The question didn’t ask what I could do. It didn’t ask how I’d done what I’d done. The question asked me to articulate the space between what my file said and what the room had witnessed, to frame the inconsistency in terms of the lecture’s thesis about information asymmetry.
The answer Dravid wanted was the answer that served his curriculum. The answer Dravid was also asking for was the one that would tell him whether I understood what I was hiding and whether I was hiding it competently.
Both answers were the same answer.
"The gap is the point, sir." I kept my voice level and conversational, the register I used when I wanted people to lean in without realizing they were leaning. "My file says I’m a mid-tier Channeler with limited range and moderate output. Anyone who reads that file walks into an engagement expecting to handle me with standard Channeler countermeasures. They’ll maintain distance past fifteen feet, deny me objects within my weight threshold, and focus on closing the engagement before my stamina depletes." I paused long enough to let the room hear what I was actually saying. "Every one of those countermeasures is designed for the person my file describes. If the person my file describes is not the complete picture, then the countermeasures fail at the exact moment my opponent commits to them."
Dravid’s expression did not change. His grey eyes held mine for three full seconds of silence that stretched longer than physics should have allowed.
"You’re describing deliberate information concealment as a tactical asset," he said.
"I’m describing the gap between registration and reality as a variable that exists for everyone, sir. My file has a version of me. The field has a different version. The space between them is where I operate."
Dravid’s cane tapped once against the platform floor, a single clean sound that echoed off the reinforced walls and the tiered seating and the thirty-eight silent teenagers who were all processing the fact that I had just told an instructor, on the record, in a classroom with documented attendance, that my registration did not match my actual capabilities, and I had done it by framing the admission as a lesson in tactical theory.
"Adequate," Dravid said.
He returned to pacing. The lecture continued. Thirty-eight teenagers slowly released the breath they’d been holding, and the room’s ambient noise crept back toward its normal operational volume.
Felicity’s knee pressed harder against mine under the desk. Her pen still hadn’t moved, and when I glanced at her tablet, the screen had gone dark from inactivity. She was looking at me with her full attention pointed directly at my profile, and the wink from five minutes ago had been replaced by something that lived in the territory between fascination and the specific brand of hunger that I was learning to recognize on the faces of women who had decided I was worth the trouble.
She leaned half an inch toward me, close enough that the vanilla note in her morning product reached my nose and close enough that anyone watching from behind would have attributed the proximity to the narrow seating.
"That," she whispered, her lips barely moving, "was the sexiest thing I’ve ever heard in a classroom, and I once watched a man defuse a bomb while quoting poetry."
"That didn’t happen."
"It happened in my head and it was excellent." Her knee shifted against mine. "You just told Dravid you’re hiding something and dressed it up as curriculum. That’s insane. That’s genius. I can’t tell which one."
"Both," I said. "They’re the same thing."
Felicity’s breath caught on something between a laugh and a sound that had no business existing in an academic setting, and she turned back to her tablet with her cheeks flushed and her bottom lip caught between her teeth in a way that the Ecchi Logic trait registered and filed for future reference.
Caden leaned over from my left again, his voice a whisper that was technically a whisper in the way that a motorcycle is technically a bicycle. "Dude. You just told a teacher you’re lying about your powers. In class. While your collar is buttoned."
"I told a teacher that information asymmetry is a tactical variable."
"Yeah, in the voice you use when you’re being honest about lying. I’ve heard that voice. It’s a specific voice and it’s terrifying." Caden glanced past me toward Felicity, then back. "Also Hardy is flushed down to her clavicle and it’s definitely not the air conditioning."
"Caden."
"Shutting up." He leaned back, and his grin split wide enough to reach both ears, and his hazel eyes crinkled at the corners with the particular warmth that Caden reserved for moments when the universe produced something he considered genuinely entertaining.
On the platform, Dravid had not paused, had not acknowledged the whispered exchange, had not adjusted his delivery or his pacing in any visible way. But as he turned at the far edge of the platform and began his return, his grey eyes passed over my position in the third row and lingered for exactly one second on the buttoned collar.
He knew something. He knew more than something. The file on Lukas Belmont that lived in a locked drawer in his office had just grown longer by several paragraphs, and the paragraphs contained observations I could not retract and conclusions I could not predict.
My phone buzzed in my pocket. I checked it under the desk with the reflexive discretion of someone who has been hiding phone activity since long before institutional rules required it.
Maribelle Kennedy. The message contained one emoji—a cat with scratching claws—followed by three words.
cover better babe
I put the phone away and kept my eyes forward and my collar buttoned and my breathing even, because the only thing worse than everyone in this room knowing something had happened to my neck was everyone in this room figuring out who had put it there.
Felicity’s knee remained warm against mine for the rest of the lecture.