Chapter 175: 175 | Burnt Sugar and Personal Brands
The next three days landed one after another like a shuffle playlist nobody asked for. Domestic comedy track, combat training track, social accumulation track. The System quantified the last one with numbers I tried not to check.
Monday morning. Five forty-five. No alarm. Boundless Stamina had decided four hours counted as a full night and my body accepted the terms without consulting me. I spent thirty seconds staring at unfamiliar ceiling trying to remember which version of the floor plan I’d woken up in. The walnut desk assembled itself in peripheral vision. Sage chair. Diane’s lamp cord. Right. Halloran. Room 205. Day two.
I ran the campus loop twice before sunrise. Both laps I passed the same runner from yesterday afternoon, tall girl with dark skin and silver locs pulled into a thick bun. She ran with the loose economy of someone who’d been putting in distance work since before she could spell cardio. We exchanged nods the second time. Neither of us spoke. The unspoken agreement between people who run before dawn is that conversation violates the natural order.
Percy was awake when I got back, cross-legged on his apartment floor with his notebook open and a portable whiteboard propped against his bookshelf. He’d mapped the entire first week into a color-coded timeline, blocks for lectures and facility tours and free periods, annotated with travel times calculated to the second. I knocked on his open door, handed him the protein bar I’d grabbed from the common room kitchen. He took it without looking up.
"Route C confirmed. Seventeen seconds faster than projected if we skip the south stairwell and cut through the faculty garden. Gate code is eight-seven-three-two. I watched a groundskeeper input it yesterday from the third floor window."
I didn’t ask why he’d been watching a groundskeeper from the third floor window.
The building filled throughout the day. By Monday evening, fourteen of twenty rooms occupied. The common area transformed from showroom into something inhabited. Someone had claimed a corner of the modular couch with a blanket and a charging cable that snaked across the floor like a territorial marker. The kitchen smelled like burnt popcorn.
The kid from Room 203, whose name turned out to be Finn, had attempted kettle corn on the gas range and discovered that caramelizing sugar requires attention he couldn’t spare while simultaneously demonstrating his gravity field Aspect for two other residents.
I cleaned the pan. Nobody else was going to. Diane had spent nine years conditioning me to view a dirty kitchen as personal insult.
Finn watched me scrub burnt sugar with a look that meant he’d just filed me under useful rather than threatening. Exactly the read I wanted.
Rina appeared in the common room twice that day, both times when population was low. First time she sat in the far corner with tea, her horns catching overhead light and casting small shadows on the wall behind her. She caught my eye across the room and offered a wave that only involved her fingers. I waved back. She returned to her tea. Four seconds. More communication than most ten-minute conversations.
Second time was around eight. Most residents had retreated to their rooms. I was reviewing orientation schedule on my laptop at the kitchen island, cross-referencing Percy’s timeline and mapping locations where I’d most likely encounter classmates in low-pressure environments. Rina materialized at the kitchen’s edge like a ghost with good posture, white hair catching under-cabinet lighting. She filled a kettle, placed it on the back burner. Stood there watching water heat with focused attention of someone who found the process genuinely comforting. Her tail swished once, slow, when she noticed me looking.
"Chamomile," she said.
"Good choice for evening."
She nodded. The kettle hissed. She poured into a mug with a cartoon sheep printed on the side. Incredible coincidence or deliberate personal brand. Her fingers wrapped around ceramic. She inhaled steam with closed eyes. For a moment the anxiety that usually ran underneath her expression disappeared.
"I found the showers," she said. "They have doors."
"Good news."
"The hot water pressure is very adequate."
"High praise."
She smiled into her tea and left the kitchen without another word, bare feet silent on hardwood as she headed for the elevator. Her tail swished twice more before the doors closed.
Tuesday brought chaos of a different variety. Diane sent a text at seven informing me she’d overnighted drawer organizers because she’d seen the inside of my dresser on FaceTime last night and it looked like I’d packed with my feet, and she refused to allow a child of hers to live like an animal at the most prestigious Hero Academy in the world, so I would put the grey organizers in the top two drawers and the white ones in the bottom two and if she saw socks mixed with underwear again she was driving down here herself.
I organized the drawers exactly as instructed. Self-preservation is the highest form of intelligence.
Sloane’s texts came in bursts throughout the day, each one a compressed emotional payload wrapped in aggressive punctuation. Her morning session with the 1-A combat instructor had gone well.
HE SAID MY OUTPUT IS ALREADY AT MID-A RANK WHICH I ALREADY KNEW BUT IT WAS NICE TO HEAR.
She’d met two more classmates she actually liked. Koda had challenged her to a sparring match after orientation. Sloane had accepted with what she described as appropriate enthusiasm, which from Sloane meant she’d probably grinned like a predator and cracked her knuckles.
She missed me but would never say it in those words, instead communicating through increasingly creative insults about my hoodie collection and demands that I visit her building that evening to help move furniture that had already been moved three days ago.
I visited. The furniture didn’t get moved. The mattress got thoroughly tested. Sloane’s wall thickness proved adequate for containing the sounds she made when I pinned her against her new headboard, though the muffled bass from Koda’s room next door provided helpful ambient cover.
We lay tangled in her sheets afterward with the window cracked open. She told me about Class 1-A’s instructor, a man named Vincent Hale whose teaching philosophy apparently involved equal parts theatrical performance and genuine tactical insight.
She spoke about him the way she spoke about anyone who impressed her. The reluctant admiration of someone who hated admitting she could learn from other people.
"He’s annoying," she said, tracing the shape of my collarbone with one finger. "But he’s annoying in the way where he’s usually right about the thing that makes him annoying."
"So exactly like you."
