Something crosses his face again. He looks away for a moment, jaw working, and when he looks back his expression is closed in the way that means a decision has been made.
"It doesn't matter what it is." He walks away. The pull ebbs behind him like a tide going out, but it doesn't disappear entirely. It never disappears entirely.
I stand in the corridor for a long moment before I start walking again.
The rest of the day blurs into a hollow, exhausting loop of cold corridors and meals I chew without tasting. The pull migrates as the hours go, moving from my chest up into the base of my skull, where it sits like a headache that won't break. My arm throbs under the cloth. My ribs grind with every breath I take too deep. By the time the sun drops below the tree line I'm running on nothing, just the mechanical fact of one foot in front of the other.
I push Harmon's office door open to find him already at his desk, folder open, ready. We work through bloodline law and territorial consolidation. Halfway through I present an argument I've been building from the additional reading he assigned, making the case that the Harford Territories' economic collapse wasn't incidental to the Council's consolidation strategy but was engineered as a precedent.
He sits back and crosses his arms. "You think the Council starved out a pack system to create legal precedent?"
"I think the sequencing is too clean to be coincidental, sir. Three separate trade restriction orders in fourteen months, eachone escalating in scope. The Harford territories had to capitulate before the consolidation protocols could be formally applied anywhere else. They were the test case."
"That's a significant claim," he says. "What's your source for the sequencing?"
"Footnote forty-seven of the Markham text. The citation chain goes to a Council archive document that confirms the dates."
He's quiet for a moment, and his quiet has a different quality to it than the quiet at the start of the session. Something has entered it.
"You cross-referenced the footnote."
"Yes, sir."
"Most students don't read the footnotes."
"I read everything you put in front of me, sir."
He looks at me. The lamplit office is still around us and whatever he's deciding whether to say seems to cost him something.
"That was better than adequate," he says finally.
"Thank you, sir."
"Don't thank me. You did the work." He stands and goes to his bookshelf, pulls out a text. "Read chapter seven of this. If your argument holds after that, we'll discuss a research paper." He crosses back to the desk and holds the book out.
I reach for it. His fingers don't pull back fast enough and the backs of my fingers catch the inside of his wrist when I take it, barely, less than a second. He goes still like the contact was electric. Then he lets go and takes a single step back. The space between us expands by exactly the distance he chose. I understand without words that this is a line he's drawing for himself.
He sits back down. His hands go flat on the desk.
"Dismissed," he says.
I leave. In the corridor I press my back against the wall and hold the book against my chest and breathe.
That night Knox is outside again.
I see him from my bed, the dark shape in the shadows below, completely still. I've seen him out there before but tonight I lie and watch him for a long time before I close my eyes, thinking about the training hall and the corridor and the way he walked away this morning when I asked him something direct.
I think about Rivera's lecture. About whatachingmeans when you write it in a notebook about something you've been feeling in your body for weeks.
My ribs hurt. My arm aches. The pull from this afternoon sits under my sternum like something that has moved in and made itself comfortable.
Lily is asleep across the room. I get up quietly, go down to the back stairwell, the cold empty one, and sit on the steps with my knees up. Five minutes of not holding it together.
Five minutes of just sitting in the dark and breathing and not pretending I'm fine.
Then I go back upstairs, get in bed, and stare at the ceiling until morning.
Chapter Eight
