Chapter 3 3

Sofia's pov

The first direct collision happened on day four.

I say collision because calling it an encounter implies more dignity on my part than the situation warrants, and I have committed to being honest about this from the beginning.

It happened in the north staircase at seven fifty-two in the morning, which is the staircase I had started using because Paco was right that it was faster, and which, I would learn later, was the same staircase that Alejandro Reyes used every morning because the Student Council offices were in the Apex Tower directly above and the north staircase connected the upper and lower tiers on the fastest line.

Nobody told me this.

This is the kind of information that is apparently so basic that everyone assumes everyone knows it, which is how I ended up coming around the second-floor landing corner at speed, because I was forty seconds from the start of my Heritage Studies class, carrying my notebook and my assessment portfolio and Abuela Carmen's thermos of coffee because the dining hall coffee was genuinely inferior.

Unfortunately for me, I ran directly into the person coming down the staircase from the opposite direction.

The portfolio sheets went everywhere.

Eleven pages of documented ability assessments, my personal notation file, and two forms that I had finally completed and needed to submit to the admin office before end of day, scattered across the landing in the specific chaotic way of papers that have been freed from a folder and have decided to express themselves individually.

I said something in Spanish that Abuela would have confiscated my phone for and crouched to gather the papers, and the person I had collided with also crouched, and we were at eye level across a scattered pile of ability assessments, and it was Alejandro Reyes.

I know this because I had by this point memorised the specific quality of his wolf's ambient frequency, the low settled pressure that other wolves organised themselves around, and it arrived in my awareness approximately a half-second before I looked up and confirmed it visually.

He was looking at the papers with the focused quality of someone assessing a situation. He picked up the two admin forms and the notation file before they could slide under the staircase railing and handed them across to me with the efficiency of someone who had done the useful thing without making a production of it.

"Thank you," I said, taking them.

He looked at me. Not the courtyard look, which had been from a distance. This was close, close enough that I could see the specific dark quality of his eyes and the expression in them, which was not what I expected.

It was not cold. It was not the dismissive door-closing quality. It was the expression of someone running an assessment and not yet at a conclusion.

"You're the Omega-blood scholarship student," he spoke.. gently.

"Sofia Vega," I responded almost immediately. "From Sevilla."

"I know," he said, which was interesting. And very much arrogant.

I gathered the rest of the papers with a speed I hoped read as composure rather than urgency and straightened.

He straightened at the same moment, which put us at standing height on the same landing with approximately the width of a notebook between us, and my wolf did the thing where it went from elevated to fully vertical in the space of a breath.

"You're Student Council head," I said, because I needed to say something and this was a fact I had.

"I am," his brows furrowed, without inflection.

"The north staircase connects to the Council offices,"

"It does," he replied after a pause.

"I'll use the south staircase in the mornings, I'm sorry I bumped" I swallowed my pride a little.

He looked at me for a moment. "The south staircase is longer."

"I uhh.. yeah, well..."

"The Heritage Studies block is on the third tier," he cut me off. "The north staircase is the more direct route from Block D."

I looked at him. "You know where I'm placed?"

"You're an unusual admission," he answered. "The Council was part of the housing committee discussion. Block D was the administrative decision." Something shifted in his expression, not much, but enough. "It was not my recommendation."

I did not know what to do with that and I did not have time to figure it out because I had thirty seconds to my class. "Okay then. Cheers. I'm going to be late," I said.

"The north staircase is faster," he said again, which was not a concession exactly but was something in that neighbourhood, and he stepped to the railing side to give me the center of the staircase.

I walked past him and up the stairs and did not look back and my wolf was vertical the entire way and I made it to Heritage Studies with nine seconds to spare and sat down and opened my notebook and wrote nothing intelligible for the first three minutes while I assembled myself back into a person with a functioning interior.

"You look like you ran, a marathon!" Val gasped, beside me.

"I did run," I eye rolled her dramatic stance.

