."

"She did during the breach. The Fracture pulled everything in, beasts first. She held on for about thirty seconds, then she was gone."

Maren’s voice was even the whole time she said this, the practiced even of someone who had told the story enough times that the words came out in order without effort.

She talked about the fox for another five minutes.

What it ate, how it slept, the way its tail curled around her wrist during cold nights.

Everything she said matched the Western Continental file Soren had seen on Dani’s desk.

The timeline, the casualty count, the breach classification. 𝘧𝑟𝑒𝑒𝘸𝘦𝘣𝑛𝑜𝘷𝑒𝓁.𝘤𝘰𝓂

Everything checked out.

Except the table under her hands was hot.

Soren put his own hand flat on the table about six inches from hers. The difference was clear.

"You miss her?" he said.

"Every day." Maren looked at her rice. Her fingers curled on the table, leaving faint heat prints on the surface that faded in about two seconds.

"She was the only thing that ever picked me first."

That sentence hit somewhere Soren wasn’t expecting.

He pulled his hand back. "I’m sorry."

"Don’t be. She wouldn’t want that." Maren picked up her chopsticks, then put them back down.

"Why are you asking me this?"

"Because you showed up in Class Z two days ago with no beast, no file I can access, a transfer story that checks out on paper but leaves out every detail that matters, your hands leave scorch marks on things."

Maren looked at her hands.

"The Bureau investigator has thermal sensors in this building," Soren said. "Every time you touch something for more than ten seconds, you’re giving her data."

Maren’s hands came off the table fast. She put them in her lap.

"That’s not..." She stopped. "How do you know about the sensors?"

"I pay attention."

She stared at him.

After about five seconds she said "You’re weird, Soren Kane" in a voice that wasn’t a compliment or an insult.

◆◆◆◆

Selah came back forty minutes later.

Soren saw her face from the end of the corridor.

The frost on her knuckles had climbed past her wrists to her elbows, which she’d hidden by pulling her sleeves down, but the fabric was stiff with ice at the cuffs.

She grabbed his sleeve without saying anything, pulled him into the east stairwell, checked both directions, then turned to face him.

Her face was white.

"She knows about the bridge bond."

Soren’s stomach dropped but he kept his expression flat. "Tell me."

"The sprite questions were fine. I gave her exactly what you told me to say. She wrote it all down, didn’t push." Selah’s jaw was tight.

"Then she asked me when I first noticed the bridge bond."

Soren ran the math on that. Joan hadn’t guessed.

She’d come into the interview already knowing. The question wasn’t to learn, it was to watch Selah’s reaction when she heard the words.

"What did you say?"

"That I didn’t know what she was talking about."

"Did she buy it?"

"She smiled at me, Soren. The whole time."

He knew what that meant. Joan smiled when the file was already closed in her head.

"Then why aren’t you panicking?" Selah said.

"Because panicking doesn’t change the math."

The frost on her elbows cracked once, a small sharp sound in the quiet stairwell.

"She asked one more thing." Selah’s voice dropped. "She asked if you forced the bond on me."

Soren looked at her.

"I told her no. I told her I would have died without it."

He tried to read what Joan would do with that answer.

If Selah was a victim, Joan’s report went one direction.

If Selah was a willing participant, it went another.

Selah had just told Joan the truth, which was the most dangerous option because the truth made both of them look guilty of different things.

He pulled out his system feed because he needed to know what Joan was doing with what she’d just collected.

[DING! — Joan Sawyer has cross-referenced bridge bond signature with Soren Kane’s soul integrity readings from medical wing records. Match confidence: 94.7%. Preliminary report draft: IN PROGRESS. Estimated submission to Continental Bureau: 36 hours.]

Joan had enough to connect the bridge bond directly to Soren’s soul depletion.

Once that report landed, the Bureau would know exactly what he’d done to save Selah, the unauthorized transfer, the impossible classification, and the secondary tamer bond that didn’t exist in any textbook.

Selah read his face. "How bad?"

"She’s filing in thirty-six hours."