"Come again?"
Ms Kira. Head staff. She had eyes the size of something you'd notice, large, brown, and almost permanently directed at her computer screen.
Her standard operating mode was a sustained, unbroken engagement with whatever was on that monitor, punctuated by a glance upward approximately once per hour.
It had created a reputation, across every student and staff member who'd interacted with her long enough to notice the pattern, that she was chronically, unimaginably busy.
Whether that was true or a very effective performance, I'd never been able to confirm.
The keyboard sounds didn't stop as I repeated myself. "I want to register for the BHA."
The room had already changed by the time the words were fully out. The ambient noise of the staff room, keystrokes, shuffling papers, the low professional hum of people pretending not to monitor each other — had either dropped significantly or stopped altogether. I could feel the eyes without looking for them.
Not a surprise. I had a history with this room and everyone in it.
From the first week I'd walked into Silvic High, the high-tier students had wanted me gone, and the staff had been the instrument through which that pressure was routinely applied.
Teachers who found new and creative reasons for implications. Suspensions built on thin evidence. A consistent institutional willingness to arrive at the worst available conclusion about me before I'd finished defending myself.
I'd survived it by becoming meticulous. Silvic High had turned me into a careful person, someone who kept evidence, who thought three steps ahead of whatever accusation was forming, who had learned that documentation was more valuable than argument. It was a skill set I'd built entirely in the interest of graduating.
And now I was standing here asking to register for the BHA on the registration closing date, which was, by all accounts, the most unexpected sentence these people had ever heard from Ren Mora. The weakest student in the school. The one who lived permanently at the bottom of every hierarchy, formal and informal.
I couldn't entirely read what was on Ms Kira's face when she finally looked up. It wasn't the active hostility I'd braced for. It was something more like fatigue, the specific tiredness of someone who has heard a version of this same piece of unexpected news too many times in the past week and has run out of the energy to react to it properly.
There had never been any particular chemistry between us, one way or another. Unlike some of the other teachers, she hadn't gone out of her way to route anything in my direction. She was, as far as I could tell, genuinely too occupied with her own operations to develop personal opinions about my existence.
"Why are you doing this on the closing date?" The dark circles under her eyes were visible as she looked at me. "Did someone pressure you into this?"
"No, I just—"
"You know what, I don't want to hear it." She waved the explanation off before it could get going and looked back at her screen. "Fred?"
The person who responded to the name arrived at her desk with the urgency of someone who had been waiting at a level of readiness that bordered on anxious. Scattered brown hair. Blue eyes behind glasses that made them look slightly magnified.
A new staff, I guessed. The way he moved toward Ms Kira reminded me of Rowan at his most jittery, that particular body language of someone who was permanently one wrong answer away from disaster.
"Yes, Ms Kira?"
"Get him an application form."
He paused briefly.
"Um — which application form?"
Ms Kira looked up from her screen.
The look she gave Fred lasted approximately two seconds. In those two seconds, several things were communicated without a single word, most of them about the current standing of Fred's employment prospects.
"The BHA form, idiot."
Fred did not wait for elaboration. He redirected immediately toward me, producing a smile that was doing its best under the circumstances.
"Come with me."
His desk was in the third row, a small compartment with the organized, slightly anxious quality of someone who had arrived recently enough that they were still proving things. The BHA application forms were in a visible stack, the heading readable from a short distance: BUREAU HUNTER ACADEMY.
He slipped one out and held it toward me. "Fill in your information here." He said it in the tone of someone who was being thorough on the outside chance the recipient needed the sentence to exist. "And submit it after you're done."
I borrowed his pen and sat on the edge of his desk to fill it out. He didn't object, probably because nothing in his short tenure at Silvic High had yet established what the norms were supposed to be, so he was defaulting to tolerance.
Name. Age. Mode of communication. Current school year. And then, disabilities.
I filled that section out and set the pen down on top of the completed form.
The feeling sitting in my chest as I stood up wasn't quite what I'd expected. Not pride. Not apprehension, exactly. Something more like the specific quality of having done a thing that you weren't sure was the right move, but which you knew you couldn't un-do and didn't actually want to.
The Bureau would approve or reject based on whatever criteria they applied. I'd listed myself as a cripple. Approval was not the likely outcome.
