“If you’re unsure how to act, watch someone who looks like they belong and do what they do.If you’re wearing the uniform, someone else is probably watching you.”— Aurelia Academy Peer Mentorship Guide
I stepped off the train onto the same platform that had echoed under my boots the first time, and the Aurelia Service Station looked the same as it had a week ago.
I checked the time.
Nine-twelve. The appointment with Dewi was at ten. The twins had asked me to come at nine, which gave them fifty minutes of whatever it was they had planned, and the only assurance I had received from either of them was Alice’s promise, in two consecutive messages, that there would be no fire involved.
That was a lower bar than I usually set for plans. But I had agreed.
The twins were sitting on a bench just past the gate. Both of them were in uniform. Both of them were watching the path, and both of them were on their feet by the time I was three meters away.
“DASH!”
Alice decided that the volume of physical greeting needed to scale with the importance of the day, and the volume was now extreme. Cecilia followed when Alice released me with a two-second hug.
“You’re here,” Alice announced.
“I’m here.”
“Too early, though. Did Dewi move you?”
“You moved me. You said to come at nine.”
“Right!” The grin returned. “I did. I forgot. I had a reason. Food first. We’re taking you to breakfast.”
I blinked. “I ate.”
“You ate at home. That doesn’t count.”
“It counted enough.”
“Dash!” Alice’s hands went to her hips. “You came to campus an hour early. You’re going to be psionically scanned at ten. That is a thing that takes energy. You are going to eat, and you are going to eat well, and you are going to eat for free, kind of.”
“Kind of.”
“How is breakfast ‘kind of free’?”
“The cafeteria runs on student credentials,” Cecilia said. “Aurelia students eat without charge as part of the tuition. Visitors require a sponsor and a meal voucher. We could get you a voucher, but the process involves the visitor affairs office, and—”
“And we are not going through visitor affairs again,” Alice said. “Ever.”
“Ever,” Cecilia agreed. “So instead, you’re going to come in as a student.”
I looked down at myself.
I was wearing the button-down from yesterday’s space trip, because Asti’s gift had survived the day without becoming a casualty and I’d liked the way it felt, plus a pair of dark trousers that did not, by any stretch of the imagination, look like part of an Aurelia uniform.
I shook my head. “I’m not a student. I look nothing like a student.”
“NO PROBLEM!” Alice’s grin widened, and she reached down behind the bench and produced a flat package wrapped in soft paper. “Already solved that!”
“Alice.”
“I solved it.”
She pressed the package into my hands.
I looked at it.
I looked at her.
“You got me a uniform,” I said.
“I got you a uniform!”
“Why?”
“Because we are problem-solvers,” Cecilia said, stepping in as if Alice’s enthusiasm needed to be translated into something intelligible. “This is the second part of what we asked you to come early for. The first part is breakfast. The second part is walking around, like, for example, you will during the ball. The uniform handles that. Re-sizing enchantment, so it’ll fit regardless of your measurements. Today is the test run; if anything is wrong with it, we have time to fix it.”
I turned the package over in my hands. The paper was embossed with the Aurelia crest in pale gold. “Re-sizing enchantment,” I raised my eyebrows. “That’s expensive, no?”
“Standard for high-end uniforms. The fabric adjusts within a defined parameter range.”
“That’s actually really cool.”
“Right?” Alice was bouncing on her heels. “I knew you’d like that part.”
I looked at the package.
Then I looked back at the twins.
“Free food?” I asked.
“Free food,” Alice confirmed. “And we show you around. The cafeteria, the route from the service station, a couple of the corridors you’ll use. Everything you need to know to come in and out without anyone asking questions.”
“Okay. Where do I change?”
Alice pointed.
There was a public toilet block tucked discreetly behind a hedge fifty meters down the path, the entrance marked with the same understated stonework as everything else on campus, presumably designed by an architect who had been told that visible plumbing was beneath the school’s dignity. I let them lead me to it.
“We’ll wait outside,” Cecilia said.
“Don’t fall in,” Alice added.
“I’ll do my best.”
I picked a stall, set the package on the small folding shelf that someone had thought to install in a public restroom for exactly this kind of purpose, and unwrapped it.
