MY DEVOURER SYSTEM

009. Control

The decommissioned sparring level hummed to life reluctantly, ancient overhead lights flickering through a startup sequence that suggested nobody had powered this room in years. Dust hung visible in the pale light. Isolde crouched at a control panel Ren couldn't read, fingers moving fast, like she'd done this more than once before.

"How many times have you actually used this place?" he asked.

"Enough to know the override code by memory." She didn't look up. "Don't ask follow-up questions. Some answers you're better off not owing me for."

The room finished booting. A wide, circular arena, scorch marks on the walls from sessions decades old, a faint outline of a holographic combat grid struggling to render at the edges. It wasn't pretty. It was private, which mattered more.

"Alright," Isolde said, straightening. "Show me what it actually looks like when you lose control. I need a baseline before I can help you build one."

Ren hesitated. "You want me to just let it happen? On purpose?"

"I want you to stop white-knuckling it for five minutes so I can actually read the shape of the problem." She crossed her arms. "You've been fighting this like it's an enemy since the moment we met. It isn't going anywhere. Fighting something that isn't going anywhere just wastes the energy you'd need to manage it."

It went against every instinct he'd built over the last week. But she wasn't wrong, and he was running out of better ideas.

He let go.

It wasn't dramatic. No transformation, no visible shift. Just a loosening somewhere behind his ribs, the same emptiness that had opened up in the Gate now spreading without him holding it shut. The room's temperature seemed to drop a few degrees that had nothing to do with the ventilation. Isolde's expression didn't change, but her eyes narrowed slightly, reading something about him he couldn't see himself.

<Notification: Concealment discontinued. Signature reads as: RAW>

"There," Isolde said quietly. "That's what a reviewer would see. Unfiltered. No discipline. Just raw hunger with a person attached to it."

"Charming."

"I'm not saying it to be cruel. I'm saying it because now I know what we're working against." She stepped closer, studying him. "Pull it back. Slowly. I want to see what it looks like when you're actively managing it, not just suppressing it."

He tried. It was harder than suppression. Suppression was a wall. Pulling back was closer to balancing on something narrow, aware the whole time of how easy it would be to fall either direction.

<Notification: Partial Concealment achieved. Signature reads as: UNSTABLE, TRAINED>

"Better," Isolde said. "Not good enough yet, but better. Do it again."

They ran it for over an hour. Ren letting go, pulling back, letting go again, Isolde adjusting her instructions each time based on whatever she could read in his signature that he couldn't perceive himself. It was exhausting in a way combat hadn't been. By the end his notification log read like a slow, grinding climb:

<Signature reads as: UNSTABLE, TRAINED>

<Signature reads as: CONTROLLED, TRAINED>

<Signature reads as: CONTROLLED, TRAINED (fluctuation: minor)>

"That last one," Isolde said, checking her data-slate against whatever baseline she was building. "That's close to something a reviewer might actually accept without escalating. Not perfect. Close."

"How much closer do I need to get?"

"Perfect, ideally. We have six days." She didn't sugarcoat it, and he was starting to appreciate that more than he expected to. "We'll keep at this every night you can manage it. It's the best plan I have."

---

Across campus, in a room considerably nicer than a decommissioned sparring level, Corbin Reyes sat across from Dax Ferro and tried hard not to look as unsettled as he felt.

"You said the storage room was clear," Ferro said. Not quite a question.

"It was supposed to be. I checked it myself two days ago."

"Well, somebody beat me to the last core in there, and I didn't see them do it." Ferro leaned back, unreadable in the low light. "Room felt wrong when I left. Like something had been standing right next to me the whole time I was in there."

Corbin's stomach turned. He didn't examine why too closely. "Probably just old wiring. That whole wing's falling apart."

"Maybe." Ferro didn't sound convinced. "You still owe me for the trip, by the way. And you're going to owe me more if I find out you knew something about this and didn't mention it."

"I don't know anything."

That, at least, wasn't entirely a lie. Not yet. But Corbin thought, unbidden, of Kestrel's file getting passed around the administrative wing. Of the rumor he'd built out of true, strange pieces. Of how satisfying it had felt to watch Kestrel walked out of the dining hall by an instructor who wouldn't say why.

He didn't let himself think about the fall itself. He'd gotten good at that, steering around it the way you'd steer around a wound that hadn't finished healing, fast enough that it barely registered as a choice anymore. He told himself he'd reached for Kestrel. He told himself that often enough that most days he almost believed it. What he didn't let himself examine too closely was the half-second before he'd reached, the half-second where some ugly, satisfied part of him had already decided what he wanted to happen, and his hand had only moved after.

He'd wanted Kestrel humiliated. That much he could admit to, in the safety of his own head. He hadn't stopped to consider he might be right about something being genuinely wrong with him, or to ask himself, honestly, how much of that half-second he'd actually meant.

"If you hear anything," Ferro said, standing, "you tell me first. Not the Dean. Me."

Corbin nodded. He didn't ask why an upperclassman wanted the first pick of information before the Academy's own administration. Some part of him already suspected he wouldn't like the answer.