Celia Ashcroft did not sit where guests sat.
Guests took the empty desk by the door, observed the period, left a note for someone above them.
That was the shape of cross-class observation when it happened, which in Class Z it never had.
She pulled the chair from the desk in front of his, turned it, and sat in it backward, arms folded on the rest, facing him.
"You don’t take notes," she said.
"I know the material."
"Class Z material. Yes. I’d imagine." She looked at the board, then back.
"I meant you don’t take notes on the room. You should. Half of it is watching you and you’ve clocked all of them and written none of it down."
"I don’t need it written down."
"No," she said, and something behind her eyes filed that. "You wouldn’t."
◆◆◆◆
She asked questions for the rest of the period.
Not the questions he’d braced for. Not where did the power come from, not what happened under the east yard, not the assembly.
The story that ran the upper halls didn’t interest her, which was its own kind of information.
She asked how he’d ranked the bonds.
She asked which of them he’d take into a collapsing structure first and why, and when he answered Maren she asked why not the wolf, and when he didn’t answer that she smiled like he’d answered it anyway.
She asked whether he slept.
"Everyone sleeps," Soren said.
"Tamers with this many active threads don’t, much. Or they sleep too well, which is worse. Which is it."
He looked at her properly for the first time.
Nobody at this academy knew that the load of the threads showed up in sleep.
The Bureau knew.
A sealed file in the Bureau knew. A noble daughter sitting backward in a Class Z chair was not supposed to.
"I sleep fine," he said.
"Mm," Celia said, and wrote nothing down, because she was the kind that didn’t need it written down either.
◆◆◆◆
Yara wasn’t in the room.
She rarely was, by day.
The wolf kept to the shadow under the dorm boards and she only came out at the edges of things, when the halls were thin and nobody counted heads.
But Soren had held her location since the night she crossed the old wall, a constant low sense of where she was, and right now she was close. Closer than the dorm. Just past the wall, in the dark of the stairwell, not moving.
Listening.
She’d come up to the edge of the room and stopped at the threshold. Far enough out that nobody would see her and she wouldn’t have to be seen.
She wasn’t pulling on the bond. She wasn’t speaking through it.
She was holding very still on the far side of the wall while a Class A girl asked her tamer how well he slept.
That was the part that ran cold. Not the questions.
Yara going silent and close instead of loud and gone.
Loud he understood. Loud was the wolf at a throat.
Silent and close was the thing he hadn’t learned to read yet.
◆◆◆◆
At the bell Celia stood and put the chair back exactly as she’d found it, turned the right way, squared to the desk.
The nobles trained that in. Leave no sign you were anywhere.
"Same time tomorrow," she said. "I requested the full week."
"I didn’t agree to a week."
"You’re Class Z. Nobody asked you to agree to anything, that’s rather the condition of the floor."
She said it without cruelty, which made it land harder. "I’ll see you in the morning, Soren Kane."
She put one gloved hand flat on his desk again as she turned, the same half-lean from yesterday, close.
This time Mona was ready for it.
Mona’s chair scraped back and Mona was on her feet between them before the hand had finished landing, lenses up at Celia, one new fist closed at her side, the cold patch under her sleeve gone to a chill Soren felt three feet off.
The room went quiet around it.
Celia looked down at the small fierce shape that had put itself in the gap, and for one second something real crossed her face. Interest. The deep kind, the kind a collector gets in front of a thing the catalogue didn’t list.
"Oh," Celia said softly. "She’s not on any roster."
She withdrew the hand. Unhurried. The lean came undone on her terms, not Mona’s.
"That’s the one I want to read," she said, to Soren, over Mona’s head. "Whatever she is. The system doesn’t have a page for her, does it."
[DING! — Bond [Mona]. Guard response sustained. Subject placed self between bearer and identified attention-source. No external instruction on file.]
The DING came after Mona had already done it. It always did now. The Heart wrote down what she’d chosen a beat behind her choosing it.
Celia read the air go cold and the girl go still and the boy behind her say nothing, and she gathered all three into whatever she was building.
"Tomorrow," she said.
She left.
Mona didn’t sit back down for a long time.
◆◆◆◆
"Why is she touching him?"
It came out low and flat, aimed at the door Celia had left through, and it took Soren a second to understand that Mona had said it.
A whole sentence. Six words. The most she’d ever put together in a row.
Maren’s head came up from her arms. Selah’s finger stopped on her page.
"Mona," Soren said.
Mona turned. The lenses found him.
Behind them the wrong eyes were doing something he hadn’t seen them do, a hot bright want with a question still loose in it.
"Why," she said again. Quieter. "Is she. Touching him."
She didn’t have more words than that. She’d spent everything she had to get those out.
Soren looked at the girl who three days ago had one sound, asking the oldest question in the room, and felt the new thread between them pull tight enough to ache.
"She’s not anymore," he said. "You made sure."