I pulled the collar of my shirt up on the left side, which worked for approximately zero seconds before the fabric settled back down to where fabric lives. The scratches ran in four parallel lines from my collarbone to the hollow of my throat, bright and obvious and telling a story I did not have time to edit. They’d already started fading thanks to the Demigod recovery rate, but recovery rate and visibility window are two different problems, and right now I was operating inside the second one.
The men’s restroom on the second floor of Building D had a mirror that confirmed what my fingers already knew. Four clean lines, evenly spaced, pink at the edges where the skin had opened and already closing into the kind of raised marks that looked precisely like what they were. Maribelle Kennedy’s manicure was professional-grade. Her toxin delivery system was the same manicure. The fact that the toxin had bounced off my nervous system like a tennis ball off concrete did nothing to address the fact that the delivery system had left a receipt.
I dug through the collar of my shirt again and found the angle. If I buttoned the top button, the fabric just barely covered the highest scratch. The bottom two remained visible if anyone looked at my neck from the left side at anything under forty-five degrees. In a classroom arranged in a horseshoe around a central platform, this meant approximately half my cohort would have direct line of sight to evidence that I’d been scratched by someone with nails sharp enough to draw blood and motives I couldn’t explain in any version that didn’t make things worse.
I buttoned the collar.
It looked wrong. It looked like someone who never buttons the top button had buttoned the top button, which is the universal signal for something happened to his neck.
I unbuttoned the collar.
The scratches sat there like a neon sign advertising poor decision-making during institutional hours.
I buttoned the collar again and left the restroom before I could change my mind a third time, because the bell was going to ring in ninety seconds and Dravid took attendance the way other people took hostages.
The walk from the restroom to Room 218 covered eighty feet of hallway that felt like crossing an open field in a war zone. Students moved past me in both directions, most of them absorbed in their phones or their friends, none of them looking at my collarbone. The paranoia was mine and I owned it. I kept my chin level, my shoulders squared, and my stride at the exact pace of someone who had nothing to cover up, which is of course the exact pace of someone who has something to cover up and has read enough spy novels to know what casual looks like.
Room 218 materialized around the corner with its tiered amphitheater seating and the reinforced demonstration platform that still bore scorch marks from whatever Dravid’s previous class had done to it. I entered through the top door and descended three rows to my usual seat, the one with sightlines to the entrance and the podium and enough distance from the front to avoid being selected for volunteer demonstrations unless Dravid felt vindictive.
Felicity had already claimed the seat to my right. Her blonde ponytail caught the overhead light as she scrolled through something on her tablet with the kind of casual disengagement that I knew meant she was paying maximum attention to everything except what she appeared to be looking at. Her white fitted top had a collar that dipped just low enough to make the Ecchi Logic trait hum, and I told the trait to shut up because I had actual problems to manage right now.
Caden occupied the seat to my left, tilted back with his ankles crossed on the seat back in front of him, his blonde hair deliberately messed and his hazel eyes tracking the room with the same deceptive awareness that made him the most underestimated person in the building. Marco sat one seat beyond Caden, eating something from a bag that rustled with the frequency of someone who considered snacking a continuous activity rather than a meal.
I dropped into my chair. The movement pulled my collar slightly to the left and I adjusted it without looking, settling the fabric back over the highest scratch line with a motion that I kept small and incidental.
Felicity did not look up from her tablet.
She did not shift her weight, turn her head, or change the rhythm of her scrolling. What she did was let her left hand drop from the tablet to the armrest between us, where her fingers tapped twice against the wood in a pattern that had no musical logic and considerable interpersonal meaning.
I looked at her.
She still stared at her tablet. Her expression maintained its default setting of pleasant, engaged, slightly bored. But the corner of her mouth had shifted by approximately two millimeters, and one blue eye slid toward me without her head moving at all.
She winked.
The wink lasted less than a second and contained more information than most people’s full sentences. It said I see the collar buttoned. It said I see you never button the collar. It said I notice the posture adjustment you made when you sat down and the specific angle you’re maintaining your chin at right now. It said all of this with the efficiency of someone who had been studying me long enough to have compiled a visual dictionary of my tells.
Her eye returned to the tablet. Her fingers stopped tapping. The two millimeters at the corner of her mouth settled back to baseline.
The entire exchange lasted under three seconds and contained zero words, and it was the most terrifying conversation I’d had all morning, including the one where Maribelle Kennedy accidentally injected me with neurotoxin while grinding on my thigh in a school hallway.
Caden leaned over from my left. "Bro. You buttoned your collar."
"It’s cold."
"It is sixty-eight degrees and there is direct sunlight coming through six windows."
"I run cold."