"You son of a bitch—"
I had his collar before the thought had fully formed. "What do you think you're doing?"
Tyler smiled. That specific smile, the one designed to make you feel stupid for expecting anything different. "What does it look like?"
"Both of you— step back. Now." Mr Ross's voice had the kind of authority that didn't leave much room for negotiation.
I held on for a second longer than I should have. Then I let go, turned back to the desk, and tried to think clearly.
"Mr Ross." I moved closer to him and pointed at Tyler. "He planned this. He's been setting me up, the cheat note, all of it. You have to hear that out."
"And grabbing your classmate by the collar is your way of proving innocence?" His eyes were flat and steady on me. Behind me, I heard Tyler make a sound that was almost a laugh. "That's a disappointment, Ren Mora. I hold students in your position to a different standard, not to coercion."
"What?" I looked at him.
He thought I was blackmailing Tyler. That I, a low-tier student with no abilities and a disciplinary record that Tyler himself had largely constructed — had somehow decided to use leverage against one of the most connected bullies in the school.
"We received a witness account, Ren Mora." He raised the cheat note again. "That still isn't sufficient reason for you to be believed?"
"Who's the witness?"
Another knock at the door. Mr Ross gave permission, and it opened.
Rowan walked in.
He had that look he always carried, that specific variety of jitteriness that made him seem permanently one step away from making the wrong move. Glasses adjusted, shoulders pulled inward, eyes going everywhere except where they needed to go.
I didn't need to hear anything else. One look at him and the entire picture assembled itself.
"Rowan sits beside you in class, correct?" Mr Ross didn't wait for me to confirm it. "He tells me that during the test, he observed you consulting a small note while completing your answers."
"What—" I turned to Rowan. Then to Tyler, who was standing there absorbing every second of this with barely concealed satisfaction.
"Ren Mora." Mr Ross's voice pulled me back. "With a witness account and physical evidence sitting on my desk, are you still asking me to dismiss all of this?"
I didn't answer him. I was looking at Rowan. Waiting. Giving him the room to do the one thing that would actually fix this, to open his mouth and say something true. Something he'd chosen, not something Tyler had scripted for him.
Rowan stared at the floor.
Coward.
"Right." Mr Ross opened his drawer. Pulled out a pen and a sticky note and began writing in the unhurried manner of someone who had already made their decision and was just completing the paperwork. "I thought so."
"What are you doing?" I made myself ask.
"Filing your suspension." He said it the way someone says filing your paperwork, routine, without weight. "Two weeks, in line with school protocol. Be grateful the penalty isn't steeper."
Deeply grateful. Truly.
***
There was something different about walking out through the school gates knowing it would be a while before I came back through them.
Two weeks. Which meant missed credit points, lectures that wouldn't wait, notes I'd have to reconstruct from nothing on the other side. The academic cost of Tyler deciding that losing a fight in front of people was something that required this level of response.
And somehow, that was what was actually sitting in my chest as I walked. Not rage. Something flatter than that.
Because the truth was, I could fight back. I'd already proved I could. But every time I did, Tyler just adjusted. He found a new angle. Engineered a new situation.
The beating at the arena hadn't stopped him. It had just redirected him, sent him looking for a more indirect method of making my life worse. Fighting him physically hadn't solved anything. It had only changed the shape of the problem.
I didn't know what actually stopped someone like Tyler. But it wasn't a punch.
"Your next challenge arrived." Amelia's hologram appeared at my side, keeping pace. "Stage 5. The difficulty profile looks promising."
[Stage 5 | Difficulty: Insane]
Right. After Cypher, there had been two more, street fighters, both of them, cleared across the past couple of days. The stat gains were accumulating into something that actually looked functional now.
Enough, theoretically, to handle two Tylers without the same desperation the first one had required. The consistency was doing what Amelia had said it would do.
"Not today," I said.
The words came out with the energy of something that had fallen a significant distance.
"Honestly, Ren, this suspension is at least partially on you." Amelia folded her arms. I was genuinely getting used to her doing that. "You stood there and let Tyler run the whole situation while you played spectator. If you're going to get out of this—"
"Ren."
I turned.
Rowan. He was running toward me from the school entrance, one hand keeping his glasses from sliding off his face. He reached me slightly out of breath, then held out my physics textbook.
"You forgot this."
He wasn't making eye contact. Not really. Somewhere in the direction of my collarbone, maybe.
I took the textbook. Kept my eyes on him.
"About earlier—" he started. "I'm sorry."
I let a beat of deliberate silence go by.
"Do you apologise for everything?" I asked. "And do you actually think an apology does anything? That it fixes what just happened?"
