“I wish I could talk to you.” Therese acknowledged the absurdity of this with a wave of her hand. “Directly. You know what I mean.”

Riley, as a beautiful young woman, sat cross-legged in the center of the suite’s common room. In this no-place, the furniture was gone, but the floor-spanning thick pile rug was still present, and Riley leaned back onto her arms, propped behind her in a tripod. “I know. Try not to blame us too much? We’re going to keep being an absolute asshole about this for a while, I think.”

Therese looked gloomy. “It’s been a month already, though.” She sighed. “I fucked up. I came on too strong about the girl thing. I should have… I don’t know. I should have been more understanding.”

“It wasn’t you. Or it wasn’t your fault, anyway. There wasn’t any gentler way to talk to us about gender that would have worked. We’ve been fragile and ready to shatter about this for years now. You were just the straw that — ugh, that’s a stupid metaphor. What’s a good metaphor for something breaking that doesn’t involve camels?”

They both sat in silence for a moment, though of the two, only Riley was actively trying to think of a better metaphor. Therese was still caught in the trap of her guilt.

“If it’s any consolation, we’re shutting everyone else out, too. Suliat is actively trying to reach out to us, and we’re pushing her away, and Himari and Eve are just kind of keeping their distance.”

Therese shook her head. “That doesn’t help at all, you know. It means I’m fucking up your cadre as well as you. How are you supposed to bond if you’re pushing them away?”

“How were we supposed to bond if we were pretending to be a boy? How tight was a bond built on an elaborate lie ever going to be, really?” Riley looked briefly concerned. “Don’t, by the way, don’t try that line on him. I already know what we’ll say, and it’s something like ‘I’m fucking everything up just by existing’, and that’s not going to lead anywhere good.”

Therese nodded mutely. The last thing she needed was to drive Riley further into self-loathing. He had enough of that for both of his selves already.

“Anyway, we’re learning this whole magic thing, at least. I think we’re not going to cause any more spontaneous mystical catastrophes. We’re learning control and how to consciously do the thing I’ve been doing unconsciously all along.” She waggled her fingers. “Though I wish there was more like, witchy stuff? And less of the math.”

“But you’re good at math.”

“Sure, but nobody’s dressing up as a sexy mathematician for Halloween, you know?” Riley’s mouth was curled into a secret smile.

Therese gaped.

“What? I’m allowed to have a secret fantasy, too!” She pushed off her hands and leaned forward, hugging herself. “God, I hate how close I feel to the surface of him, and how far away. I want to actualize so bad.”

“How do you know all this stuff, anyway? Like, how are you so… girl?”

Riley let her secret smile turn into a real smile. “We just are. We read everything we can get away with, at least without rousing suspicion. We sneak looks at fashion magazines and we read essays for teen girls about empowerment and beauty, and we follow a lot of girls anonymously on social media. Followed.” She frowned. “Shit, it’s been a month. I didn’t post a lot, but enough that… do people think I’m dead or something?”

Therese shrugged. “People disappear off social media all the time. Were you posting self-harm ideation?”

Riley shook her head. “Nah. Like I said, I didn’t post much at all. Yeah, probably I’m just another anon who vanished one day. Anyway. Back to your question.” She gnawed on her lip, thinking. “I guess I’m the person we wished we could be, so I’m the person who’s been soaking up all the misogyny that the world’s been bombarding us with. Like, he’s everything the world has told us about how to be a boy, and I’m everything the world has told us not to be.”

Therese considered this. “So you’re saying you’re like… socialized both male and female?”

“Oh ho, looks like someone’s been reading about trans stuff!” Riley smirked at Therese’s blush.

