The interface didn’t say a word about the text, which was how I knew it was bad. Ecchi Logic bent reality around me to produce underwear reveals and convenient stairwell collisions, and the Oracle Feed narrated my humiliations in real time with the enthusiasm of a sports commentator, but the one time an actual adult with an actual budget reached out to me personally, the whole system went quiet and let me handle it alone.
I read Odette Reyes’s message twice. Fifteen minutes, informal, my convenience, on or off campus. That was the language of somebody who had already decided what the conversation was and was letting me pick the wallpaper.
Then I opened my class group chat, scrolled to the contact I’d never once used, and typed.
Downstairs. Now. Outside the west entrance.
The reply took ninety seconds, which meant she’d read it immediately and spent eighty-nine of those seconds deciding how to sound.
I am not a dog, Belmont.
Two minutes or I come up. Your neighbors will love that.
Nothing for a while. Then: Four minutes. I am not going outside in what I currently have on.
Which meant she was going to change, which meant she’d already lost the part of the conversation where she pretended this wasn’t happening.
I went down the west stairwell instead of the elevator because the elevator meant standing still, and standing still meant thinking, and I was doing that badly enough on the move. The common room noise faded behind the fire door. Outside the air had gone cool the way it did on campus after eight, jasmine off the hedges, sprinklers ticking somewhere in the dark toward the training fields, the whole place performing serenity for nobody.
Here’s the thing about my situation that I don’t think anybody involved fully understood, including the system that built it.
False Data made me invisible to machines. I could sit in a diagnostic chair at the IHL regional office and let them run a full-spectrum Core scan and the readout would come back as a mid-tier Channeler with a fifteen-foot ceiling and a stamina flag, and no analyst alive could catch it, because there was nothing to catch. The lie wasn’t hidden in the data. The lie was the data. Every scanner in California could line up and take a number.
What False Data could not do was stop a woman with an agency and a grudge from telling a reporter she found the Belmont boy’s timeline interesting. It couldn’t stop a thread on a hero forum from putting my three negative diagnostics next to my entrance exam score and asking a question in a font that got screenshotted. It couldn’t stop the machine that took Jade from thirty-seven to rank eightty seven in a single bad interview.
Institutions I could beat. Institutions ran on documents and I had a passive trait that wrote documents.
Public opinion had no Core to fool. It just decided, and then it was true.
Petra came out the west door four minutes and ten seconds after her last message, and I will admit that the ten seconds were spent on purpose and that they worked.
She’d changed into something that was supposed to read as thrown on and had clearly involved a mirror. Cream cashmere, sleeves pushed to the elbow, the neckline sitting low enough to be a choice, and a dark pleated skirt that stopped high on the thigh and did not appear to be aware of any dress code. Bare legs. Heeled ankle boots, on grass, at night, walking out to meet somebody she claimed she didn’t care about. Her hair fell in those geometric black waves that survived combat drills and humidity and probably minor explosive events, and the emerald eyes found me and went cold in a way she’d practiced in front of people who mattered more than me.
She stopped six feet away with her arms folded under her chest, which did things to the cashmere that she was fully aware of.
"You have a remarkable understanding of how to make a request," she said.
"Your mother pulled my file."
Something moved behind her face and got caught before it finished. Half a second of it, and then the shutter came down, and she tilted her chin up exactly the amount that put her looking down her nose at a boy four inches taller.
"My mother runs an agency," she said. "Agencies review candidate registrations. It’s called scouting. You’d know the word if you’d read the Castillo material instead of coasting on charm."
"Three inquiries in seven days. Crestline. Halcyon. Lang." I closed one step. "Crestline and Halcyon pulled the standard packet. Your mother requested my diagnostic history and my manifestation timeline, specifically, by name. Nobody scouts a first-year’s medical file, Petra. That’s not scouting. That’s a background check with a bow on it."
Her jaw tightened. She didn’t move back, and I gave her credit for that, because the polite thing to do when someone with my Strength stat walked at you in the dark was move back.
"And you assume I’m responsible."
"I know you’re responsible."
"You know nothing," she said, and the aristocratic finish on it cracked slightly at the edges, which was the first honest sound she’d made. "You have a theory and a very high opinion of it, which appears to be your entire operating system."
Two more steps. Now the light from the west door reached us both, and I could see the pulse going in her throat, and the very faint sheen on her collarbone that meant she’d walked down the stairs faster than she wanted to admit.
"Your hallway," I said. "Four-oh-something in the afternoon, you left the conference room, you came back for a pen you knew the location of, and you saw me with Sloane against the wall. Fifteen minutes later you were on the phone. Not to your mother, because your mother would have opened with the file, and she opened with the timeline, which means she got it secondhand from somebody who thought the timeline was the interesting part." I watched the confirmation arrive in her eyes before she could stop it.
"Brother. You called your brother."