I read the notification and my brain immediately started working the problem.
Private space. Five minutes. No audience. We were in a school dining hall during lunch hour with every student and two administrators within eyeline. The math was not cooperating.
[Atmosphere under influence.]
Miss Brown walked through the entrance. She wasn't alone. Beside her was a woman in her early fifties, tall, cream bell-bottom pants, navy blue top, high heels, sunglasses pushed up into hair that was pulled back with the kind of precision that said everything about how she moved through the world.
Beautiful and composed in the specific way of someone who had been both for long enough that they'd stopped thinking about it.
They walked to the center of the dining hall and stopped.
"Has the dean ever come to the dining hall?" someone at the next table murmured.
I looked at May. She was still at the table. Technically. But her attention was somewhere else entirely. Her finger was tapping the table in a small steady rhythm, something between a countdown and a calculation, and her eyes had the slightly distant quality. Something was happening that I didn't fully understand yet.
"Good afternoon," Miss Brown addressed the hall. The room settled.
"I'd like you to meet my mentor, Sophia Vale."
Sophia. The name landed with a click. The woman from the conversation behind the building. Bagins' contact. Here to assess, here to decide whether Miss Brown was worth poaching, here to set a sequence of events in motion that none of the people in this room knew about yet except me.
"Whatever I am today is because of this woman," Miss Brown said, with the genuine warmth of someone who meant every word. "But she didn't come to pay me a visit. She came with a team to supervise Hogsby. So I'd ask all of you to be on your best behavior." She smiled. "We'll also be conducting ability scans for the seniors this evening."
[High influence. Watch the room.]
I watched the room. My eyes found Mute.
Something was wrong with his face. Not dramatic, not announced, just a slow visible change, color rising, jaw setting, the specific look of a man whose feelings had just arrived somewhere they'd been heading for a while. He was looking at Mable across the room. He stood up.
[Host under influence. Trust the read.]
My body moved before my brain finished the sentence. I crossed the floor and stepped directly into his path and pushed him into the nearest table, not hard, enough.
The dining hall went completely silent. Miss Brown, Sophia Vale, every student in the room, all of them looking at me standing over a boy who had just been minding his lunch a second ago.
Mute got up. He didn't swing. He looked at me with the expression of someone deeply confused about what had just happened to his afternoon.
"What's wrong with you?" he said.
I had no answer that I could give out loud.
"Abram." Miss Brown's voice was level and final. "Can you explain your actions?"
I stood there in front of the dean of Hogsby, the supervisor who had come to evaluate the school's future, every senior student, and the woman Bagins was trying to maneuver into offering Miss Brown a promotion, with absolutely no explanation available.
"Two hours detention," Miss Brown said. "Now."
Three minutes since May had told me ninety nine point nine percent. I looked around the room. Sherry's face said everything her voice wasn't saying, which was: *what in the world is wrong with you.*
Mute leaned toward me as he walked back to his seat.
"I'm visiting you tonight," he said quietly. Packaged and delivered.
"Del," Miss Brown said, to almost no one.
A man appeared from nowhere, landing in the dining hall from a teleport like he'd been waiting just outside reality for the call. Tall, unhurried, the specific calm of someone who removed students from situations professionally and had stopped being interested in why.
[Del Slater. Teleportation, Level 9.]
Level nine, I thought. School security. Of course.
He walked toward me and reached out.
"Don't you dare lay a finger on him." May's voice cut across the hall, clear and sharp. "He didn't do anything that—"
"Detention," Miss Brown said, cutting her off. "Both of them."
Del touched my arm and the dining hall was gone.
***
The detention room was small. White walls, because apparently Hogsby had one aesthetic and committed to it. One window. No timer this time. Just two chairs, a table and the specific quiet of a room that people got sent to.
I sat. My brain was still running the sequence. CGI headquarters. Expulsion. Bala's face when I came back through the gate having failed my first assignment. The plain waiting on the other side of everything I'd built in three days.
"Relax," May said.
I came back to the room. She was sitting across from me with the easy posture of someone who had arrived exactly where she intended to be.
"The probability was always inevitable," she said.
I looked at her. Then I looked at the room. Then I started doing what she had already done.
What is the probability that the dean walks into the dining hall during lunch? What is the probability that Mute loses control in front of authority at that exact moment? What is the probability that Mute, who cares deeply about Mable, moves toward her in a way that requires someone to intervene? What is the probability that a boy and a girl, specifically that boy and that girl, end up in a detention room alone together?
Each one: nearly impossible.
All of them together, in sequence, in five minutes: zero. Unless someone had been running the numbers and pushing the variables.
"Get out of your head, Abram," May said, with the same pleasant directness she brought to everything. "We have somewhere to be and we're already here."
I looked at her.
"Is there any chance Del comes back before we're done?" I asked.
She looked at me with the patience of a mathematician explaining something elementary.
"No chance," she said.
[LEWD LEVELING SYSTEM]
[May: Probability manipulation, level 4. First encounter. Full charge.]
[She moved the whole room for this. The least you can do is show up.]
I stopped thinking and showed up.