Chapter 574 | The Arithmetic of the Lie

Chapter 574: 574 | The Arithmetic of the Lie

I walked in.

The conference room had been reset since the breach, cleaner than the hallway, glass and pale wood arranged around a table long enough to seat twelve and currently holding seven. Diane took the chair to Park’s left before I did, sliding into it with the ownership of someone who’d decided the geometry of the room before she arrived. I sat beside her. Sloane went to the far end with Theo and Percy, her energy pulling tight through the bond, a rubber band held at maximum tension by someone who very much wanted to let it snap.

Felicity slid into the seat between me and Sloane, exactly where Diane had placed her in the elevator recitation. Camille sat across from Felicity. Petra took the seat at Park’s right, mirroring me, which put the two class representatives on either side of the woman who’d flown in from Geneva to figure out whether Halloran had accidentally admitted a war crime.

Park set the folio on the table. She did not open it.

"Thank you for accommodating this on short notice," she said, though nobody had accommodated anything and the notice had not been short. "I understand you’ve all been through a significant trauma. I’ll try to be respectful of that."

She would not try to be respectful of that. She’d try to find the seam in the story and pull until it came apart. Respect was the wrapper she put on the knife.

Diane smiled the smile she used on clients who thought they were the smartest person in the room. "We appreciate that, Director. These are children. Some of them watched their instructors get hospitalized. Two of them are still processing survivor’s guilt that a licensed therapist flagged as clinically significant."

The therapist part was invented. I knew it was invented because Diane had invented it in the car, dropping it into the seating recitation like a landmine she wanted Park to step around. It worked. Park’s pen didn’t move, but something in the set of her shoulders shifted, recalculating how hard she could push before the optics turned against her. ℴℴ𝘮

"Of course." Park’s eyes went to Percy. "You’re Mr. Mendoza. You ran the headcount."

Percy’s pen was already open on the notebook in front of him. "Yes. At eleven forty-one I initiated a roll call through the recovered communication channel. All forty candidates confirmed present by eleven fifty-three. I logged response times and physical status for each. I have the full record if it would assist your investigation."

He would give her the full record. He’d give her a hundred and nineteen permutations of the full record if she asked. Percy didn’t lie. Percy processed. The trick was that the truth Percy processed had gaps in it exactly where my truth started, because Percy had never actually seen what I did, only its effects, and its effects fit inside the story we were selling if you didn’t look too hard at the arithmetic.

"That would be helpful," Park said, and made a note. "Ms. Fitzgerald."

Sloane’s chin lifted. Through the bond I felt the effort it took her to keep her voice level, to be the girl who’d witnessed something instead of the girl who’d nearly lost everything. "Director."

"You were in the plaza at the conclusion of the event."

"I was."

"You saw Mr. Belmont take direct exposure to the hostile Aspect described as black fire."

The bond spiked, hot and fast, and I pressed my knee against Felicity’s under the table because I needed an anchor and Sloane was too far away. Sloane’s jaw worked once. She held. "Yes. He put himself between me and it. I saw him do it."

"And what did you observe about his physical state at that moment?"

"He was already hurt." Her voice cracked, just slightly, on the last word, and I watched Park clock the crack and file it as grief because grief was allowed. "Separated shoulder. He could barely stand. And he stood anyway."

Diane had told her not to editorialize. That last line was editorializing. But it was the good kind, the kind that read as a girl telling the truth about a boy she cared about instead of a witness being coached, and Diane didn’t flinch, which meant she’d decided it landed correctly. Park made another note.

"Thank you," Park said. "That aligns with the footage."

Then she turned to me, and the temperature of her attention changed. Everything before had been warmup. This was the part she’d flown nine hours for.

"Mr. Belmont. Your registration lists you as a Channeler, Class One. Force Manipulation variant. Effective range approximately fifteen feet. Weight threshold fifteen to twenty pounds." She recited it the way you’d recite something you’d read too many times to need the paper. "You manifested late, at seventeen, after nine years of negative diagnostics. Correct?"

"Correct."

"The footage from the breach shows you moving at speeds consistent with an A-rank mobility specialist. It shows electrical discharge across your entire body. It shows you wielding a white staff that appears on no equipment manifest filed with this academy." She still hadn’t opened the folio. "It shows you punching through a Legendary-classification crystalline barrier during a training exercise three weeks prior, an event witnessed by faculty and cataloged in Instructor Dravid’s assessment notes. None of this is consistent with a fifteen-foot Channeler with a twenty-pound ceiling."

I let the silence sit for a second. Diane had told me not to fill it. Frightened boys didn’t rush to explain. Frightened boys sat in the discomfort and let the adults draw the discomfort out of them.

"I don’t know how to explain most of that," I said, and pitched it lower than my usual register, rougher, closer to the thing I actually felt every time I woke up in a body that wasn’t originally mine. "I’ve been trying to figure it out since it happened."

Park’s eyes narrowed by a fraction. "You don’t know."

"I’ve had my Aspect for a few months. Before that I was Unmarked for nine years." I kept my hands still on the table, visible, the way I’d learned watching Diane’s clients learn it from her. "I got three negative scans between seven and fourteen. Then it just stopped working, so I stopped asking. And then this year something turned on."

"And you’re telling me you don’t understand what turned on."

"I’m telling you it hasn’t finished." I looked at her when I said it, held the eye contact the way Odette had trained me to hold it without knowing she was training me. "The telekinesis was first. That’s what I registered. And then in training, when things got hard, other stuff started showing up. Speed I couldn’t control. That electricity you saw. I didn’t ask for any of it and I can’t turn it on when I want to."

"Convenient."

"It’s not convenient." Something sharp slid into my voice before I could stop it, and I felt Diane go still beside me because that sharpness was exactly the thing she’d warned me about, the cocky edge Park was fishing for. I dialed it back, let the sharpness fold into something younger. "Sorry. It’s not convenient. It’s terrifying. I don’t know what my own body is going to do and the one time it did the thing you’re asking about was when a monster that put two instructors in the hospital was about to kill my classmate."

There it was. The story. Compound expression, progressive manifestation, a scared kid reaching for something he didn’t understand because the alternative was watching someone die. I’d delivered it clean, wrapped in enough genuine fear that the fear did most of the work.

Park studied me. I studied her back. The folio sat between us, six pages of whatever she’d assembled, and I knew with the specific clarity of my Intelligence stat that she was deciding whether to open it.

"Progressive Manifestation Syndrome," she said. "Category Seven."