He muttered something I couldn't catch. His voice was too small for whatever he was trying to say.
"If you're actually remorseful," I said, "then stop doing the things you have to apologise for afterward. Stop letting someone like Tyler use you as a prop in whatever he's running. The moment you start holding your ground, not for me, for yourself, you'll realise that most of his power only works because you hand it to him."
I didn't wait for a response. I turned and kept walking.
Rowan wasn't a bad person. That was the frustrating part. He was just someone who had learned that capitulating was cheaper than resisting, and hadn't yet figured out that the cost compounded. Tyler ran on people like that, he needed them. The moment they stopped cooperating, he lost half his infrastructure.
Maybe Rowan would get there. Maybe he wouldn't.
"Hey, kid."
I was almost through the school gate when someone stepped out from the side of a parked van. Young, noticeably so, maybe two or three years older than me. His uniform shirt was deep blue where mine was white, with a small badge on the chest.
East High.
Of course.
East High and Silvic High operated on a long-standing mutual dislike that neither school had found a reason to resolve. Whatever this person and whoever was in the van behind him wanted from me, it was not going to be pleasant, and it was not going to be brief.
"How's it going?" He was smiling, which was somehow worse than if he hadn't been. He swung an arm around my shoulder like we'd been introduced at some point.
"What is this?"
"Relax." He brought his voice down, close to my ear. "The boss just wants to see you . He wants to talk.He'll have you back before you know it."
"Not interested." I pulled his arm off.
He didn't argue. He didn't react at all, actually. He just glanced around the gate with the casual attentiveness of someone checking whether anyone was watching. I clocked the movement in my brain file.
What I didn't clock was the handkerchief.
It was against my mouth and nose before I'd processed his hand moving. I couldn't shout. Couldn't get leverage against his grip in the second I had before the chemical hit.
My consciousness didn't leave gradually, it just stopped, the way a signal drops, and the last thing I was aware of was the weight of my own body becoming someone else's problem.
What a day this is going.
***
[External POV]
Huff. Huff.
It's been two years since Rowan had done anything resembling a leg day. That fact was making itself very loudly known as he ran.
He'd thought about it the whole walk back from the gate. Ren's words, stop doing the things you have to apologise for, sitting in his chest in a way that wouldn't go quiet. And then the van. He'd seen it from a distance, seen Ren get pulled in, seen the East High badge on the guy who'd done it.
He'd stood there for exactly four seconds.
Then he ran.
There was only one person who might actually be able to do something about this. One person who was outside the hierarchy entirely, who Tyler's name didn't reach, who had made it clear in a hundred small ways that she didn't think the system at Silvic High was acceptable.
He knew where to find her. He'd been here once before, during one of Tyler's lunch demands. Tyler had wanted pork rinds, and Rowan had been the person sent to get them.
He remembered the restaurant. He remembered seeing her for the first time, setting a plate down in front of a customer, and being too afraid to look directly at her in case she thought he was connected to Tyler.
Aria hated bullies. Even being adjacent to one felt like a risk around her.
Cauli's Pork and Rinds came into view.
Rowan pushed through the door, nearly collected a customer on the way in, and scanned the room immediately. Silver hair pulled back with a hair tie. Crimson eyes. Red apron. She was over by one of the tables, talking to a regular with the easy manner of someone who'd been doing this long enough that the work had become comfortable.
Rowan didn't wait.
He crossed the room and grabbed her shoulder.
"Aria." He was still catching his breath. "I need your help. It's Ren... he was... they just—"
"Slow down." She turned, still holding the tray. "Who's Ren? And what happened?"
Rowan pulled in a breath and tried again. "He's in my class. He got into a fight with Tyler, beat him, actually. And Tyler's been looking for a way to make him pay for it ever since." He steadied himself. "You have to help him."
Aria looked at him for a moment. Considering.
"Tyler's part of your group, isn't he? Why are you telling me this?"
The question landed where it was meant to. Rowan went quiet.
"I can't help you if I don't have the full picture," she said, and started to turn away.
"Sancho has him!" The words came out fast. "Sancho Reeves. East High. Tyler made a deal with him to get Ren out of the way. They took him from the school gate." A pause. "And Tyler's not my friend. I was just — I was scared of him. That's all it was."
Aria stopped.
She turned back slowly. The hospitality in her expression had been replaced by something quieter and more controlled, the specific kind of stillness that preceded action.
"East High students took a student from our school," she said. Not a question.
Rowan nodded.
She set the tray down on the nearest surface, untied the apron, and dropped it across the counter without looking where it landed.
"Take me to them."