The textbook landed on the table with the flat authority of something placed, not dropped.
Yami looked up from his notebook. Quirk biology , the section on secondary expression in mutation-type abilities — research he'd been building toward fragment mechanics without a direct line of research available to approach it from. The school library had the UA academic collection, which was significantly better than the public library option.
Yaoyorozu sat down across from him.
She had a folder, a mechanical pencil, and the expression of someone who had decided this conversation was happening and had prepared accordingly. Her own library books were stacked with their spines aligned.
"Your throw," she said. No preamble. "I calculated the force required for a 68-meter softball distance against standard projectile drag at your body weight and arm length. The result exceeds what passive physical recovery in a resurrection-type quirk should produce by a factor of approximately three."
Yami set his pencil down.
"I'm not reporting this to anyone," she said, and her voice was level rather than reassuring — a factual statement about what she had done and was doing, not an emotional offer. "I'm telling you because I want to understand it, and because you deserve to know that the calculation exists."
He looked at her for a moment. Considered the available options. Outright denial produced a conversation he'd already had with Aizawa and which had not fully concluded to anyone's satisfaction. A second deflection to warm-up observation pushed the story into territory it would have trouble surviving. The folder in front of her implied she'd written the calculation down, which meant she'd been thinking about this for a week.
"I have a minor strength enhancement," he said. "It's secondary to the resurrection. Not dramatic — probably equivalent to a low-level reinforcement quirk. I didn't mention it because it felt irrelevant compared to the primary ability."
She opened her folder. Showed him the calculation. "This force output is consistent with a low-level reinforcement if it's always active and compounding over baseline. It's also consistent with a higher-level reinforcement that you've been consciously limiting in public displays."
"I've been limiting it," he said. "I don't fully understand its upper range yet. I didn't want to present something I couldn't accurately describe."
She looked at him. Her expression was doing the thing he'd first noticed in the corridor after the Apprehension Test: active processing rather than reaction, the face of someone taking in data and sorting it rather than responding to it emotionally.
"That's reasonable," she said, and closed the folder. "Aizawa reached a similar conclusion."
"I know."
"He hasn't pressed it because he doesn't have grounds to compel a disclosure beyond the registered minimum." She folded her hands on the table. "I have less institutional leverage than Aizawa and significantly less interest in using whatever I have. I wanted to tell you the calculation existed. You can do with that what you want."
The conversation had arrived at a conclusion, which left the question of what replaced it, and Yami looked at the quirk biology text she'd placed on his table — which was an academic text he'd had to request from the third-floor restricted section, and which she had apparently already read, given that it was a UA-acquisition copy and had her return stamp on the inside cover.
"You've read this," he said.
"The developmental pages, yes. The lipid conversion section has a methodology error in the second sub-study that propagates through the statistical analysis." She touched the cover of the book. "They miscalculated the surface area available for complex molecular assembly in active-state quirk use, which inflates the production rate estimates by about thirty percent. The conclusions are directionally correct but quantitatively off."
"You caught an error in a published academic text."
"It wasn't difficult. The raw data is in the appendix." A pause. "Why are you reading developmental quirk biology?"
Here was the question he'd prepared for. The answer he'd developed was technically accurate: he was trying to understand the interaction between his resurrection quirk and the enhancement element, specifically whether the enhancement was a trait of the resurrection process or a secondary expression. It was the answer a curious student would have for a question about his own ability.
"The enhancement and the resurrection might have different developmental pathways," he said. "I want to understand whether improving one affects the other. The biology seemed like the right starting point."
"The answer to that is probably yes," she said, "but the mechanism would depend on whether the enhancement is active-state or ambient. Active-state would suggest independent development; ambient suggests they're the same system." She pulled a second book from her stack — a developmental genetics text, more recent publication date. "This has better methodology on the interaction question."
She opened it to a bookmarked page and pushed it across the table.
Yami looked at the page. Then at her.
"You bookmarked the relevant section," he said.
"I thought we might end up here."
He didn't know exactly what to do with a person who had confronted him about a quirk discrepancy and then arrived to the conversation with relevant academic resources. He decided the correct response was to engage with the resources.
"The surface area methodology issue in the other text," he said. "Does it affect the molecular complexity limits, or just the production rate?"
Her expression changed — not dramatically, but in the specific direction of a person who had just been asked a question they wanted to think about. "Both, but differently. Production rate is the primary distortion, but the complexity ceiling calculation depends on available surface area, so—"
Forty minutes passed without his tracking them. The library light shifted from afternoon to early evening quality. She explained the complexity ceiling problem with the pencil drawing force diagrams on a scrap page and he followed the logic and contributed three questions that were not the questions of a person with fifteen years of life experience, and she answered each one with the focused attention of someone who didn't encounter many people who could follow this kind of reasoning at this pace.
The glass figurine appeared near the end, when she was demonstrating the difference between ambient and active-state creation: she extended her palm and assembled a small sphere from lipid conversion, the shimmer visible at her forearm, and held it up — perfect, transparent, the light going through it at the angles of a thing built with molecular precision rather than approximation.
"Ambient state creation at low complexity uses about four percent of active-state energy cost," she said. "Reaction time isn't the limiting factor — molecular alignment is."
She set the figurine on the table between them and turned back to the text.
When she packed her books twenty minutes later and left with the unhurried quality of someone whose evening had a next item that was ready for her, the figurine was still on the table. She didn't pick it up. Didn't acknowledge leaving it.
Yami held it up. The lamp caught it and scattered a small spectrum across the library table — five colors, brief, the size of a hand.
He put it in his breast pocket.
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