Chapter 168: 168 | Nervous People Pay Attention
I opened it. Percy stood in the hallway wearing cargo shorts and a plain white t-shirt that hung loose on his lean frame, his navy blue hair catching the overhead fluorescent light in a way that made it look almost purple. His brown eyes were doing that thing they always did where they processed approximately eighteen variables simultaneously while his mouth struggled to select which one to verbalize first.
"Your mat is deployed."
"I saw."
"I considered the GO AWAY option but determined that first impressions with neighbors should establish baseline cordiality before introducing sarcasm." Percy paused. His left hand twitched toward the notebook visible in his cargo pocket. "Your room looks. Good. The desk placement is."
"Three inches to the left."
"I noticed. The lamp cord routing is cleaner at that position. Whoever made that call has opinions about cable management."
"You have no idea."
Percy stood in my doorway and did not enter. This was a Percy thing. He would stand at thresholds indefinitely until explicitly invited past them, not from shyness but from a genuine respect for boundaries that his brain categorized as load-bearing social infrastructure. Crossing without invitation would create a data conflict he didn’t want to process.
"Come in, Percy."
He stepped through the door with visible relief and immediately began cataloguing the apartment. His eyes moved in the specific pattern I’d seen in the furniture store, systematic sweeps that evaluated spatial relationships between objects. I watched him note the desk position, the reading chair angle, the distance between the bed and the bathroom door, the window sightlines. His lips moved slightly as he processed.
"Your layout optimizes for three primary functions." Percy’s voice had steadied now that spatial analysis gave him something concrete to anchor on. "Study at the desk. Rest in the bed area. Casual occupation in the living space. The reading chair creates an interstitial zone that allows transition between rest and study without committing to either. That is. Unusual. Most people commit to binary layouts."
"Diane planned it."
"Diane Fitzgerald. Your." Percy’s mouth worked around the word for a moment. "Guardian. Who runs Fitzgerald Media Group. Who represents. Several top-fifty Heroes."
"That’s the one."
Percy nodded once, a small sharp movement that suggested he was filing this information into a mental folder he’d already created and labelled sometime before arriving on campus. He drifted toward the window with the automatic pull of someone drawn to observation points, his reflection ghosting faintly across the glass as he looked down at the training grounds. From this angle I could see the notebook in his pocket more clearly, the corner of what looked like a hand-drawn map poking out the top, its edges covered in annotations so small I’d need binoculars to read them.
"I mapped the bathhouse this morning."
"Naturally."
"The temperature differential between Pool One and Pool Three is. Significant." His fingers pressed against the glass like he was measuring something. "Pool One operates at approximately twenty-one degrees Celsius. I measured using the provided thermometer in the facility monitoring station. Pool Three registers at approximately forty-one degrees, which is optimal for muscle recovery but exceeds recommended temperatures for extended immersion without hydration breaks. The sauna."
He hesitated, his mouth working around the next words. "I haven’t confirmed the sauna temperature yet because access requires an active residential keycard and the system didn’t initialize until seven this morning. Based on the cedar construction specifications and the ventilation requirements listed in the housing packet I received three weeks ago I estimate operating temperature between seventy and eighty-five degrees Celsius. Possibly higher if they’re targeting traditional Finnish sauna standards."
He turned slightly, enough that I could see his profile against the morning light filtering through the window.
"You waited outside the bathhouse for thirteen minutes at six in the morning."
"The door opened at seven. I was the first one in. The tile work is. Very good." Another pause. "I brought my own towel because I wasn’t certain the provided towels would meet my tactile preferences. They do. The provided towels are excellent."
I sat on the edge of my bed and watched Percy vibrate with information that his mouth couldn’t release fast enough. This was the version of Percy that emerged when he felt safe enough to stop performing normal and just existed in the space his brain actually occupied, which was several processing layers ahead of everyone around him.
"How many other people have moved in so far?"
Percy’s expression shifted. His hand went to the notebook in his pocket and stayed there, fingertips touching the leather cover like a talisman.
"Seven. Including us." He pulled the notebook free and flipped to a page near the middle. "I’ve observed five others arriving between six AM and the present. Two male. Three female. One male carried a skateboard and approximately forty pounds of equipment in military-grade duffel bags. The other male arrived with two parents and a younger sibling and appeared to be emotionally processing the separation based on his sustained physical contact with the younger child. The three females arrived independently at staggered intervals."
"You got names?"
"One." Percy glanced at his notes. "Camille Ortega. Room 302. She introduced herself to me in the elevator. Unsolicited. She said, and I am quoting directly: Hey, blue hair, you know where the gym is? I like your notebook. Don’t let anyone tell you organization is weird."
The way Percy recited Camille’s words, his voice unconsciously shifted register. Slightly louder. More direct. A cadence that belonged to someone who treated the world as a thing to be grabbed by the collar rather than observed from a safe distance.
"She sounds fun."
"She was. Loud. In a way that felt. Honest rather than performative." Percy closed the notebook and held it against his chest. "She also asked if I was nervous and when I said yes she said good, nervous people pay attention, and then she got off on the third floor and I haven’t seen her since."
Camille Ortega. Room 302. Third floor West Tower. Loud, direct, honest. Acknowledged Percy’s notebook without treating it as strange.
That was the kind of person who registered on my radar for reasons that had nothing to do with the System.
