Chapter 13: A Small Problem.
Every student tested. Every result the same.
No changes. No movement. The levels that had walked into the assessment were the levels that walked out of it. The machine confirmed each one with the same flat efficiency it had used at the gate, and each confirmation landed a little heavier than the last.
Annabelle was the only exception in the history of this room. Possibly in the entire history of this school. I was watching the last assessment wrap up when I felt it.
𝐟𝐫𝕖𝗲𝘄𝚎𝗯𝕟𝐨𝕧𝐞𝚕.𝕔𝕠𝐦
Annabelle stood up from beside her sister and walked to the back of the room. To us. She stopped in front of me like we were old friends and said, "Follow me to the library. We have something important to discuss."
I was already calculating how to respond without drawing attention when the system hit me with clarity.
[Illusion ability is being used against you.]
Annabelle was still sitting at the front of the class, exactly where she’d been for the past twenty minutes. She looked back at me over her shoulder, blinked once, deliberate and slow, and then stood and walked out of the room.
An illusion. Precise, targeted, delivered directly into my perception without touching anyone around me.
But Annabelle was pyrokinetic. That was her ability, confirmed twice today by a machine that didn’t make errors. Pyrokinesis didn’t produce illusions. Pyrokinesis produced fire.
What is going on here?
"Are you okay?" Sherry asked.
"Fine," I said. "I’m good."
I stood. "Coming back."
Sherry watched me head for the door with the expression of someone who had done the math and found it suspicious. "Ohhkay," she said, stretching the word out just enough to make her position clear.
***
Annabelle was not in the corridor. I stood outside the classroom door and looked both ways at a campus I didn’t know the layout of.
Hogsby was large in the way of institutions that had been built for a different era and a different population. Pre-catastrophe architecture, wide buildings, long corridors, the bones of a university that had survived by becoming something else. The student population rattling around inside it now was a quater of what it had been designed for.
The library was somewhere in here. I walked. I passed classrooms, a common area, a courtyard that had gone mostly to weeds, and was somewhere in the office quarter when I heard voices through a partially open door. I stopped.
"I’m convinced it isn’t Bagins’ teaching." Miss Brown. Clear and certain. "It is impossible to jump from level four to eleven. Impossible."
"I agree." A female voice I didn’t recognize. Younger.
"I need you to look into this. Follow everything. Report back to me directly." A pause. "Everything, Daphne."
I stood in the corridor for a moment and then knocked. The conversation stopped.
"Come in."
I opened the door wearing the expression of someone who had heard nothing. Miss Brown and Daphne looked at me from across the desk.
"Good afternoon," I said.
"Abram." Miss Brown’s voice shifted to something pleasant and unhurried, the voice of a woman who was excellent at putting things away quickly. "How can I help you?"
"I got lost. Looking for the library."
"Of course." She smiled. "Daphne, could you show him?"
Daphne stood without hesitation. I followed her out, and as the door closed behind us I revised my understanding of Miss Brown.
Professor Bagins was a man who believed in his students and had just watched that belief confirmed. Miss Brown was a different instrument entirely. Precise, patient, unwilling to accept a result she couldn’t explain.
She had celebrated with him in the room and started investigating the moment she could. She was going to find something. The only question was what.
"I heard that you’re from outside," Daphne said as we walked.
"Yes."
"What’s it like? Outside."
"Hard," I said. The shortest accurate answer.
"Life inside isn’t easy either," she said, in the tone of someone who means it but knows it doesn’t quite compare.
I looked at her properly. She was genuinely beautiful, and under different circumstances, with a different version of my brain available, I might have been more present for this conversation.
But Annabelle was waiting somewhere in this building with information that had the shape of a problem, and that was occupying the part of me that would otherwise have been paying attention.
[Daphne: Hidden Ability. Pursue when opportunity permits.]
Noted.
"You’re actually a beautiful woman," I said, because it was true and I had apparently developed a habit of saying true things out loud.
"Thanks," she said, brushing it off with the ease of someone who had heard it before and filed it accordingly. "That’s the library."
She pointed at an entrance set into the far wall of the building, old wooden doors propped open, the smell of something aged and specific coming from inside.
"Abram Nadez," I said. "By the way."
"Daphne." She smiled once and walked back.
One name. Always one name. There was a reason for it. I added it to the list of things I intended to understand eventually and went inside.
****
The library was large and dim and ancient in the way of rooms that had outlasted the purpose they were built for. Shelves running floor to ceiling, books that had probably not moved in years, junior students scattered at tables with the focused silence of people who were actually studying.
My eyes moved through the room the way they always moved through new spaces, cataloguing, sorting, until they found her.
Annabelle. Corner table. Empty chair across from her, positioned like it had been saved. I crossed the room and stopped at the table.
"May I sit?"
She looked up. Something in her eyes that in a different context might have been called warm.
"Please."
I sat. She leaned forward, elbows on the desk, closing the distance between us to something that was going to keep this conversation between us.
"Bram." She used the name the way Sherry used it, which was either coincidence or something I’d already become without noticing. "We have a small problem."
She held my eyes.
"The level up was so abrupt. Someone is already investigating."
I looked at her. Small, I thought. She used the word small.
"Who?" I asked.