MY DEVOURER SYSTEM

008. Mutual interests

Ren found her exactly where he suspected he would. The same storage room, an hour past curfew, going through a stack of confiscated gear like this was the most ordinary thing in the world to be doing after curfew.

"You're keeping a debt ledger," he said from the doorway. "Aren't you."

Isolde didn't look up from the crate she was sorting. "I prefer to think of it as due diligence." A pause. "You look like someone who's about to pay a debt he'd rather not."

"Dean Halvern pulled me in today." He stepped inside, letting the door click shut behind him. "There's a policy. Automatic review for flagged Gate anomalies. Mine's flagged. Someone's looking at my file within the week."

That got her attention. She set the crate down and turned to face him fully for the first time since he'd walked in. "That's faster than I expected."

"You expected this?"

"I expected something, eventually. Just not this soon." She crossed her arms. "Sit down. Tell me everything. All of it, the way you promised."

So he did.

He told her about the Gate floor giving out, the pressure behind his eyes, the installation message cut off mid-sentence. He told her about waking up next to a hollowed-out corpse and a core he'd eaten without deciding to, about the countdown that never fully stopped, about the storage room and Ferro's near-miss and the twenty-some hours he was currently running on borrowed time from. He didn't perform any of it. Didn't try to sound braver or more in control than he'd actually been. Somewhere in the last week, performing had stopped feeling worth the effort with her specifically.

Isolde listened without interrupting. When he finished, she was quiet long enough that he started to regret telling her all of it at once.

"Ravener," she said finally, testing the word. "That's what the System called itself?"

"Yeah. Why?"

"Because I've heard that word exactly once before, somewhere I wasn't supposed to be listening." She chose her words carefully. "My mother, on a call with someone from another House, years ago. I was young enough that I don't remember most of it. I remember the word because of how quickly the conversation ended the moment she realized I was in the room."

The countdown flickered at the edge of Ren's vision, momentarily irrelevant. "So it's real. It's a known thing."

"It's a known word, in a family that treats certain words like they're radioactive." Isolde exhaled. "I don't have more than that. I wish I did."

"That's still more than I had an hour ago." Ren sat on an overturned crate, the weight of the day catching up with him for the first time since Halvern's office. "So what happens when whoever reviews my file looks at it? What are they going to see?"

"Depends entirely on who they are." Isolde started pacing, slow, deliberate. "If it's a standard Academy reviewer, they'll see an unclassified Aether signature and probably escalate it further. Bad, but survivable. Slow. Bureaucratic. Buys you time. If it's someone House-affiliated, someone who already knows what that word means—" She trailed off.

"Then they already have a name for me before I walk in the room."

"Then they already have a use for you before you walk in the room," Isolde said. "Which is worse."

Ren hadn't considered that angle. That the danger might not be exposure at all. Might be the opposite. Being recognized. Catalogued. Wanted.

"So what do I do?" he asked. "I can't exactly outrun a review."

"No. But you might be able to outperform it." Isolde stopped pacing and looked at him. "If your Aether signature reads as controlled, disciplined, deliberately trained, instead of unstable and unclassified, a reviewer has less reason to escalate. The threat isn't what you are. It's how out of control you look."

"You're saying I need to get good at this. Fast."

"I'm saying you have a week to turn something that terrifies you into something you can perform on command." A trace of dry humor. "Which means we're going to need somewhere private, and something for you to practice on that isn't a hallway full of witnesses."

Ren almost smiled, despite everything. "You have a plan already, don't you."

"I have the beginning of one." Isolde pulled the data-slate from her jacket, already scrolling. "There's an old sparring level under the east wing. Decommissioned, mostly forgotten, still functional if you know which panel to override. Nobody's logged time there in years."

"And you know this because—"

"Because I make it my business," she said, "to know where things are kept that other people forget about." She glanced up. Something in her expression eased, just slightly. "You're going to owe me considerably more than a truthful conversation by the time this week is over, Ren Kestrel."

"I'm aware," he said. "Starting to think that might be a fair trade."