Soren woke wrong.
Not the homing this time. That hole had healed shut overnight, the slack line gone taut again on the far side of choice.
This was lower. The floor of himself sat a notch under where it used to.
He lay still and took the reading without a meter.
A worn coat pulled a season thinner. The level he’d felt drop in the dark had found its new resting place and stayed there.
He’d known the cost going in. He had not known it would keep a record.
Mona was already up.
◆◆◆◆
She sat at the foot of the bed with her lenses on, watching him.
She did that some mornings now.
But she usually watched the door, or the corner, or her own new hands like she still didn’t trust them to be hers.
This morning she watched his chest. The place over the braid.
"I’m fine," Soren said.
"Augh."
"I am."
She tipped her head.
The lenses caught the gray coming through the window and threw it back flat.
She’d felt it.
The lurch in the night had gone out both ends of the new thread, and she was the other end now, and she’d felt whatever leaving her had cost him land in him.
The one bond that used to cost nothing was the one that could feel the cost.
"Get dressed," he said. "We’re late."
◆◆◆◆
The corridor knew his name before he reached the stairs.
It had since the assembly. That part wasn’t new and he’d stopped hearing most of it.
You stop hearing a fan after a while. Same thing.
What was new was who carried it now.
The whispers used to run along Class Z and die at the door.
They didn’t die at the door anymore.
They went up the stairs ahead of him into the higher halls, where students who’d never once looked at the cellar class turned to look now.
A second-year from Class C said the word hero to the girl next to her and didn’t lower her voice.
Maren fell into step on his left.
"Are they staring again?"
"They’ve been staring."
"Higher up the building now." She watched a knot of Class B students part around them. "It used to stop on our floor."
"Fame leaks."
"Is that what we’re calling it."
He didn’t answer.
Mona had stopped three paces back, planted in the middle of the corridor, lenses turned up at the older students like she was reading a weather she didn’t have a word for.
"She doesn’t get it," Maren said.
"She gets that they want something."
"Do they."
"Everyone in this hall wants something." He nodded Mona forward and she came. "Most of them just want the story. A few want the boy in it."
Maren’s tail went still.
"Which are you watching for," she said.
"The few."
◆◆◆◆
Class Z was the same four walls it had always been.
That was the thing about the cellar room.
It didn’t care what the upper halls had decided about him overnight.
Troy had the corner desk and his beast asleep across his boots, and he gave Soren the nod he gave him every morning now, the one that used to be a glare.
Selah had saved the seat with her book.
She did it without looking up, hand flat on the desk beside her, frost gone to its quiet daytime pattern.
"You’re slow today," she said.
"Long night."
"The mole." Not a question.
She’d have felt the room shift too, the new draw opening in the shared dark. "She thinks she’s real."
"She turned real."
Selah marked her page with one finger.
"That costs," she said.
"I know what it costs."
"I know you know. I’m saying it out loud so one of us has."
He sat. Mona folded down beside him, cold patch finding his arm. She found it every time now without aiming for it.
Selah looked at the two of them and didn’t say the rest.
She went back to her book. The frost on her knuckles climbed a quarter inch and stopped, which was Selah holding something she’d decided not to throw.
◆◆◆◆
The instructor never came.
A second-year did instead, gray sleeve, Council writ folded once in her hand, and she read the reassignment off it flat. The room had a guest sitting in for the period. Cross-class observation. Standard.
Nothing about it was standard. Class Z didn’t get observers. Class Z got forgotten, which had been the whole point of it once.
Soren read the writ shape from across the room and filed it. Not the monitor. Not gray enough, not still enough. Someone else’s instrument.
The door opened on the back of that thought.
She came in unhurried. The room was already hers and she was only confirming the deed.
Class A pin. Pale, composed, hair pinned the noble-house way, every strand answering to a rule.
She found Soren in the first sweep of the room and didn’t pretend she hadn’t.
She crossed the cellar floor that no upper-class student crossed and stopped at his desk.
"Soren Kane," she said. Not a question either. "I’ve read three different versions of you this week. None of them agreed."
"That happens."
"It shouldn’t." She tilted her head a fraction and studied him. A line of text that had come out wrong at the printer. "I came down to read the original."
Mona’s cold patch went flat against his arm.
The new hand on her far side curled closed.
[DING! — Bond [Mona]. Proximity-guard response logged. Source: elective linkage, no external instruction. The behavior moved first.]
She’d felt the pull of the woman’s attention before Soren had named it a threat. The thread he’d turned real in the dark had a watch on it now, and the watch was hers.
"And you are?" Soren asked.
The Class A girl set one gloved hand on the edge of his desk and leaned in half an inch, close enough that Mona’s grip on nothing went white.
"Celia Ashcroft," she said. "You’re going to be the most interesting thing I do this year."