ROWAN #3
“I know he didn’t.” My Basilisk presses hard beneath my skin, and heat crawls along my arms where scales threaten to surface.
“He didn’t need to. He knew what kind of case he was giving us.
He thought something might threaten one of us badly enough to force Lev into another adaptation, and he sent us anyway. ”
Amand doesn't tell me I'm wrong. He looks down at the prediction instead, his jaw tightening as he follows the date back to the beginning of the case.
I shove away from the desk before I break something and cross the office once, forcing myself to stop near the shelves instead of putting my fist through them.
When I turn back, Amand is already going through the remaining section of the folder. He pulls several pages free and lays them across Gerald’s desk beside one another. “There’s more. These aren’t observation logs.”
I come back to the desk and look down.
Case numbers run along the left side of the first page. Instead of the normal classifications Essence uses, Gerald has assigned each one another label.
Isolation stimulus.
Predatory threat.
Designation saturation.
Bond destabilization.
Foreign magical contamination.
I move to the final column and feel my stomach drop again.
Expected Chameleon response.
The cases become recognizable once I read the dates. Every major case, training exposure, and assignment Gerald has steered toward Lev is represented somewhere in the records, paired with the kind of pressure Gerald expected it to create and the response he hoped to observe.
“He’s been choosing them.” I follow one line across the page, then another. “He wasn’t just assigning whatever came through the door. He was deciding which cases Lev got based on what he wanted to expose him to.”
Amand braces both hands against the desk and reads the next row. “Or what threshold he wanted Lev to cross. The crimes were real. The clients were real. Gerald was using that to hide what he was doing.”
That is what makes it worse. If Gerald had manufactured every threat himself, the lie would be simpler. Instead, he waited for dangerous things to walk into Essence and decided which one might push Lev in the direction he wanted.
I think about all the times Lev came home talking about Gerald like the man understood him when nobody else did.
Gerald taught him how to control the parts of his designation that frightened him.
He explained Chameleon magic when Lev had spent most of his life without anyone else like him.
Every time Lev manifested something new, Gerald acted interested and surprised, like they were discovering it together.
Half of those discoveries were already sitting in this drawer.
Amand reaches for the last page in the section, and I nearly tell him to leave it alone. I'm not sure how much worse this can get, which is exactly why I know we have to see it.
He opens it between us.
There are three columns.
CURRENT CAPABILITIES.
PROJECTED CAPABILITIES.
REQUIRED STIMULUS.
Several abilities have already been marked confirmed. Others remain incomplete, with Gerald’s notes beside them describing conditions that might provoke the next change.
Halfway down the page, one entry stops me.
Adaptive neutralization of hostile magic directed at bonded system.
Beside it, under required stimulus:
Direct life-threatening magical event involving primary bond.
The original projection date predates the Medusa case.
The confirmation date was entered after the scan at Essence.
I stare at it until the rest of the page blurs around the words. While Lev sat beside me worrying about whether the stone had damaged my lungs, Gerald was updating a prediction.
He got his answer.
Amand exhales slowly beside me and begins gathering the pages into order. The sound of his phone unlocking pulls my attention away from the confirmation date. “I’m copying everything before we put it back.”
I look toward Gerald’s office door. “I’d rather wait here for him.”
“I know.” Amand starts photographing the pages one at a time, careful to capture the dates and headings with each entry. “But Lev sees this before Gerald knows we found it. We also don’t leave the only proof locked in a drawer Gerald controls.”
Every instinct in me wants Gerald to walk through that door anyway.
I want him close enough to explain why my lungs were worth a data point.
Why Lev’s terror while I turned to stone was something he had already considered useful.
Why our bond, our venom, our bodies, and the things we do together when no one else is supposed to matter became variables in an experiment none of us agreed to join.
Amand finishes photographing one page and slides the next toward himself. Another prediction sits near the bottom with the same familiar problem: Gerald wrote it before Lev manifested the ability.
“He was waiting for it.” I keep staring at the date even after I say it, because some part of me still wants that to be the worst version of the truth.
Amand lowers his phone and looks across the rows of projected outcomes spread over Gerald’s desk. His expression stays hard as he shakes his head. “No. He planned for it.”