But the form was filled. That part was done.
"That's everything," I said to Fred, and started walking. Then stopped. Turned back. "One thing though." He looked at me, part confused, part braced. "Nervous people don't last long here. I just thought you should know."
He held that for a moment, expression moving through several options before settling into something that couldn't quite decide between defensive and thoughtful.
I didn't need his response. I just needed the information delivered.
So I left.
***
Lunch had been fine, up until the point it wasn't.
No foreign hair in the food, which was already an improvement over two days ago. No clusters of low-tiers reconstructing the Tyler fight for the fifth time this week. The whole thing had mercifully faded from active conversation after about seven days, which was the natural lifecycle of school gossip unless someone kept feeding it.
And no Aria.
I didn't know what had kept her from the lower cafeteria today. I wasn't particularly invested in finding out. What I was was comfortable with the absence, not out of anything personal, just the straightforward recognition that Aria had a pattern of finding my table whenever she needed one, and treating my presence there as a convenient bonus.
Today's quiet was its own kind of good news.
Though the punching meter was still in my head. Had been since the arcade. Something about watching the screen land on 999 after a single casual punch — the way she'd done it like it was nothing, like it was obviously nothing — had settled in my mind in the specific way that things do when they've become a target.
"Is this table free?"
I looked up.
A guy holding up a food tray. He was standing across from me with a small, settled smile that suggested he wasn't actually asking, he was just extending a courtesy before sitting anyway. Deep blue hair, deep blue eyes. Nose piercing, one on the right ear. Jawline with the geometry of something intentional, like it had been arranged according to an opinion.
Cael Voss.
The room noticed before I'd fully finished processing it. The shift was immediate and audible — a drop in ambient sound replaced by the particular whisper-frequency of low-tiers encountering something outside the expected order of events.
It's Jack—
He's really here—
What's he doing in the lower cafeteria—
I had no answer to that last one. I sat there looking at him like a question I hadn't asked had arrived in physical form and taken a seat. He sat down across from me, picked up his fork, and took a bite.
The expression that moved across his face at whatever the lower cafeteria's kitchen had produced was specific. A. slight contraction, quickly managed, immediately followed by the practiced neutrality of someone who had decided to continue regardless.
That was his problem. Mine was the geometry of the situation. The Jack of Silvic High. Across from me. In the lower cafeteria. Eating food he clearly had opinions about.
It made the space feel strange. Not threatening, just wrong-shaped, like a thing that didn't fit where it had been placed.
"What's your deal?" I didn't make it a hostile question, just a direct one. "You didn't come down here to build a reputation."
Cael set down his fork. Reached for his glass, drank, set it down. Wiped his mouth with a napkin. All of it at the pace of someone who had decided not to be rushed by anything.
"Don't be nervous. I'm just curious about something."
"You can be curious from another table," I said. "I eat alone."
"My curiosity is specifically about you, Ren." His eyebrows moved slightly, the kind of micro-expression that comes before something someone has decided to say directly. He leaned forward, elbows on the table, eyes on me in a way that had genuine attention behind it. "And in this room, right now, there's nothing else in that category."
I didn't fully understand where he was going. But I could work with him talking. As long as he was talking, there was a clear endpoint somewhere, he'd say the thing, earn my silence, then leave.
"I wanted to ask you something." He turned his glass slowly between his hands, watching it. "Are you and Aria together?"
I laughed. Not a big one, short, involuntary, the automatic response when instinct beats thought to the punch.
Of course. A high-tier with a personal interest in a girl who'd never once indicated she thought about the hierarchy when deciding where to sit. And there I'd been thinking the Order only engaged with things that were relevant to their actual position.
"And if I am?" I could feel the shape of a smirk on my face without deciding to put one there. "What happens, would you drag me somewhere and deal with it?"
Cael stood. Straightened his jacket with the practiced ease of someone who had done that specific motion enough times that it had become reflexive. "I'll take that as a no." He gave a short, functional nod. "Sorry for the interruption."
"One thing though." I said it before he'd completed the turn to leave. He paused. "Don't work too hard at it. I don't think Aria's type is... how would I put it... guys who are ridden with ego."
Cael looked at me. The smile that came back was the controlled kind, the variety that communicates something without specifying what.
"We'll see, Ren."