Chapter 459: A New Normal

Zack turned the X factor over like a stone. "If it’s metabolic... if whatever this is can feed cells that aren’t supposed to have a source..."

"Then people start running faster," Zoey said. "Seeing in the dark. Waking up different. And nobody wrote the user manual because nobody knew there was a product."

Stan watched a cluster of students at the next table pass a phone around, the night-vision kid’s interview already clipped and captioned. The boy in the clip looked embarrassed and a little luminous, as if he were apologizing for a talent he had not applied for.

"They’ll invent manuals," Stan said again, quieter. "Some of them will be useful. Most of them will be stories people tell so they can sleep."

Zoey glanced at him. "Damn but really, this super power like thing is crazy. really..."

Around them the rumors kept moving, unfinished, multiplying, already hungry for the next impossible thing. Two tables over, a debate had started about whether this was evolution, invasion, or a very expensive prank by a bored god. Peak stayed Peak, but the seams were showing.

Stan sat in the current of it and did not correct anyone. The X factor had a name already, in older rooms than this one. The dining hall would learn it later, or invent a worse one. For now it was enough that the cultures had told the truth, and the dark had become optional for at least one student who had only wanted a quiet place to study.

The next impossible thing was already on its way down the path. They would hear it before they saw it. They always did.

They found each other near the edge of the dining hall’s spill of noise, where the doors breathed students in and out and dusk was beginning to take the color out of the brick.

Camilla stood waiting for Stan in the direction he was walking to...

Zack and Zoey’s chatter stumbled half a step when they realised this beautiful woman was actually planning on joining them, then recovered into the polite version of itself.

"Hey," Zoey said, bright, assessing without being rude.

Zack offered a nod that tried to be casual and landed close enough. "Good to meet you."

Camilla returned the greetings with the economy of someone who did not collect small talk for its own sake. The group’s energy shifted anyway, four instead of three, a new silence occupying the space beside Stan like a fourth shadow.

They drifted back onto the path.

Zack leaned in, joking-mood intact, and whispered, "New girl?"

"Bro, come on..."

Zack laughed under his breath. "Haha. I’m joking. I’m joking."

Stan did not need to check whether Camilla had heard. Her hearing did not miss things. He glanced over and found her staring at him with a face emptied of comment. Blank, which in her was never empty. Hurt sat behind it, whether from being filed, even as a joke, with ordinary human girls, or from the offhand ease of the remark, he could not sort in public. Royal blood did not enjoy being reduced. Pride had been pricked, and she would not give the wound a sentence.

He turned toward her as if the path required it.

"What do you think of the university."

"It is good," Camilla said.

Even. Final. The tension under it did not leave; it only agreed to walk.

Zack and Zoey did the rest of the work without knowing they were doing it. A light argument about whether the east quad club fair was good or not. Zoey insisting Hale’s eye-contact policy was a human rights violation. Zack claiming he had once survived a group project by pretending to lose wifi.

The jokes were not clever so much as free, and freedom turned out to be a solvent. Camilla did not become warm. She became less sharp at the edges.

Stan listened with one ear and watched with the part of himself that did not belong to dusk walks.

Qi here was a shade richer than in the streets beyond the gates. Not a flood. A held breath.

Compatible bodies would start taking it in without knowing they had been invited, the swimmer, the library kid who had woken to perfect dark, whoever came next. Stan realised that this might be more rampant than he guessed it would

Universities would log it first, the way hospitals and leagues would: strange times, strange recoveries, data that refused a box. Under the old stadium grounds a minor node slept, a faint glow on the map he kept behind his eyes. Dormant. Present.

’Whatever X is, it’s not local. It’s everywhere, and it’s rising.’ Ainsworth’s sentence might as well have been written on the air. ...

Camilla’s gaze flicked once toward the stadium, too brief for anyone else to notice, then returned to the path. She did not ask. She did not need to. Stan felt the question sit between them anyway. The quad was not the place for it.

He decided, without saying so, that this ordinary campus stretch would last as long as he could make it last. Not forever. Long enough for Zoey to finish roasting Zack, for Zack to recover, for Camilla to decide whether "it is good" could grow a second sentence.

Zack was still talking. "I’m just saying, if the dining hall is going to run out of the edible rice at 6:10, they should put it on a calendar. I planned my whole afternoon around that tray."

Zoey did not look up. "You planned your afternoon around a nap and a rumor. The rice was collateral." "I was strategically resting."

"You were face-down on your notes. I have the photo."

Zack pointed at her, mock-solemn. "That photo is out of context. I was reviewing."

"based on your looks you were salivating."

"That’s called commitment. Never anticipated eating your favourite food, cooked to perfection before?" Camilla’s mouth almost moved. Not a smile. Just the brief look of someone realizing these two argued like it was a sport they both intended to lose on purpose. Anyways their argument reminded her of her crazing and anticipation for blood meals.

They passed the fountain that never quite worked and the bulletin board already filling with notes, anyone else see better at night? / swim times? / Ainsworth talk Friday?, people writing instructions for a thing nobody had named yet.

Stan stayed between their talk and the node. The four of them kept walking the quad at dusk, still together, the larger change traveling with them like weather that had not decided to break.