14. Chapter 14 The Dining Hall #2
Valt's hands went to his throat. His fingers clawed at skin that wasn't being touched by anything. His mouth worked, pulling for air that wasn't coming, and his face shifted from anger to confusion to terror in the space of three heartbeats. His pale eyes went wide.
Lucien's eyes flickered crimson. A pulse, there and gone, a flash that only someone watching his face closely would have caught. Red bled into his irises for less than a second and then retreated, suppressed, pushed back behind the brown.
He held the choke for five seconds. Valt's face turned a shade of blue. The boy's legs buckled and he caught himself on the edge of the table with one hand, the other still clawing at his own throat.
Lucien let go.
Valt sucked air, a ragged ugly sound that filled the silence. His chest heaved and he stood there, braced against the table, gasping, one hand still pressed against his throat. His eyes were wet and his face was the color of spoiled milk.
Lucien moved his hand, two fingers and a turn of the wrist. The telekinesis was clean and surgical, a force application that cost nothing from a core that could level the building.
Valt left the ground.
The throw took him out of his stance and across six feet of floor.
He hit a chair and the chair went with him, both of them landing in a heap of limbs and furniture, Valt on his back and the chair broken underneath him.
The crash carried: wood hitting stone, a body hitting wood.
A plate slid off a nearby table and shattered.
Every head in the hall turned.
Lucien picked up his fork and went back to eating.
He had toast left. He cut into the first piece and chewed it, and the butter had soaked through to the center because he'd let it sit.
He took a drink from his cup. The coffee was predictably bad.
He drank it anyway. A girl near the entrance had her hand over her mouth, and two boys at the closest table sat rigid in their seats, breakfasts forgotten, and Lucien spread the second piece of toast with butter from the dish in the center of the table and ate it in three bites.
The room stared at him. Forty students spread across a space designed for three hundred, and none of them were eating.
He considered the remaining food on his plate and decided the toast had been the better half of the meal.
Valt was on the floor. He'd rolled off the wreckage and onto his hands and knees, coughing, one hand still on his throat.
His hair was in his face and his crest had caught on a splintered piece of chair backing.
He pushed himself to his feet, unsteady, and stood there swaying for a second before he found his balance.
He looked at Lucien across the distance between them with the raw, undisguised expression of someone who had just learned something about the world that he couldn't unlearn.
He didn't speak. He turned and walked toward the exit, too fast for someone who wanted to look unbothered. The doors closed behind him and the room held its breath for three more seconds before the whispers started.
Lucien drank his coffee. His plate was empty.
Tesslyn and Liora reached the table.
They came from the main entrance, side by side, bags on their shoulders, walking at a pace that had changed when they'd spotted what was happening across the room.
They'd been too far away for the words but close enough for the tone, and the last thirty seconds had been unmistakable: the choke, the throw, the boy on the floor and the splintered furniture, and Lucien sitting at his table eating breakfast.
Tesslyn sat down first. She put her bag on the bench beside her and folded her hands in front of her, and her green eyes held on Lucien with quiet intensity. Her gaze moved to the wreckage across the room, then back to his plate.
"What happened?" she asked.
"Valt Krenning came to talk. It didn't go well for him."
"I can see that." Her voice was steady but she'd just seen Lucien choke a student without a visible spell or a formed construct, a boy's airway closing because the quiet first-year across from him decided it would.
Liora sat down on Lucien's other side. Her bag went under the bench and her gold eyes moved across the room, reading the aftermath: the upended furniture, the shattered plate, the students who were staring and trying not to stare, the empty space where Valt had been standing. She turned to Lucien.
"What did he say?"
"He said a lot of things and they were all stupid."
"What did he say that made you choke him in front of forty witnesses?"
Lucien took a drink of the coffee. It was still bad. "He said something he shouldn't have."
Liora's eyes narrowed. She read his face with the same focus she brought to everything, looking for the data behind the deflection. She didn't push, not here, not with forty students watching. But the question sat between them, marked and unforgotten.
"You're going to tell me later," she said.
"Probably."
"Definitely."
He didn't argue the point. He went back to his coffee.
The room was settling. The whispers had become low conversation and a few students had gone back to their food, though most of them kept glancing at Lucien's table.
A kitchen worker came out and picked up the pieces of the shattered plate.
She glanced at the wreckage across the aisle, then at Lucien, and carried the fragments back through the kitchen door without comment.
Tesslyn had been quiet. She sat with her hands folded, her posture composed, looking down at the table. Then her gaze moved left.
Liora's left arm rested on the table. Her sleeve sat pushed above the elbow, the same position it had held since Saturday afternoon, and the mark was visible on her inner forearm. The lines were raised and angular, the color of old blood against red skin, clean and sharp in the morning light.
Tesslyn's green eyes settled on the mark and stayed there. She didn't say anything or reach for it or ask what it was. Her gaze traced the symbol burned into Liora's skin, and behind her composure a question was forming that she wasn't ready to ask.
Her eyes moved to Liora's face. Liora was focused on Lucien, still working on the answer he hadn't given her.
Tesslyn's attention returned to the mark. The lines caught the morning light.
Then she picked up her bag and pulled out her notebook. She opened it to a blank page and took out a quill. She didn't write anything at first. She held the quill over the page then began to sketch the mark she saw on the page.