The uniform unfolded in my hands.
Navy blazer with gold piping along the lapels, the same fitted cut I’d seen on Noran when he’d introduced himself to me in the waiting room last week. Matching trousers in dark fabric. A high-collared shirt in pale cream. A tie in the same navy as the blazer, with a subtle embroidered pattern that resolved, on closer inspection, into a repeating Aurelia crest. Polished shoes at the bottom of the package.
I put it on.
The re-sizing enchantment was as advertised. The blazer adjusted across my shoulders as I shrugged into it; the trousers settled at my waist with no need for a belt, and the shirt collar found the right tension without me having to fuss with it. The shoes fit before I’d finished tying them.
I checked the small mirror above the sink.
A young man in an Aurelia uniform looked back at me.
He looked, I had to admit, like he belonged. The cut of the blazer flattered the shoulders. The dark trousers gave the silhouette a clean line. The cream shirt caught the light in the way good fabric did, and the navy tie pulled the whole thing together into the visual language of a student who attended a school that cost eight figures a year.
It was deeply uncanny.
I bundled my own clothes into the package paper, folded the paper around them, and stepped out. Alice clapped once when she saw me. “OH that is preem.”
“It looks correct,” Cecilia said.
“I feel like I’m cosplaying.”
“Then commit to the cosplay,” Alice said, looping her arm through mine. “Walk like you own it. Confidence is ninety percent of the costume.”
“What’s the other ten?” I said as I tried to look confident. I vaguely recalled a lesson on how to walk, but I was not really paying attention back then and my tutor Eldon was frustrated with me.
“The shoes.” She pointed at my feet. “And those are perfect, so we’re at a hundred.”
She steered me down the path.
We walked into a section of campus I hadn’t seen on my first visit. Cecilia took point now, leading us along a route that branched off the main avenue and into a quieter stretch between two of the pale stone buildings. The path here was narrower, the foot traffic thinner. A handful of actual students passed us in the opposite direction, and not one of them gave me a second look.
It worked.
The disguise actually worked.
Cecilia turned us into a long colonnade, open on one side to a manicured courtyard, closed on the other by a row of wood-paneled doors marked with brass plaques.
She stopped at the midpoint and turned, gesturing down the corridor in the opposite direction we’d come from.
“That way,” she said quietly. “If you go all the way to the end, there’s a stairwell. The stairwell goes down two levels and it lead, uh, somewhere, where you can... do your mission.”
I looked down the colonnade.
It stretched maybe sixty meters before bending around a corner. The stairwell would be past the bend, presumably, at the corridor’s terminus.
“Why aren’t we going there now?”
“We can’t,” Cecilia said. “Silly Dash. Just remember the route. End of this colonnade, around the bend, stairwell on the right.”
“End of this colonnade. Around the bend. Stairwell on the right.”
“Good.”
Cecilia turned us out of the colonnade and back into the main avenue, and from there she navigated us through a curved walkway between two of the larger buildings, across a plaza I hadn’t seen before, and to a set of double doors set into a carved stone arch that announced itself, in pale gold relief, as AURELIA ACADEMY DINING HALL — EAST.
She pushed through.
I stopped two steps in.
The cafeteria was not a cafeteria.
I had been in cafeterias. The Traninum South cafeteria was a cafeteria, with its molded plastic trays and its tiled floors and its specific institutional smell that suggested the food and the mop water were stored too close to each other. Even the corporate cafeteria at Mom’s office was, by any reasonable definition, a cafeteria.
This was a restaurant.
Vaulted ceiling, exposed wooden beams, hanging brass light fixtures that diffused warm golden light across a room the size of a small ballroom. Tables scattered across the floor in irregular clusters rather than the rigid rows I’d expected, each one dressed in white linen, the surfaces actual wood beneath.
The floor was the same patterned stone as the campus walkways. A discreet host stand stood near the entrance, staffed by a woman in Aurelia administrative uniform, and beyond it I could see waiters moving between tables.
Cecilia chose a table near a window, away from the larger clusters, and the three of us settled into chairs that were, I now noted, unmistakably real chairs. Solid construction.
