The room keeps going. Every pair still working their forms, no one crossing to my mat. This is how the pack tests work. The collective witnesses but doesn't interfere. I look at Professor Cross. She's watching. Her clipboard is at her side. She's assessing whether I can handle Alpha-level pressure. After a moment she looks back down, giving me space to prove myself.
I put my good hand flat on the mat and I push.
Getting upright with a dislocated shoulder and broken ribs is finding out exactly how much pain you can move through. I do it in increments. Hand down. Push to sitting. Three full breaths while my vision clears. Plant my foot. Stand.
The room registers this. I can feel the shift in attention, the pack noting that I held position under significant physical dominance.
Ryan rises from his crouch, unhurried, and brushes off his training gear. Something moves in his expression when he sees me upright. He expected submission. I gave him endurance instead.
"Good session," he says. There's a note in it that might be respect.
I pick up my bag with my good arm and walk out. I don't favor the broken side until I'm fully around the corner in an empty corridor. Then I put my back against the stone wall and breathe through my nose, slow and intent. The shoulder is a constant grinding ache. Every breath sends a stab through the left side. I stand there just breathing, just managing the fact of it.
Then I walk back to the residential wing.
My room is empty. I close the door and lower myself onto my bed, lying carefully on my back with my arms at my sides. I breathe. Shallow and slow. The pain is constant but manageable if I don't fight it.
I think about the test. About Ryan being given permission to apply that much force, about Caspian watching to see how I'd respond. They're trying to determine what I am, whether I'm dormant Alpha or submissive Omega, whether I'm strong enough to remain in the pack. This is pack law. This is how hierarchy gets established.
I drift somewhere between sleep and not. I'm still there when Lily comes back and stops in the doorway.
"Nova." Her voice is careful. "You're white."
"I'm fine."
She looks at my arm lying wrong, and her face goes still. She comes in and closes the door. "How bad?"
"Ribs and shoulder. Both on the left."
"I'm getting the healer."
"Don't." I say it quietly but firmly. "They'll document it. Documentation goes to Owen. Owen reports to the Council." I hold her gaze. "I'll be fine by morning."
She stares at me. "Nova, that's not how healing works. That's not normal healing time."
"I'll be fine by morning," I say again.
She sits on her own bed and looks at me for a long time, then opens her textbook. She doesn't leave. I close my eyes and breathe through the pain as the afternoon goes dark.
The ribs are better by morning.
I wake at four in the dark. Lily's breathing is even across the room. She stayed. I didn't ask her to and she stayed anyway.
I lie still and press my fingers to my left side. The bone is smooth. The fracture from last night is gone. I press harder, muscle soreness but no wrongness, nothing broken. I rotate my shoulder. It moves freely.
Twelve hours. Broken ribs for twelve hours.
I lie there and I think about the letter.Your parents were not human. You are not human.I think about every thing that's been slightly off about my body: scrapes closing overnight, bruises gone by morning, strength that doesn't match my size, dreams of running on four legs through pine forests. It's all the same thing. It's all been pointing toward this building and whatever I am that they wanted my parents dead over.
I think about Ryan Slate's face, patient and testing on the mat.
I think about what that face would look like if he knew what I can do.
I tell no one.
I spend the next two days mapping the building's rhythms. Which corridors fill between classes and which stay empty. Which bathrooms get used at which hours. I'm building new routes, because the ones I've been using have been tracked.
The second day I start varying my timing. Third day I change bathrooms entirely, using the one at the far end of the east wing.