“I just felt like I ought to know more about—”

“I’m teasing. It’s a good idea. Smart people have already thought about a lot of this.” She waved a hand to dismiss the rest of Therese’s explanation. “No, we’re not socialized male at all. ‘Male’ is kinda like… armor? We pick up how to be a boy in self-defense. Like, if we can do the boy thing, emotional distance and unavailability and all that? Then we don’t get hurt when we fuck up and let our — let me out.” She winced. “You know what happens when you giggle like a little girl at something, and you’re inside a body that looks like him?”

Therese nodded. “I was a teenager in high school once, too.”

Riley looked up at her. “It’s weird, I keep forgetting that you’re older than us. I guess it’s not that much older, but you’re already graduated from this Tower thing, and you have a real magic job and everything. Like, you’re an adult in a way we’re not.”

Therese shuddered, hating the idea of thinking of herself as ‘adult’. “Only by a couple of years. And I started younger than you.”

“Wait, does that mean you never graduated high school?”

She looked down, embarrassed. “I um. I graduated two years early. Or I started school a year early, and then I skipped senior year.”

Riley looked impressed. “So you’re a nerd!” She seemed strangely pleased by this revelation.

“See, this is why I didn’t mention it before. I hate feeling different from other people about this.” She waved a hand to preempt the obvious retort. “Yes, I know I’m an Adept Diviner in a magical Tower in an alternate reality who can cast spells and all that. I know it’s stupid to feel different about something like high school at this point.”

Riley grinned again. “Look who you’re talking to. We’re a student in a magical Tower that accepts only girls, and we’ve managed to feel different and outcast because of being a girl.” She laughed. “I think we’re on the same wavelength here.”

Therese found herself smiling. “I guess that’s true. We can both be weird together.”

Riley shook her head. “The more I learn about the other girls in my cadre, the more I think we’re all weird, every single one of us. Maybe it’s only the weird girls who can do magic.”

“Something to ask Nora about.”

Riley groaned. “Nora. We’re pushing her away, too. She’s too curious about us, and it’s making us close up around her. This sucks.”

Therese reached out in the no-space to put her hand on Riley’s. How close were they sitting? It seemed to be arbitrary, conforming to the needs of the moment, the emotive requirements of the conversation. Dream divination was weird, and Therese kind of wanted to ditch her current research obligations to just dig into dream space theory.

“Riley, listen. Nobody is blaming you, okay? We’re not going anywhere. We’ll all still be here when, you know. You’re able to…” She started to say come out, but that seemed too on the nose. Then she realized it was on the nose for precisely the right reason, that there wasn’t any euphemism that better suited the specific thing she wanted to say.

Riley spared her the awkwardness by finishing her sentence. “When I’m able to come out. Yeah.”

“Yeah.”

“I just hope… I hope we don’t do anything people can’t forgive us for.”

# # #

“Oh my god he is so fucking aggravating.”

Therese was sprawled in the chair in Key’s room, where she and Key had been talking about — what else? — the Problem of Riley. And when Allie arrived with an irritated look on her face and the kind of body language that suggested she really wanted to punch a pillow, Key had grabbed her by the hand and dragged her over onto the bed.

Now Allie had her head on Key’s lap, and Key was stroking and smoothing her hair. It was like the tension was draining out with each stroke, Key’s fingers finding every little tangle in the thick glossy black and gently teasing it out.

“What did he do?” Therese asked. She tried to keep her curiosity neutral and casual, though she wanted to immediately jump to Riley’s defense. Riding the wave of his emotions while he was in class was distracting and Therese did her best to shut them out, but some trace of them always leaked through, and she knew that Riley had been in a kind of low-intensity anxiety attack for the entire morning class. Something had set him off earlier, and while that wasn’t an excuse if he was being unbearable to his instructors, it was at least an explanation.

“It’s just more of the same.” Allie let her breath out in a long sigh. “Pushing back on everything I try to tell him, and when I point out that I do know what I’m doing, that I do know my way around Sigils and Working, he brings up some kind of way that he’s an exception to everything I know.”

