Chapter 3 The Reading

Three days into term and I've mapped the social architecture of Northveil the way I map every new place I land in.

The Wolves run the floor. Whatever Rhydan says quietly in the right room becomes unspoken policy by the following morning. The Dragon Shifters run nothing but everyone's faintly cautious around them anyway, which functionally amounts to the same thing. Sera Vance sits at the absolute top of the Witch hierarchy with the ease of someone who was born specifically for that position, which she probably was, and she knows exactly who I am already because she looked at me across the dining hall on day one with the calm, measuring expression of someone filing a potential problem away for later.

Ember House is politely invisible.

I'm mostly fine with invisible. Invisible means room to observe. Room to observe means understanding what I'm walking into before it walks into me.

The problem is that on Wednesday afternoon, Ability Theory gives us our first practical session.

Not practical the way I'd imagined it. No dramatic ability displays. No channelling exercises. Just Professor Elara in the circular third-floor room telling us to sit in silence for ten minutes and notice what our ability is doing.

Most of the room goes still immediately, eyes closing, the subtle expressions of people already feeling something.

I sit in silence for ten minutes and feel absolutely nothing and keep my face perfectly composed and notice Rhydan, two rows back and one to the left, notice that I'm noticing nothing. I don't know how I know he's watching. I just know.

After class, Professor Elara asks everyone to share one word for what they experienced.

Warmth. Heat. Pull. Vibration. Current. Expansion.

The words go around the room and every single one of them means something, and then it gets to me.

"Quiet," I say.

Professor Elara tilts her head slightly. "Quiet can mean many things."

"Just quiet," I reply.

She holds my gaze for a moment with an expression I can't fully categorise and then moves on, and I look down at the desk and breathe through the specific humiliation of being the only person in a room full of supernaturals who felt nothing at all.

Again.

I'm on my way to the library afterward, head down, jaw tight, doing the internal maths of how long I can keep this up before someone officially flags me as a mistake in the admissions process, when I nearly walk into Rhydan coming around the corridor bend.

He doesn't stop walking. Neither do I. We pass within two feet of each other and he glances at me sideways with that same unreadable assessing look and I feel my spine straighten against my will and I hate it.

He says nothing.

He doesn't need to.

The nothing he says has the exact same shape as what he said in the coffee shop and I walk the rest of the way to the library with that nothing sitting in my chest like a stone.

I'm deep in the library, deep into first-year Ability Theory because I might not have powers yet but I will absolutely not fall behind academically, when the broad-shouldered one drops into the chair across from me without asking or announcing himself.

Cassian, I've gathered. Rhydan's closest friend.

"Hi," he says pleasantly.

I check behind me. Nobody. "Can I help you?"

"Probably not," he admits easily. "I just wanted to say sorry. About the coffee shop."

I study him for a moment. He seems genuine. Annoyingly genuine.

"You weren't the one being horrible," I point out.

"No," he agrees. "But I didn't stop it either, so..."

"Why are you apologising on his behalf?"

"I'm not, actually. He doesn't know I'm here." He leans his elbows on the table. "This is from me."

Huh.

"Okay," I say. "Apology accepted."

His grin is immediate and easy and I can see exactly why people like him. We talk for a few minutes, and I'm mid-explanation of dormant trigger mechanisms when I find it, the dual-nature chapter, buried in the footnotes of the third-year elective section I pulled because nobody else was using it.

I stop reading.

Read the paragraph again.

Something cold and specific moves through me that I don't have a name for yet.

The library door opens.

That pressure change at the back of my neck happens before I've consciously registered why.

Rhydan stops just inside the door when he spots me. His gaze cuts from my face to Cassian and something moves through his expression, quick and not entirely friendly.

"Cass." Flat.

"Hey." Cassian sounds entirely unbothered. "You know Veyra, right?"

"We've met," Rhydan replies, glancing at me now with that same assessing look.

"Great," Cassian says, clearly enjoying himself. "She's explaining dormant ability triggers. Pull up a chair."

Rhydan doesn't pull up a chair. He walks over slowly and stops beside the table and his gaze drops to the book open in front of me, scanning the page, and then goes very still.

"You're on the dual-nature chapter," he says.

"It was in the reading stack," I reply.

"Nobody reads that first year. It's a third-year elective topic." His eyes come back to my face. "Why are you reading it?"

"Because it was interesting," I say simply. "Is that allowed?"

He doesn't answer that. Something has shifted in him, the careless edge from the coffee shop completely gone, replaced with something controlled and careful and underneath the control, something that feels uncomfortably urgent.

"What do you know about dual-nature suppression?" he asks.

"Why?" I reply.

His jaw tightens. "Just answer."

"Hmm." I lean back slightly. "Ask nicely and maybe I will."

Cassian presses his lips together very hard.

Rhydan stares at me and the library is so quiet I can hear the clock on the far wall ticking.

"Please," he says finally, and it clearly costs him something actual to say it.

I look back at the book. "Dual-nature suppression happens when two supernatural natures exist in one body and one starts to dominate. The secondary nature doesn't disappear, it pressurises. The longer it stays suppressed the more volatile it gets, until eventually the body can't contain the pressure anymore."

Silence.

"What triggers release?" he asks quietly.

I glance up at him. His face is completely controlled but his eyes are doing something they weren't doing thirty seconds ago, something tightly leashed and raw and a little desperate, and it lands in my chest like a small cold key turning.

Oh. This isn't academic curiosity at all.

"Contact," I say carefully. "With someone whose ability is naturally compatible with both natures."

He holds my gaze. "How rare?"

"Extremely," I reply.

The word sits between us and we both feel the weight of what the next question would be and neither of us says it out loud.

"Rhydan," Cassian says quietly. A note of caution.

Rhydan ignores him. "There's a winter forest trial. Mandatory. First years get partnered with older students for it."

I wait.

"You're assigned to me," he says.

My stomach flips. "Since when?"

"Since the board posted the list this morning."

"Did you have anything to do with that list?" I ask directly.

Something moves through his expression, there and gone. He picks up his bag.

"Don't fall behind on the reading," he says, and then he's gone, and the library quietly exhales around us.

Cassian watches the door with an expression I can't fully categorise.

"What just happened?" I ask him.

He's quiet for a moment. Then, "Honestly? I'm not completely sure." He looks at me carefully. "But I don't think either of you is either."

I look back down at the dual-nature chapter.

And then I look at my right hand lying open on the desk.

There's the faintest trace of warmth in my palm. Faint enough that I might be imagining it.

I've never imagined warmth in my palm before.

I close my fingers slowly and read the same paragraph four times and don't retain a single word of it.