Chapter 85: Yara Moved A Girl’s Shadow In Front Of Everyone And Didn’t Even Pretend
The walk back to the academy went through the east promenade, and the east promenade was where everyone could see you.
Soren knew that going in.
The tournament had put him on a stage in front of a few thousand people and the people had not stopped looking since.
He kept his pace even, his eyes forward, the burned hand in his pocket where the scar didn’t show.
Behind him the others spread out without being told to.
Selah at his left shoulder, close enough that the air around her ran cool.
Maren a half step back, watching faces instead of the road.
Dani somewhere off to the side pretending to read a noticeboard.
A girl crossed the promenade toward him.
Class A.
He’d seen her in the stands during the second bracket, the kind of student whose jacket fit right and whose rank sat high enough that she’d never had to think about it.
She came up smiling.
"You were unbelievable out there," she said.
"Thanks."
"No, I mean it." She put her hand on his arm, just above the elbow. "Half the Class A boys couldn’t do what you did, I had to come say it."
Soren felt the temperature drop two degrees on his left.
He did not look at Selah. He’d learned that looking was its own kind of answer.
◆◆◆◆
Yara did not come out of the shadow.
Every other time, she rose out of the dark under his feet, smoke pulling itself upward into a shape.
This time the shape was just there, standing on the promenade in the open daylight where four hundred students could see her, and the daylight didn’t seem to know what to do about it.
Yara didn’t speak.
She walked the three steps to the Class A girl and put one hand flat on the girl’s shoulder.
Then she looked down.
The girl’s shadow lay on the stone in front of her, ordinary, the noon shadow of an ordinary person.
Yara looked at it the way she’d look at a dog she was about to call.
It came.
The shadow peeled off the girl’s feet and slid across the stone toward Yara,leaving the girl standing in a circle of bare light with nothing of her own under her.
It pooled around Yara’s ankles and curled there, and it stopped.
The girl’s hand came off Soren’s arm.
She didn’t say anything.
The girl just stepped backward, found that her legs still worked, and walked away fast, and somewhere behind her the shadow let go and snapped back to her heels, she didn’t notice because she was already gone.
Soren let three seconds pass before he said anything.
Long enough to clock who was watching, which was everyone, and how.
"Was that necessary?"
"She touched you!" Yara said.
"People touch people."
"Not you." She turned the red eyes on him, and there was nothing fake in them. "Not where I can see."
He held her gaze a second longer than was comfortable, then he started walking again.
She fell into step beside him in the open, not in his shadow, in the open, where everyone could keep looking.
She wasn’t hiding what she was.
That was the part that landed.
For a long time the suppression had been the whole point, keep her quiet, keep her off the grid, keep the Bureau from reading the shape of her.
The tournament had ended that.
He’d won in front of thousands and she’d decided, somewhere in that winning, that there was no longer a reason to pretend the thing standing next to him wasn’t a girl.
Selah caught up on his other side. She’d watched the whole thing without moving.
"She’s getting worse," Selah said.
"I know."
"You should do something about it."
"I know that too."
Soren didn’t, though.
He had a severed Author, a scar that wouldn’t heal, a third voice in the Quill that had picked his side for reasons nobody had explained, an investigator who’d burned her own career and decided to stay anyway, and four bonds whose numbers were all crawling toward the ceiling at once.
A girl’s shadow crawling across a courtyard was the smallest problem he had and it was still the one everyone had just watched.
◆◆◆◆
The DING came when they reached the dorm.
He’d worked that out a long time ago, that the system measured after the fact, that it was a record and not a trigger.
Whatever moved Yara to do what she did had already finished moving by the time the numbers caught up to it.
The behavior went first.
The number followed, trying to describe a thing that had already happened.
[DING! — Obsession Index updated. Yara Hale: 73/75.]
He read it twice.
Two off the ceiling, and the gap between seventy-three and seventy-five was not a gap he understood the far side of, because the ledger only told him what the cap was and never what happened when something pressed against it from the inside.
[DING! — Bond resonance: HIGH. Tamer rank progression eligible.]
He closed the window.
Selah was already inside, her coat over the chair, the room four degrees colder than the hall the way it always was when she’d decided to stay in the dorm.
Maren came in behind her and dropped onto the spare bed without asking, which meant she’d be there all night and the room was going to be loud later.
Yara stood in the doorway and didn’t come in, didn’t go to the shadow, and just looked at him with the red eyes open the way she’d kept them open in front of the whole school.
"You’re not going to tell me to stop," she said.
Soren didn’t answer immediately.
He closed the distance between them until he was deep in her personal space, forcing her to tilt her head back to maintain the gaze.
He reached out gripping the doorframe just above her shoulder, pinning her in the threshold.
"No," he said.
"But don’t mistake my silence for permission. What you did on the promenade was a show, Yara! Every pair of eyes out there saw me as much as they saw you."
He leaned in closer "I dictate the boundaries. Understood?"
Yara’s throat moved as she swallowed. "Good," she whispered, but she looked more excited than scared.
He stepped back, releasing the tension just enough for her to move.
She stepped past him into the room, and the door shut behind her.
Soren’s ribs ached where the unspent sentence sat, and across the city the third voice in the Quill said nothing at all, which was its own kind of waiting.
