"Kennedy."
"You’re glowing."
"I’m perspiring. The fourth floor has inadequate climate control."
"No, babe, you are glowing. That is a specific kind of glow." Maribelle padded over on bare feet and planted herself directly in Petra’s sightline with her hips cocked and her head tilted at the exact angle optimized for reading someone’s face from below. Maribelle was five-seven in bare feet, which placed her eyes at Petra’s collar height, which placed her attention at the exact location Petra most wanted to conceal. "And your neck has a thing on it."
Petra’s hand went to her collar before she could stop it.
Seven lockers down, Rina Soleil sat with her sheep mug between her knees and her white hair still dry, wearing her oversized cream hoodie over her training shorts while her tail curled around the bench leg. Her purple eyes watched the exchange with the careful attention of someone who catalogued danger for survival purposes. When Petra’s hand touched her own collar, Rina’s gaze dropped to the tile.
"There is nothing on my neck."
"Mm." Maribelle’s tail curled forward and tapped against her own thigh twice. "Okay. Sure. But also I saw the fourth floor conference room light from the garden when I was coming back from the track, and I thought, that’s funny, because the meeting should have ended thirty minutes ago, and Belmont is supposed to be at Dravid’s at three, and here’s the thing, Lang." She leaned closer. Her pheromonal aura did something soft and warm to the air that Petra refused to acknowledge. "When I walked past the stairwell, the broken window was open."
The locker room went quiet.
The showers kept running. Somewhere in the tiled block beyond the lockers, Lyra Osei had dissolved into liquid silence that required no commentary and produced no sound. Three benches over, Nyx Calloway occupied her corner in black fishnets and platform boots, phone angled toward the exchange with the specific casualness of someone recording evidence.
Her grey eyes tracked the conversation from behind an expression that suggested she found this interesting without finding it important. At the farthest bench, Suki Tanaka sat with her notebook open and her pen frozen above blank paper. Her cerulean gaze remained fixed on Petra’s collar. She was reading something. She was always reading something. She did not require speech to do it.
But the conversation had stopped. The rustling through duffel bags, the casual cross-talk about assignments, the background noise of women existing in adjacent space without coordinating that existence. All of it suspended. The room had committed its attention to whatever Maribelle Kennedy was about to say next, and Petra felt that commitment the way someone feels a spotlight swinging toward them on a stage they did not agree to stand on.
"The window’s acoustics are terrible," Maribelle continued. "Or excellent, depending on your position. And someone was making sounds that were. Let me find the right word."
"Don’t."
"French."
Petra closed her locker. The metal rang.
"That’s a language, not a sound," she said. Her voice came out clean and cold and did not waver, which she considered one of her better performances given that her underwear remained in a condition she had not yet addressed and would not address in front of nine women with varying degrees of agenda. "And whatever you think you heard from a broken window on a stairwell forty feet from a conference room through two fire doors and a corridor was, at best, ambient noise from the HVAC system."
"The HVAC system," Maribelle repeated.
"Which requires maintenance. I’ll file a facilities request."
"In French."
"Kennedy."
"Okay! Okay." Maribelle raised both hands in surrender, but her tail kept moving and her gold eyes kept gleaming and the specific brightness in her face communicated that she had extracted exactly the amount of information she wanted and would distribute it on her own schedule. "I heard nothing. The HVAC was loud. In French."
Camille stood from the bench. The tape on her palm flexed as she curled her hand into a fist and released it. She walked to the drinking fountain between the locker rows and filled a bottle without looking at anyone, and the aggressive disinterest in her shoulders communicated more than volume would have.
Felicity’s voice dropped half a register. Quiet enough for the row. Loud enough for Petra to register the shift from friendly to surgical.
"Lang. Can I ask you something that might be personal."
"You can ask."
"Was the person in that conference room with you the same person whose collar was buttoned wrong in Dravid’s class on Thursday."
Petra opened a makeup case from the third compartment of her bag and retrieved concealer. Foundation, blending brush, setting powder. The routine took forty-five seconds and produced results that would withstand a camera flash at four feet. She applied the concealer to the mark below her collar with clean strokes, watching her reflection in the small locker mirror.
"I have no idea what anyone’s collar looked like on Thursday."
"Because I notice collars," Felicity said. "As a hobby. And his was buttoned all the way up, which he never does, and there were marks on his neck that someone with claws or very sharp nails left there, and he spent the entire class with his chin at an angle designed to keep those marks out of overhead light."
Three benches down, Maribelle’s head turned toward Felicity with the speed of a predator locating a sound.
"Wait. Thursday? I saw those. Those weren’t me."
Every head in the locker room rotated toward Maribelle.
"I mean." Maribelle’s crimson skin darkened across her cheeks. "I scratched him on accident on Thursday morning in the hallway. A door thing happened. But those marks were already fading by lunch. Whatever was under his collar at Dravid’s was fresher."
Silence again. The shower block contributed steam and nothing else.
Camille’s water bottle hit the fountain basin with more force than hydration required.
"Can we stop." Camille turned around. The orange light at her fingertips pulsed once and died. "Can we stop talking about Belmont’s neck like it’s a crime scene. He’s one person. He walked into this building three weeks ago and every single conversation in this room has been about him since day four. His collar. His file. His interview. His hands. Who he’s kissing and who he’s pinning and which of us went to his room at midnight and what happened when."