“More ‘boys can’t do magic’ stuff?” Key asked. Nora had been annoyed by this, as well; it seemed to come up at least twice a week, that clearly Theory was not to be trusted because of this fundamental error in their understanding of magic. When he decided to challenge Nora on genetics and chromosomal sex, she’d finally given up and told him to take it up with the Archives, because she wasn’t going to discuss it any further. Which is how Key ended up being on the receiving end of that particular load of bullshit.

“Not this time. This time it was whether Sigils were sentient.”

Key snorted, and Therese said, “Why does that matter?”

“Because, apparently, if they’re sentient, and we call and break them, we’re failing to get their consent.” Allie’s eyes rolled hard. “I started to explain why that was nonsense, but then I realized he didn’t even care about the argument. He was messing with me for its own sake. He was trying to get me to fight with him. Just to have a fight.”

Therese sighed. “Yeah. He’s been doing that to everyone, lately.”

Key said, “He tried to get me to justify the indexing system to him. Like, why we have certain letters associated with certain topics. I told him it was arbitrary, and he wanted to know why we didn’t just use the Library of Congress system, and finally I just said ‘because that’s the way it is’, and refused to talk about it anymore.” She shook her head. “I mean, it’s an interesting topic, and if he was actually listening to me, I would have been happy to explain, but… he was just trying to fight about it.”

Allie nodded, wincing as the motion caused Key to pull her hair. “I hate to say it, but you know what he’s acting like?” She looked pointedly at Therese. “Like a man. Like that kind of man. You know?”

Key continued, “We’re trying to cut him some slack because of, you know. What he’s dealing with. Inside.” She shook her head. “We’re trying, but it’s like he wants to make us all hate him before we can even get to know him.”

Therese did know. That’s exactly what he was doing. He was being as abrasive and obnoxious as he could be, in all the ways that were guaranteed to drive women away from him, to grate on them. Constant challenges with only the authority of masculinity to back them up. Unwarranted confidence in his opinions. Aggression and conversational dominance. It was like he was working as hard as he could to alienate every woman he encountered, and given that the entire rest of the Tower’s population was women, that meant he was very quickly running out of friends.

“Really, I just want to get through the year and hope he goes for the exit.” Key didn’t sound angry, just pragmatic. “He’s probably nice when you get to know him, but the reason I’m a lesbian is so I don’t have to deal with that kind of shit.”

Allie laughed. “The real misandry finally comes out! You only love me for my gender—”

Whatever else she might have said, Key cut off with a kiss.

Therese chewed on the side of her thumbnail, thinking. Everyone’s tolerance for Riley’s behavior had grown thinner and thinner. She was regularly on the receiving end of complaint sessions just like this one, increasingly finding herself the lone voice raised in his defense. Eventually, she knew, she was going to get pulled into a meeting with Gaveny, and she was either going to have to reveal everything she knew to the Headmistress, or she was going to have to come up with some very compelling bullshit to justify keeping Riley in the Tower. Sealing and expulsion were going to look pretty attractive to Gaveny, especially with multiple instructors complaining about the one and only boy in the school.

And whatever else happened, she knew, she absolutely could not let Riley get Sealed. Even if she didn’t have the constant emotional eavesdropping to tell her why Riley was behaving the way he was, there was the total certainty that the Tower itself wanted Riley, and the Tower had appointed her to look after him. And that alone was so damn unprecedented that it scared the hell out of her. The dreams scared the hell out of her. The way she could still taste acid bile in the back of her throat when she thought of what the Tower had told her, about them, scared her most of all.

So she had to make excuses for the increasingly inexcusable toxic masculinity of the boy that everyone seemed to think of as her protégé, or at least her responsibility.

“I think…” She paused, as Key and Allie disentangled from their extremely gay kissing-and-biting-and-teasing game. “I think he’s acting out because he’s scared, and he’s using this toxic bullshit as a way to cover for that.” She paused. “Scared of who he is. You know. Inside.”