I ran a hand along the armrest.
“These,” I said, “are not NullSit chairs.”
Alice frowned. “What?”
“Dash,” Cecilia said carefully. “Is that supposed to mean something?”
“Haha, complicated joke.”
“Fair,” Alice said.
The two of them accepted it, they probably had their own inscrutable jokes, or maybe it was because a server appeared at the table.
He was perhaps my age, in a uniform that was the staff variant of the Aurelia aesthetic, a fitted black vest over a cream shirt, no blazer. He set down three small embedded panels in front of us, one each, and the panels lit up with a menu.
“Good morning. Take your time.”
He stepped back.
I stared at the menu.
Even the menu was elegant, the dishes laid out with brief descriptions underneath, a single photograph for each. Alice tapped her panel three times in quick succession and pushed it away from her.
“Done.”
Cecilia took longer, scrolling back through twice, and made her selection with visible reluctan.
I scrolled.
“What’s good?”
“Everything’s good,” Alice said. “But if you want simple, get the eggs Florentine. Poached eggs, spinach, hollandaise, sourdough. Comfort food, but they make the hollandaise from scratch every morning.”
“I’ll have that.”
I tapped it. The panel asked me to confirm. I confirmed.
The panel went dim.
Maybe ninety seconds later, the server returned with a tray.
He set Alice’s plate down first. A pastry, a small bowl of seasonal fruit, something with a poached egg balanced on top and a drizzle of bright green oil. Cecilia got a single piece of toast topped with sliced avocado and a soft-boiled egg, the kind of meal that looked simple and probably required twenty minutes of prep.
Mine arrived last.
Two perfectly poached eggs sat on a bed of wilted spinach over toasted sourdough, the hollandaise pooled around the base in an even layer. A sprig of something herbal lay across the top. A small silver pot of coffee, plus a glass of fresh juice that I had not ordered, accompanied the plate.
The first bite was extraordinary. The spinach perfectly seasoned, the sourdough still warm at the center, the hollandaise rich without being heavy, with a bright finish from lemon.
I closed my eyes for a second.
“Right?” Alice said.
“Yeah.”
“It’s the worst part of being on holiday from school. You miss the breakfast.”
“Alice misses the breakfast,” Cecilia corrected. “I miss the library.”
“Liar. You miss the breakfast.”
“I miss the breakfast… slightly.”
We ate.
For a few minutes we didn’t talk much, but then she leaned forward. “Okay. While you eat. Gossip.”
“Alice—”
“He needs context, Ceci. If he’s going to be around campus, he should know who the players are.”
“Fine. But the abridged version.”
Alice’s grin sharpened. “So. First. The Lin twins—different twins, not us—are in a feud with the Chen heiress because someone leaked that the Chen girl was using a charisma-enhancement plugin during last semester’s debate competitions, and the Lins published the leak under an anonymous handle, except it wasn’t actually anonymous because they signed it with a pun on their family name, so everyone knows it was them.”
“Why a pun?”
“Because the Lin twins are idiots. Lovable idiots. But idiots.”
“Documented idiots,” Cecilia said.
“Documented idiots. And the Chen heiress responded by buying out the entire Lin family’s allocation at the spring gala, so the Lins literally cannot attend, which is a huge deal because the spring gala is where you signal your alliances for the year, and now the Lin family looks like they were excluded for a reason, when the actual reason is the Chen girl spent forty thousand sols to spite them.”
“It is inflated, relative to the buying power of normal people,” Cecilia said, not looking up from her toast.
“Right. So. Second.” Alice held up two fingers, then forked a piece of pastry into her mouth. She chewed quickly. “There’s a hookup scandal in the third-year dorms. Someone got caught with a hidden recording of, uh, activities, and they were planning to sell it to a Trendloom, except the recording got leaked accidentally by the person doing the recording, and now everyone has seen the video and the person who took it has been expelled and is suing the Academy for confiscating their device, and the lawsuit will go nowhere but it’s the funniest legal case currently in motion at Aurelia.”
“That is not gossip,” Cecilia said. “That is a tragedy.”
“It is gossip with tragic elements.”
“It is a tragedy with gossip framing.”
