Asa
I barely made it to campus before Jorak pulled up in his own car, spouting some bullshit about ‘another Esper can take care of that, you’re more important’. I didn’t complain but now he’s close, very close.
I try to pull my thoughts away from the memory of Jorak’s mouth on my shoulder, away from the way he smelled in the nest, dark cedar and the sharp, metallic bite of whiskey.
He’s standing two feet away in a tactical jacket that looks entirely too aggressive for the humanities wing.
He hasn't spoken in ten minutes, but I can feel his gaze tracking the pulse in my throat.
Mira pauses, her hand hovering over the dial of the reader.
"It’s not inefficient if you want the data to disappear without leaving a deletion log.
You can't scrub a hard drive without someone noticing the gap. But a box of papers in a flooded basement? That’s just a tragedy.
Luckily for us, the university’s preservation department is staffed by people who hate the ESA even more than I do. "
She gestures toward a narrow, unassuming door at the back of the restricted archive.
It’s tucked behind a shelf of oversized cartography folios, the kind of door that people look at every day and never actually see.
Mira leads the way, her boots clicking softly on the marble, and I follow with Jorak at my back.
The temperature drops as we descend a cramped spiral staircase, the air growing thick with the scent of stagnant humidity and dust that has been undisturbed for decades.
"I found this section by accident while I was looking for the old node maps," Mira explains, her voice hushed. "It’s not in the library directory. Everything in here is from the pre-standardization era. Before the ESA decided the modern class system was the only language worth keeping."
The room at the bottom of the stairs is small, lined with industrial steel shelving that sags under the weight of gray archival boxes. A single, low-wattage bulb hangs from the ceiling, casting long, shivering shadows across the floor.
Jorak moves past me, his presence taking up too much space in the narrow aisle. He runs a gloved hand along the edge of a shelf, his eyes narrowed as he scans the labels. He looks like a man expecting an ambush. I suppose, in his world, he usually is.
"These aren't student records," Jorak says. "These are field reports. Casualties. Burnout rates from the first generation of suppression nodes."
Mira pulls a heavy, leather-bound volume from a box labeled RED-DEPT-ALPHA-ZERO.
The cover is cracked, the gold leaf lettering worn down to nothing.
She lays it on a small wooden table and opens it to a bookmarked page.
I lean in, my shoulder brushing Jorak’s arm.
The contact sends a jolt through me, a sharp spike of heat that settles right in the center of my chest. He doesn't move away.
He leans closer, his scent wrapping around me like a blanket.
"Look at the terminology," Mira says, pointing to a hand-annotated chart. "They don't use S-Class or F-Class here. They use output variables. And they mention a subtype that isn't in any of the modern textbooks."
I squint at the faded ink. The handwriting is precise, clinical, and utterly devastating.
Subtype: Anchor. Rare. Mechanism: Origin-point stabilization. Notes: Unlike traditional Guides who function through energy absorption or redirection, Anchors act as a structural lock. They do not drain the Esper. They stabilize catastrophic output at the origin point.
I read the words again. Then a third time. The air in the room suddenly feels much too thin.
"Origin-point stabilization," I whisper.
"It says they’re difficult to test," I continue. "Useless in ordinary low-level exams because they require a catastrophic threshold to activate. The system doesn't register an Anchor because an Anchor has nothing to anchor until the world starts ending."
Jorak stiffens beside me. I can feel the tension radiating off him, the way his power, the Black Current, begins to stir in response to my agitation. A low, electric hum fills the small room, the scent of ozone and black cedar sharpening until it stings my nose.
"Anchors," Jorak says, the word sounding like a curse on his tongue. "I heard stories about them in the facility. Stories about Guides who could hold an S-Class through collapse without dying. I thought they were just fairy tales. Something to keep us from losing our minds before we burned out."
"Stories come from somewhere," Mira says. "And if the ESA erased the word from every modern textbook, there’s a reason."
I look down at the page, at the cold, clinical description of what I am. All those years of feeling like I was failing a test I didn't understand. All the times I’d apologized for being inert while my skin felt like it was humming with a frequency nobody else could hear.
My F-Class label may not have been proof that I was weak.
It may have been proof that the system never tested for what I actually am.