“Sure, but he’s coming awfully close to actually abusive behavior,” Allie said, and Key stroked her forehead.

“Like I said, we’re letting it slide for now but.” Key frowned. “There’s a line that, if he crosses it with Allie? I am not going to hold back.”

Therese nodded. “I know. I don’t think he’ll cross that line, though.” Please let me be right, she thought. Please don’t let him cross that line. “I think he wants to learn magic more than he wants to keep up this facade of masculinity. I think it might be the only thing he really wants in the whole world.”

“He scares me, Tee.” Key was dead serious now. “That shit in the Archive scared me. The way he acts like he’s about to start Working any minute really scares me. It scares me that we’re teaching him to be even more dangerous. It’s like we’re giving a gun to an angry kid and hoping he doesn’t shoot up a school.” She paused for just a fraction of a second before the word ‘kid’, and Therese heard the unspoken ‘angry white boy’. Because all three of them were thinking of the same names, the same horror stories.

Therese said, “I trust the Tower to shut down anything he does before it gets out of hand or anyone gets really seriously hurt.”

Key looked skeptical still, but eventually nodded. “I guess the Tower has dealt with worse. Or, well, I mean I know it has. I’ve read the Archives.”

Allie said, “I just hope he doesn’t fuck up the rest of his cadre’s training while he’s figuring out his bullshit.”

“Yeah. I was thinking the same thing,” Therese said. But that was only half a truth, because the other thing she was thinking was just how direct, how overwhelming the Tower’s intervention had been in her conversation with the Magisters. The Tower was very, very protective of Riley. The presence had made that clear, just in the brief brushes with it she’d experienced: Riley was a priority for it. And she realized that she didn’t want to find out, if it came to it, who the Tower would choose to protect in a conflict — the Academy, or Riley.

# # #

They think I’m a box of sweating dynamite, oozing nitroglycerin and threatening destruction with every little shock, Riley thought. They tiptoe around me like the vibration of their feet through the floor is going to trigger something catastrophic.

The past month had been grueling when it wasn’t just frustrating. The effort of not thinking about the conversation with Therese, of shunting that entire bundle of revelations into a private memory chamber where he could ignore it and all of its implications, had left him irritable and distracted. The former was a poor basis for trying to make friends with the women he was obligated to live with; the latter was a poor basis for trying to learn how to call Sigils and break them down usefully.

Eve, entering from the hall, saw him sitting in his usual chair, paused for a long moment as though considering sitting with him, and then hurried across to her own door without speaking.

Eve was by far the worst of them, for walking on eggshells. Himari would have said something mean. In a friendly way, of course, but with barbs hidden in it. And Suliat maintained a constant pressure of cheerfulness no matter what he did or said. She was implacably open and tirelessly friendly, an automaton of interest in his life and well-being.

In that sense, perhaps it was better to think of Eve as the best of them, rather than the worst. At least he wasn’t obliged to keep up the act of being okay around her. He didn’t have to fake wellness, manufacture a smile and a polite mask. Eve was simple: she mostly avoided him entirely.

If only everyone would. If only the whole world would.

She pulled her door shut softly, quietly, but the silence in the common room was thick, and the click of the door latch popping into place inside the frame was startling.

Idly he considered the Sigil they’d talked about earlier in the week, The Hush Following Rainfall, and its sphere of influence. The Hush featured in Workings involving sound, and specifically those that concerned dampening sounds. There was a Working to keep the sounds of a conversation from traveling beyond a few feet, for instance. He supposed you could use it to plug up your own ears, too — a Working for noise-canceling headphones, basically.

This was the key difference between what Alexis had been teaching them, and what he’d done intuitively on previous occasions. When he’d acted on intuition, he’d just reached out to make something happen, without any sense of how or by what authority. The Sigils he’d called had been supplied by the moment, by the unseen celestial world, by his subconscious, by something that wasn’t him. What he did with them was just as intuitive and mysterious. It was more a matter of letting them act through him, rather than demanding something specific, making choices, exerting volition.

