When I turn around, Aubrey’s watching me with that look—the one that’s equal parts sympathy and frustration.
“Your aunt?”
“Yes.”
“You don’t want to go see them?”
“They took me in when my parents died. They didn’t have to.” I pick up my pencil, clicking it once. “I owe them. Besides, I enjoy my cousin Larisa.”
“The scary tween?”
“Yes.” I chuckle. “Middle-school girls are terrifying.”
Aubrey opens her mouth, then closes it. “You should take it. Not because he’s him. Because you don’t get to keep shrinking your life to stay safe.”
My forehead scrunches. I don’t have a comeback that doesn’t sound ridiculous.
Aubrey’s watching me with that knowing look. “He rattles you.”
“He’s loud.”
What I don’t say is:
His voice turns the air steel blue, and I can’t stop hearing it.
He looks at me like I’m a puzzle he wants to solve.
He makes my pulse kick when he’s close, and I hate that I notice.
6
FEEDBACK LOOP (KIERAN)
The lab hums quiet, just fan noise and relay clicks. I’m halfway through rigging cheap sensors to a broken hockey stick when Wren’s voice cuts through the space, level and precise.
“No—slow down. You skipped the free-body diagram. If you don’t draw it, you’re guessing.”
My hands still on the shaft. I tell myself I’m not eavesdropping. But I am.
The kid she’s tutoring nods too fast, pencil squeaking against paper. Wren waits him out, patient as a sniper. She’s relentless.
I nudge a small weight onto the stick shaft, watch the readout creep, and try to focus on my own work. I clamped this broken stick in a vise last week, started testing how much it bends when pressure hits the carbon fiber. I know how a shot feels when it loads right in my hands, but I want to see it in data, turn instinct into proof, motion into numbers. If the setup works, maybe it becomes my senior project. Or maybe I just stop thinking about it at three in the morning.
The freshman finally gets it. His shoulders drop, relief flooding his face. He thanks her twice, stuffs papers into his backpack, and bolts for whatever counts as dinner at this hour.
The lab goes quiet again. Not dead quiet. The breathing kind.
Wren caps her pen, neatly stacks her notebooks, and presses the spot between her eyebrows for exactly two seconds. Work-tired. The kind that comes from carrying too much and still showing up anyway.
Something in my chest pulls tight—an instinctive, useless urge to step in. Do what, I have no idea.
She doesn’t look at me. She never does first.
Which, of course, makes me talk.
“You scare the shit out of them,” I say, nudging a weight onto the stick shaft. “You know that, right?”
Her head lifts a fraction, eyes narrowing. “If they’re scared of diagrams, that’s a them problem.”
