Monday arrived the way Mondays always do — without apology.
I'd slept better the second night. Not well, but better. The kind of sleep that actually does its job and leaves you functional rather than just technically conscious. I moved through my morning routine with the mechanical ease of someone whose body had finally accepted the schedule even if his mind hadn't fully caught up.
Dressed. Bag. Lenses in.
No new briefings. No incoming messages from TRAD.
Just the quiet hum of connection and three days of what might — possibly, optimistically — resemble normal life before Thursday arrived and reminded me what normal actually cost.
I stepped into the hallway and did the thing I'd been doing without deciding to do it.
I looked at Bella's door.
Closed. No light under the frame. No sound.
Either she'd already left or she was still asleep, and I had no business knowing which. I held the look for exactly one second longer than made sense, then turned toward the stairs.
Sky was already at the bottom, two coffees in hand, wearing an expression of a man who had spent Sunday quietly losing his mind and was ready to discuss it.
"Before you say anything," I started.
"I wasn't going to say anything," he said, handing me the coffee.
"You were absolutely going to say something."
"I was going to say good morning first," he said. "I have manners."
We pushed out into the Monday air. The campus was already alive — students moving in loose currents toward the main building, the morning carrying that particular low-grade anxiety of a week beginning whether you were ready or not.
Sky lasted approximately forty seconds.
"I've been thinking," he said.
"I know."
"About Isabella."
"I know."
"Specifically," he continued, as though I hadn't spoken, "about the social implications of the fact that she said good morning to me. Warmly. With her actual face." He sipped his coffee. "Because here's the thing, Marx — Isabella Lopez doesn't talk to people. She exists near people. There's a difference. But she talked to me. Which technically makes me—"
"Don't."
"—an insider."
"You're not an insider."
"An adjacent insider."
"That's not a thing."
"It could be a thing." He was warming to this in real time, I could hear it. "Think about it strategically. If Isabella Lopez acknowledges your existence, certain social doors open. People who wouldn't give you the time of day suddenly want to know who you are. It's like — you know those fish that swim next to sharks? They go everywhere. Nothing touches them."
"You want to use Bella as a social stepping stone."
"I want to be in her orbit," he corrected. "There's a dignity difference."
"There really isn't."
"Also," he added, dropping his voice slightly, "she's terrifying and beautiful and I'm pretty sure she could end me with a look, which is a combination I find deeply confusing and would like to understand better."
I said nothing to that.
Sky glanced at me sideways. "You're very calm for someone whose face was almost on Socials."
"Almost?"
"The angle was bad. You can't really tell it's you." A pause. "I can tell. But I know your coat."
I kept walking.
"I'm keeping your secret," he added, more quietly now. Genuinely. "I want you to know that. Whatever's going on — and I know something's going on — I'm not going to be the one who makes it harder."
I looked at him.
Sky was grinning, because Sky was always grinning, but underneath it he meant what he said. He was one of those people whose jokes and sincerity occupied the same sentence so naturally you could miss the sincerity if you weren't paying attention.
"Thank you," I said.
"Don't thank me. Just survive whatever it is." He bumped my shoulder. "And maybe put me in the acknowledgments."
--------------------------------------------------------------------
Three days of peace, I told myself as we took our seats.
Seventy-two hours between now and Thursday. Between the version of me walking into this classroom and the version that would suit up and go looking for the people behind the drones.
Three days to sit in a normal room and let a teacher talk about things that had nothing to do with blast radiuses or encrypted data or the particular way a crowd parts for someone who moves like they're always the most dangerous person in it.
I could do three days.
The teacher — Mr. Osei, a compact man who ran his class like a well-maintained engine, no excess, nothing wasted — was already at the front when we settled in. He did his usual sweep of the room, the habitual headcount of a man who noticed absences the way some people noticed weather.
He paused.
"Has anyone seen Ferdinand this morning?"
The room offered a general shrug. A few glances exchanged. The particular social silence of people who don't know and don't want to be responsible for not knowing.
Ferb's seat was empty.
I hadn't noticed until now.
Sky leaned toward me, voice low enough to stay between us. "Heard something yesterday."
"About Ferb?"
"Someone said they saw him with Camilla. Yesterday evening." He let that sit for a second. "Just the two of them. Which — you know Camilla's people. They're not violent or anything, but they're devoted in a way that makes them stupid, and if they think he posted something that made her look bad by association—"
"The Socials post didn't involve her at all."
"Doesn't matter," Sky said simply. "When you're in her circle, proximity to drama is the same as causing it. Logic doesn't really get a vote." He reached for his pen. "Just — be aware. If anyone comes at you weird this week, Camilla's fans or anyone who thinks they're defending Isabella's honor or whatever — I've got you. You know that, right?"
"You've got me," I repeated.
