"The feedback," I clarify. "You made a sound. Like you didn't expect it to hit that hard."
"The amplification was stronger than I modeled for." His voice is level.
"That's not what I asked."
He stands up again. This time he walks to the bookshelf, which puts his back to me, and he adjusts something on the shelf that doesn't need adjusting. "You should go," he says. "Evening meal will be ending soon."
"Ashford."
"Take the schedule. Come tomorrow at six. Don't tell anyone about this meeting."
"I want an answer."
"You want a lot of things," he says to the bookshelf. "That's not a quality that will serve you well here."
"Neither is being told to trust no one by the person who just tested me without my consent and then warned me he has his own agenda." I fold the paper and put it in my jacket pocket. "You ran death magic through me to see what I'd do with it. You held my wrist to measure a feedback loop. And now you'retelling me to come back tomorrow at six and let you do it again." I wait until he turns around. "I'm going to come back tomorrow at six. Not because I trust you. Because you're right that I need to learn to control this before it controls me. But I want you to know the distinction I'm making."
Something moves behind his eyes. It's not the professional stillness. It's not cold. It's something closer to the expression he had in the corridor when he asked if I was hurt, quick and real and gone before it can be examined.
"Noted," he says.
"Good." I move toward the door.
"Angelic." His voice stops me with my hand on the handle. I wait. "The people who will want to use you," he says. "They won't announce themselves. They'll seem like allies first. People who want to help you understand what you are." A pause. "Be suspicious of anyone who offers you answers too easily."
I turn enough to look at him over my shoulder. He's standing in the middle of his office with his arms at his sides and his face as controlled as it always is, except his eyes are doing something they haven't done before in any interaction I've had with him.
He's afraid.
Not of me. For me, which is a different thing, and somehow much more alarming coming from a man who has never looked like he was afraid of anything.
"Including you?" I ask. "Easy answers from you."
"I haven't given you any easy answers," he says. "I've told you what you are, that you're in danger, and that I have my own interests. None of that is easy."
He's right. It isn't.
"Tomorrow," I say. "Six."
I open the door and step into the corridor, which is dim and empty, the evening meal crowd still dispersing somewhere in the floors above me. The paper in my jacket pocket is warm frommy body heat. My wrist still registers the memory of his grip, the specific pressure of fingers that knew exactly where to press to stop a current from running.
I walk back toward the main building. The cold from the death magic has finished leaving my hands, but the shape of it is still somewhere in me, a residue, something learned rather than lost. My body catalogued it the same way it catalogued the fire spiral, the same automatic filing system I didn't know I had until it started filling itself without asking.
Somewhere in the building, Thane Valorix is sitting with his questions. Somewhere, Seraphina Vale is building a version of the afternoon that will be useful to her. Somewhere, the students who watched the scorch mark on the arena barrier are deciding what it means and who to tell.
And in that narrow office with no windows, Ryder Ashford is standing in the middle of the room looking afraid of something he won't name, and I am the only person who saw it, and I don't know yet whether that makes me safer or more exposed than I was an hour ago.
I turn the corner toward the dormitory stairs. The whispers have already started in the common areas, I can hear the shape of them even without the words, and I pull my jacket tighter and keep walking, because the only thing worse than being the subject of the conversation is stopping to listen to it.
Six in the morning. No witnesses. A man who told me not to trust him and then looked frightened when he thought I might not come back.
I'll be there at five fifty-five, just to see his face when he realizes I actually showed up.
Chapter 8
"You are summoned before this Council not as a student in good standing," the senior Councilor says, "but as an unclassified anomaly presenting an ongoing threat to institutional safety."
There are seven of them behind the curved stone table. Seven sets of eyes on me. The Council Chamber smells like old magic and older grudges, and the seats are arranged so that whoever stands at the center of the room has nowhere to look except at all of them at once.