But a real Working was a combination of a choice of agency and the math of distributing the power of that agency into reality in particular ways. And the agency wasn’t always well-suited to every task.

He thought of it like a complicated word puzzle with a thousand different rules. You had to turn a jumble of letters into a specific word or phrase, but you had to do it by using those rules. Maybe you could swap two letters, or swap every fifth letter. Maybe you could turn a vowel into a specific consonant, or a string of specific consonants into a vowel. Maybe you could perform a simple cipher on the string, where A became N and so on.

But if you knew your goal was the word ‘quiet’, it was easier to get there if you started from the word ‘quick’ than if you started from the word ‘zipper’. Fewer steps, fewer characters to change around.

He knew this analogy wasn’t quite right, but it had gotten him to the point where it made sense that you’d want to start with the Hush to mask sounds. It already had a lot of sound-related concepts in it. Getting from there to the specific sound-masking Working you were imagining was much simpler than getting from a Sigil that was related to, for instance, stones or fire or whatever. Less math. Simpler ideas. Fewer rules to manipulate to get from point A to point B.

Fewer, but not ‘none’. So he memorized equations and the rules by which the terms of the equations could be manipulated. An algebra of the properties of reality itself, a system for moving between something that was and something that was desired.

He had a goal in mind. It wasn’t something he’d actually expressed in words, even in the quiet of his own head, late in the night, but it was a guide star that he oriented himself around, with each new element of Working and each new property of a Sigil that Alexis gave him.

I want to be normal.

I don’t want to feel like a girl inside.

I want a Sigil and a Working to make me content with being a boy.

I want to be normal.

He already knew this was far, far beyond what he was learning in these first weeks of the first year. Once he’d started using his Archives class time to research this specific problem, he’d learned what a complete and utter tangle any Sigil concept dealing with the human psyche was, and how absurdly difficult the Workings inevitably were as well. There were elements in them that he’d taken careful notes on, brought to Alexis, been referred off to Nora, and then ultimately told that if he wanted to enter Adept-level Theory studies after his three years as a Novice, he would be more than welcome in their ranks, and then perhaps things like ‘identity’ and ‘self-awareness’ and ‘consciousness’ might become comprehensible. Or at least the introductory math around them might.

Changing who someone was, at the very root of their being, was one of the really difficult problems of magic. It touched on questions like ‘why are the Sigils like that, anyway?’ and ‘what makes humans so interesting to the Celestial powers?’ and ‘how do only some people end up able to use magic?’ and the ever-present mystery that had, in the last week, started to make Nora openly irritable towards him when he brought it up: ‘Why can only girls use magic?’

He was pretty sure the question annoyed her because she didn’t have the answer, but he also suspected there was something more to it than that. Something else about it was chafing her, and it didn’t help that the specific focus of the question, the reason it even came up at all, was one Riley Hawkins, weapons-grade irritant and general obnoxious asshole.

He didn’t really have a good handle on why he was being an asshole. He was introspective enough to know he was driving people away from him, keeping them at arm’s length, or further than that, if he could. Intellectually, he knew this. But when the nasty words, sharpened and cruel, came spilling out of him, it never felt intentional. It never felt like he wanted to be an asshole in that moment. It was like he was taken over by the sense of what the perfect response should be. If this were a script, if this were a character he was playing on a stage.

Which, he supposed, it kind of was.

And that wasn’t something he felt like thinking about at the moment, not really, and so he shoved the thought away and let it be replaced with—

The same thing that came back to him in every empty moment, of course. Therese.

That constant buzz in the back of his mind. That ever-present awareness of another person. Sometimes nearer, sometimes further, but always there. He’d gotten good at tuning her out, but that required the tumult of active thought, of occupation, and if he wasn’t keeping busy, he had no choice but to feel the burr of her, rubbing a spot of his mind into inflamed aggravation.

