Shattered Innocence: Transmigrated Into a Novel as an Extra

Chapter 1249: The Observation

“Lucavion. Stay.”

Two words, delivered to the plate.

During his life on Earth, those words had belonged to a very specific genre of dread. A teacher said them as the bell rang, the room emptied around the one student named, and nobody in recorded history had been kept behind to be congratulated.

He did not rise. His hands stayed flat on the bench, where they had been all lesson, and he spent the time she had given him on her face instead. She still had not looked up. The window light caught her in profile: jaw level, lashes lowered over the cleared plate, the mouth held at a neutral so flat it had to be deliberate. Selenne did not do anything with her face by accident, so when she did, it was worth reading. A point of violet flickered at one fingertip and went out.

“That is an interesting expression,” he murmured.

He pitched it for himself, and the station beside him got none of it. The order, though, had carried to every corner of the room. Chairs that had been scraping stopped scraping. Pens that had been capped took a surprisingly long time to find their cases.

Lucavion minded the audience less than the audience seemed to expect. Being stared at was an old condition of his, and a room of students with notebooks was a gentler crowd than most. A girl in the front row winced on his behalf, small and quick. Two stations over, a boy gave him the short, tight nod people give someone about to be told off. Beneath the pity sat a second look, which asked what he had done and had already settled on the answer.

‘Detention. Some things travel between worlds.’

They had it wrong, he suspected. He had no better version to give them.

Whatever he had done, he could guess at the candidates. He had left his trace crooked and kept his hands off it, on her own advice, and if obedience was an offense, he wanted to see the statute. Thalor was not even enrolled in the course and had been handed a plate anyway; Lucavion had not arranged that, and if he had, he would have charged admission. Then there was the paperwork Elias had filed in his name, which Selenne’s rivals would gladly carry to her door.

Behind him, a chair leg scraped and was hastily apologized to.

None of it explained why she was late.

‘Late. Selenne. Someone should write that down.’

Selenne was never late. The novel had given her only a handful of scenes before the midterms, but she had been on time to every one, the kind of woman who arrived before the room did. Today she had skipped the small remark about wrists or breath that the room had learned to expect, and if this was anger, it was the quiet kind, and quiet was worse. A loud Selenne he could have argued with. This one he would have to stand in front of.

‘If it’s me, I can fix it. If it isn’t…’

Just then, as the two first-years at the back were still closing the same notebook, Selenne looked up.

Looking across the room, past Thalor drifting toward the door and the students who had suddenly found a great deal of packing to do, she stopped at the slate beside the entrance, where the room’s afternoon hours were chalked in a tidy column. The corner of her mouth tightened. It was the first expression all afternoon that she hadn’t planned, and she put it away quickly.

She had meant to do this here, he realized, and she hadn’t counted how long a room takes to empty when it wants to stay. The room was spoken for after the bell.

“It seems this room takes some time to empty,” Selenne said, to no one in particular, and the notebook in the back row closed for the last time.

Then she looked at him and lifted her case from the plate.

“Lucavion. Follow me.”

She was already crossing toward the door, her cloak a half-step behind. Lucavion stood and took his bag. Around him, the packing sped up considerably, since there was a departure to watch.

The corridor was quieter than the classroom, which gave her boots more to say than she did.

Lucavion kept a step behind her shoulder. “Should I be asking who wronged you, or who I’m about to?”

“Why do you think I’m angry?” She didn’t turn her head.

“It’s on your face.”

“It isn’t.” She said it to the corridor. “If you’re this sure, you must be carrying something you expect would anger me.”

Lucavion laughed, low, and corrected nothing.

‘Well, she isn’t completely wrong.’

Her face had only confirmed it. The real reason was the [Flame of Equinox], which read her vitality the way another man might read a flag. It ran hot and tightly wound, anger on a short leash, and it left the target blank.

Two turns and a staircase later, Selenne stopped at the last door in the corridor and laid her palm on the lock. It opened for her.

Closing the door behind them, Selenne crossed to the far side of her desk and took her place there. The office was small and cleared to the grain: a desk with nothing on it that was not in use, a visitor’s chair left empty, a shelf of crystal cases labeled in handwriting too tidy to be anyone else’s, and a single window behind her that put the afternoon over her shoulder and onto the desk. She did not offer him a seat, and he did not ask for one, though he did not notice that he had stopped a pace nearer the door than the desk.

She looked at him. That was all she did.

A glare, Lucavion decided, was a lecture with the sound off. He had been graded in this Academy before, but never by stare alone.

“What?” he asked, bluntly.

The stare continued. Selenne’s face gave nothing, and the quiet stretched until the window light seemed to have crept a full pane across her desk.

“Magister…” He coughed into his fist. “Ahem. I’m afraid that if you keep glaring at me like that, I’ll get a hole in my head soon.”

The [Flame of Equinox] caught the change before her face did. The heat in her vitality, wound tight since the classroom, loosened a turn, then another, until the anger was folded away and put somewhere out of his reach. She had finished sorting whatever she had been sorting.

‘Well, there goes my fun.’

“Your written observation,” Selenne said, in the voice she used for lectures. “The one from the Flow Control course.”

‘Right…. The assignment.’

Of course he had it. Her sponsorship was the reason he sat in Magicians’ classes at all, and he did not intend to repay it with a late page. Homework was the cheapest thing in the world to get right, and he had gotten it right in mostly plain sentences, with one word of his own in it that he hadn’t found a way around.

He had found the habit in the most ordinary place, which was conversation. Just before he decided what to say or do, his mana went still and drew slightly inward. The movement came first, and the decision followed. This time he had recorded the movement before correcting it. One entry was imperfect, the correction arriving ahead of the record, and he had left it in as it happened.

He was quietly pleased with the pages, and wary of being pleased, which was a great deal of feeling to carry around over a few sheets of paper.

Lucavion took them from his bag and laid them on her desk.

Selenne drew the pages across the desk and read them from the first line to the last, her thumb resting against the margin.

Lucavion watched her, since there was nothing else to watch. The heat in her vitality had gone small and steady, a lamp where there had been a fuse. At the second page it dipped. She had reached the imperfect entry, and she stayed on it longer than on any other line.

He did not fidget. Waiting on a grade was the one exam he had never found a way to study for.

She turned the last page over, squared the stack against the desk, and raised her eyes to his. Violet and level, and the heat in her had gone level too, which told him nothing about what came next.

“This is…”