Chapter 6 6

Sofia

By the end of the first week I had established the following as facts, which I put in the back of my theory notebook in a list because writing things down is how I process them and I was processing quite a lot:

One. The churros at Window Two were consistently the best. Window One had better coffee but inferior churros, and Window Three had mediocre everything but no queue, which was a different kind of value proposition depending on how much time you had.

Two. Professor Garza moved through Heritage Studies material at a rate that required pre-reading, which I had discovered on day four when she referenced a framework she had not introduced yet and three-quarters of the room already had notes on it. I had added pre-reading to my evening schedule and caught up by day seven.

Three. The lower training facilities in Block D's ability development programme were exactly as Paco had described, older equipment and junior instructors, but the junior instructor assigned to my Omega-blood ability development session, a young woman named Professor Salas who was visibly annoyed about her assignment and redirecting that annoyance into being aggressively helpful, was actually excellent. I had not expected that. I filed it as a positive data point for reasons I was not sure of yet.

Four. My wolf did not settle.

This was the one I was thinking about when Val knocked on my dormitory room door on Saturday morning and came in without waiting for a response, which was her established operating procedure by now, carrying two takeaway cups of the good coffee from Window One and wearing the expression of someone who had been thinking about something and was ready to have a conversation about it.

"Your wolf hasn't settled," she said, sitting on the end of my bed and handing me a coffee.

"Good morning," I said.

"It's nine-fifteen," she said. "How long have you been awake?"

"Since six-thirty," I said.

"Thinking about?"

"Several things," I said. "You didn't get the coffee for no reason. What do you want to talk about?"

She wrapped both hands around her cup and looked at me with the direct quality she brought to things that she had decided deserved directness. "Your wolf has been sitting elevated since day one," she said. "I can feel it. Beta-blood perception reads emotional and physical frequency shifts in wolves in proximity, and yours has been running higher than standard Omega-blood expression since the moment you walked through the gate. And before you tell me it's adjusting to the altitude, you've been here nine days."

"I know," I said.

"What's it doing?" she said. "Not the theoretical answer. What does it actually feel like, from the inside?"

I thought about how to answer this honestly. "It feels like it woke up," I said. "Since I got here. Like something that had been very quiet and very flat for a long time has started paying attention. To the campus energy, to the pack frequency, to." I stopped.

"To?" she said.

"To a direction," I said.

She was quiet for a moment. "A direction," she repeated.

"I know what it sounds like," I said.

"What does it sound like?" she said.

"It sounds like my wolf is responding to a dominant wolf's presence," I said. "Which is a documented response pattern in suppressed Omega-blood expressions when they're in proximity to high Alpha-blood frequency. It's in the Heritage Studies reading from week one."

"The documented response pattern is a mild heightening of awareness," Val said, with the precision of someone who had also done the reading. "Not a directional navigation pull."

I drank my coffee and did not immediately respond.

"Sofia," she said.

"I know," I said.

"When did it start?" she said. "The directional part."

"Day one," I said. "The courtyard. When he stopped the fight."

Val put her cup down on my desk very carefully. "Okay," she said.

"I'm not saying it means anything," I said.

"I'm not saying that either," she said.

"I'm saying my wolf is doing something and I don't have enough information about my own ability to know whether it's a standard response to proximity or something else," I said. "And the right thing to do is get more information."

"Right," she said. "And how do you get more information?"

"The Heritage Studies restricted archive has documented historical cases of unusual Omega-blood ability presentations," I said. "Including several cases of elevated wolf response in proximity to specific individuals. I need access to that section."

"You're a first-year Omega-blood student," she said. "The restricted section is third-year and above, minimum Beta-blood classification."

"I know," I said.

"Paco knows the building," she said, after a pause.

"I was going to ask him," I said.

"Not yet," she said. "First get through the second week of classes and establish a normal pattern. You've been here nine days and you've already had a staircase conversation, a twelve-minute methodology discussion, and an UNCLASSIFIED ability readout. If you start trying to access restricted archives in week two, it will draw attention that you can't afford yet."

I looked at her. "You sound like you've thought about this."

"I think about everything," she said. "It's the Beta-Class-Three perception ability. I'm aware of things before I've consciously processed them. It's occasionally inconvenient." She picked up her coffee again. "Second week first. Let the patterns establish. Then we talk to Paco."

"Okay," I said.

"Okay," she said. She looked at me for a moment. "Are you scared?"

I thought about that honestly. "Not of the wolf stuff," I said. "Not of. Whatever is happening with my ability. That part I think is. It feels like mine, even if I don't understand it. What I'm scared of is that someone else has already figured out what it is before I have, and they're ahead of me in ways I can't see yet."

She was quiet.

"That probably sounds paranoid," I said.

"No," she said. "It sounds like someone who has been paying attention." She stood up. "Come on. The dining hall is open for late breakfast and Paco said he found a reference in the second-tier library to historical cases of UNCLASSIFIED ability readings and he wants to show it to us."

"He found it already?" I said, getting up.

"He went to the library at seven this morning," she said. "He makes maps and he reads at seven in the morning. This is who he is."

"I love that about him," I said.

"Me too," she said, and held the door.

The reference Paco had found was in a Heritage Studies supplementary text, not the restricted archive, just the general second-tier library, in a volume on the history of wolf ability classification in Spain from the pre-Academy period. He had it open on the library table when Val and I arrived, with three pages of notes beside it in his precise handwriting.

"There were eleven documented UNCLASSIFIED ability readings in the recorded history of Spanish wolf assessment," he said, without preamble, moving his notes so we could see the reference. "Three of them were eventually classified as rare expression types that the existing system didn't have vocabulary for at the time. Four of them remained genuinely unclassified and the wolves in question left the pack record after a certain point."

"Left how?" Val said.

"The text doesn't say," he said. "Left is the word used. Left the pack record. Which could mean emigrated, or could mean something else."

"And the other four?" I asked.

"Reclassified after secondary assessment," he said. "At the Academy, specifically. Three of the four had their UNCLASSIFIED status resolved during Heritage Studies independent study, which is a programme where a student works one-on-one with a faculty member on their specific ability profile." He turned the page. "The faculty member who ran those three cases is cited by name. Esteban Mora."

The library was quiet on a Saturday morning, just the three of us and the distant sound of wind on the high windows.

"Mora's still here," I said.

"He's the Heritage Studies head," Paco said.

"He hasn't approached me," I said.

"You've been here nine days," he said.

"He will," Val said. "If he runs independent assessment for unusual classifications and you're the most unusual classification in nine days, he will."

Something in my chest settled in a way that was not comfortable. Not fear. Something more like the specific alertness that Abuela Carmen called the body knowing something before the mind does.

"When he does," I said carefully, "tell me what you both know about him before I agree to anything."

Paco looked at me across his notes. "You want us to research him."

"I want to know who he is before he tells me who he is," I said. "Which is different."

Val and Paco looked at each other with the brief eye contact of people who have communicated something complete in two seconds.

"We'll start Monday," Val said.

"Thank you," I said.

My wolf, which had been doing its directional thing all morning with the quiet persistence of something that had decided this was its default setting now, was still doing it when I left the library and walked back down toward Block D through the mountain afternoon, and I let it, because fighting it had not made it stop and understanding it had not made it legible, and the only thing left was to gather information until the picture clarified itself.

Abuela Carmen had a saying about patience and pictures, something from the archive years about documents that looked incomplete until you found the piece that made the rest of it readable, and you had to hold the incomplete picture without deciding what it was until the piece arrived.

I was holding the picture.

I was going to hold it until I could read it, and not before.