Cassidy Holt reported up a chain.
The girl waiting for Soren three days later had already read the report.
She was sitting on the low wall outside the drill yard when he came out alone.
Gray uniform. Class A trim. Not a tamer’s kit though, no beast-bond hardware on her, and that was the first wrong thing.
Everyone at this academy walked with a beast or the socket where one used to sit.
She had the socket.
"Soren Kane," she said. "You don’t have to stop. I already know all the parts that matter."
He stopped anyway.
"Celia Ashcroft."
She didn’t offer a hand.
She looked at him instead, slow, top to bottom, checking a structure for the crack she already knew was in it somewhere.
"You’ve got five," she said. "Six, if the quiet one with no thread counts, and she does, she costs the most." A pause. "I read Holt’s note. She thinks the interesting thing is that your circle won’t sell. That’s not an interesting thing."
"What’s the interesting thing?"
"That you’re still standing."
Behind him the yard was emptying.
He felt Yara pick up his location and hold it, a floor away, the held note going tight the second a stranger got this close to the subject.
Celia caught the shift in him.
"There’s your goddess," she said. "The one reading you right now. She feels it, doesn’t she? The thinning."
Soren said nothing.
"She’s the only one who can," Celia said. "Mine couldn’t. Mine didn’t have the reach."
He didn’t ask.
Not asking was the move, because people who came to tell you a thing spent themselves faster when you made them carry the silence.
Celia carried it for a moment.
Then she turned her wrist over and showed him the socket, the dead bond-port under the skin of her forearm, gone matte the way live ones never went.
"Humanoid," she said. "Mine had a name I’m not going to say to you because saying it does a thing to my face I don’t do in public anymore."
"What happened to it?"
"Her," Celia corrected, soft, and it was the only soft thing she’d said.
"What happened is nothing happened. That’s the part nobody tells you right."
She pulled her sleeve back down.
"There’s no warning," Celia said. "You keep waiting for a warning. A bad night, a number that drops, a season you can see coming so you can brace. It doesn’t come like that. You get a stretch that feels exactly like every stretch before it. Same warmth. Same weight in the room. And then one morning she looks at you and there’s nobody behind her eyes who knows your name."
"She forgot me in the order I fed her," Celia said. "Small things first, then in the morning she walked past me in a corridor and I was furniture."
Soren held still.
He’d had this shape from Garrow, in a burned-out field, in a man’s clipped warnings before the containment work took him elsewhere.
He’d never had it from a mouth that had actually lived inside it and come out the other side alone.
"You’ve got five drinking at once," she said. "Six. Do you know what that does to the rate? One bond thins you slow. Five thin you five ways at the same time and there’s no thread to spread it because half of them chose you, and choice has no thread."
She tilted her head. "Your season’s going to arrive faster than anyone’s on this campus. You’re the richest boy in Class Z and you’re spending capital you can’t see the balance of."
"Why are you telling me this?"
"Now that," Celia said, "is the right question."
She got off the wall.
She was shorter standing than she’d looked sitting, and she came in closer than she needed to, close enough that he could see there was nothing warm in it, no pity, no play.
"I could be telling you because I don’t want another person to walk down a corridor and become furniture," she said. "That would make me kind."
"Are you kind?"
"I used to be." She looked at him a beat too long. "Or I could be telling you because you’re the first case I’ve ever seen running six at once, and I want to know how long the frame holds before it goes. I lost mine at two. You’re at six and upright. I’ve never had data like you."
Somewhere a floor up, the held note went hard as wire.
Celia felt that too, or read it off his face.
"She doesn’t like me?" Celia asked, pleased. "Good. She shouldn’t."
"You’re going to have a season that feels like all the others," Celia said. "I had mine. I didn’t see it coming, and I was watching for it, and I still didn’t."
She stepped back.
"I’ll be around. Class A, same review docket as you, apparently, so we’ll be sharing a lot of hallways before the Council’s done."
She said the word review like she was handing it to him on purpose, checking whether he already knew.
"Ask your goddess to keep counting. She’s the only instrument you’ve got. When the count starts moving faster than the closeness explains, that’s not more girls."
"That’s the season?"
"It is," Celia agreed.
She walked off toward the A wing without looking back.
Soren stood in the emptying yard.
A floor up, Yara let his location go slack again now that the stranger was leaving, but the note didn’t fully loosen, and he understood why.
She’d heard the whole thing through him.
She’d been counting degrees alone. Now there was a second person on this campus who knew the count existed.
And that one wasn’t counting to protect him.
She was counting to see the number.
◆◆◆◆
Yara was waiting inside the stairwell.
She didn’t ask what Celia had said.
She’d had all of it through him, live, degree by degree.
She stepped into his space with the red fixed on his mouth, both hands flat on his chest, not pushing, just resting there where she could feel him breathe and confirm the count for herself.
"She wants to watch you go," Yara said.
"Yes."
"She said it to your face and you let her stand there."
"I wanted to hear the rest."
Yara’s hands slid up, thumbs at his collarbones, the touch of someone taking inventory of a thing they’d decided was theirs and had just been reminded was borrowed against.
"The next time she gets that close to you," Yara said, quiet, even, "I’ll be the one standing in the yard. She can take my measurements."
It wasn’t jealousy the loud way.
Selah was loud.
Yara was telling him plainly that a girl who’d come to watch him thin would not get a second unsupervised inch.
He put a hand over hers on his chest.
The note in her went slack, finally, all the way, now that she was the one holding the ground between him and the door.