His eyes change. Something moves in them that he doesn't quite manage to cover. "Surviving."
"Yes, sir."
"Elaborate."
I look at him and I make a choice. "I was locked in the old chapel until three in the morning. By students. Members of the Dominion."
The stillness that comes over him is total and intent. His jaw tightens and then releases and I watch the control move through his face.
"The Dominion," he says. His voice has gone flat.
"Yes, sir. Three of them. I was summoned by note to the chapel at midnight, told that if I didn't come my roommate would pay the price instead, and then they locked me inside when they left." I keep my voice level and it costs me everything. "I got out through a window. I cut my arm climbing through." I don't show him the arm but I can see in his face that he knowsI'm telling the truth. "I didn't sleep, sir. So when you tell me I'm not prioritizing History, you're correct. I've been prioritizing other things."
Professor Julian Harmon looks at me for a long moment. His hands are at his sides and they make a brief motion, fingers pressing once against his thigh and releasing, something small and restrained and entirely involuntary.
"Three students locked you in a building in the middle of the night," he says. "You're a student in my class."
"Yes, sir."
"Your education is my concern." His voice has gone back to its classroom register, carefully neutral, intentionally professional. "The social dynamics of this institution are not." He stands, crosses to his desk, picks up a folder, and holds it out to me. "This is a reading list. Additional sources to address the gaps in your understanding. You'll work through these or your marks will continue to suffer."
I take the folder. The paper is slightly warm from sitting on his desk.
"Additionally," he says, "you'll attend mandatory tutoring sessions. Every evening at seven. My office. Ninety minutes." He holds my gaze. "This is not optional, Miss Bardot."
"As a punishment, sir?"
"As a remedial measure." Something in his face is working hard to stay composed. "Is that clear?"
"Yes, sir."
"Then you're dismissed."
The corridor after class is loud with students moving between periods and I walk against the current of them, head down, thefolder pressed against my chest. The morning feels like it's lasted three days already. The cut on my arm pulses under the cloth. My ribs ache. My eyes are doing that thing they do when you've been awake too long, a low sandy burn that makes the overhead lights too bright.
I make it to the main corridor intersection before it starts.
It isn't a sound. It isn't a smell, exactly. It's a pressure behind my sternum, faint at first, like a plucked string vibrating somewhere inside me. I slow without meaning to and scan the crowd automatically.
Caspian is at the far end of the corridor, walking toward me with Nico and two other seniors, all of them talking about something, relaxed, easy. I should turn and take the east route. That would be the sensible thing. Instead I keep walking, because turning around is what you do when you've already lost and I'm not there yet.
The pressure in my chest builds the closer we get. Ten feet away it's a pull, something physical and insistent, like a tide dragging at the back of my ribs. Five feet and it becomes something I have to breathe through, something that wants me to stop moving.
His eyes cut to me.
For a second something crosses his face, something fast and complicated, and then it's gone and he's looking through me like I'm not there. They pass. My feet keep moving. The pull fades behind me but leaves a residue, a dull throb under the left side of my ribs that sits there for the rest of the morning like a bruise pressing from the inside.
I don't understand what that is. I only know it's getting worse each time.
Lily is already at the back table when I get to the dining hall. She's got a sandwich in front of her and she's reading something on her tablet. When I sit down across from her she looks up and smiles.
"How was History?"
"He moved me to the front row."
Her eyebrows go up. "Seriously?"
"Yeah. And he assigned me mandatory tutoring every evening."
