Chapter 35 The Three-Question Rule

Learning the syntax of a riddle.

The lecture hall for Advanced Classical Literature was always too loud before the professor arrived, filled with the ambient, echoing clatter of laptop keys, rustling notebooks, and the casual, mindless chatter of over a hundred hundred students who had nothing to hide.

Caelith sat in her usual around the last row in the back, her fingers tightly interlaced around a paper cup of lukewarm tea. The knit scarf around her neck felt suffocatingly warm, she was tempted to take it off, but the handprint was yet to completely fade. Every time she swallowed, a sharp reminder of the grey mist radiated through her jaw. She had specifically sat at this row instead of her usual middle row or casual front rows, just to monitor Nadia.

Three rows ahead of her, sitting under the dim fluorescent lights of the middle tier, was Nadia.

From the back, Nadia looked entirely unremarkable. She wore a generic gray wool sweater, her dark hair pulled into a neat, low clip, her posture perfectly straight as she typed notes on a slim digital tablet. For months, Caelith had sat in this exact same room, looked at the exact same girl casually, completely blind to the fact that Nadia wasn’t just a fellow student, she was a shadow, a clinical asset tracking her ordinary movements under the guise of an academic schedule.

Caelith didn't hear a single word of the lecture.

She just watched the rhythm of Nadia’s shoulders. Every time Nadia turned a page or adjusted her posture, Caelith’s heart gave a small, irregular thud against her ribs. The paranoia was no longer a shapeless concept; it had a face, a seat assignment, and a class schedule.

When the bell finally rang, signaling the end of the two-hour block, the mass exodus of students began instantly. Caelith waited. She watched Nadia calmly pack her tablet into a leather satchel, stand up, and blend into the heavy stream of people moving toward the double doors.

Caelith stood up a second later, dropping her notebook into her bag without zipping it. She slid into the crowd, keeping four paces of separation, her eyes locked onto the gray wool sweater as they spilled out into the high-arched corridors of the arts faculty wing.

The chase didn't last long, but it felt entirely deliberate.

Nadia didn't head toward the main quad where the crowds were thickest. Instead, she turned down a narrow, quieter service hallway that led toward the old administrative block, a part of the building where the stone walls grew thicker and the student traffic thinned out almost completely. The echo of their boots against the linoleum became the only sound bridging the distance between them.

Nadia turned a sharp left corner into a dead-end recess near the old faculty mailboxes.

Caelith took a breath, rounded the corner instantly, her muscles tensed for a confrontation, only to find Nadia already standing perfectly still, her back against the frosted glass of an empty office door, her arms crossed over her satchel. She wasn't running. She was waiting.

"There’s no point," Nadia said. Her voice was level, entirely devoid of the frantic energy that usually filled the campus air. She looked at Caelith with a cold, clinical detachment that made the hairs on Caelith’s arms stand up. "If you want something, you should just ask."

Caelith stopped three feet away, her hands balling into fists inside her jacket pockets. The sheer audacity of Nadia’s composure made a sudden spike of heat flare behind her ribs. "You've been stalking me for months. You sit behind me in every seminar. Who gave you the right to track my life?"

"Why would I be doing that?," Nadia answered simply, her eyes tracking the slight tension in Caelith’s shoulders.

“Why are you in this school?”

“To study, obviously”. Caelith was getting a bit frustrated.

“Why literature?”

“This isn't getting anywhere. But, since you went through the trouble of following me down a service corridor, I assume you have actual questions."

Caelith stepped closer, her voice dropping into a fierce, raspy whisper. "Can you tell me about my powers? What is going on in my life right now? Who are the people who attacked us in the alley?"

Nadia didn't flinch. A small, almost imperceptible shadow of pity passed over her features before her face went entirely blank again. "I’m not the person that's supposed to answer that." She paused, her dark eyes drifting down to Caelith's hidden neck before returning to her face. "He gave you his contact, didn't he?"

Caelith’s mind flashed instantly to her phone. To the name My own Idris sitting in her digital ledger. A cold sweat broke out along her hairline. "Idris? You work for him?"

"I didn't say that," Nadia replied smoothly.

"Then why are you in this school?" Caelith demanded, her frustration boiling over into a raw, angry gesture. "Why are you taking classical literature if you're part of whatever corporate monolith is hunting me?"

