Dravid did not nod, did not shift his posture, did not adjust the position of his cane against the podium. His stillness score was genuinely terrifying. I had seen people who were good at being still. Dravid existed at a frequency where stillness became a weapon, where his complete absence of movement communicated more than most people’s full body language.
"On what subject."
This was the part where I had to choose between the several truths available and the one truth that would not get me expelled, investigated, or placed in a laboratory. The gap between what I could say and what I needed to say was exactly the kind of information asymmetry Dravid had spent ninety minutes teaching us to exploit, and the irony of deploying his own curriculum against him in real time was not lost on me.
"Three agencies have pulled my file in the last seven days," I said. "My registration is Category Seven, progressive manifestation, which means it triggers an automatic secondary verification if two or more independent inquiries land within thirty days. That trigger should have fired. It hasn’t appeared on the public docket."
Dravid’s expression did not change. His grey eyes remained precisely where they had been, focused on my face with the attention density that his Dead Air signature concealed from the world.
Anyone looking at Cole Dravid from the outside would see a mid-range Channeler at best. The reality underneath was a Legendary-classification Aspect called Suppress that could shut down anyone in his line of sight, and the gap between those two truths was the broadest in the building.
"You are describing a regulatory concern," Dravid said.
"I am describing a regulatory concern that is about to become a personal concern during a coordination meeting tomorrow afternoon with a representative from the Lang Agency."
"The Lang Agency." Something in the flat register shifted by a degree so small that my hundred Intelligence barely caught it. "Margot Lang’s operation."
"Her daughter is my co-representative for Class 1-B."
"I am aware of Miss Lang’s position." Dravid’s cane lifted from the podium by approximately half an inch and settled back with a click that sounded like a period at the end of a sentence. "I assigned her the position."
This information rearranged several things in my understanding of the past two weeks. Steele had told the class that representatives were elected by their peers, which was true.
But class assignments, curriculum design, and the structural parameters within which student elections occurred were faculty decisions. If Dravid had positioned Petra in 1-B specifically, knowing that the Lang family would respond to their daughter’s proximity to a Category Seven registration with federal-level curiosity, then the chess game I was playing had pieces I hadn’t placed.
"You knew this would happen," I said.
Dravid looked at me for four seconds. The seconds passed with the specific weight of a man deciding how much information to release and how much to retain.
"I read your file the day I received it," he said. "The file describes an Unmarked candidate with no Aspect and a legacy hero family name. I then read the entrance exam performance data. The data and the file do not produce the same picture."
My lungs locked. My hands, resting on the desk in front of me, went very still in a way that I hoped did not communicate the degree to which this statement rearranged my circulatory system.
"I started a file on you that day," Dravid continued. "Before you arrived. Before your first session. Before I watched you demonstrate Phantom Touch at a level that does not correspond to your registration, which I have now watched you do eleven times across seven separate sessions, each time at a different percentage of whatever your actual ceiling is. The file is three pages long. You have been at this institution for three weeks."
The faculty lounge armchair was not getting used at two o’clock today. I could feel that certainty settling into the room with the same permanence as Dravid’s observations settling into his locked drawer.
"The question you are actually asking," Dravid said, "is not about regulatory triggers or verification requests or the Lang Agency’s assessment protocols. The question you are actually asking is whether the gap between your file and your reality is sustainable, and you are asking me because I am the person in this building most likely to have an accurate answer, and because my Aspect means I have already attempted to suppress yours and observed the result."
The floor dropped out of my stomach.
He had tried to suppress me.
At some point during the past three weeks, Cole Dravid had looked at me and activated Suppress, the Legendary-classification ability that could shut down any Aspect in his line of sight, and nothing had happened because the System was not an Aspect.
The System did not originate from an Aspect Core.
It did not register on any classification the IHL recognized. Dravid had fired his most powerful weapon at me and the bullet had passed through empty air.
"Your Phantom Touch constructs are real," Dravid said. "They manifest with a genuine energy signature. They interact with the physical world in ways consistent with Channeler-type force manipulation. Under Suppress, they should dissipate. They did not."
His grey eyes held mine with the patience of someone who had been waiting three weeks for this conversation and was prepared to wait three more if necessary. "The constructs are not your Aspect. They are a product of something I cannot classify, cannot suppress, and cannot detect through standard or non-standard means. You are, in every operational sense, something that should not exist within the framework I have spent fifteen years studying."
I sat very still in the third row of an empty amphitheater while the most dangerous instructor at Halloran Academy calmly explained that he had already identified me as an anomaly and had been building a case file ever since.
My Demigod recovery rate could handle a building collapse, but it could not process the specific terror of being known by someone with no obligation to protect me.
"I am not asking you to explain yourself," Dravid said. "I am telling you what I have observed. What you do with that information is your decision. I am also telling you that Steele has observed similar inconsistencies and that her file, while less detailed than mine, arrives at conclusions that are adjacent to my own. I am telling you that Radiant looked at you during your first Hero Basics session and his expression changed in a way I have seen exactly twice in twelve years of sharing a faculty with him."
"What does that expression mean?"