Chapter 65: Cat in My Bed
Something was wrong with the weight distribution of the bed.
I turned my head.
Tessira.
She was on top of the covers, fully dressed, curled on her side with both hands tucked under her cheek, sleeping with the complete absence of self-consciousness. My cultivation notes were on the floor beside the bed, several pages spread open.
She had come here to study.
She had apparently also come here to sleep.
I had a class in an hour.
I sat up carefully. She did not stir.
"Tessira."
Nothing.
"Tessira."
"...Nn."
She pulled her hands closer to her face.
I crouched to her eye level.
"You are in the wrong room," I said.
A long pause.
One eye opened. Then the other. She looked at me.
The red deepened considerably.
She sat up fast.
"I..." she started.
"My notes are on the floor."
She looked at the floor. Then at the door. Then at her hands.
"I came to study," she said.
"I know."
"I did not mean to..."
"I know that too."
She pressed both palms against her face.
I picked the notes up from the floor while she was doing this. The open section was on the Sanguine Pulse circulation framework. Not the basics. The advanced progression section, the part that required a stable mid-tier heart to practice safely. She had not been reviewing my notes. She had been working through something she was trying to build herself.
I set them on the desk without saying anything about it.
The door opened.
Anastasia walked in the way she walked into every room. Without knocking, with the full expectation that the room would contain what she expected it to contain, which was me, possibly notes, and nothing complicated.
She stopped.
Her eyes moved to the bed. Tessira sat there with both hands over her face, fully dressed, cheeks burning. Then to me, crouching beside the bed. The cultivation notes on the desk. Finally, back to the bed.
She stayed in it for one full second longer than necessary.
"I came to tell you breakfast starts in twenty minutes," she said, in the tone of someone who had arrived with one piece of information and was now holding several additional pieces of information she had not planned to hold.
"Thank you," I said.
Tessira had not moved.
Anastasia looked at the bed. Then at the notes on the desk. Then at me.
"She was studying," she said.
"Yes," I said.
"Here."
"Yes."
She held on this for a moment with the specific quality she brought to things she was categorizing from a framework that was not quite the current one.
"I will wait in the corridor," she said.
She went back through the door and pulled it shut behind her with the careful precision of someone making a deliberate choice about how to close a door.
The room was very quiet.
Tessira lowered her hands from her face very slowly.
She looked at the closed door.
Then at me.
The red had reached her ears.
"I am going to my room," she said.
"Probably a good idea."
She looked at the desk. At the notes I had stacked there.
"The Sanguine Pulse section," I said. "The advanced framework. You were in the right place."
She looked at the stack for a moment.
"I will need to read it again," she said. "When I am more awake."
"The notes will be here."
She picked up her bag and crossed to the door with the posture of someone committed to the exit.
At the door she stopped.
Did not turn around.
"Did you sleep," she said.
"Yes."
"Good."
She opened the door.
Anastasia was standing directly outside it.
Tessira and Anastasia looked at each other.
"Good morning," Tessira said.
"Good morning," Anastasia said. A beat. "The secondary cafeteria entrance opens fifteen minutes before the main one. You showed me on the map."
Tessira looked at her.
"Yes," she said. "I did."
"If we go now we would arrive before the queue forms."
A pause. Tessira glanced back at me once. Then looked at Anastasia.
"Yes," she said. "We would."
They walked down the corridor together. I watched through the open door until the turn took them out of sight. Neither of them was talking, but the silence between them was different from the one at the base of the stairs yesterday, when they had been separate, on opposite sides of something.
I had my bag over one shoulder and the door open when the smoke appeared.
Luna stepped out of it.
She still had the bunny ears.
"Three months," she said.
"Long time," I agreed.
"Monthly spin. Here is fine."
She straightened her ears, adjusted her cuffs, cleared her throat.
"Round and round the wheel goes..."
"You can skip the song," I said.
She looked at me.
"I never skip the song."
"I know. I said you could, not that you would."
She continued from the beginning.
"Round and round the wheel goes, where it stops, nobody knows~!"
The wheel spun. It stopped.
"Congratulations. You have won Sovereign’s Instinct."
"What is that."
"Passive ability. Pattern recognition under pressure. Reading a situation correctly when the information available is incomplete."
I thought about that.
"That is useful."
"Yes," she said. "It is."
"Why do you sound like you were not expecting me to win it."
"The outcome was not unanimous," she said.
[The Lady is laughing.]
[Ink: +150.]
[Message: I voted for you. Eventually.]
"Eventually," I said.
"You are growing on her."
I looked at the wheel.
"Is there anything else."
"No. Just the spin." She turned toward the smoke. Then stopped.
"Yuta."
I waited.
"The things you are building here. The people. Be careful with them."
"I am always careful."
"No." She turned to face me properly. "You are always strategic. You plan around people. You account for them. You make good decisions about them." A pause. "That is not the same as being careful with them. Careful means knowing the difference between a person and a variable."
The smoke gathered around her.
"Go to class," she said. "Pay attention. Hiratsuka is going to do something today that you will want to have seen coming."
The smoke closed.
The corridor was empty.
Hiratsuka.
I had noticed her once, in the first week, before the assessment. In the covered balcony above the training courtyard, the figure who had stopped walking when the blue flame appeared.
The secondary pin on her lapel, the one the other faculty did not have. The way she had looked at the room during orientation. Not watching the Dean, watching the students, running a comparison against a known model.
She had been there before I had known to look for her.
I picked up my bag and walked to the end of the corridor and down the stairs.
The morning was cold and clear. The mana-light strips along the path were still running at their nighttime setting, the slightly warmer color that shifted to standard at the first bell.
At the base of the stairs, Tessira and Anastasia were coming back from the secondary cafeteria entrance, both of them carrying something.
They reached me at the path junction.
Tessira held out something wrapped in cloth.
"The woman said it was the same recipe as the market in Moonshade," she said.
I took it.
I looked at them both.
Something registered that I could not have named exactly the day before. The arrangement of the two of them, the angle of the space between them, Anastasia’s hands held open at her sides rather than folded.
Tessira had shown her the map. Anastasia had used it to do something that included Tessira rather than routing around her. The distance between them was not a meter anymore.
Careful means knowing the difference between a person and a variable.
I looked at the cloth in my hand.
"Thank you," I said.
The morning bell rang.
We walked toward the main building.
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