My Yandere Tamer System: Every Beast Becomes a Sexy Goddess

Chapter 152: The Festival Opened and The One Name I Didn’t Recognize Walked Straight At Us

The doors opened at noon and the academy let the public in.

Soren stood at the edge of the Class Z exhibition and watched a season of quiet corridors turn into a floor full of strangers.

They came in as crowds do.

Slow at first, in ones and twos, then all at once when the ones and twos decided it was safe.

Booths ran the length of the main hall.

Ability showcases on raised platforms.

A combat exhibition ring at the far end where upper-class students threw sanctioned techniques at each other for people who had paid to watch.

The pack was where the grid had put them.

Maren on the demonstration floor, close to the ring, a fire showcase billed as a taste of Class Z’s contribution.

Dani at the information booth with her terminal.

Joan at the reception threshold, greeting.

Selah two floors up already, standing in the center of a cold hall she’d been building since dawn.

Soren worked the floor.

He did it the old way.

He’d spent a season working without the thing he used to lean on, the sight that read intent off a person before they moved.

It was gone.

He’d stopped grieving that it was gone.

You could read a room without it.

You just had to do the work.

He read hands.

A hand near a pocket that stayed near the pocket too long.

He read feet.

The people who drifted with the crowd and the people who steered through it.

He read eyes, the cheapest tell and the most reliable.

A person at a festival looked at the festival.

A person working looked at a target.

Two working eyes in the crowd, and he’d found both of them before the hall was half full.

The first was Celia.

She was near the north wall in her gray with one glove on, and she was not watching the exhibitions.

She was watching him.

Caught catching her, she did not pretend otherwise.

Two fingers lifted off her folded arm, a small acknowledgment, the greeting of a person who wanted him to know she saw him seeing her.

Soren gave her nothing back and kept moving.

Celia at a festival was Celia collecting.

She’d told him what she was the first day, and a broker who tells you what she is has not stopped being what she is, she has only made you feel clever for knowing it.

The second working set of eyes was harder to place, and it took him a full circuit of the floor to find her.

Cassidy.

She was near the buyer seating, the tier that had been sold quietly to people whose credentials didn’t come with bylines, and she was not looking at the exhibitions either.

Her eyes were on the buyers.

She was counting them.

Soren watched her do it.

She had a drink she wasn’t drinking and a position with sightlines to three of the bought slots.

Her eyes moved buyer to buyer, logging faces.

The same work Dani was doing from the booth, except Cassidy was doing it in the room instead of on a screen.

She did not acknowledge him.

That was Cassidy on her own timing.

She’d told him in the service hall that nobody had sent her, and a woman nobody sent did not wave at a person she’d broken protocol for.

Two watchers.

Soren stopped at Dani’s booth on his circuit, because a man crossing a floor twice with no destination drew the eye, and a man stopping to talk to the information desk did not.

"Anything," he said, low, not looking at her.

"Buyer seating’s full. All of it." Dani kept her eyes on her terminal and her voice on the flat professional register she used when she was passing him something under a public surface. "Every slot that shell bought is occupied. I’ve got faces on most of them. Three I can’t place."

"Cassidy’s counting the same room."

"I saw her. She’s faster than me at faces. Slower at accounts." Dani tapped something. "If she’s here on the floor and not behind a screen, she wants to be seen counting."

"She wants me to know she’s still on our side of it."

"Or she wants whoever’s watching her to think she is." Dani finally glanced up, half a second. "Don’t decide which yet."

Soren let his shoulders down half a degree and kept working, and that was the mistake, because he’d been so busy finding the watchers he knew that he almost missed the one he didn’t.

◆◆◆◆

The crowd near the main doors changed.

It didn’t part.

It was too dense to part.

But something moved through it low and unseen, and a shift of attention rolled ahead of the thing before the thing itself was visible.

Soren turned toward the shift.

A man came through the doors.

Not a student or faculty.

Not one of the paying public, who wore the festival on their faces, the small open pleasure of people spending a day at a thing.

This man wore nothing on his face at all.

He moved through the dense crowd and the crowd moved for him without seeming to decide to, and he was dressed in the muted formal of a delegation that did not need to announce itself, because announcing itself was beneath the office.

Soren knew the three delegates from the novel.

He’d read their names off the guest list in the winter and known their faces before he’d ever seen them.

This was not one of the three.

◆◆◆◆

This was the fourth.

The name that hadn’t been in his book.

The line on the guest list he’d read twice standing in the corridor because he’d thought the winter had knocked something loose in his memory, and it hadn’t, the name simply wasn’t in the story he’d memorized.

Here was the face that went with the name.

Soren stood very still at the edge of the exhibition and did the only thing a man without his sight could do, which was watch, and log, and give nothing away while he did it.

The fourth delegate came into the main hall.

He looked at the booths without interest, and at the combat ring the same way, and at the ability platforms and the paying crowd and the bunting and the sold seating with the same flat non-interest.

A man walking past a thing he had already decided did not concern him.

Then his attention caught.

◆◆◆◆

It caught on the Class Z exhibition.

Soren watched it happen.

The flat non-interest stopped being flat.

Something behind the man’s eyes came online, quiet and total, the attention of a person who had walked into a building full of noise and found the one thing in it he’d come to see.

He turned and walked toward the Class Z floor.

Not a drift.

Not a wander.

He crossed the hall on the straightest line the crowd would allow, past the booths he hadn’t cared about and the ring he hadn’t cared about, and the line ended at the demonstration floor where Maren was making fire for strangers.

Soren moved to intercept without running.

He was not going to reach her first.

He could see that already.

The delegate had started closer and the crowd was thicker on Soren’s side, and the geometry of the room had decided this before Soren could argue with it.

The fourth delegate reached the edge of Maren’s floor.

Maren looked up from her fire.

And the man looked at her with the flat certainty of someone matching a face against a description he’d carried a very long way.