“If I add one extreme value here, say, a significant outlier, what do you think happens to the mean?”

Eydis blinked.

And she found herself in a room walled with mirrors in every direction. Some were diagonal, some jagged; triangles, rhomboids, and other polyhedra of no uniform shape reflected a fractured image of her. Her disguise, to be precise. The shards were unsettlingly and structurally wrong, following no known geometry. A fact that irritated her more than the “aesthetic” itself.

Under a sourceless light, her inky panther form rippled as she streaked through the silver maze with predatory grace. Her paws made no sound, reflecting back at her from a floor that was just as mirrored as the walls.

The room dilated on her inhale and contracted on her exhale, expanding and collapsing in an endless loop. There was no white space, no dark space, nor a flaw, nor an unreflective corner where eyes could rest. Every surface was covered with a congregation of herself, her green eyes staring back from a thousand angles; none of her forms were whole.

For a moment she thought it was Pride’s doing; they had played this kind of game once before. But this, of course, was not Pride.

She blinked again—

“…which is where, in statistical modeling, to understand the true shape of the data, we must remove the outliers, with reasonable justification of course…”

—and found herself back in Mrs. Henderson’s Statistics class.

She flicked a look at her open textbook, then at her watch. Three minutes of reality for forty-two recursive loops inside that woman’s head. Every single one had ended exactly the same: lost in a labyrinth of broken reflections.

Orion, the late enrollee, definitely a Van Nassau operative and definitely a Boundary Breaker, was sitting in a different classroom in this very building. A complete enigma.

How curious.

Lust’s power was never empathy to begin with. It subtly selected a weak point, the “sleeping” desire hidden in the lightless depths of a mind. That was how it resonated with much of this realm’s hacking mechanism and how it had managed to reach Astra and Taika.

As much as it galled Eydis to think Taika had glimpsed her intimacy with Astra, that image was exactly what gave her the opening to invade his mind during the fight.

But Orion was different. Taika’s memories of the operative were blurry, but the reality was worse. She had no desire. No latent want. Her mind was just an empty room of broken mirrors.

Eydis had walked forty-two loops through that room hunting for the crack that was not a crack—the dreamer who had never learned to dream.

It was like the sea-glass colour of her eyes, pale and frosted, polished into something deceptively beautiful by years of abrasion in sand and salt.

At its core, it was still just a shard of something already shattered.

As Mrs. Henderson droned on about the excision of outliers, Eydis weighed the metaphor.

Should she personally excise this particular outlier? Or would that be a reckless decision that would hide the uglier, more truthful shape of the mean?

Eydis leaned back against the chair and tapped her pen against the heavy textbook. Their goal was to find whatever secret the Van Nassaus were going all out to hide in Queenstown. Removing Orion would mean severing a link.

She needed to see the full layout of the chessboard first. She needed to know exactly which square Natalia occupied before she started plucking pieces from the enemy’s side.

And then there were the secrets of the girl whose body she now inhabited. The mysteries continued to stack up, the "big picture" still blurry and full of holes. She had the frame, but she was missing the centre.

Who was the grandmaster at the head of the table?

Eydis paused her tapping and closed her eyes.

Only one way to find out.

The fragrance, steamy scent of freshly pan-fired Longjing tea enveloped her. The dark leaves gathered at the bottom of her delicate bone china cup, tender enough to eat.

“Is the tea to your liking?”

The moment her father spoke, the white walls exploded into a tea plantation stretching uphill like a green carpet toward dark emerald mountains. A blood sun dipped low on the Hangzhou horizon—a breathtaking canvas of fire and forest.

She hadn't been here since she was a child, back when she was the only one her father ever took on his travels. Neither Atlas nor Adrian had ever been invited.

Atlas…

Her grip tightened on the porcelain handle until she heard a crack. Tea spilled across the ornate white metal table, weeping through the filigree and onto her peach silk dress. She reached for a napkin but froze. Her hands weren't those of a child. They were long and slender, weighted with rose gold rings and a Cartier Tank wristwatch.

“Thena.”

Glancing up, her breath quickening, she noticed the gold in her father’s eyes was a different shade than she remembered.

