Chapter 285: 285 | Side Quest: Don’t Disappoint the Sheep
The response took twelve seconds.
How did you know
I’m looking at the courtyard from the common room window. You’re sitting on the bench near the fountain.
A pause. Longer this time.
That’s creepy Lukas
I’m not being creepy. I’m being observant. There’s a difference.
The difference is timing and I think 1am tips the scale toward creepy
I smiled despite everything. Rina’s texting voice was different from her speaking voice. Drier. Less apologetic. The absence of face-to-face social pressure let something sharper emerge, something closer to who she actually was underneath the constant performance of smallness.
Can’t sleep? I texted.
Thinking too much. Today was a lot.
Yeah. Yeah it was.
I looked down at her on the bench. She hadn’t moved, hadn’t looked up toward the window. Just sat there with her phone in one hand and her other arm wrapped around her knees, her horns catching the silver light and her tail curled protectively against her thigh.
Want company?
Another pause. Fifteen seconds this time.
You don’t have to
That’s not what I asked.
The longest pause yet. Twenty-two seconds. I watched her head tilt down toward her phone, the soft glow of the screen illuminating the planes of her face from below. Her tail uncurled slightly from her waist, the tip twitching the way it did when she processed something she wasn’t sure about.
Okay.
I pocketed the phone and headed for the side exit that opened onto the courtyard.
The night air hit my skin with that specific California coastal coolness that showed up after midnight, the kind that made the daytime heat feel like a memory from a different lifetime. The courtyard was a simple space, a circle of stone benches around a low fountain that burbled with enough volume to mask quiet conversation from anyone who might be listening from the windows above. Rina sat on the bench closest to the eucalyptus trees, their peeling bark a pale column of white beside her own white hair.
She looked up when my footsteps crossed the stone.
"Hey."
"Hey." I sat down on the opposite end of her bench, leaving enough space between us that she wouldn’t feel boxed in. Her purple eyes watched me settle with the wariness of someone who still defaulted to threat assessment in every new interaction, even with people she trusted.
"You really were awake," she said.
"Couldn’t sleep either."
"Too much thinking?"
"Something like that."
She studied my face for a moment, her horns tilting slightly as her head angled. The moonlight turned the dark obsidian of those spirals into something opalescent, black with veins of deep purple that matched her eyes. She wore an oversized cream hoodie over leggings, her standard comfort uniform that she retreated into whenever the social pressure of existing in public became too heavy. The hoodie swallowed her frame and made her look even smaller than her five-foot-three, though the fabric couldn’t entirely hide the curves beneath it. Her tail rested on the bench between us, close enough that I could have touched it if I reached out.
"You look like someone punched you," she said.
"That’s basically what happened."
"During the match?"
"After it."
She processed this without pushing for details, which was one of the things I genuinely appreciated about Rina. She didn’t demand explanations. She let silences exist without trying to fill them. In a cohort of people who treated every quiet moment as an opportunity to perform competence or dominance or humor, Rina’s willingness to simply sit with discomfort stood out as rare and valuable.
The fountain burbled softly. A breeze moved through the eucalyptus trees and carried their sharp, medicinal scent across the courtyard. Somewhere in the distance, campus security made their rounds with flashlights that swept across building facades like searchlights in a movie about escaping from prison.
"I was thinking about what Steele said," Rina murmured after a while. "About my Aspect."
"The part where she said it was one of the most dangerous in the cohort?"
Rina nodded. Her tail curled tighter against the bench cushion.
"Nobody’s ever said that before. Not like she said it. The way she looked at me when she talked about it was so..." She searched for the word. "Serious. Like she actually meant it. Like she wasn’t being nice."
"Steele doesn’t do nice."
"I know. That’s why it hit different." Rina’s fingers found the hem of her hoodie and twisted the fabric. "My old academy put me in support roles. Search and rescue. Civilian comfort during evacuations. I was the girl they sent to hold someone’s hand while they waited for the real heroes to show up." The bitterness in her voice surprised me. It was a new note, something I hadn’t heard from her before. "And then I get here and this woman who terrifies everyone in the room tells me I’m dangerous, and I don’t know what to do with that."
"You believe her."
"I want to. Is that stupid?"
"It’s the opposite of stupid."
Her purple eyes found mine across the space between us, and for a moment the constant apology that lived in her expression receded enough for something else to surface. Something stubborn. Something that had been buried under years of being told she was soft and helpful and not suited for the work that actually mattered.
"You said something similar," she added quietly. "On move-in day. When we talked in the common room. You said my Aspect was terrifying."
"I remember."
"I’ve been thinking about that too. About why you said it like you meant it."
"Because I did mean it."
She pulled her knees closer to her chest and rested her chin on them, watching me from inside the protective shell of her own body. Her horns framed her face in the moonlight, and her white hair glowed softly against the dark trees behind her. The sheep tail lay still now, resting against the bench in a posture I was learning to recognize as calm.
"Can I ask you something weird?"
"Sure."
"What does it feel like? When your Aspect is working? When you send those amber things out and they grab stuff and move stuff around?"
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