I do. There's a physical sensation of closing, something pulling back from the contact point, something that had been open now shut. "Yes."
"Remember that." He doesn't release my wrist. He's watching my face with an attention that has nothing academic in it anymore. "The amplification through contact is the part that will get you killed. If you touch someone while you're holdingan active absorption, you feed it back to them at a level they're not prepared for. A strong enough mage survives that. A less powerful one doesn't."
"I didn't know it would do that."
"I know you didn't." He finally releases my wrist. Steps back one step, which puts the appropriate amount of professional distance back in the room, except now I'm still half-sitting on the edge of his desk and the lantern is still slightly unsteady and the cold is still fading from my palms. "Which is why no one can know what you are. Not the full picture."
"Valorix already suspects."
"Valorix suspects you're something unusual. He doesn't have the vocabulary yet for what he saw." Ryder moves back around the desk, putting it between us, and the shift feels deliberate. "The fire signature was a problem because it was public. What just happened here is a different order of problem entirely."
"Because it's more dangerous."
"Because it's more useful," he says. "To the wrong people. There are individuals at this academy who would find a conduit with your particular amplification abilities extremely valuable, and by valuable I mean they would not leave you enough autonomy to object to how you were used."
The word used lands in a specific place. I know that word. I grew up in a house full of people who used it.
"So I trust no one," I say. "That's your advice."
"That's not advice. It's a warning." He sits back down, and for a moment he just looks at the desk. "Including me."
That stops me. "You're warning me not to trust you."
"I'm telling you that you shouldn't have to take my word for anything." His jaw is set. "I have my own reasons for keeping you functional and enrolled. Some of them align with your interests. Some of them are mine. You should know the difference exists."
"That's a very honest thing to say."
"Don't mistake honesty for safety."
I push off the desk and stand properly, because leaning against furniture while he's sitting at it is the wrong power arrangement for this conversation. "What are your reasons?"
"The ones that align with yours? You're the only conduit I've encountered in a decade of study, and I'd like to understand what you are before someone else does." He holds my gaze. "The ones that don't? Those aren't yours to have yet."
"That's frustrating."
"Yes."
"You could just tell me."
"I could," he agrees. "And then you'd have information you're not equipped to protect, and the people who want you useful would find a way to get it out of you, and we'd both be worse off." He picks up the pen again. "There are things I'm keeping from you because I don't trust your ability to conceal them. That's not a comment on your character. It's a comment on the fact that you've been here two weeks and you've already publicly demonstrated three impossible abilities."
"I'm not exactly doing it on purpose."
"That's the problem." He writes something, one line, and caps the pen. "You have no control over the mechanism. You absorb magic you weren't trying to absorb, you hold signatures you didn't know you were holding, and you amplify on contact without any deliberate engagement." He slides the paper across the desk. "That's your training schedule. Starting tomorrow. Private sessions, my office, six in the morning before the main building opens."
I pick up the paper. Six sessions a week. Four of them listed as containment work and two as signature management, which sounds like a polite name for something that's going to be deeply unpleasant. "Six in the morning."
"The building is empty. No witnesses."
"And if I say no?"
"Then you walk out of this office without the skills to stop yourself from feeding death magic into the next person who touches you, and we find out how long it takes before someone notices." He leans back. "Your choice."
I look at the schedule. I look at him. He's watching me with that careful stillness, the professor face, the one that gives nothing away. Except I'm standing close enough to notice that he's holding his own hands still with visible effort, fingers flat against the desk, and that the controlled nothing of his expression is costing him something.
"You felt it too," I say. "When I touched your wrist."
He doesn't answer immediately.