"I'd obviously lose any fight I got into on your behalf," he clarified, "but I'd be there. Morally. That counts."
Despite everything, I almost smiled.
I looked toward the front of the room, toward the seat where Camilla always sat with that particular composed stillness, like a painting that had decided to attend school.
She was there.
Notebook open. Pen in hand. Expression the same as every other Monday — calm, contained, a faint attention in her eyes that could have meant anything or nothing. She wasn't looking at Ferb's empty seat. She wasn't looking at me.
She was looking at the board, where Mr. Osei was writing the morning's topic, and she looked like a person who had slept perfectly and arrived with her thoughts in clean, organized rows.
Indifferent.
Composed.
I watched her for three seconds and learned exactly nothing.
Which, I was starting to understand, was precisely the point.
***************************************
The room where Ferb sat was not on any campus map.
It wasn't threatening, exactly. More like a space that had been made deliberately unremarkable — a converted storage room somewhere in the administrative wing, two chairs, a table, a single overhead light that was slightly too yellow to be comfortable. The kind of room that made you feel like the conversation happening inside it didn't officially exist.
Ferb sat in one of the chairs and tried to look like a person who wasn't internally catastrophizing.
He was not entirely succeeding.
Across from him, the person who'd brought him here set a phone on the table between them. The screen showed @nobody_asked — his account page, his posts, his carefully curated archive of every interesting thing that happened within a five-hundred-meter radius of wherever Ferb happened to be standing.
"Is this yours?" they asked.
Ferb adjusted his glasses.
"That's a broad question," he said carefully.
"Ferdinand."
"Ferb."
"Is this your account."
A pause.
"...Yes," he said.
They began scrolling.
Not the Sunfire post — though they paused on that too, briefly, with the focused attention of someone filing information rather than reacting to it. They scrolled further back. Weeks back. Months.
The time a senior prefect had been caught using the greenhouse for reasons entirely unrelated to botanical science — Ferb had posted a photo of the footprints in the soil and let the comments do the work.
The time two members of the debate team had been overheard rehearsing an argument that turned out not to be about debate.
The campus maintenance schedule leak that had resulted in three separate student-organized events being moved on the same day, none of which were supposed to overlap.
The quiet, devastating observation about the Chemistry department head's recurring lunch with the school's external contractor that had appeared as a single, innocuous photo of a parking lot with a caption that said only funny how often some cars show up.
The person scrolling didn't say anything for a long time.
Ferb sat with his hands flat on his knees, trying to calculate exits.
"You're good," they said finally.
He blinked.
"You're very good," they continued, still scrolling. "You're never in the frame. You're never named. Every post is technically just an observation — a photo, a caption, nothing provably false, nothing that could get you expelled or sued." They set the phone down. "And yet somehow you're always exactly where the interesting things are happening."
"I just have a good eye," Ferb said modestly.
"You have an excellent eye." They studied him. "And people talk around you because they've decided you're harmless."
Ferb's expression did something complicated. He'd worked very hard on being decided as harmless. It was, in fact, his entire operating strategy.
"I'm going to ask you something," they said, "and I want you to think about it seriously before you answer."
"Okay," said Ferb.
"How would you like to get paid for what you're already doing?"
The overhead light hummed.
Ferb pushed his glasses up.
"I'm listening," he said.
They leaned forward.
"We don't need you to do anything different. We don't need you to take risks or go anywhere you wouldn't normally go. We just need—" they chose the word carefully "—your perspective. On certain people. When certain things happen. You notice things that trained people miss because trained people look like they're looking." A pause. "You look like you're just there."
Ferb was quiet for a moment.
"Which certain people?" he asked.
They smiled — not unkindly.
"You already know which ones," they said. "You've been posting about them for two weeks."
Ferb thought about the Sunfire post. About the boy he'd recognized from class, the way he'd moved through that crowd with a particular kind of awareness that didn't belong to someone who was just enjoying a festival. About Isabella Lopez, who Ferb had been quietly, methodically documenting since she'd told Nate in biology to be quiet using only her eyes — because anyone capable of that kind of controlled impact was worth watching. About the new boy, Marx Cartez, who had arrived with the energy of someone trying very hard to arrive quietly.
"There's one condition," Ferb said.
"Name it."
"I keep the account." He met their eyes steadily. "I don't post anything you tell me to post. I don't fabricate anything. I post what I see, when I decide to post it." A beat. "What I give you stays between us. What I post stays mine."
The person across from him considered this.
Then nodded.
"Deal," they said. "Welcome aboard, Ferdinand."
"Ferb," he said.
"Ferb," they agreed.
He adjusted his glasses again, and behind the lenses, his eyes were doing the thing they always did — cataloguing, filing, quietly noting every detail of the room, the person, the conversation, the particular quality of the pause before they'd agreed to his terms.
He was already working.