Chapter 235: 235 | The Watermelon Question
The second mile separated the wheat from the chaff, to use an expression I’d never fully understood until I watched half my cohort start falling apart. Eden’s face turned a shade of red that matched his hair. Rina dropped so far back I couldn’t see her when I glanced over my shoulder. Percy maintained his position with the kind of methodical determination that suggested he’d calculated his optimal pace to the second and refused to deviate.
Steele ran alongside us.
Not in front. Not behind. Alongside. Matching whatever pace the leaders set with the effortless stride of someone who could do this all day and probably had.
Her legs ate ground with mechanical consistency. Each footfall landed with the same controlled power as the last. I watched the way her thighs flexed through the compression material and immediately regretted having eyes.
"Dude." Caden’s voice was barely audible between his wheezing breaths. "Do you think Steele’s thighs could crush a watermelon?"
I stumbled.
Literally stumbled, my right foot catching on nothing because my brain had decided to prioritize processing that mental image over coordinating my motor functions.
Steele’s thighs. Watermelon.
Yeah. Probably.
Actually, definitely. Those thighs could probably crush a lot of things. Cars. Steel beams. The hopes and dreams of anyone who disappointed her.
I was so busy imagining this that I didn’t notice Steele had dropped back to run directly beside me until her voice cut through my very inappropriate thoughts.
"Belmont."
I flinched so hard I almost tripped again.
"Ma’am."
"Your pace dropped by twelve percent in the last thirty seconds." Her eyes stayed forward, tracking the field. "Either you’re more tired than you should be at mile two, or something distracted you. Which is it?"
My brain scrambled for an answer that wasn’t "Caden asked if your legs could crush fruit and I got way too invested in the question."
"Momentary lapse, ma’am. Won’t happen again."
"Hmm." The sound she made communicated that she knew I was lying but hadn’t decided whether to push it. "Eyes forward. Legs moving. Whatever your friend said isn’t more important than your time."
She accelerated, leaving me in her wake with a view of her back that I absolutely was not going to let myself appreciate because that way lay madness and probable death.
Caden wheezed out something that might have been a laugh. "Oh man. Oh man. Your face."
"Shut up."
"Your face when she ran up next to you. I thought you were going to swallow your own tongue."
"I’m going to kill you."
"Worth it. Completely worth it."
The third mile was when things got serious. Steele started calling out names of students who were falling behind, her voice carrying across the field like a judgment from on high. Rina’s name appeared twice. Eden’s once. Someone I didn’t recognize from the back of the group got pulled aside entirely and told to walk the remainder while everyone else continued.
I pushed my pace up, climbing from middle of the pack toward the front. Not enough to look suspicious. Just enough to show I could do better when pressed.
Camille held the lead. Theo ran second, his Kinetic Bank apparently also including the ability to store determination and deploy it as stamina. Lyra had moved into third with that same patient economy she’d shown during yesterday’s evaluation, letting others burn energy while she glided forward like the race would come to her eventually.
I slotted into fifth, right behind Marco, who looked like he was running on pure spite.
"This sucks." He grunted without turning around. "This sucks so much."
"Could be worse."
"How? How could this possibly be worse?"
"She could make us do it carrying weights."
Marco’s groan was almost loud enough to echo.
Mile four broke people. I watched students who’d seemed confident yesterday fold under the accumulated fatigue, their form deteriorating into survival shuffles. Caden dropped back so far I lost sight of him entirely. Felicity, who I’d been tracking in my peripheral vision because of course I had, seemed to find a second wind and pushed past several people to climb into the top ten.
Her face was flushed and her ponytail had started to come loose and she was still beautiful in the way that made me think Sloane’s jealousy might not be entirely unreasonable.
Steele appeared beside me again. Her breathing hadn’t changed. Her stride hadn’t shortened. She looked exactly as fresh as she had at the start, which was probably the point.
"You’re holding back again, Belmont."
I kept my eyes aggressively forward. "Just pacing myself, ma’am."
"Is that what we’re calling it?" Her voice carried that specific edge of "I know you’re lying and I’m going to make this uncomfortable." She ran in silence beside me for maybe twenty seconds before continuing. "Your entrance exam footage shows you completing a sprint section faster than anyone in your testing group. Significantly faster. Yet here you are, running fifth in a field of twenty against people you should be lapping."
I didn’t have a good answer for that, so I went with the honest one.
"Drawing attention isn’t always strategic."
Steele made that "hmm" sound again. "Neither is hiding capability you’ll need to deploy eventually. Every moment you spend pretending to be less than you are is a moment someone else spends learning your tells. By the time you decide to show them who you actually are, they’ll have catalogued enough inconsistencies to see through it."
She accelerated again, pulling ahead to rejoin the front of the pack.
I processed her words while my legs continued their mechanical work.
She wasn’t wrong. That was the frustrating part. Every evaluation where I deliberately underperformed was another data point in someone’s file. Another inconsistency for sharp observers to notice. Another crack in the fiction I was trying to maintain.
The last mile was just suffering.
I stopped thinking about strategy and started thinking about finishing. My lungs burned in the specific way that meant I’d pushed past comfort and into the zone where every breath felt like an achievement. My legs had gone past aching into that numb automatic state where they kept moving because they’d forgotten how to stop.
Camille crossed the finish line first at thirty-one minutes and change. Theo followed twelve seconds later. Lyra drifted in third with an expression that suggested she’d been sandbagging the entire run.
I finished fifth at thirty-two minutes and forty-seven seconds.
Marco stumbled across the line two seconds behind me and immediately bent double with his hands on his knees, his breath coming in ragged gasps that sounded like someone had filled his lungs with gravel.
"Never. Again." He wheezed. "I’m transferring. Support track. Business department. Anything that doesn’t involve this woman trying to kill me."
