MY DEVOURER SYSTEM

004. Contact

Isolde caught up with him three hallways later, once Corbin and the others had peeled off toward the mess hall, still arguing among themselves about a duel that hadn't happened.

"You didn't answer my question," she said.

Ren stopped walking. "Which one?"

"What you brought back with you." She fell into step beside him, unhurried, like she had nowhere else that mattered more right now. "I could see it happen. In the infirmary. Something in you reacted to me the same way it reacted to Corbin a minute earlier. I'd like to know what that was."

"I don't know what you're talking about."

"You do." She didn't move any closer. Didn't need to. "I read Aether signatures. It's the whole reason I'm Seat One and not, say, someone who can punch through a wall. Yours isn't registering as anything the Academy has a category for."

"Maybe your ability's glitching."

"It isn't." Her expression didn't change much, but something in her voice hardened. "I've had two years to learn what my own ability looks like when it's wrong. This isn't that."

Ren's jaw tightened. Two years of being invisible, and the one person who'd finally noticed him had noticed the worst possible thing. "So what, you're here to report me?"

"If I wanted to report you, I already would have." Flat. No drama in it. "I've had a report drafted since the hallway. I haven't filed it."

"Why not?"

"Because a report closes the question." A beat of something like frustration in her voice before she smoothed it over. "Whatever you are, you're the first anomaly I've found on my own, without a House name doing the work for me. I'd like to actually understand it before someone with more authority and less patience takes it out of my hands."

<Deficiency Penalty in 13:41:12>

The number sat at the edge of Ren's vision. He didn't have time for a long, careful conversation — and somewhere behind that clock, a second one was already running. Three days until Corbin expected an answer, in front of an audience that wouldn't forget the wager even if Ren did. "Look. I appreciate you not turning me in, but I have a problem that's on a clock, and I don't think you can help with it."

"Try me."

He hesitated. Two years of keeping his head down didn't undo itself because one person finally looked at him directly. But the countdown didn't care about his instincts. Lying to someone who could apparently see straight through him seemed like a worse use of the next thirteen hours than telling her some version of the truth.

"I need something," he said carefully. "Soon. And I don't know where to get it without it being noticed."

Isolde studied him for a long moment. "A monster core."

Ren's silence answered for him.

"There's a storage room under the west training hall," she said. "Confiscated materials from failed field exams. Cores nobody claimed, weapons nobody's cleared to reissue. It's not exactly secret, just inconvenient. Second-years use it sometimes when they don't want the requisition paperwork."

"And you know this because—"

"Because I make it my business to know where things are kept that other people forget about." A trace of dry humor. "It's a useful habit for someone whose ability isn't good in a fight."

It was the most human thing she'd said since the door had opened. Ren filed it away without meaning to.

"Why help me at all?" he asked. "You don't know what I am. For all you know I'm dangerous."

"You are dangerous," Isolde said, without heat. "That's not a reason not to help you. It's a reason to want to understand you before you become a problem instead of a mystery."

It should have been unsettling. It wasn't. It was the first honest thing anyone had said to him since the Gate opened under his feet.

"There's a condition," she added.

"Of course there is."

"When you're not on a countdown, you tell me what actually happened down there. All of it. Not the version you gave the infirmary." She held his gaze. "I'm good at noticing when people are lying to me too."

Ren almost laughed. First real impulse toward it he'd felt in two days. "Deal."

Isolde turned to go, already pulling a data-slate from her jacket — probably to draw him a route to the storage room that avoided patrol paths. She made it two steps before she stopped.

"One more thing." She didn't turn around. "I said your signature doesn't match anything the Academy has a category for. That's not quite true."

Ren's stomach dropped. "What does that mean?"

"It means there's a category. It's just not one I have access to." She glanced back at him. Something in her expression had shifted, less certain than a moment ago. "It's House-restricted. Whatever you are, someone above both our pay grades already has a name for it."

The countdown at the edge of his vision went forgotten for a full second.

"Someone already knows what I am?"

"Someone already knew this could happen," Isolde said. "Which is a very different, and much worse, question."