Chapter 21: My New Classmate Burned A Hole Through The Training Dummy And Told Everyone It Was A Defect?!

Beck paired them off without looking up from his clipboard.

"Cole and Hansel. Kane, you’re on the rail. Watch and learn something."

Soren leaned against the viewing rail and crossed his arms and did exactly that.

Because apparently his role in this story was to stand on the sidelines while his soul fell apart and his wolf plotted murders.

Maren Cole had been in Class Z for six days and nobody knew what to do with her.

Beck had paired her with Hansel Jay, which was either lazy or deliberate, and with Beck it was always deliberate.

She pulled every punch.

She even stumbled on the second one, and the stumble was good enough that most people would have bought it, but Soren had watched Selah fake a loss in the novel and the body mechanics were the same.

You couldn’t hide trained footwork. You could only pretend to trip over it.

Grimm sat at Soren’s feet with her chin on her paws.

She hadn’t spoken in days but the angle of her ears said she was hearing Maren.

Hansel threw the earth-hammer.

He put his hips into it, the Stoneback Beetle’s reinforcement flaring brown-gold along his forearm, and the strike connected clean with Maren’s ribs on the left side.

It was a real hit. Full power.

The force drove in and she let out a short exhale, chest heaving once as the top stretched taut.

Hansel’s face changed because he hadn’t meant to go that hard, and Soren saw the apology start to form on his mouth, then everything went wrong.

Maren’s eyes went gold.

Full and bright, both irises at once, the color lighting up the lines of her face for that single second before it vanished.

The training dummy behind her caught fire.

It was six feet away and nothing had touched it.

The canvas torso went up in a column of white heat that turned the dummy into ash in about three seconds and left a black mark on the packed dirt underneath.

The ring went quiet.

Beck blew his whistle once.

"Halt."

Maren turned around and looked at the pile of ash that used to be the dummy and laughed, and the laugh was good enough to fool almost everyone.

"Cheap dummy," she said. "Probably dry rot. You know they don’t replace these things."

Nobody challenged her.

Nobody was going to challenge the girl standing next to a pile of ash that was still smoking.

She stood with shoulders back, breathing still visible, the damp top plastered to her skin.

Hansel looked at his hands, then at the ash, then at Maren, and he took one step back without meaning to.

Beck looked at the ash for a long time and wrote something on his clipboard and said "Next pair" and that was that.

Soren watched the system feed scroll behind his eyes.

[DING! — Joan Sawyer’s surveillance nodes in Corridor B4 have registered a thermal anomaly. Magnitude: 1,200°C point-source spike, duration 0.8 seconds. All four nodes triggered simultaneously.]

[DING! — Cross-reference initiated. Joan Sawyer is comparing this event against Corridor B4 cryo-events from the past 72 hours.]

[DING! — Pattern detected: 2 ice events + 1 fire event. All originating from students in proximity to Soren Kane.]

’Fantastic,’ Soren thought. ’I’m the common denominator in a thermal crime spree. At this rate Joan could just install a sensor on me personally and save the Bureau some money.’

The ash was still warm when the class filed out.

Soren didn’t file out.

He waited until Beck was gone and the ring was empty and Maren was walking toward the stairwell alone with her jacket over one shoulder and her knot coming loose on the right side.

He caught up to her on the landing between floors. The space was narrow, walls close.

"Hey," he said.

She turned around. The smile was still on. "Hey yourself."

Up close her face was flushed from training, a sheen of sweat on her skin, one strand of dark red hair stuck to the side of her neck.

"You need to stop doing that."

"Doing what?"

"Whatever you’re hiding. The woman with the surveillance nodes just recorded a thermal signature that doesn’t match any registered beast in this building."

The smile died.

The loudness, the easy posture, the girl who laughed about dry rot while standing in front of an ash pile, all of it went away in about two seconds and what was left was someone very still with her back against the stairwell wall.

The position pushed her chest forward under the damp top.

"How do you know about the surveillance nodes?" she said.

"I know a lot of things."

"That’s not an answer."

"It’s the answer you’re getting right now."

She looked at him and the stairwell was quiet enough that he could hear the ventilation clicking through the walls.

Her hands were at her sides and her fingers were curled in and he noticed the tendons in her wrists pulling tight.

"What things," she said.

Soren looked at her hands and the way her fingers curled inward.

"I know the Fracture at Western Continental wasn’t a natural collapse," he said.

"Something broke through the boundary and consumed the beasts first."

He watched her face go pale.

"I know six people survived and the Bureau relocated all of them to different academies to keep them separated".

Maren’s hands started shaking. "And I know the exact same spatial pressure is building under this academy right now".

She shoved her hands deeper into her pockets and her jacket slipped off her shoulder.

"You don’t know what you’re talking about!"

"Then explain how thirty-two tamers died and you walked out without a single scratch?"

The gold came back into her eyes for half a second and he saw her blink it away.

"You’re not my tamer," she said.

"I didn’t say I was."

"Then stop looking at me like you’re trying to figure out what I am!"

"I’m looking at you like you’re standing next to a surveillance node and your hands are on fire."

Maren looked at her hands.

They were smoking, the heat rolling off her in waves that crossed the space between them.

"...Shit."

She closed her fists and the glow went out and she pressed her knuckles against her thighs until the smoking stopped.

"Listen to me," Soren said.

"Joan Sawyer’s 72-hour review window ends tomorrow. Your thermal spike just hit all four of her corridor nodes at the same time. She already has two ice events from Selah on her logs and now she has a fire event from you, and every single one of those events came from a student who was standing near me."

Maren’s eyes were on the floor.

"She’s going to see the pattern," Soren said.

"So what do you want from me?"

"I want you to come to my room tonight so we can figure out how to make that pattern disappear before she reads it."

"I don’t know you."

"You don’t have to know me. You just have to know that Joan Sawyer is very, very good at her job and you have about eight hours before she pulls the thermal log and cross-references it with the shadow and cryo data she already has."

Maren picked up her jacket off the floor.

She put it over her shoulder and pulled her hair knot tighter with one hand and her fingers left a faint scorch mark on the elastic that she didn’t notice.

"Room number," she said.

"Third floor east wing. The one with the frost on the window."

She looked at him for another second and was trying to decide if setting it down in front of a stranger was better or worse than the weight.

She turned and walked up the stairs without answering.

Soren leaned against the railing and exhaled hard.

He had just told a girl he’d known for six days the most dangerous piece of information in his head.

If she went to the Bureau, finished.

If she told anyone, finished.

If she just got nervous tonight and burned something Joan could trace back to this stairwell, finished.

Three ways to die from one conversation, he thought. New personal record.

Grimm climbed the three steps and pressed her head into his hand and he held her ear and stood there doing the math.

[DING! — Joan Sawyer has flagged the thermal event. Cross-referencing with Corridor B4 data. She will identify the source within 8 hours.]

[DING! — Quest timer: 14 days to Fracture. 23 days to Obsession cap collapse.]

[DING! — Obsession Index: Yara 49/50. Selah 22/50.]

[DING! — Soul integrity: 78%. Spiritual Friction aggregate: 24%.]

Grimm made a sound against his hand, not a word, just a vibration.

He looked down at the wolf.

"Yeah," he said. "I know."

He pushed off the railing and started walking toward the east wing, and the shadow behind them followed three steps too close to be natural.