Chapter 2 #3
A hundred. A thousand. Why Aamon specifically? What are his abilities? Why won't you tell me? Why am I in a shed at the edge of campus instead of a dormitory? Do you actually want me to succeed or am I a box you're checking before you send me back?
"No," I say. "Thank you."
Leyonna nods. Balcour closes his portfolio with a snap that sounds like a period at the end of a sentence.
Aamon hasn't moved. The remote has disappeared—into a pocket, I assume, close and ready. His hazel eyes are on me, and I force myself to meet them because I will not be the one who looks away first.
Not after what he just did.
Something in his expression flickers. Not warmth—I wouldn't call it that. Just a shift, quick and deep, like a current moving under ice. Then it's gone, and he's stone again.
"Seven a.m.," he says. "Training room B. Don't be late."
I pick up my duffel. Stand. My legs are steady because I'm making them steady, because I will not walk out of this room on shaking knees in front of these three people, in front of their oil paintings and their wards and their leather portfolios.
"I won't be," I say.
And I leave.
The hallway is empty. The door closes behind me and I stop walking for a full three seconds, my hand on the wall, my eyes closed, my chest heaving with a breath I've been holding since the fail-safe tore through me.
The stone is cool under my palm. The wards hum.
Behind the door, I can hear their voices resume—Leyonna's musical cadence, Balcour's clipped responses, and underneath both, a silence where Aamon should be speaking and isn't.
I push off the wall. Walk downstairs. Cross the foyer with its vampire portraits and its vaulted ceiling. Push through the heavy doors and out into the heat that folds over me like a damp hand.
Corvin and Zeva are waiting at the bottom of the steps.
"I need to find my housing," I say. Hold up the map.
Corvin glances at it. "We know where it is. Follow us."
We cross the courtyard—the whispers start up again, softer this time, or maybe I just don't have the energy to register them—and take a path that curves away from the main buildings toward the older part of campus.
The oaks get thicker here. The paths narrower, the stone more uneven.
The manicured grounds give way to something wilder and less tended, and I can smell the apothecary garden before I see it—that rich, green, witchy smell that made something behind my ribs ache when I passed it earlier.
The cottage sits at the end of the path. Small. A duplex—two doors, two windows, a shared wall between them. Someone has put a pot of geraniums on the front step that looks about two days old. A gesture of welcome so minimal it circles back around to insulting.
Corvin stops. "This is you. Right side." He nods toward the other door. "We're on the left."
"Cozy," I say.
He doesn't respond. Neither does Zeva. They disappear through their door without a word, and I hear the lock turn from the inside.
I stand on the path for a moment. Just me and the geraniums and the late-day sun slanting through the oaks and the distant hum of the wards and the garden thirty feet away, still pressed flat in the direction I'm standing.
I put the key in the lock. Turn it. Open the door.
It's small.
A bed, a kitchenette, small table with two chairs, a bathroom I can see from the doorway, a wardrobe standing open with dark grey uniforms hung in a neat row. Functional. Impersonal. Staged like a model room—technically livable, completely devoid of evidence that a person lives here.
For a dizzy, horrible second it looks exactly like the room I left this morning. Same dimensions. Same emptiness. Same feeling of a space that was built to hold a body and nothing else.
But the window doesn't have wire mesh. And the lock is on my side of the door.
I step inside. Close the door behind me. Lean my back against it.
The wood is solid and warm against my spine.
I let my duffel slide off my shoulder and hit the floor with a soft thump.
I close my eyes. Take one breath. Deep and slow and shaking at the edges—pulling the air all the way down to the bottom of my lungs, past the fail-safe still humming at my neck, past the dampeners still fogging my blood, all the way down to the place behind my sternum where my magic lives.
It's still there. After everything—the implant, the activation, the half-second of total erasure—it's still there. Muffled. Restless. Pressing against its walls like something pacing in a cage.
I know the feeling.
Tomorrow the dampeners finish their wean.
Tomorrow I meet the full, unfiltered version of whatever I am—the version I haven't felt since I was thirteen, the version that killed everyone I loved.
And then someone is going to put me in a room and ask me to perform, and a man with hazel eyes and a remote in his pocket is going to watch me try, and a diplomat with a leather portfolio is going to write down whether I passed or failed, and the answer will determine whether I ever stand in a room with a lock on my side of the door again.
Twelve months. That's what I have. Twelve months to learn what I am, learn what I can do, learn how to hold the fire without burning everything down.
I press my palms flat against the door behind me. Feel the wood. Feel the lock. Feel the thin, fragile boundary between me and the rest of this place.
No pressure.