MY DEVOURER SYSTEM

003. Seat Thirty Returns

The infirmary lights were too bright. Everything was too bright, too loud, too much, every heartbeat in the room carried clear across the space between beds, distinct enough that Ren could have counted them with his eyes closed.

"Your bloodwork's clean," the nurse said, frowning at her tablet. "Which doesn't make sense, given what your file says happened down there."

Ren kept his eyes down. "Guess I'm just built different."

She didn't laugh. Fair. It hadn't been that funny, and his voice still came out wrong. "Extraction team found you unconscious next to a Class 3 anomaly corpse. Hollowed out from the inside. No injuries on you consistent with the fall." She studied him a beat longer, made a note, and left without waiting for an answer she clearly didn't expect to get.

<Deficiency Penalty in 14:22:03>

The door hadn't finished closing before Ren heard laughter outside it. He recognized the voice before the door opened.

"Miss me?" Corbin said, stepping in with two students trailing behind him. Priya came in last, looking like she'd rather be anywhere else.

Something in Ren's chest went cold and still at the sight of him, a flash of concrete rushing up, a hand closing on empty air a half-second too late, a grin that hadn't looked like an accident. He pushed it down. He didn't have room for it right now, not with a countdown ticking somewhere at the edge of his vision and a room full of people watching him for any sign of weakness. Whatever he thought he'd seen on the way down, it would have to wait its turn behind everything else trying to kill him today.

"No," Ren said.

"Disappointing." Corbin's smile didn't reach his eyes. "You disappeared during a field exam. Abandoned your squad. And somehow triggered a Gate anomaly nobody can explain."

"I fell."

"You triggered it."

"I fell." Ren held his ground. "Same as I told the nurse. Same as I'll tell whoever asks next."

Corbin stepped closer, close enough that the whole room felt smaller. "Then prove it."

Priya moved between them before Ren had finished processing the words. "Corbin, don't. He's barely cleared to walk."

"Then it should be easy."

Ren looked past her, at Corbin's raised fists, the faint kinetic glow already gathering. Every Aether signature in the room was suddenly loud in his ears, Corbin's, bright and violent; the two bystanders, dimmer; Priya's, steady and close. Underneath all of it, the hunger from an hour ago stirred again, quieter now but not gone, and Ren understood with a cold, distant clarity that a fight right now was the worst possible idea he could agree to.

"Not a fight," Ren said. "A wager."

That got the room's attention, Corbin's most of all.

"Three days," Ren said. "You think I'm hiding something. Fine. Three days, and if you still think I'm lying, I'll say it in front of whoever you want. But if I'm not, you admit you were wrong. Publicly."

Corbin's jaw worked. The offer cost him something to consider, and Ren could see exactly how much by the way his eyes flicked toward the two students watching. An audience made backing down expensive.

"Three days," Corbin said. "Fine."

He held out his hand. Ren looked at it a beat too long before he took it — some old, stubborn refusal to let Corbin see him hesitate winning out over whatever instinct was telling him not to touch it at all.

The moment their palms met, something came through that had nothing to do with grip strength, a signature, sharp and compressed, violent the way a held breath is violent right before it breaks. And underneath that, buried under two years of performance, something Ren's Aether Sense read as fractured. Not weak. Not fake. *Cracked*, in a way that didn't belong to the arrogant, confident Seat Twelve everyone thought they knew, and for one disorienting second, it lined up exactly with the grin Ren was still trying not to think about. Whatever had smiled at him while he fell, it lived somewhere in that crack, and Ren didn't have the first idea what to do with knowing that.

Ren pulled his hand back too fast.

Corbin's eyes narrowed. "What?"

"Nothing." Ren wasn't ready to know what he'd just felt, let alone explain it.

The overhead lights flickered, once, twice, and every head in the room turned up toward them, frowning, without understanding why. Ren felt his own pulse in the flicker, a rhythm he hadn't given permission to show itself.

Everyone looked at the lights.

Isolde Rivenhall, standing in the doorway, looked at Ren.

She hadn't been there a moment ago. Ren had no idea how long she'd been watching.

"That's not a lighting problem," she said, quiet enough that it barely carried past the two of them. Corbin was still busy glaring at the ceiling to notice she'd spoken at all.

Ren met her eyes and said nothing, which apparently told her everything she needed.

"You weren't like this yesterday," Isolde said.

The hunger in his chest, still faintly turned toward Corbin from an hour and a fall ago, shifted its attention toward her instead. It didn't feel like hunger this time. It felt like recognition, like whatever had answered her question was already deciding she mattered more than she should.

"Ren," Isolde said, quiet enough that only he could hear it now. "What did you bring back with you?"