“Same thing.”
“Different thing.”
I ate the last bite of my eggs.
I had cleaned the plate without consciously tracking the progress, which meant the food had been even better than I’d given it credit for. The juice was fresh and acidic in a way that cut through the richness of the hollandaise.
I sat back in the not-NullSit chair, full and warm, and looked at the two girls across the table who had gone to elaborate lengths to make sure I would eat well before being psionically scanned.
“Thank you,” I said.
Alice waved a hand. “Free.”
“Not just for the food. You are… great friends. And you plan better than I can.”
“That’s because you are a tinkerer,” Cecilia said calmly, “and not a strategist. Different skill sets.”
“You’re a strategist.”
“I am a strategist.”
“And Alice?”
“I am the chaos,” Alice agreed proudly.
The server returned to clear the plates, and Alice glanced at her holoband. “Okay,” she said. “Time to see Dewi.”
—
The walk to the psionic annex took about six minutes by Cecilia’s count.
I tried to memorize the route as we went, because being able to find this building unaccompanied seemed like a useful skill for a man who might one day be on this campus without his minders, but the buildings on Aurelia had a habit of looking like other buildings on Aurelia, and by the third turn I had stopped trying.
The waiting room was the same one I’d left the previous week. The empty chairs gave the room a stillness the cafeteria had been working very hard not to have.
Alice grabbed both my shoulders.
“Good luck,” she said, as if she was sending me to a war. “You’ve got this. Dewi’s the best. Whatever it is, just say yes.”
“Alice,” Cecilia said.
“Within reason. Say yes within reason.”
She hugged me—the full-contact version, both arms, a squeeze that compressed my ribs and ended with a quick double-pat on my back as if she were closing a deal. Cecilia stepped in after, her chin near my shoulder for one second, and when she pulled back, she didn’t say anything.
The door across the waiting room opened on its own quiet hinge.
Dewi was standing there. “Dash.”
“Miss Dewi.”
Dewi gestured at the daybed with one hand. “Sit, please. Not lie. We’re not there yet.”
I sat on the edge.
She took her chair across from me, crossed one leg over the other, and rested the same cloth-bound notebook on her knee. The mug from the shelf had migrated to a small side table near her chair, and a thin curl of steam was rising from it. She had been having tea while she waited for me. The detail was so small and so domestic that I almost forgot, for a second, why I was here.
She looked at me over the notebook. “Did you have time to go through the options?”
I let the smirk happen before I could decide whether to. “They are not options.”
Dewi’s smile wanted to surface, and she pushed it back down with what I suspected was muscle memory honed across many patients who tried to charm their way out of clinical conversations, and her face resettled into a neutral that wasn’t entirely convincing.
“I was being professional, Dash.” I shifted on the edge of the bed, which was easier said than done because the daybed was upholstered to a standard that resisted shifting, and I started counting on my fingers.
“First one. Instant operation. Single session. Soul-excoriation to separate the anchor, full extraction in the same procedure. Advantage: it’s done. Disadvantage...” I paused. “I’m not going to recite the disadvantages back at you, Miss Dewi, that would be rude. The report did the work.”
“It is genuinely an option.”
“It is genuinely an option for someone who has annoyed Aurelia personally and wants to atone through suffering.”
She giggled, then she caught herself, pressing her thumb against her lip as if that would catch it on the way out. It didn’t. “It’s not that bad.”
“Miss Dewi. The report used the word ‘excoriation’ four times.”
“It’s the technical term.”
“It’s the technical term because it is that bad.”
“All right.” The laugh finished itself. “It is, in fact, that bad. The technical term is accurate. The aftercare involves psionic counseling for at least three months, and the description of the procedure itself was, perhaps, written more diplomatically than the procedure deserves.” Her eyes settled. “I include it because patients have chosen it before, when their circumstances required something instant. I will not pretend it doesn’t exist.”
I tipped two fingers up similarly to Alice earlier. “Visit Aurelia once a month. Sit in a chair. Receive six shots from machines that I assume have been blessed by every relevant authority. Feel nothing during the procedure, feel nothing after. Six months. I walk out at the end as if nothing had happened to me.”
“Approximately, yes.”
