My fourth night at Hogsby.
I lay on my back and stared at the ceiling and thought about Sophia Vale. Unknown entity, the system had said. Not unknown ability. Not unregistered user.
That was not a comfortable thought to take to bed.
I could hear Sherry through the wall. Drawers. Footsteps. The specific sound of someone who should be sleeping but wasn't. I checked the time.
It's eleven o'clock. What are you doing, Sherry?
The sounds stopped. Her door opened. Footsteps. Then a knock on mine.
I sat up. Sherry?
"Bram. It's me."
I opened the door. She was standing in the corridor in an oversized sweater and a long skirt, arms crossed loosely against the cold, the specific posture of someone who'd gotten bored of their own room and decided that was everyone else's problem now.
"Should I come in?"
I stepped aside.
She came in, sat on the bed, looked around with the evaluating eye of someone checking the comparison. "They're identical," she said.
"Seems like it." I sat on the table. Not the bed. Appropriate distance, appropriate message.
"Boring night." She looked at the window. "Do you think there's a way to reach Max?"
Max Donman. She had been thinking about him all day and I was only finding out now, which meant she had been carrying it quietly through the dining incident, through whatever had happened in the room with May, through the whole day.
"I don't know much about communication in here yet," I said. "I'll ask around tomorrow."
She nodded. Then: "Are you expecting anyone tonight?"
I shook my head.
"Then I'll sleep here," she said.
"You're serious."
Her face confirmed that she was entirely serious and had already made the decision before she knocked.
"Take the bed. I'll take the floor."
She didn't argue. She settled onto the bed and I pulled the spare blanket down and set up on the floor with the ease of someone for whom the floor had always been a reasonable option.
I closed my eyes.
"Bram." Low voice. "Are you comfortable down there?"
I laughed. The real kind. "Sherry. I grew up on the plain."
Good silence settled. The kind that precedes sleep for both people.
"Do you think they actually care?" she asked.
I had almost found sleep. It retreated politely.
"Who?"
"The government. About people outside the walls."
I didn't answer right away, because the honest answer was no, probably not, and I hadn't let myself sit with that yet. The walls, the food, the girls leveling up, the soft bed I'd voluntarily abandoned for the floor. I'd been too busy living the dream to interrogate who built it.
"I saw something at headquarters," she continued, not waiting for me. "In Doctor Reed's lab. A screen. Active tracking of ability users outside the walls." A pause. "It showed one remaining outside. One, Bram. Why would they track?"
I had no answer.
She shifted to the edge of the bed, looking down at me. I turned to face her.
"Max's great grandfather," she said. "Money and ability both. A real asset to the government. But he was against leaving vulnerable people outside the walls, so they cast him out anyway." She let that sit. "This government doesn't help outside people unless something inside is broken. Whatever they want from us, it isn't charity."
The heat underneath the words was old. She'd been carrying this before Hogsby. Before the plain crossing. She'd carried it all the way here.
"I don't think the government allows people inside walls they've kept closed for decades without a plan," she said.
"Immm."
"If there's one thing you hold onto — don't let the walls fool you."
"Immm."
"Bram. Bram. Are you still there?"
"I'm genuinely done," I said, as gently as I could manage. "Everything. Tomorrow. All of it."
A beat.
"Okay," she said. Softly. Like she'd just remembered the day had been just as long for me as it had been for her. The room went quiet for real this time.
I lay on the floor of a school dormitory inside walls I'd spent my whole life staring at from the outside, with a girl I'd known for four days sleeping three feet above me, full of government conspiracy theories I was too tired to think about.
Sleep came in under a minute.
***
It lasted approximately one hour.
The knock pulled me out of it immediately. Old reflex. I was upright before I was fully conscious.
I looked up. Sherry was still sleeping, turned toward the wall, breathing slow and even. She had gone out properly. Whatever she'd been carrying through the day had finally put her down.
"Sherry," I said low. Nothing.
I focused. My instincts sharpened the way they always did, reading what was outside a space before entering it. Something on the other side of the door that wasn't right.
[Possible hostile intent.]
The system agreed.
I got up quietly, crossed the room, and slipped out, pulling the door closed behind me without a sound. Whatever was coming, it wasn't coming into that room. I stepped into the corridor.
Mute appeared at the far end of the hall, near Sherry's door. He had the loose, comfortable posture of someone who'd already decided how this ended.
"Told you I'd pay you a visit." He tilted his head. "Miss me?"
Last time he had found me with no defense skills, no attacking skills, and the specific tactical awareness of someone who had no idea what a level three teleporter could do up close. He had used me as a wall decoration for sixty seconds and left when Sherry's door handle moved.
Tonight I was level ten. I smiled.
He launched—gone in a blink. I reacted, muscles snapping into motion—but he was already on me. Too slow.
He reappeared behind me and drove me into the wall hard enough to shake the corridor. Pain lit up my ribs.
Good, I thought. You're still dangerous.
He came back. Same energy, same loose confidence — gone in a blink and back in my face before I could blink twice. But this time I watched him. Not his body. Not where he landed.
I watched the half-second before he arrived — the small disturbance in the air, the specific nowhere he stepped out of.
Where does a teleporter go when he has no reason to be clever? Straight at you. Every time.
I let him hit me once more, just to be sure. That was the last free hit he was ever getting.