Chapter Five: Special Candidate

Sandra was waiting on my bed when I got back to the room, sitting cross-legged with a mug of something that steamed purple, and she took one look at my face before I’d even shut the door.

“Okay,” she said. “Tell me everything, and don’t skip the part where Ronan Kade apparently carried you across a battlefield.”

“He didn’t carry me anywhere.”

“That’s not what I heard. Three different people already told me three different versions, and in one of them you punched the chimera.”

“I threw a rock at it.”

“See, that’s so much less impressive than the story that’s currently going around campus, and I need you to understand that as your roommate, it’s my sacred duty to make sure the better version survives.” She patted the space beside her. “Sit. Talk. Tell me what happened.”

I sat.

I told her most of it. The chimera, Ronan getting hurt, throwing the rock, but left out the part that mattered most, the crack in the stone that hadn’t come from anything either of us did. I told myself I wasn’t lying to her, exactly. I just wasn’t ready to say it out loud yet, because saying it out loud meant it might actually be true.

“And Dorian just left? After all that?”

“Said we’d talk soon. Then walked off like nothing happened.”

Sandra’s facial expression changed, there and gone fast enough that I almost missed it.

“What?” I asked.

“Nothing. Dorian’s just thorough. If she says ‘we’ll talk soon,’ she means it. She doesn’t forget things.” Sandra took a long sip of her purple drink, watching me over the rim of the mug in a way that felt sharper than the rest of the conversation had been. “You sure that’s everything? Nothing else weird happened out there?”

I thought about the crack in the stone, radiating out from underneath the chimera’s feet like something had reached up from beneath the courtyard and yanked the ground apart.

“Nothing else,” I said.

She didn’t push. But she also didn’t look like she believed me, and I got the feeling filing that away for later was something Sandra did as naturally as breathing.

The summons came the next morning, delivered by a first-year messenger who looked terrified just standing in our doorway.

“Professor Dorian wants to see you. Before first class.”

“Did she say why?”

“No. She just said to come alone.”

Sandra’s eyebrows went up at that, but she didn’t say anything until the messenger had gone, door shut behind him.

“Alone,” she repeated. “That’s not a good sign, you know. Professors who want to talk to students alone before classes even start usually aren’t handing out compliments.”

“Comforting. Thanks.”

“I’m serious, Mia. Whatever she wants, be careful what you tell her. Dorian’s kind, mostly, but kind doesn’t mean safe. Not up here.”

I didn’t have time to ask her what she meant by that. The messenger was still hovering outside, clearly under instructions not to leave without me, and I had a feeling showing up late to whatever this was would be its own kind of mistake.

Dorian’s office was smaller than I expected, tucked into a corner of the faculty wing with a window that looked out over the Arena instead of the clouds. Books covered every surface, some of them bound in materials I didn’t want to think too hard about, and a globe on her desk that showed a map I didn’t recognize, continents in shapes that didn’t match anything from home.

“Sit,” she said, not looking up from whatever she was writing.

I sat.

She finished her sentence, set down her pen, and folded her hands on the desk in front of her, studying me in a way that made me feel like I was being read instead of looked at.

“Do you know why you’re here, Ms. Callahan?”

“The chimera?”

“Partly.” She tilted her head slightly. “Tell me what happened. In your own words. Everything you remember.”

I gave her the same version I’d given Sandra. The fear, the rock, Ronan going down, the chimera turning on me. I left out the crack in the stone again, and this time I felt her notice the gap in the story, the way her eyes narrowed just slightly at the part where I skipped straight from the chimera lunging to the chimera falling.

“That’s all?” she asked, when I’d finished.

“That’s all.”

She studied me for a long moment, long enough that I had to fight the urge to fill the silence with something, anything, just to make it stop.

“You waived the physical trial,” she said finally. “Do you know why?”

“No. I was hoping you could tell me.”

“I don’t know either. Not yet.” She said it evenly, like it was simply a fact and not something strange at all, but I caught the way her fingers tightened slightly against the desk. “Your application flagged an anomaly during intake. The system waived your trial automatically, without any human, pardon the expression, input from staff. That doesn’t happen. Not ever, not in the history of this school.”

My stomach churned as I didn’t have a good feeling about this but I tried not to show it.

“What kind of anomaly?”

“I don’t know that either.” She leaned back in her chair, watching me carefully. “Which is precisely why I find it interesting that a crack opened in solid stone last night, in a pattern no natural fissure would take, at the exact moment a chimera was about to kill you.”

I opened my mouth to argue, to reach for one of those driftwood explanations I’d been clinging to since the courtyard, and she held up a hand before I could get a word out.

“I’m not accusing you of anything, Ms. Callahan. I’m telling you what I observed, because I think you deserve to know that I observed it, rather than pretending I didn’t.” Her voice softened, just slightly. “Whatever is happening to you, you’re not in trouble. Not with me. But I need you to be honest with me going forward, because I suspect you’re going to need someone in your corner who already knows the truth, rather than someone finding out the hard way.”

I sat there, throat tight, and for one dangerous second I almost believed her enough to say it out loud

“I think something’s wrong with me, I think something happened, I think I’m not as human as I thought I was.” I thought to myself.

I didn’t say it.

“I really don’t know what happened,” I said instead. “I wish I did.”

An expression surfaced on her face for a split second, disappointment, maybe, or patience wearing thin, but she nodded like she’d expected exactly that answer.

“Alright,” she said. “Then we’ll simply have to wait until you’re ready to trust me.”

She turned back to her papers, a clear dismissal, and I was almost at the door when she spoke again, quiet enough that I almost missed it.

“For what it’s worth, Ms. Callahan I don’t think you’re a lost cause. Whatever Mr. Kade may have told you.”

I turned around, but she was already writing again, not looking up, and I left her office with more questions than I’d walked in with and the distinct, uneasy feeling that I’d just made an enemy of my own silence.