She was the best here in class, another fact that pissed me off immensely, which was why I’d made it my mission to work a mistake into every one of her protocols. I didn’t know what else to do to get her to finally switch courses. Thankfully, she was the only one in the seminar who had not applied for the position at the DLSC and if she really was as intelligent as she pretended to be in her written work, she would soon sign out of the seminar.

Smirking, I leaned back and held her concentrated gaze.

Was she trying to play with me? Make me nervous? Too bad she didn’t know who I was.WhatI was...

“Miss Blair, if you’ve already finished, you can hand it in,” I said, trying not to sound challenging. “Don’t be afraid to show off your fast pace to your fellow students.”

Even though there was little movement in her expression, her hand clutching the pen before she let it disappear under the table signaled to me how uncomfortable this situation was for her.

I couldn’t help but smirk as I watched the others turn to her.

Introverted students hated having their achievements exposed in front of the whole course. I had to know. After all, I had been one of them.

“What are you waiting for?”

Julie bit her lip and I stood up to circle my table. Julie rose as well and reached for her experiment plan.

As she walked toward me, a strange tingling sensation ran through me, but only for a split second, because then she was already standing a meter in front of me and held out the sheet of paper to me with her lips pressed together.

I smirked down at her, tried to hold her gaze with mine, to pierce into hers with my eyes to make it clear to her who had the upper hand here. And it helped that she was more than a head shorter than me.

Still, she managed to unsettle me with her staring aventurines, although I would never show her that.

Without breaking eye contact, I took the paper from her hand. And suddenly, her irises turned a barely noticeable...ice blue.

Confused, I fixed her eyes, which obviously unsettled her, and the color immediately disappeared from her irises. She wheeled around and left me with the sheet of paper.

I forced myself not to stare after her because some girls from the class were already watching me, so I wheeled around and walked around the table with Julie’s piece of paper. But before I could sit down, I looked at her again, searching her eyes for the blue.

Had I been wrong, and she was a Water Quatura, or had my paranoid mind just played a trick on me?

It had to be her mere presence. She brought my paranoia to a new high. I couldn’t stand it when she was here.

“Those who are finished can leave already,” I said loud and clear, whereupon the Senseque in the last row jumped up and handed in hisobviously unfinishedprotocol plan to me.

Noah’s performance wasn’t very satisfactory, and every time he came to football training, he asked me to improve his performance, but it didn’t work that way for me. I didn’t want to risk my job.

He looked at me insistently, probably to remind me of the $2,000 offer, but I shook my head almost unnoticeably and snorted.

If he had known what I was, he would never have asked me for such a favor.

He left the room gruffly, followed by David, who kept an extra-large distance, which I couldn’t blame him for.

Senseque and Ruisangors hated each other to bits, and I was surprised that none of them had died in a fight yet, nor that an earth-shattering war had broken out in Blairville long ago. The director certainly didn’t seem to mind. And if he wouldn’t take care that this Quatura co-director disappeared, I would have to intervene there myself.

Julie grabbed her light gray leather backpack and hurried out of the room with her fists clenched.

Only now did something inside me relax, even if it didn’t solve my problems in the long term. I had to take care of this girl. Whatever that meant…

Chapter 21

Julie

Suspenseful Investigation Piano

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I couldn’t believe I was here again. Only because the fact that he had let me leave early gave me the certainty that he would spend another thirty minutes in this seminar room.