Aveline shivered.

Someone who could not identify faces.

That explained Lucien far too well. Suddenly, the way he had looked at her made a chilling kind of sense. He had not looked at her as though he knew her. He had looked at her as though she had stirred the outline of someone he had lost long ago, someone whose face time had stolen from him but whose absence still lived somewhere deep inside him.

And with that realization came another thought, quieter but sharper.

Could she use him?

Aveline’s gaze drifted toward the direction of the Archduke’s laboratory, and her mind began moving faster than her fear. Those stones. That place. That madness wrapped in research and secrets. If she could get close to him, she might learn far more there than she ever would while sitting dutifully in class and listening to teachers recite history as though it were something dead and harmless.

Maybe she could finally understand why she saw the stones differently from everyone else.

Why they glowed only for her.

Why shadows moved in ways that seemed to answer her instead of merely obeying the shape of light.

And if this strange old man truly believed she was someone else, then perhaps standing near him would not be entirely useless either.

Aelion noticed the shift in her face before she had fully hidden it. She was staring in the direction of the Archduke’s laboratory with an expression that made his stomach tighten. It was not the look of curiosity alone. It was the look of someone who had just made a decision that could ruin her.

And perhaps ruin him too.

He caught her arms before she could move away.

"Do not go to him again," he said urgently. "He will reduce you to ashes, and no one would even know you were missing."

Aveline stopped and looked at him.

No one?

A faint, stubborn thought stirred in her chest.

Theron would look for her.

Even if he was hiding from her now, even if he could not come to her openly, she believed that if her life were truly in danger, he would find her. He would come. He would help.

Still, the word ashes bothered her.

"Ashes?" she repeated.

"The Archduke is the strongest fire-bender in the kingdom," Aelion said, his voice low. "No one even comes close to him."

Aveline gave a thoughtful nod. "You are rather good yourself," she said. "Isn’t lightning a subdivision of fire-bending?"

At once, Aelion’s face changed.

The color drained from it.

His grip on her arms tightened, and the shadows on his face shifted with the sudden surge of emotion she had just provoked. Anger. Fear. Something more tightly reined in than either of those.

"Do not tell anyone about my bending," he said, his voice rougher now. He looked away for a brief moment, jaw clenched so hard it seemed to ache, then forced himself to breathe before meeting her eyes again. "Just... do not tell anyone."

Aveline studied him for a second, then gently pushed his hands away.

"All right," she said lightly. "I will keep your secret. After all, you did save my life that day."

She smiled then, disarmingly soft, as if the moment had meant no more than a passing exchange, and turned away.

But the second her back was to him, the smile disappeared.

Her expression settled into something far more serious.

This place, which had looked so bright and wealthy and magical from the outside, was beginning to show its teeth.

Aveline could feel it now.

Something was wrong here.

And from then on, she observed everything more attentively. She tried to make friends, but it appeared everyone wanted to keep her at arms length.

She could not have said what it was about her that kept others away. Her face, perhaps. Her accent. The fact that she came from somewhere no one else here understood. Or maybe it was simply the room she occupied in the Arcanum, the quiet proof that she had been placed somewhere above the poorer students without ever truly belonging among the privileged either.

No one approached her.

They whispered behind her back. They stared when they thought she would not notice. But they never came near enough to speak to her directly.

At first, she had tried.

She had tried to smile, to ask questions, to make herself useful, to find even one person who might tell her what was happening around her. But every time she stepped closer, the conversation would die. Eyes would slide away. Voices would lower. And the distance between her and everyone else would remain exactly the same.

Loneliness taught her to see more clearly.

In that silence, she noticed the shape of this place. Greenvale was built on class as much as it was built on power. She had already seen the wealthiest side of it, the polished halls and ornate families and all the glittering pride that came with them. But even inside the Arcanum, even in the dormitories above the ground floor, the divide was impossible to miss.

In the upper levels and cramped attic rooms of the dormitory, girls of little means slept four or six to a room, their beds pushed close together, their lives narrowed by necessity. And yet some of them excelled with startling brilliance. A few came from backgrounds so poor they reminded Aveline painfully of herself back in Willowgrave, before her life had become even harsher than it already was. Those girls, despite everything, were strong. They were bright. They were gifted in ways that should have made the world bow to them.

And yet the world rarely did.

She saw other things too.

The prettiest girls among them would disappear at night, slipping quietly toward the boys’ dormitories with the kind of smug confidence that made it clear they had something to trade. They called themselves "marked," as if belonging to a noble had made them untouchable. The guards looked the other way. Bribes made silence easy.

The boys were no better.

Some strutted about as if the Arcanum had been built for them alone. Others were shoved aside, laughed at, or outright bullied, especially those with longer hair or softer features, the ones people found easy to mock for reasons that had nothing to do with talent.

Aveline stayed out of it.

It had nothing to do with her.

Or at least, that was what she told herself.

In this place, money mattered. Beauty mattered. Influence mattered. Whoever had coin or charm or a noble name could bend others into shape around them. Everyone else was treated like something disposable, something fragile enough to crush beneath a careless shoe.

So why, Aveline wondered, did no one bother her?

She did not spend extravagantly. She did not flatter anyone. She did not offer favors or trade smiles or try to win their attention. And yet the distance others kept from her remained almost unnaturally wide.

Was Theron helping her from the shadows?

The thought stayed with her as she walked.

Then, one day, she noticed a girl in a linen uniform watching her from across the corridor.