We drove back in silence. The town faded behind us, the tired streets, the small businesses, the people carrying things with their hands because nobody here had a gift to make it easier.
Daphne kept her eyes on the road. I kept mine on the window. By the time the Hogsby gates opened in front of us the silence had become comfortable, the kind that doesn't need filling.
She parked in the teachers' quarters. I shrugged off her leather jacket she'd given me earlier and held it out.
"Thank you."
"It was a pleasure." She leaned back in her seat, engine off, not in any hurry to move. "I'd like to hear more stories about zombies having sex."
"I have several," I said. "The outside is full of content if you survive long enough to collect it."
She laughed again, the same unguarded laugh from the restaurant, and I noted that it came easier now than it had an hour ago. Progress. We got out. Stood on the same side of the car in the afternoon quiet.
"Are you open to visiting the town again?" she asked. Casual. Not quite casual enough.
"Anytime," I said. I let exactly one second pass. "To be honest, Daph, I enjoyed your company today. If you ever have free time, I'd like more of it."
She looked at me. She knew what I was doing. She had been a teacher long enough to know when a student was doing something, and she wasn't offended by it, which was information.
"I'm a full time employee at Hogsby," she said. "Free time isn't really part of the arrangement."
"What about the boring nights that make you get out the binoculars?" I said, in exactly the tone she had used when she admitted it. "We could use that time instead."
She looked at me for a long moment, her expression doing something I couldn't fully read.
"You know my door is always open," she said, and climbed the stairs without waiting for my response.
I stood there and turned that over.
Always open. Either she was agreeing to the possibility of something developing, which would take patience, or she had just directly invited me to her room at night and phrased it with enough deniability to be comfortable with. Both interpretations led to the same place.
I'll figure out which one it is when I get there, I decided, and headed toward the main campus.
***
I was two buildings from the school premises when my ears caught voices around the corner. I stopped.
Twenty years on the plain had tuned my hearing into something closer to an instrument than a sense. You learned to stop before corners, not after. The voices were coming from a position with a clear view of anyone approaching from the school side. They hadn't expected anyone from the teachers' quarters direction at this hour.
Professor Bagins. And a woman. I couldn't recognize her voice, how could I, when it was the first time I'd ever heard it? So I stayed perfectly still and let them talk.
"It's a win win," Bagins said. "We both get exactly what we want."
"I need to be certain first," the woman said. Her voice had the clipped precision of someone used to managing things. "A genuine confirmed level up. How was it possible?"
"Practicals," Bagins said. "I've identified a pattern. Consistent methodology and measurable results."
He believed it completely. He had watched Annabelle perform at level eleven and written himself into the story as the cause. The confidence in his voice was the specific confidence of a man who had decided something was true and stopped examining it.
You delusional fucker, I thought. You have no idea what the method actually is or what it costs.
"So your proposal is that I offer Brown the dean position at School Central," the woman said.
"Now we're on the same page, Sophia." The excitement in Bagins' voice was genuine. "Brown has produced the first confirmed level up in recorded history. When the government hears about it she'll be positioned to take over institutions across the city. You need to move before that happens. Offer her something that looks like a promotion."
"School Central is considerably larger than Hogsby," Sophia said, not convinced yet. "More students, more staff, more complexity. Brown has never managed at that scale."
"Which is exactly why she won't refuse the opportunity," Bagins said. "The offer flatters her. It looks like recognition. She moves up, she moves out, and I take Hogsby."
I assembled the full picture quietly. Bagins wanted the credit and the institution. Sophia ran a larger school and was willing to move Miss Brown sideways before the government could reward her properly. Miss Brown would receive what looked like a promotion, accept it because she was ambitious and it would seem like the obvious next step, and never know she'd been maneuvered out of the recognition she actually deserved.
Politics, I thought. Identical on both sides of every wall.
"Brown will want her best students," Sophia warned. "You know how she is about them."
"Fine," Bagins said, without hesitation. "She can have the seniors. I'll rebuild from the juniors. I know the method now. I can replicate it."
You cannot replicate it. You don't even know what the method is.
I had heard enough. I stepped back, changed my route, and went around the back of the building.
If Miss Brown goes to a city school, I thought, working through the implications, and takes the seniors with her, that means Sherry, Annabelle, Mable, Isabelle, May, Wells, all of them, moving to a larger institution. A city institution. With a significantly larger population of ability users.
That was not a problem. That was actually a very interesting development for a prime charger with a list and a system telling him to keep pursuing. But first, Hogsby. One thing at a time.
[LEWD LEVELING SYSTEM]
[Note: Current charge insufficient for defense skills. Prioritize tonight.]
I know, I told it. I'm working on it.
I straightened the Hogsby uniform, walked around the building, and headed toward the main campus like a man who had been on a perfectly normal educational trip to town and had heard absolutely nothing on the way back.
Tonight, I thought. One step closer to not getting beaten across a campus again.