MY DEVOURER SYSTEM

006. Rumors

By the time Ren made it to breakfast the next morning, the story had already grown teeth.

He caught the shape of it before he caught the words. Conversation dipped and shifted when he walked past. A table of first-years went quiet, then not-quite-quiet the second he was three steps clear of it. Two years of being invisible had taught him to read a room fast. This wasn't invisibility. This was worse.

"You hear the version where he attacked a monster bare-handed and came out covered in its blood?" Tomas's voice, not troubling to lower itself, from a table Ren hadn't meant to walk near. "Or the one where Griff's covering something up because Seat Thirty's dad donates to the Academy?"

"My dad doesn't donate anything," Ren said, before he could stop himself. "My dad drives a transport truck."

A few people laughed. Not unkindly, which was almost worse. Tomas at least had the decency to look embarrassed. The laughter didn't kill the rumor. It just proved there was enough of an audience now that the rumor had a life independent of whether it was true.

He found the source without much effort. Corbin held court near the far wall, pitched exactly loud enough to be overheard without technically being aimed at anyone. Ren caught fragments as he passed: unstable, should be reported, lucky the readout was wrong or he'd have killed someone. "Two days left on his little deadline," Corbin added, loud enough that it clearly wasn't meant for just the people standing next to him, "and all he's given me so far is more reasons to think I was right." A couple of the second-years around him nodded along like they'd been there themselves, like they hadn't gotten the whole story secondhand from someone who wasn't even on the exam.

None of it was quite a lie. That was the part that stung. Corbin hadn't needed to invent anything. He'd just taken the true, strange pieces of what happened and arranged them into the worst possible shape.

Ren didn't approach him. Didn't trust himself not to make it worse. Instead he found Priya, alone at the end of a table, not eating much, carefully not looking at anyone.

He sat across from her. "You okay?"

"Fine." She didn't sound fine. "Corbin's been reminding people I stepped between you two in the infirmary. Like it's evidence of something."

Guilt landed harder than Ren expected. "You shouldn't have to deal with that because you were decent to me for five seconds."

"I know." A tired almost-smile. "Doesn't change that I do, though."

"I can talk to him—"

"Don't." Priya's voice sharpened. "That makes it worse, not better. He wants a reaction. Don't give him one. If you go after him, it stops being a rumor and starts being a fight, and fights get written up." She looked up. "What actually happened down there, Ren? Not the infirmary version."

Second time in two days someone had asked him that directly. The second time he had to decide, fast, how much of the truth a person deserved.

"I don't fully know yet," he said. Not a lie. Not the whole truth either. "I'm working on it."

Priya studied him for a moment. "Okay," she said finally. "But whatever it is, it's making people nervous. Nervous people report things. You should figure it out before someone else decides they already know the answer."

She was right, and it sat close to something Isolde had already told him. Whatever category his signature belonged to, someone above both their pay grades already had a name for it. Two separate people, two separate warnings, both pointing the same direction. The clock wasn't just counting down hunger anymore. It was counting down how long he had before this stopped being his secret to manage, and somewhere underneath that, Corbin's two remaining days were still ticking along on their own, a public deadline Ren still didn't have a plan for.

He didn't get long to sit with that.

"Kestrel." Not Corbin's voice. Not a student's at all. An instructor Ren didn't immediately recognize, standing at the edge of the hall, tablet in hand, wearing the neutral look people wear right before delivering something unpleasant. "The administrative office wants to see you. Now, not after breakfast."

The hall went quiet enough that the words carried to every table.

Ren stood, feeling the weight of every eye in the room. Priya's worried. Tomas's guilt. A dozen others he didn't know well enough to read. Corbin's smug and satisfied, on the surface, but underneath it, for just a moment, something else. Not triumph. He looked almost startled, like he hadn't fully believed this consequence would actually arrive. Gone before Ren could be sure he'd seen it, same as it had been in the infirmary, same as it had been on the way down through the dark two days ago. Ren still didn't know what to do with any of it. He filed it away with everything else he wasn't ready to look at directly.

"What's this about?" Ren asked, already walking, already bracing for whatever answer he wasn't going to get.

"Above my clearance to say," the instructor said. "Let's go."

Ren followed him out, doing the math on how much of the truth an administrative office would settle for. He didn't like the answer he came up with.