The lunch bell had barely finished ringing before the academy dining hall flared to life.
Figures moved in streams between the long tables. Trays knocked against one another. Chair legs dragged across the floor with a harsh scrape. Spoons struck porcelain in quick, bright bursts. Voices piled over voices until the whole room felt swollen with them. The air was thick with roasted meat, black pepper, and the heavy warmth of hot oil. Wednesday lunch was always the best menu of the week, the academy tossing out one decent meal like a reluctant act of mercy in the middle of its most chaotic stretch.
Tray in hand, Solan made a slow loop through the crowd before settling, in the end, for a table by the window.
The light outside was good. Too good. It turned the glass into something thin and watery, as if the whole wall might ripple if someone touched it. Even so, once he sat down, he could still feel the looks. They were not always direct. Usually it was just the edge of someone’s attention, a glance that flicked over him and then slipped away again, carefully casual. Lately the academy had been full of stories about the duel with Herman—stories in which Solan had apparently coughed blood, dropped to his knees, and begged.
He had not really cared. At least, he did not think he had. Still, eating alone in the dining hall while half the room pretended not to stare was its own kind of irritation.
He drove his fork into the beef ribs and found himself thinking, for no clear reason, that it would have been better if Matt were here. Matt, at least, would have dropped into the seat across from him and loudly demanded whether the academy kitchen had some personal grudge against cattle. He would have made enough noise to ruin the atmosphere for everyone, which was preferable to this—the strained politeness of being watched by people committed to acting as though they were not watching.
But Matt had not been doing especially well lately either.
For the past few days, he had stopped going to the bar across from campus. It was not a money problem. According to Matt, most of the bettors had gotten their principal back after the livestream cut out. On paper, nobody had really lost. The bleeding had happened farther down the chain: equipment deposits, promotional payouts, hedging positions, settlement channels, middlemen taking their slice. None of it had been Matt’s money. Every piece of it, somehow, had still gone through under his name.
So now he took the long way around. After seven, he tried not to leave campus at all. He never lingered too long in one place. He kept two SIM cards in his phone, answered messages fast, and somehow still never quite said anything complete. Even that bar—his favorite one—had become somewhere he only glanced at from across the street before tugging the brim of his cap lower and moving on, as if the place itself had turned into a zone where staying too long could get you hurt.
Thinking about that, Solan jabbed at the ribs again. The meat had been stewed too long. It looked tender on the surface, but there was still that strange stubborn resistance underneath, like the academy kitchen had once again managed to put a faintly disappointing finish on its best meal of the week.
He was just wondering whether Matt would want a takeout box when someone stopped at the edge of the table.
“I heard you slept in my brother’s room.”
The mouthful of lemonade Solan had just taken nearly came straight back out.
He choked hard, coughing so abruptly his shoulders jerked with it. The person across from him did not flinch. She only reached, quick and unhurried, for a few napkins and held them out. Solan took them, wiped his mouth first, then bent to mop up the splash of soda on the table, feeling heat crawl pointlessly into his ears.
“Long story,” he managed at last, his voice still rough from coughing.
By then Clara had already set down her tray and sat across from him, as if the seat had always belonged to her.
It was the first time he had seen her all week. Normally the only fixed point where they reliably crossed paths was Professor Alan Mercer’s Disaster Response Theory. But this time of year was almost always the academy at its worst.
Class cancellations came in waves. Nearly half the faculty seemed to be somewhere else in the world—flying to conferences, coordination meetings, closed briefings, or whatever higher-level disaster had suddenly decided it needed a professor more than a classroom did. The students, naturally, had no objections. Nobody complained about fewer lectures. The truly absurd part was that the same professors still scheduled their midterms for these weeks anyway, leaving the TAs to inherit them with pale faces and brittle smiles.