Someone else’s thoughts, twinkling in the corner of his mind’s eye like distant images just barely too far to make out. Someone else’s emotions, heard like the sound of an old radio just barely able to pick up a far-off station.

And she worried about him, and that was the most aggravating thing of all. She worried, and he felt like a burden, and then he felt angry because he hadn’t chosen this connection, and then he felt guilty because he suspected she’d saved him from the car accident, and then he felt angry all over because his life had been a misery since the accident, and then he felt ashamed because it had been a misery before the accident, too.

And round and round he went, and ultimately he knew goddamn well that she was not the problem, that he was the problem, and that little buzz of awareness of her was, in the end, a reminder of that base fact. He was a problem.

He sighed and brought up the shape of The Hush in his mind’s eye. Not imbuing it with power from the Celestial, careful not to do any magic without his watchful and solicitous and damnable cadre around him. But his memory was extremely keen, and he could imagine the various parts of The Hush and imagine how they might be moved around, shaped or constrained or rebuilt, all without any actual Sigil being involved. Exercise for his mind. Calisthenics for his ability to use magic. Stretches and strength-building.

It was like building with Lego, and the Sigil was the base kit you chose to build with. What special pieces did it have in it? What custom shapes might be re-purposed from their original roles as part of the Batmobile or Rivendell?

While he worked, occasionally doodling a shape or a bit of math in his notebook, the ache slowly crept back in. It was background noise these days, the pain in his hip, and because it was background noise, he hadn’t really noticed when it spread across to his other hip, to encompass his whole pelvis. Then, one day, he realized that no matter how he sat, no matter how he twisted and turned in the chair, he couldn’t find a comfortable way to position himself. His hips hurt.

Fuck that, he thought at the time, and went to the infirmary to get whatever passed for magical healing in this place.

What he got was store-brand Ibuprofen from a drug store chain. He’d imagined the tender ministrations of elves or whatever; when he asked, he was told that healing was complicated Working, and that if it was just aches and pains, he didn’t need to risk any of the possible side effects of a Worked healing. Which led him to ask what those might be, and the answers left him completely satisfied with good old Ibuprofen. The part of the answer that included ‘quick-replicating hostile flesh parasites’ was particularly vivid in his memory.

So the ache persisted, and he took the painkillers, and he tried not to notice when the ache moved up and set roots into his chest. This was probably unsustainable in the long-term, the self-deception, the pretense of ignoring the aches and what they might mean. He was very, very good at not thinking about things. He was an expert at it. He could ignore this.

But probably not forever. Probably not even for that much longer.

Because if he was right, things were going to start happening to him soon, and he was about to be forced into a choice he didn’t want to make.

Fuck, I sound like the voice in my nightmares. That voice, that casually incisive voice, the girl’s voice that chased him through his worst dreams. The one that always seemed to know him so deeply, to know all his secrets, and yet when he woke, the voice’s words tore away into shreds and tatters, becoming insubstantial wisps of memory.

For a while he thought the voice was Therese, because he sometimes dreamed about her, too, and why wouldn’t he? Given her constant presence in his awareness, dreaming about her was completely understandable. But the voice wasn’t her. For one thing, he had dim memories of the voice in his nightmares from long before the Tower. But beyond that, it was too knowing, too assured, and didn’t have any of the Divination Adept’s caution or gentleness. The girl’s voice in his nightmares was practical, pragmatic, and unrelenting. It was the voice of self-critique, and it was cryptic and mysterious, and it always found some way to fault him.

He’d wake with nothing but the stress of the dream and the sense of having been a disappointment. Which was, at least, a very familiar feeling.