Usually, there was a frosty glaze that only those who dared look would notice. But now they were piercing, intense, and startlingly clear. The light shimmering in those depths moving as the corners of his eyes crinkled in a rare show of genuine amusement.

Athena jolted and found steam curling around her face. It was no longer the scent of…

The scent of… what was it?

She wrinkled her nose, recognising the distinctive smell of minerals and sulfur. Unpleasant. She’d always hated it here. As a child who hadn’t known what should be said and what should be kept in her head—not that it mattered much to him—she had complained loudly about the stench of rotten eggs and the way the humid heat seemed to swallow her whole.

She looked down at her small feet and found herself standing on dry, cracked earth the colour of rust, streaked with the pale yellow of sulfur. With another step, her flat heels sank into the damp, spongy ground.

The earth was breathing beneath her, constantly under pressure. It was geological. But there was something else moving down there, an arcane current churning untamed beneath her, a flow generated by the earth itself.

Father stepped up beside her, gesturing toward a milky pool of vivid jade. “Fascinating, isn’t it? To think nature could be this unpredictable.”

That did not sound like something Father would say; he had always seemed apathetic toward the changing of nature. It sounded like something she would have said.

She reached for his calloused hand just as the earth began to bubble. Expecting him to pull away, she was surprised he caught her palm in his.

Now, they were standing on the familiar marble balcony of her childhood, overlooking the Warrungal Ranges as they embraced the distant spires of Alchymian City.

“Breathtaking view, I must say,” he noted without looking at her.

Beneath her heels, the ground was solid stone. She felt off balance, as though her body expected her to be standing somewhere much softer.

“It’s about time you remember, Athena,” he added. “What he—what I—wanted you to forget.”

His voice triggered a collapse of time. Athena was no longer standing; she was gliding through what seemed like scene after scene of a reel. Perhaps memories. Perhaps imagination.

She moved through plains of green grass where indigenous basalt columns formed ancient geometries; across the timber deck of a cruise ship rocked by storm-tossed waves; through a frozen canyon where the ice soared as high as skyscrapers.

“Athena,” a deep voice rose above the sound of the bell.

Athena jolted awake to find herself staring into Theo’s silver, concerned gaze, her cheek still resting against her knuckles.

“You dozed off,” Theo said. “Are the new students bothering you?”

“I…” Dozing off? She hadn't felt that tired this morning, though with students constantly stopping for small talk in the corridors, it was draining to silence their thoughts.

Always so full of greed and opportunity.

“I was dreaming, I think,” she said, frowning.

Theo moved to the window and tweaked the lever, raising it to let in a fresh winter breeze to cut through the stifling heat of the conference room. “What did you dream about?”

“I don’t remember.” Athena dropped her pen and massaged her temple. Deciding to change the topic, she added, “A new Gifted student challenged me for a duel today, written in a letter and all.”

Theo turned to her with raised eyebrows and an amused look. Their conversation returned to a more lighthearted topic, but Athena’s mind was elsewhere.

The dream—she thought she had remembered it, but the moment Theo spoke his first words to her, it vanished into abstract swirls of colour. But within those reds, yellows, jades, and greens, one thing stood out in her mind.

Gold. Piercing and brilliant. Not of her father’s, or Atlas’s, or Adrian’s, or hers.

She felt a prickling sensation of being watched, raising the fine hair at the back of her neck. Deep in the depths of her mind, a voice vibrated through. It was her father’s cadence:

“Remember, Athena. Trace the steps we took.”

Eydis’s golden eyes cooled back down to amber as the bell rang at 3:30 p.m. She glanced discreetly around and saw her classmates starting to pack up. Picking up a pen, she quickly scribbled down what she had seen in Athena’s dreams:

Hangzhou: Longjing Tea Plantation.

Geysers: Potentially Rotorua, NZ, or Iceland. Research required.

Deep Sea: High arcane turbulence. Bermuda?

There were a few more she had written down, but one location caught her eye. She took out a red pen and circled the words.

The Van Nassaus’ home, located at the peak of the Warrungal Ranges, staring down at Alchymia like a titan delivering judgment.

A golden light passed through her eyes as she tapped the word with the back of her pen, a smile curling on her lips.