“And the disadvantage is that during those six months, the anchor is still attached. Still draining. Still in me. Slow path, fully painless, very long.”
I held up a third finger.
“The middle one. Four visits, spaced a week apart. You cast a spell on me. Each cast nudges the anchor a little further outward, and the fourth cast finishes it off entirely. A month, give or take. It’s the only one that’s actually shaped like a—”
I stopped.
A thought had walked up to me without knocking, set itself on the table between us, and waited politely to be acknowledged.
I would be on Aurelia campus. Four times. With clearance, with a medical record, with a reason that would survive any background check the school’s security cared to throw at it.
The Twins had asked me to break in for them. They had found me a route through a colonnade and a stairwell and a corridor that ended at a server room, and we had agreed that the ball would be the cover, the night with the music and the dancing and the security team thinned out and reassigned to perimeter duty.
We didn’t need the ball.
We didn’t need anything. I would already be inside. Once a week. With every door that mattered already opening for me, because I was a patient now.
“Dash?” I blinked. Dewi was looking at me with curiosity.
“Sorry.”
“Where did you go?”
“I had an idea about a separate problem.”
“Mm.”
“It’s not relevant.”
“Mm.”
“It really isn’t.”
Her eyes said she did not believe me and was choosing not to press, and I appreciated the second part of that more than the first. “So,” I said, recovering. “Four spells, four weeks, and then we’re done. A month. Each cast nudges the anchor further out, and the fourth one finishes it.”
“Approximately, yes. The fourth cast is technically the removal; the first three are preparation, separating layers of contact between the anchor and the outer soul. Without that preparation, removal in a single session is what option one is, and we have already established what option one is.”
“Three months of crying.”
“Approximately, yes.”
I let out a breath. “So the only actual option is the middle one. Do I need to go into the...” I waved a hand. “The thing. The soul-rest thing.”
“Not for this.”
I felt my shoulders drop half an inch; I hadn’t known they’d been holding.
“For the spell to land properly,” Dewi continued, “I need you conscious. I need your soul reaching the way it normally reaches. Soul-rest stills the surface—that’s why it works for diagnostics—but for treatment we want the surface active. So you stay awake. You hear everything. You feel everything. And you participate, in a small way, by not panicking.”
“I can not-panic professionally.”
“I have noticed.” She set the notebook on the side table next to her mug. The notebook went down with the soft thump of paper meeting wood. “Shall we begin?”
I looked at her.
“Now?”
“Well,” she tilted her head. “When else?”
“I mean—I thought—I assumed there’d be like—like a scheduling thing. A separate appointment. A consent form printed in a font designed by lawyers.”
“The consent for the procedure itself is verbal, the same as last time. We can do it now. I have the room, you have the morning, and I would rather not send you home with this still attached for another week if we don’t have to.”
I gulped. The sound of it was loud in the warm amber room, and I had no dignity available with which to disguise it. “What does it feel like?”
Dewi’s voice softened. “A prickling, at first. Across the surface where the anchor is. Not painful. Strange, but not painful. The cast itself takes about ninety seconds. Afterwards you’ll feel as if you ran the perimeter of campus without warming up first. Sore, tired in the soul, a little hollow in the chest. That part lasts a few days. It will pass.”
“Only a few days?”
“A few days. By next week’s session you will feel normal again, and a little stronger than normal. Your soul will be doing some of the repair work in the background while you sleep.”
“That’s...” I couldn’t find the word. “Convenient.”
“It is how she designed the work.”
I didn’t ask which she and let out another breath. The lamp threw its amber across the rug and the daybed and the side table where the mug was still steaming in the small honest way that mugs steam when you have remembered to drink them, and Dewi was waiting, not impatiently, with her hands folded in her lap and her eyes calm.
“Go ahead,” I said.
She rose from her chair and crossed the small space to the head of the bed, and she placed her hand on my chest the way she had the week before, palm flat over the sternum, fingers warm through the fabric of the borrowed Aurelia shirt.
Her hand began to glow.
A soft white light bloomed beneath her palm, and it spread along her fingers and then deeper, into the place where… my soul lived.
“Everything will be fine.”