He looked down and saw that he’d been writing while daydreaming. The Hush Following Rainfall. In big looping strange letters that didn’t feel like his own handwriting. Elaborate calligraphy, trying perhaps to incorporate the shape of the Sigil into the writing of its name. He wished again that he’d been forced to learn cursive; as much as the tiresome GenX adults complained about it, he thought it was interestingly elegant. He could read it, but his writing in it was a messy scrawl like a five-year-old’s attempt at script.

Then he saw that he’d been writing other names in the same looping writing.

Riley. Suliat. Eve. Himari. Riley. Suliat. Eve. Himari.

Over and over, tangled together. Loops making room for other loops, turning and twisting through each other.

Well, that was embarrassing. He quickly turned to a clean page, hiding the strangely obsessive writing exercise from himself.

He found himself thinking about the women he lived with uncomfortably often. This shouldn’t be surprising, given the circumstances, but it was; he’d always been able to tune out the people around him, rebuff any attempts to reach out to him, and live entirely within the bounds of his own self. He would be hard pressed to even name the people he’d gone to school with, people with whom he’d been jumbled into the mixing bowl that was the school system, who in theory were his peers. He could dimly recall some of their faces.

These three women, though. He had thought that he didn’t like the idea of being seen by others, but in the past month he’d come to realize he’d had it backwards. Being seen was easy to ignore. Seeing others, on the other hand — seeing how your words and your behaviors affected the people around you, being forced into even the most gentle accountability — was what actually bothered him. If other people weren’t really there, because you lived entirely in your own head, it was easy to not notice their judgment.

As if summoned, Suliat entered the common room from the hall, and spotting him, closed the door firmly enough to alert him. Not that he’d needed the warning; he was hyperactively aware of others in the suite, his skin prickling to their presence as though sensing pressure changes in the air of the room.

Suliat dropped herself into the chair nearest him, not quite sprawling — she never sprawled — but he had a sense that she was trying to intentionally occupy more space than she normally would. To force herself into his awareness. It was an annoyance, but it was also a provocation. He knew she wanted him to say something, even if just to ask her to stop.

She grinned at him, head turned, looking right into his face and trying to make eye contact. Nope.

“Hi, Riley!” Suliat’s voice was all perfect cheer and enthusiasm, as though they regularly spoke at length and this was just an anomaly, he was just temporarily out of sorts. “I missed you at dinner, so I told the constructs to bring up some snacks later. I’ll just leave them here on the table, in case anyone wants them.” The pause just before ‘anyone’ was so fucking performative. It was so intentional. It was more provocation.

He nodded. “Yeah, thanks.” His voice lacked any real affect, but he wasn’t trying to come across as catatonic. He just wanted to be left alone. Gray-rocking his cadre would just make things worse, he suspected, so he exercised the minimum level of engagement that didn’t seem entirely dysfunctional.

“Anyway, I’m going to study for a while, so I hope I’m not bothering you.” She had the Goetia in hand already, with several bookmarks inserted in various places. “We don’t all have photographic memories, after all.” She smiled broadly at him again.

“I don’t have—” He realized she was baiting him. He sighed.

“You’re so easy.” She laughed a little. “Someday you’ll learn to stop reacting when I tease you, and then I’ll be sad.”

“Maybe you will, but I won’t.”

She sat back to read. There was the silence of shared space for a few minutes. Then Suliat, without turning to look at him or leaning forward again, said “If you really were trying to shut me out, you’d be in your room.” She paused. “But you aren’t. You’re out here where we all keep unavoidably entering your space.”

They sat in the empty moments that followed. Riley knew he needed to say something, defend himself, or maybe even make an admission, but he was pinned by the obvious truth of it: this was a sulk, and he wanted to be pulled out of it.

“In case you thought no-one had noticed.” Her voice was quiet and kind and afterwards she fell silent once more.

persenche

Hope you've enjoyed this! I'll see you all on Wednesday for the other half of Distortion, when you'll get to find out why that's the title of the chapter, and you'll get a better look at the actual plot. In case you were wondering if there would be one eventually.

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<3 all of you