Selah’s went fast, because Soren had already broken it in the spring and she refused to perform it twice.
"Every overload was staged," she said. "I’ve had perfect control since the winter of first year. The system reads instability and prescribes grounding. Grounding means him. So I supplied instability."
Maren’s fork stopped halfway to her mouth.
"The cafeteria," Maren said. "The one where you nearly froze to death and I had to wrap around your back."
"That one was real."
"How do I know that?"
"Because I was unconscious for it and I’m not good enough to fake unconscious." Selah sipped her tea. "The other eleven were staged."
"Eleven?"
"Approximately eleven. I stopped counting so I wouldn’t have to know the number."
Maren put the fork down.
"You’re worse than Dani."
"I’m more efficient than Dani. Dani used a delay. I used a body."
◆◆◆◆
"Fine," Maren said. "Fine. Great. Everybody’s a monster."
She stood up.
Sat down.
Stood up again and went to the window and stayed there with her back to the table and her tail moving in a way that meant she was about to do something she’d been putting off.
"Maren," Soren said.
"I’m getting to it."
"Take your time."
"I don’t want to take my time, that’s the problem. I’ve wanted to say it since the woods and I keep not saying it because it’s stupid." She turned around. "It’s not evil-genius stupid like Dani’s. It’s embarrassing stupid."
"Those are usually better."
"You’re going to be so annoyed."
◆◆◆◆
"The fan club," Maren said.
Yara’s ears went straight up.
"Six accounts," Maren said. "Seeded over a month. Posting under different names, escalating slowly, cross-linking to the ranking board so the algorithm picked it up."
The room went completely silent.
Yara said, very carefully, "I seeded six accounts."
"I know," said Maren. "I found four of them in the first week and thought they were Council plants. So I made six more to bury them."
"You did what."
"I thought somebody was building a file on him." Maren’s ears were flat and her face had gone red under the fur. "The posts were too organized. Nobody’s that organized about a Class Z tamer. So I flooded it. I figured if the whole board was noise, nobody could tell which noise was the surveillance."
Yara put her face in her hands.
"That’s why it got out of hand," she said, muffled. "Three hundred years of subtle work and a fox doubled my output."
"It worked, didn’t it?"
"It went continental, Maren."
"So it worked extremely well."
◆◆◆◆
"How many of the accounts were still running at the festival?" Dani asked.
"All twelve," said Yara and Maren, at the same time.
They looked at each other.
"Six," Maren corrected.
"Six," Yara agreed.
"Twelve total," said Dani, writing. "That explains the autumn spike. I flagged it as bot activity and closed the ticket."
"It was bot activity."
"It was two of my own people."
Soren pinched the bridge of his nose.
"So the fan club that made me famous," he said, "the one that made me too inconvenient to erase, the single most useful accident of my entire first year, was two women independently running psychological operations on the same message board without telling each other."
"Yes," said Yara.
"Yes," said Maren.
"And neither of you noticed the other one."
"I noticed her," Yara said. "I assumed she was a Council plant."
"I assumed she was a Council plant," said Maren.
Dani wrote that down.
"Don’t write that down," said Soren.
"I log everything."
◆◆◆◆
"That’s not the real one," Maren said.
The room settled again.
She came back to the table but didn’t sit.
"The training yard," she said. "First year. The dummy."
Soren went still.
"You burned a training dummy to ash from six feet away," he said. "Beck logged it as equipment failure. Everybody bought it."
"You didn’t."
"No."
"That’s the point." Maren’s tail wrapped her own waist, the thing she did when she was holding onto herself. "I’d been in Class Z six days. I was pulling every punch. I was going to spend the whole year being fine and unremarkable and getting quietly reassigned in the spring."
"And then?"
"And then I watched you clock me pulling punches on day two." Her voice dropped. "Nobody had done that. Ever. Not one instructor in my whole life. And I decided if the only person in this building who could see me was going to be in this building, I wanted him to see all of it."
She looked at the table.
"So I let it out on purpose," Maren said. "The dummy. The eyes. All of it. I aimed it in front of you and I made it look like an accident, and then I laughed and said the dummy had dry rot."
◆◆◆◆
Soren sat with that.
"You exposed your own fusion," he said. "In front of the entire class. Deliberately. Knowing it would be logged."
"Knowing it would be logged, knowing it would go in my file, knowing it would flag the Council." Maren’s ears stayed flat. "I made myself into a problem you’d have to keep. Because problems you have to keep don’t get reassigned in the spring."
"That’s the most expensive thing anyone at this table did."
"I know." Her voice cracked once and she stamped on it. "Everyone else sabotaged a routing request or faked a shiver. I set my own life on fire in a training yard so a boy I’d known six days would have a reason not to let me go."
She finally sat down.
"That’s my confession," Maren said. "I picked you first and I made sure you couldn’t put me down."
"Six days," said Joan, from the counter.
"Six days."
"You burned your own future down over six days of a boy noticing your footwork."
"When you say it in that voice it sounds unhinged."
"It is unhinged. I wrote a Bureau clearance over a personnel file." Joan poured. "I’m not judging. I’m establishing a scale."
◆◆◆◆
Nobody said anything.
Then, from under the desk, Mona surfaced.
She came out backwards, dragging half a blanket, climbed the leg of Soren’s chair with total commitment, and deposited herself on his chest with a sound of profound satisfaction.
"Augh," said Mona.
Everyone looked at her.
"She’s the only one who’s done nothing," Selah said.
"She dug a hole in the floor last week," said Dani.
"That’s not manipulation. That’s a hole."
"It’s under the heating line."
"It’s a hole, Dani."
Mona, unbothered, went to sleep on the exact spot where the wire ran through Soren’s chest, and stayed there for the rest of the accounting.
◆◆◆◆
Soren looked around the table.
A goddess who built his world. An analyst who strangled a rescue plan in her own queue. An ice-type who’d faked eleven breakdowns. A fox who’d immolated her future to be unforgettable.
And one mole, asleep, guilty of nothing but structural damage.
"That’s four," Soren said.
Every head at the table turned, at once, toward the counter.
Joan had her back to them, both hands flat on either side of the coffee pot, and she hadn’t moved in five minutes.
"Joan," said Soren.
"I heard you," Joan said, without turning around.