Nadia blinked, her expression remaining perfectly serene. "Because I'm studying. I have an exam on Victorian syntax on Monday."

"Stop lying to me!" Caelith choked out, her voice cracking against the stone walls of the recess. "You're a shadow. You're a fake. Nothing about you is real."

"You need to learn to ask the right questions," Nadia said, her tone shifting slightly, becoming authoritative, like a proctor managing a strictly timed examination. She raised two fingers, her gaze locking onto Caelith's with an intensity that felt heavy, almost physical. "You have two questions left."

Caelith hesitated. The silence in the narrow corridor felt suffocating. Her brain raced through a hundred different inquiries—about the Ascendant Group, about the black vans, about the grey mist, but Nadia’s cold composure told her that generic answers would only yield generic walls. She looked at Nadia’s hands, at the steady, unbothered way she held her satchel.

"Do you..." Caelith began, her voice dropping into a quiet, tentative register. "Do you also have weird powers or something?"

Nadia stared at her for one long, unblinking moment.

"Yes," Nadia answered.

The word was small, but it hit Caelith like a physical blow to the chest. A sudden, dizzying wave of conflicting emotions rushed through her. For a split second, she didn't know if she was glad or relieved to find someone else in this massive, indifferent city who carried the same terrifying anomalies inside their blood. Was she really similar to her, she wondered? Was this girl, this clinical corporate asset, a reflection of the same light that pulsated beneath Caelith’s own skin?

"Really?" Caelith whispered, her defensive guard dropping slightly as she searched Nadia’s face for a sign of shared humanity.

"Yes," Nadia repeated.

And before Caelith could form her final question, Nadia turned on her heel, her gray wool sweater catching the dim light of the corridor as she walked briskly toward the main exit doors at the end of the hall.

"Wait!" Caelith called out, taking two rapid steps forward, her hand reaching into the empty air. "I wasn't finished yet…. And she's gone"

The heavy fire door clicked shut.

Caelith stood alone in the dim recess, the silence rushing back in to fill the space Nadia had left behind. Her chest was tight, her mind fractured by the brief, terrifying admission. You need to learn to ask the right questions. The words echoed quietly through her thoughts, repeating in the rhythm of her own frantic breathing.

______

Later that day, the sun had dropped below the university’s western boundary, leaving the campus wrapped in a crisp, autumn chill.

Caelith walked toward the campus bookstore, her boots dragging slightly against the pavement. Her head ached from the sheer weight of the secrets she was carrying, her throat still stinging beneath the wool scarf. She needed to lose herself in something mundane a textbook order, a routine syllabus check, anything that tasted like the normal life she was losing.

As she entered the warmth of the shop’s entryway, her eyes drifted toward the large cork bulletin board mounted beside the register. Usually, she wouldn't pay attention to the chaotic mess of flyers notices for cheap student housing, lost keys, and local band posters were just background noise to her.

But as she turned to leave, the title of one specific post caught her attention.

It was a clean, minimalist white flyer printed on heavy cardstock, looking entirely too professional compared to the neon paper around it. Caelith stopped, her eyes narrowing as she read the bold text at the top:

THE ARCHITECTURE OF AN INQUIRY: ASKING THE RIGHT QUESTIONS IN APPLIED METHODOLOGY.

A cross-disciplinary guest seminar hosted by the Department of Cognitive Science and Advanced Research.

Caelith felt a cold prickle of goosebumps break out across her arms. Right questions. A phrase similar to what Nadia had used in the corridor, printed clearly on a university notice board.

She leaned closer, reading the small text at the bottom. The seminar was scheduled for tomorrow afternoon in the secondary lecture hall of the science block, a part of the campus she had never had a reason to visit. It was completely outside her department. It was detached from her literature circles.

She pulled out her phone, noting the date, time, and room number with a slow, deliberate intensity.

"I'll check it out," she whispered to herself, her fingers tapping the screen as she saved the memo.

Maybe it was a coincidence. Maybe her mind was just desperately trying to find patterns in the noise because the alternative was going mad. But looking at the clean white flyer, she felt a strange, quiet resolve settle into her chest. Going to a random, crowded guest seminar outside her discipline felt like a way to take back control. Maybe it would bring a bit of normalcy back to her recent routine.

She turned and walked out into the cooling evening air completely forgetting what she had come to this part of the school to do in the first place.