Page 94 of Embers of Midnight
“…got her Proving moved—favoritism—”
I turn my head. “It’s posted on the board with everyone else’s,” I say mildly. “If you’d like to accuse me of bribing the bulletin, at least make it an entertaining number.”
The culprit goes red. I keep walking. Breathe. Two short. One long.
Alchemy & Runecraft feels straightforward on paper: duplicate a stabilizer plate, then seat it in a low-voltage frame with a sealer draught. Hyssop moves between benches like a man who wants to trust us and also knows better. Taya and I split tasks; Laz documents with the focused joy of a chaos archivist.
On our second plate, the rune at the corner sits off by a hair—the kind of hair that turns a seal into a leak.
“Hold,” I murmur. Taya freezes. I anchor my left hand over the lattice, exhale heat in a thin, flat line, and rotate the tile back the degree it needs without spilling energy through the grid. The glass shows zero wave. Hyssop’s eyebrows do a small lift.
“Clean,” he notes. “If the deviation was intentional, document. If not, you prevented a lab lecture with fire. Carry on.”
Across the aisle, Cassandra pretends to stretch. The silver ring she shouldn’t be wearing in lab light kisses the edge of our bench, just shy of plausible deniability. Laz’s camera clicks once. Taya’s mouth tightens in a smile with teeth.
We finish with glossy plates and dry sleeves. No spills. No incident. The victory tastes boring and perfect.
On my way to lunch, the hallway widens and the sound grows. I spot our table: Ronan and Darian already seated, Ash dismantling a pear with indecent focus, Caelum pouring water like the act matters. My chest does that treacherous warm thing.
I’m halfway into my chair when Cassandra arrives on a vector that thinks it’s a coincidence. She plants a hand on the back of Caelum’s chair, lean close enough to claim familiarity, and angles her voice into the soft register some people save for seduction or hostage negotiation.
The dining hall sounds like forks and gossip had a child. We take our usual spot under the high window—Ronan to my left, Darian on my right, Caelum across, Ash already stealing olives like heinvented theft. Taya and Laz slide in a minute later with a bowl that could qualify as landscaping.
Vex drop-lands on the back of Ash’s chair and eyes the bread. Morrow is black ink along Ash’s forearm today; Silks is a cool curve at his wrist, scales rendered so clean they look wet when the light hits.
Rumors travel like steam here. I can feel them bead on my skin. I eat anyway. Ronan nudges my water toward me without looking. Darian’s knee rests against mine, solid as a handrail. It shouldn’t help as much as it does.
“Remind me,” Ash muses, popping an olive. “Do we grade on a curve, or on who can weaponize whispering faster?”
“Eat,” Ronan says. Translation: don’t feed the circus.
I take a second bite of something green and good and I’m halfway to normal when Cassandra arrives with her satellites. She drifts in like she owns the aisle, a hand already angling toward the back of Caelum’s chair. Not today.
She doesn’t look at me. She aims straight for him and leans, voice pitched for the crowd. “Caelum. That rehearsal yesterday—the scherzo. It wasn’t public, but I heard things. Stunning control.”
Her fingers brush his shoulder.
He lifts the shoulder exactly enough to dislodge her hand and shifts his chair two inches closer to me. No speech. No drama. A simple, clean line.
Heat spikes behind my ribs. My magic likes the idea of solving this with fire. My brain prefers we stay enrolled.
Darian feels it before I curse in my head. His palm finds my knee under the table. Not a squeeze. A steady weight that says stay with me. Breathe. Two short. One long. The exhale gives me back the room.
Cassandra tilts her head, performs surprise. “Oh. Are you—?”
Ash claps once, soft. “Great opener,” he says brightly. “Here’s a better one. Did you ever figure out why your handwriting looks exactly like the notes taped to our door? The ones that said ‘stay small’ and ‘know your lane’ in that smug calligraphy that thinks patience equals intelligence?”
Her smile thins. “Excuse me?”
“Sure,” he goes on, relentless but cheerful. “We can do exhibits, if you like. Exhibit A: rotated rune tile in Hyssop’s lab, timestamped, plus a perfectly placed elbow nudge from your shadow. Exhibit B: frost filament in Dream Magic—Caelum bagged it, same resonance pattern as the door notes. Exhibit C: near-after-strike in Combat the day Voss forgot to care about rules. Exhibit D: a Hunter insignia scrap Vex liberated off someone who cut through our yard the night they shouldn’t have.”
Vex croaks like he’s swearing under oath. Laz already has his phone out with a gallery of receipts because of course he does.
A ripple goes through the tables around us. Cassandra’s friends trade glances that don’t match.
“You’re reaching,” she says coolly. “You always do, when attention isn’t on you. As for Hunters?” She laughs, high and airy. “Paranoid much?”
“Cute,” Ash says. “But you’re not as good at hiding your tells as you think. Every time something ‘random’ happened, you were positioned to watch me watch her.” He tips his head at me. “That’s not coincidence. That’s choreography. Bad choreography.”