"From something or toward something?" she asked.

"Toward class," I said. "Because I was late."

"And were you late because you were delayed or because you left late?"

"Delayed," I swallowed. "I ran into someone on the north staircase."

She waited.

"Alejandro Reyes,"

She was quiet for a moment. "Shit. What happened?"

"I dropped my portfolio," I paused to arrange my sentence properly. "I bumped into.. well, we bumped into each other. He helped pick my things up."

"He helped?" she gaped in awe.

"He handed me the admin forms before they fell through the railing," I tried to explain without issues. "And he told me Block D was not his housing recommendation."

Another silence. "That's. Interesting,"

"It's probably just a fact he mentioned,"

"Sure,"

"It doesn't mean anything," I stated, clearly.

"Of course not," she chuckled, in the tone she used when she meant something different, and then Professor Garza called the room to attention and we both turned to face the front.

I sat with the staircase landing for the rest of the session and tried to understand what, if anything, to make of a person who steps to the railing side of a staircase to give you the faster route.

The thing about the staircase incident was that it had lasted approximately three minutes, and in those three minutes the version of Alejandro Reyes I had assembled from the courtyard observation and the Wolf Law Theory class back row had been complicated by an addition I had not been expecting. I had been expecting cold.

I had been expecting the precise and pointed quality that I had seen him deploy in the class discussion. I had not been expecting someone who stepped aside on a staircase.

I told myself I was not going to think about it more than was analytically useful.

I thought about it for the rest of the morning.

At lunch, Paco listened to the staircase account with his full attention, which for Paco looked like eating his food without looking at it, and then said, "He told you Block D wasn't his recommendation."

"Yes,"

"He didn't have to tell you that," Paco deadpanned.

"No," I said

"People who want you to know where they stand say things they don't have to say," Paco said, and ate a spoonful of soup.

"Or people who feel guilty about a committee decision mention it as a disclosure," I said. "That's also a thing."

"Also a thing," Paco agreed. "Which one do you think it was?"

"I don't have enough data," I said.

"Then you should get more data," he said simply, and went back to his soup, and Val, who had been listening with the patience of someone waiting for the conversation to arrive at a point she could contribute to, said, "The combined ability theory session is tomorrow. All bloodline ranks together. He'll be there."

"That's not how I'm going to get data,"

"It's how you'll see him in a classroom setting," she said. "Which is different from a staircase. People are different in classrooms. You can learn a lot from how someone participates in a class discussion."

"She's right," Paco nodded..

"You can learn a lot from how someone participates in a class discussion," I repeated slowly. "That's very practical advice about a thing we are apparently all pretending is purely academic."

"It is purely academic," Val said, with enormous serenity. "I'm helping you understand the social architecture of the Academy by suggesting you observe how a prominent second-year student engages with integrated coursework." She picked up her fork. "Very educational."

"Right," I mused, as I ate my food, and my wolf sat at its elevated position and did not comment

~~~

Day five was the combined ability theory session.

The classroom was larger than the standard ones, built to accommodate the full first and second-year complement for integrated sessions, long and well-lit with windows on both sides and ability monitoring panels along the back wall that the faculty used during practical demonstrations.

Professor Ramos ran it, because Wolf Law Theory and Ability Theory overlapped at the practical level and he covered both.

I sat in the third row, center, which was where I always sat in theory classes because the sight-lines were good and the professors didn't overlook it. Val was to my left, Paco one row behind.

The second-year students filed in from the west door, which was the door that connected to the upper tier staircase, and they arranged themselves in the back rows with the settled practice of people who had done this every week for a full year. I did not look.

I was looking at my notes. I was very focused on my notes.

My notes were dated, titled, and had a small margin diagram of the discussion framework Ramos had circulated in advance.

My wolf told me the exact moment Alejandro walked through the door, before any visual confirmation, with the specific vertical-lift that it had been performing since day one and that I was beginning to suspect was not going to become less distinct with time.