Clara set her book aside, unrolled the cloth napkin with the cutlery tucked inside, and spread it over her lap. The motion was easy, unhurried, as if the sentence that had nearly killed him a moment ago had been nothing more than something she happened to mention on the way in. Then she looked up, as though remembering something else.
“Did you see Atlas?”
Solan blinked. “What?”
“The turtle.”
He stared at her for two full seconds. “Damien… has a turtle?”
“Technically, mine.” Clara nudged the vegetables on her plate with her fork, her tone level. “The dorm rules are strict about pets. Foundry’s different, so Damien keeps him now. I go over sometimes.”
Solan still needed a moment.
Damien. A turtle.
For some reason the combination made immediate, bizarre sense. It was the kind of fact he had never once imagined, yet now that he knew it, he could no longer picture a version of Damien that did not quietly contain a turtle somewhere.
His gaze dropped to Clara’s tray and stopped.
“Is that liver?”
Clara glanced down. “Beef liver.”
Solan was silent for a beat. “…Why?”
“Because they had it.”
She said it with complete calm, as if that were a full and sufficient philosophy of living. Then she cut off a small piece, set it near the edge of her plate, and nudged it toward him.
“My mom used to make it,” she said.
Solan looked at the dark little piece of liver with the weary suspicion of someone being handed surprise coursework. Clara had already lowered her eyes and gone back to eating. She did not urge him. She did not even look at him again. Whether he accepted it or not seemed, apparently, his own problem.
In the end he speared it with his fork and put it in his mouth. The taste was heavier than he had expected, bitter in a way that felt almost metallic.
After a while, as if the thought had only just reached her, Clara asked, “How’s the DFT midterm?”
The effect on him was immediate. He seemed to visibly deflate.
Draconic factor. Stabilin. Ordozyme. Just seeing those words arranged on a page was enough to make his head hurt. To him the whole course felt like twenty-first century alchemy with a cleaner name attached to it, a pile of things that should not exist being forced into a theoretical framework that only barely held together.
“Trying to push through,” he muttered, sawing into the beef ribs with unnecessary force. The academy kitchen, he thought, had once again managed to make an animal die for nothing.
“I hope you do better than last time,” Clara said.
His hand paused. He knew exactly what she meant. Last time he had stayed up all night just to avoid failing. By the end of that exam he had felt like something wrung out by a cheap machine, his head so empty it seemed to ring. When Clara had run into him afterward, she had said hello and he had not even heard her.
He looked up at her now and could have sworn he caught the briefest flicker of a smile. Not much. Gone too quickly to pin down. But it was there, quick and light, like something brushing the edge of glass.
He meant to answer. Nothing came.
Around them, the dining hall carried on in layers. Someone laughed too loudly in the distance. A knife clattered off a table somewhere and struck the floor with a bright, sudden crack. Sunlight angled in through the windows and caught the ice in his lemonade, turning the glass sharp with light. The glances were probably still there. At some point, though, they had stopped mattering quite so much.
Then Clara asked, “What are you doing for Halloween?”
Before he could answer, she added, “Might overlap with First Light.”
She said it casually, as if she were noting the chance of rain. Even so, the words shifted something small in the room. Time, maybe. Or just the feeling of it.
“Haven’t thought about it,” he said, answering both questions at once.
“It’s your first First Light here,” she said. “You can come with us, if you want.”
Solan nodded.
Clara finished the last bite on her plate and set her fork down. After a quiet second she leaned back in her chair and stretched, small and unselfconscious, as if her body were simply giving an honest response to having finished a proper meal. As she lifted her arms, her sleeve slipped back enough to show a strip of wrist before she tugged it down again with that same absent, tidy calm.
A moment later his phone buzzed in his pocket.
He did not need to check. It was probably Matt, finally resurfacing from whatever safe corner he had crawled into, asking Solan to bring back an order of beef ribs. The message would almost certainly be phrased like an insult. As if the most serious crisis left in the world was whether Matt got lunch.
Maybe he’d bring the beef liver instead.