Chapter 11: The Math is Wrong.
Annabelle left early in the morning before anybody could notice.
She was now officially on my list. The first name. The opening entry. There were going to be many others.
[Pursue additional ability users. The work continues.]
The work continues, I thought, reading it for the second time. Not even a morning off.
I got up, dressed, and stepped out. Sherry was already in the corridor waiting, which meant she had been up long enough to be ready and patient, which meant she had probably been up for a while. She looked at me with an expression I couldn’t fully read and didn’t try to.
We were late. Professor Bagins’ voice was already carrying through the corridor before we reached the classroom.
"Tomorrow we have supervisors. If there’s no measurable progress, the government sees no reason to continue funding Hogsby."
We knocked and entered. He stopped mid-sentence. Every head turned.
Annabelle found me from across the room immediately. She was sitting beside Isabelle, alive, healthy, practically luminous. Her eyes were doing things they had agreed not to do. We had a deal. Secrets required stillness and she was not being still. I looked away before Isabelle could triangulate anything.
Whispers moved through the class. Two outsiders, arriving together, late, from the same direction. The math the class was doing was wrong but it wasn’t a problem I needed to correct. Sherry was objectively beautiful and I had no personal objection to whatever conclusions people were drawing.
"Practicals," Professor Bagins said the moment we reached the back. "Everyone up."
𝕗𝐫𝐞𝕖𝕨𝐞𝗯𝚗𝕠𝘃𝐞𝚕.𝐜𝗼𝚖
We had literally just sat down. I stood back up.
***
May appeared beside me in the corridor with the timing of someone who had known exactly when to arrive.
[May: Probability manipulation, level 4. Simple target.]
Simple, I noted. The system thought she was easy. I wanted the harder ones first. Simple targets kept. Hard targets didn’t.
"How was your night, Abram?" she asked pleasantly.
"I’d say good."
"Told you." She said it without looking at me, already accelerating back into the group, already somewhere else entirely. She didn’t acknowledge Sherry.
Not a glance. Not a word. Sherry was furniture to her in that moment, which was either tactless or deliberate.
Sherry watched her go. I watched Sherry watch her go. Neither of us said anything. Some silences were more informative than conversations.
***
Same glass. Same bench. Same view of the arena where yesterday the seniors had failed level three and Professor Bagins had called it excellent.
I sat with the familiar weight of watching through glass. Story of my life, technically. Always on the outside looking in. Except now I was on the outside by assignment rather than by birth, which was a different feeling entirely.
"Abram. Sherry. You’ll observe."
I must have shifted somehow, something readable in my posture, because Bagins turned back.
"Healers don’t fight," he said, not unkindly. "They stay safe and keep the fighters standing. That’s not a lesser role. That’s the role everything else depends on."
I nodded. He wasn’t wrong. He just didn’t know I wasn’t a healer.
The glass room filled. Students taking positions with the focused quiet of people who understood that today was different. The supervisors. The funding. The institutional threat hanging over a school full of people stuck below par with no evidence yet that anything could change.
"Level one infected," Bagins called.
The door opened. Projected zombies shuffled out, slow and directionless. The kind I used to step around on the plain when I had the energy to be careful about it.
Before any of the other students could move, Annabelle raised one hand. What came out was not a beam.
It was a wall. Precise and total, moving through the projected zombies like they were suggestions. Every single one dissolved on contact. The glass cleared in under four seconds. Complete silence.
Wells had stopped mid-windup and was just standing there watching her. The twins were supposed to move in sync and Isabelle had broken it, frozen, staring at her sister. Professor Bagins outside hadn’t moved.
Annabelle looked at her own hand like it had done something without consulting her.
"Have you seen what that girl just did?" Sherry asked, low and amused.
"I got eyes," I said.
[Annabelle: Pyrokinesis. Host’s first successful charge.]
First successful charge?!
"Level three," Bagins called, recovering himself.
The door opened. Level three, fast and coordinated. The kind that had eaten half the class yesterday in under ten minutes.
Annabelle moved through them. Not around them. Not carefully. Through them, fire precise as surgery, each burst landing exactly where it needed to before the target could redirect. The other students stood back without deciding to, the instinctive space given to something operating at a level they hadn’t seen before. Level three cleared in sixty seconds.
"Impossible," Bagins murmured. To no one. The word of a man quietly dismantling everything he’d assumed about his own student.
I know exactly what happened, I thought. I know precisely why she’s impossible today when she was level four yesterday.
"She might be a ten," Sherry said. "Never seen anything like that."
"Impressive," I agreed.
She nodded toward the glass where Annabelle was rolling her shoulders like she had energy to spare. "Whatever this school does, it works. There’s hope for us yet, Bram." She smiled when she said it, half certain, half convincing herself.
I said nothing. I watched the glass.
"Level five," Bagins called.
The door opened and infected dogs came out. Not humans. Dogs. Fast, low, hunting in the coordinated way of pack animals that had kept all the instincts and lost all the hesitation. The class fractured immediately. Mute took a hit. May went down in the first thirty seconds. Maybe probability manipulation doesn’t help when the probability of getting bitten is one hundred percent.
"Your girl is down," Sherry said, watching May hit the floor.
She said it with a tone. The specific tone of someone who had heard things through a wall last night and had drawn a conclusion that was wrong but not entirely wrong either.
She thinks I slept with May, I realized. I filed that away and kept my face neutral.
Isabelle froze the ones coming from the left. Wells covered the right with beams, keeping pressure off the students on the ground. Annabelle burned through the center like a weather event, not a person. Between the three of them, level five cleared.
Professor Bagins laughed. Not a professional laugh. The real kind, the kind that comes out before you decide to allow it. He pressed the remote. Dissolved dogs, cleared floor, open glass.
"Have you seen my students?" He was talking to us, genuinely, colleague to colleague. "Have you seen them?"
The seniors filed out. The class gave Annabelle space the way crowds give space to something that has just recalibrated everyone’s understanding of what’s possible. Even Isabelle was looking at her sister differently.
Bagins crossed the floor and hugged her. The hug of a man who had invested years in something and just watched it pay off beyond what he’d dared to hope for.
"You leveled up," he said, pulling back, looking at her like he was confirming it for himself. "You actually leveled up."
Annabelle smiled. Slightly dazed. The expression of someone who had woken up different and was only now beginning to understand how different. She glanced at me over his shoulder.
"We need to test your level," Bagins said.