"I wasn't making a claim. I was redirecting fire in a combat trial."
"What you were doing and what it looked like are two different things." His eyes drop to my hands briefly, then back up. "Where did you even get it? My signature isn't ambient. You can't just pick it up from proximity."
I think about it. The way the fire felt when it hit me, that specific spiral at the core, the pattern I recognized before I could name it. "I've been near you before," I say. "In Reaper class. When you ran the fire exercises last week and I was standing two benches away. I must have caught traces of it then."
"Traces." He says the word like it has a bad taste. "You held traces of my fire signature in your body for a week and then reproduced it under pressure."
"Apparently."
"That's not a null ability."
"No," I agree. "It isn't."
The silence that follows is not comfortable. He's looking at me with the gold still burning in his eyes and something else moving underneath it, something that is working very hard to stay behind his face and not quite managing it. His chest rises and falls, and mine does too, and the room is small enough that the air between us is carrying both.
"You're going to destroy everything," he says. His voice comes out low and controlled and utterly serious. "Do you understand that? You walk around this academy using signatures that don't belong to you, sitting in houses that don't know what to do with you, and every time something impossible happens everyone looks at you and then at everyone around you and they start asking questions that none of us can afford to answer."
"I didn't ask to be here," I say.
"I know."
"I didn't ask to absorb anything. I didn't ask to use your fire signature. I didn't ask to be whatever I apparently am." I hold his gaze. "But I'm here, and I'm going to keep being here, and if that's inconvenient for your politics then I'm genuinely sorry, but I'm not going to apologize for surviving a combat trial."
He makes a sound, not quite a laugh, not quite its opposite. "You're not afraid of me."
"Should I be?"
"Most people are."
"Most people probably have better options." I cross my arms. "What do you want, Valorix? You dragged me in here, so you want something. Either tell me what it is or let me go."
His jaw works. The gold in his eyes pulses once, sharp, and then he takes a step closer, closing the last of the distance between us, and I tilt my head back to keep meeting his gaze because I refuse to be the first one to look down.
"What are you?" he says. His voice is quiet, private, not a challenge now. Something rawer than that.
"I don't know yet," I say. "When I find out, you'll probably hear about it."
His mouth is very close to my ear when he says, "You should be more careful about what you carry."
I can feel the heat of him, not fire, just warmth, the kind that comes from a body standing close in a cold room, and my pulse has made a decision I haven't agreed to yet, and I'm about to say something sharp and true that will put the appropriate amount of space back in this situation.
The door opens.
Ryder Ashford fills the frame.
He takes in the room with one look, both of us, the distance between us, or the lack of it, and his expression doesn't move. His eyes track from Thane's face to mine and back.
"Valorix." His voice is very flat. "Step back."
Thane doesn't move immediately. He holds for a beat that has a point to it, the point being that he doesn't take orders, not even from professors, and Ryder Ashford knows it and is giving the instruction anyway. Then Thane steps back, slowly, and turns to face Ryder directly, squaring up without raising his hands.
"Professor." The word is polite enough and means nothing. "We were talking."
"I saw what you were doing in the arena." Ryder steps into the room. He doesn't look at me yet. "And I saw you follow her out."
"Concerned about the academic integrity of my conversation?"
"I'm concerned about a student being cornered in an empty room by someone with a personal stake in what she just demonstrated."
