Chapter 22: The Rumor Breaks Wrong

|HER POV|

Thursday morning the rumor broke in the wrong direction.

I found out from Saoirse at breakfast, who had found out from Petra, who had found out from a second-year whose name I didn't know but whose social intelligence was apparently excellent. The story circulating by eight AM was not the one the network had intended to run.

"Someone leaked the entrance assessment results," Saoirse said, sitting across from me with her coffee held in both hands, watching me carefully. "Not just yours. The full committee evaluation. Including the independent confirmation." She paused. "Your placement score is on record. It's — Lyss, it's genuinely first. Not arranged. Not close. First by a significant margin."

I looked at my coffee.

The documentation, he'd said last night. It's been confirmed. Filed as of eleven-forty tonight.

I had assumed he meant the channel documentation. The admission pathway. I had not assumed he meant the full committee evaluation made public.

"How did that get out," I said, not making it a question.

"No one knows," Saoirse said, watching my face with the attention of someone who absolutely knew and was choosing not to say it. "It appeared in the administrative public records portal this morning. Completely legitimate. Timestamped two weeks ago, which is — interesting, given that it was apparently just there and nobody noticed it until now."

Timestamped two weeks ago.

He'd been building this for two weeks. Before Cressida had even come to me.

I sat with that for a moment. The weight of it. The specific, complicated feeling of being protected by someone who had done it so far in advance that by the time the threat arrived the answer was already in place.

"You already knew," Saoirse said quietly.

"I knew it was being handled," I said honestly, turning the cup in my hands. "I didn't know how."

She was quiet for a moment. "The network's move is dead," she said. "You can't run a fraudulent scholarship narrative when the full assessment results are in public record and you placed first by twenty-two points." She looked at me steadily. "He didn't just fix it, Lyss. He buried it."

"I know," I said.

"How do you feel about that," she asked, and her voice was careful in the way it got when she was asking something real.

I thought about it honestly. About the scholarship letter on heavy paper. About I made sure the door was open. About last night — the knock on my door, the cup of tea, you skipped dinner said in the flat tone of someone who had checked the dining hall log at seven-thirty and come across the wet grounds at midnight because of it.

"I feel like it's mine," I said finally. "The place. The assessment. All of it." I looked at my coffee. "And I feel like someone has been making sure of that for a very long time without asking for anything in return."

Saoirse was quiet for a full four seconds, which was unprecedented.

"Two days," she said softly.

"Two days," I confirmed.

She picked up her coffee. Looked at the table. Then: "I'm glad you have him, Lyss. Whatever he is. Whatever this all turns out to be." She looked up at me with the specific direct warmth of someone saying a thing they mean without decorating it. "I'm glad."

I didn't answer. My throat was doing something I wasn't going to acknowledge in the dining hall.

I picked up my coffee instead and drank it.

I found him at the library table at noon, which was not his usual time — he worked evenings, not middays, which meant he was here because he'd calculated that I would check, which was the most Kae thing that had ever happened.

He looked up when I sat down across from him, setting his pen down carefully, and watched my face with the silver-grey attention that had been taking me apart since September.

"The assessment results," I said, keeping my voice even, looking at him directly. "You released them."

"I made sure they were properly filed," he said, his voice low and measured. He held my gaze without flinching. "The records existed. They were simply not accessible."

"You made them accessible two weeks ago," I said. "Before Cressida came to me."

A pause. He held my eyes. "Yes," he said.

"You built the answer before I knew there was a question," I said, and my voice came out quieter than I intended it to.

"Yes," he said again, watching me carefully, trying to read what I was going to do with it.

I looked at my hands on the table — ink on the second and third fingers, the worn cuff — and thought about twenty-two points. About a margin that no one could argue with. About a placement that was mine by any metric that mattered.

"Thank you," I said. It came out simply, without decoration, because that was the only way I knew how to mean things. "That's all."

Something shifted in his expression — the controlled surface doing something at its edges. He looked at me for a long moment, with the particular intensity of someone receiving something they hadn't expected to receive.

"Yes," he said, for the third time, but this time it meant something different.

I opened my notebook. He picked up his pen.

Two days.

~~~