Chapter 591 | Efficient Manipulation

Chapter 591: 591 | Efficient Manipulation

The Student Services wing smelled like someone had painted over the entire past month and hoped nobody would notice the fumes. Fresh latex, industrial carpet cleaner, and the particular staleness of a room that had been sealed and reopened too many times in three weeks. I sat in a plastic chair that had been designed by someone who hated the human spine and held a sealed envelope with my name printed on the front in a font that suggested bureaucratic finality.

BELMONT, LUKAS. Class 1-B. Provisional Community Service Contract.

The envelope felt heavier than paper had any right to feel, which was probably psychological, and I made a note to examine that later when I had fewer women within fifty meters reading my heart rate.

Nineteen other first-years lined the row of chairs and the two rows behind me, each holding an identical envelope, each pretending they weren’t pretending to be calm. Sloane sat two seats down with her knee going like a piston, her pink hair pulled into the ponytail she wore when she wanted her hands free for something violent. Through the bond she read as a coiled spring that had already decided which direction it planned to snap.

Percy occupied the seat to my left with the informational packet open across his knees, reading it for the third time and annotating the margins in tight blue ink. His pen moved down a paragraph about supervisory reporting protocols, paused, and made a small notation that I could not read from this angle but that I trusted was correct about something the rest of us had missed.

"You’ve read that twice already," I said.

"Three times." He did not look up. "The second reading identified an inconsistency between the described evaluation timeline and the winter assessment calendar. The third reading is to determine whether the inconsistency is intentional or a formatting error."

"And?"

"Intentional." He underlined something. "They want us to feel like the placement matters more than it technically does, so we treat it with the appropriate seriousness. It’s manipulation, but it’s the kind that works on people who are already trying, which is everyone in this room, so it’s efficient manipulation." He caught himself using a word I’d heard him use a dozen times and did not apologize for it, because Percy did not apologize for accuracy.

Felicity sat across the aisle in a cropped white sweater and dark jeans that had opinions about her legs, and she had checked her phone four times since I sat down. Her blonde hair fell loose over one shoulder, and every time the screen lit her face she read it, made a face, and put it away, which meant she was texting someone who was not answering fast enough and it was driving her quietly insane. She caught me watching, mouthed bestie, and went back to her phone.

Camille leaned against the far wall because she refused to sit in the plastic chairs, her arms folded, her two-tone hair loose around a face that had decided the entire process was beneath her patience. She wasn’t holding her envelope. She’d put it in her back pocket like she already knew and had simply come to watch the rest of us find out.

Imara Steele came through the door at ten fifteen precisely, and the room stopped pretending to breathe.

She wore her gold jacket and carried a stack of envelopes I already had a copy of, which meant the distribution was ceremonial rather than logistical, which meant Steele wanted to watch our faces when we opened them. Her right arm still moved a fraction slower than the left. She’d stopped covering the burn, and the black tree of scar tissue ran from her wrist up under the sleeve, and she’d made a decision about that scar that I recognized because I’d made the same one about the marks on my own back. You either hide the thing that almost killed you or you let people look. Steele had chosen to let them look.

"Provisional Community Service Contracts," she said, and her pink eyes swept the row. "Distributed alphabetically. When I call your name, you come get your copy. You do not open it until everyone has theirs. If I catch you opening it early I will assume you cannot follow a simple instruction and I will file that observation, and it will follow you into your winter assessment. Questions before we start?"

Nobody had questions before we started. We had nineteen envelopes’ worth of questions and none of them were the kind you asked out loud.

"Ashida, Ren."

Ren rose and crossed to her and took his envelope and returned to his seat, and the whole thing had the energy of a funeral where everyone was still alive but not entirely sure for how long.

"Belmont, Lukas."

I stood.

The pause was small. Zero point seven seconds, maybe less, the gap between when she said my name and when she extended the envelope, and it was long enough for a hundred Intelligence to catch it and short enough that nobody else in the room would have registered anything. Her eyes found mine and held for that fraction, and there was something in them I didn’t have a clean name for. Not pity. Steele didn’t do pity. Closer to the look you give a man walking into a room you’ve already been in and didn’t enjoy.

I took the envelope. Her fingers didn’t release it for a half-beat after mine closed on it.

Then they did, and I went back to my chair, and the bond spiked with Sloane’s attention narrowing on the exchange because of course she’d caught it, because she caught everything about me now, because we were structurally welded together and she’d spent eleven days counting my breaths and had not gone back to trusting the universe.

The rest of the names went by. Holt, Caden. Hardy, Felicity. Kennedy, Maribelle. Lang, Petra. Mendoza, Percy. Ortega, Camille, who pushed off the wall, walked up, took the envelope she already had a copy of, and returned to her wall without acknowledging that the ceremony had touched her at all.

Steele finished at Whitfield, Zara, and stepped back to the front of the room, and the silence changed texture into the specific held-breath quiet of twenty teenagers waiting for permission.

"Open them."

Paper tore in a ragged wave across the room.

I slid a finger under the flap and pulled out a single sheet with the Halloran crest at the top and the IHL provisional stamp beneath it, and I read it once, and then I read it again because my brain wanted to be sure it hadn’t invented the words.

EASTSIDE PROVISIONAL CONTRACT. VERANO METRO DISTRICT 7. SUPERVISING HERO: DRALUN (RANK C). DURATION: EIGHT WEEKS. START DATE: MONDAY, NOVEMBER 18TH.

Eastside.

The word sat on the page in the same government font as everything else, indifferent to what it meant, and I felt something in the back of my skull go very quiet in the specific way it did when the transmigrant in me recognized a setup he couldn’t yet see the shape of.

Eastside. District 7. The part of Verano that didn’t make the tourism renders. Highest unresolved case rate in the city. Two Rank-C agencies split the coverage and were perpetually short-staffed. The Strand was eleven minutes away by highway and might as well have been on a different continent.

The part of the city where Marcus and Reina Belmont died on a Tuesday nine years ago.