"Meaning the ones who would find an answer useful." He unfolds his arms. "Come to my office after the evening meal."
"Is that a request or a summons?"
"It's a practical instruction." He's already moving toward the door. "What happened today crosses into territory that requires documentation before someone else documents it first."
"Documentation," I repeat. "You're very romantic about this whole thing."
He pauses with his hand on the door. His back is to me, and I watch his shoulders and wait.
"The fire signature," he says, without turning around. "Don't let it out again until we understand what it means that you have it."
"And if someone points more fire at me in the meantime?"
"Absorb it. Don't redirect." He opens the door. "There's a difference between defending yourself and making a declaration in front of witnesses."
He walks out.
I stand in the empty classroom for a moment, in the cold, with the chalk-smeared board and the narrow window and the scuff marks on the tables. My chest is quiet now, the heat long gone, but I'm aware of my own pulse in a way I wasn't an hour ago. The combat trial. Thane's face when he saw the scorch mark. Ryder in the doorway.
I press my palm flat against one of the cold tables and breathe.
By dinner, the versions will be circulating. I know how this works. I've seen it happen to other people and it happened to mein the first week and it will keep happening because I keep doing things that are impossible, and impossible things are currency in a place like this. People trade them. People weaponize them. Seraphina will have a version by the time the afternoon classes end, and her version will be designed to make me look dangerous in a way that justifies whatever she has planned next.
And Thane Valorix will be sitting somewhere with his gold eyes and his bloodline politics and his question, what are you, that I couldn't answer because I don't have the answer yet.
And Ryder will be in his office, writing something down, and I'll go there tonight, and he'll be careful and professional and tell me not to do the thing I already did, and neither of us will say anything about the way he walked into that room and told Thane to step back.
I push off the table.
The corridor outside is empty. The arena sounds have resumed from around the corner, the thud and crackle of the next round of trials, some other pair of students working through their impossible match-up while the gallery watches and calculates.
I pull my jacket straight and walk back toward the main building, and behind me in the gallery I can already hear the whispers starting, spreading outward from the scorch mark on the barrier stone like heat from a fire that has found its way through a crack and decided to stay.
Chapter 7
Ryder's office door is already open when I get there.
I knock anyway. He doesn't look up from whatever he's writing.
"Close it behind you," he says.
I close it. The office is smaller than I expected for someone with his authority, a desk, two chairs that look like they've never been used for sitting, a narrow bookshelf running the length of one wall. A single lantern on the desk. No windows. The kind of room built for conversations that don't leave.
"Sit down," he says.
"I'll stand."
He sets down his pen. Looks up. "I wasn't asking."
"Neither was I."
He holds my gaze for a moment, then leans back in his chair and crosses his arms, which on Ryder Ashford is the equivalent of adjusting his position on a battlefield. "Fine. Stand."
I stay near the door, which feels like the right distance. Not far enough to look afraid. Close enough to leave.
"You know what I am," I say. I've been carrying the words since the classroom, since the corridor, since he looked at me in that empty room and said of course it didn't about the fire not burning me. I'm not asking. I'm telling him I've already worked it out.
"Yes," he says.
