Chapter Twenty Seven: Socialization

NEUROVIA INSTITUTE: ALL-PARTICIPANT NOTICE

SOCIAL INTEGRATION EVENT
SATURDAY, 18:00
COMMONS WING C

ALL COHORTS REQUIRED
DRESS: CASUAL
PURPOSE: CROSS-COHORT COMMUNITY

Theo read it twice.

Then a third time, looking for the part it was not saying.

“Cross-cohort community.”

Ben made a noncommittal sound around a mouthful of toast. His fingers tapped against his coffee mug, the one with a quantum equation whose punchline he had once explained to a room that had not asked.

“They’ve never used that phrase before,” Theo said.

“They’ve never had four cohorts before.”

“They’re engineering something.”

“Obviously. Four cohorts, one room. It’s a season premiere. They want to see who forms an alliance and who cries by the snacks.”

Ben took another bite.

“Or it’s cheese cubes and forced proximity. Hard to say.”

“I’m serious.”

“I know. That’s the part I’m enjoying.” Ben nodded toward Theo’s plate. “Are you eating that?”

Theo pushed the toast across the table.

Outside, two new students crossed the courtyard, one slowing to point at something the other could not see. In the months since the expansion announcement, arrivals had become ordinary. Screening appointments. Families carrying overnight bags. Furniture delivered through side entrances.

Eventually, implantation.

Now the new cohorts wore the careful, slightly stunned expressions the older students had apparently forgotten they once had themselves.

Julian leaned over Theo’s shoulder, still warm from his run. His breathing had settled, but a faint red remained along his cheekbones. He read the notice.

“Good.”

Theo looked up at him.

“The inter-cohort stuff has been…” Julian stopped. “Narrow.”

“That’s a word for it.”

“I mean we only see each other when there’s something to win.”

“Cohort One put Leena in the medical suite.”

“I know what happened.”

Julian’s fingers flexed against the back of the chair.

He looked at the notice again.

“Competition made us better at some things. It can’t be the only thing we do.”

He went to get coffee before Theo answered.

Ben watched him leave, then took the last piece of toast.

***

Forty-eight hours before the event, the faculty met under a different title.

COHORT SOCIALIZATION: DESIGN REVIEW

Halvorsen ran it standing.

“The concern is that the rivalry becomes permanent.”

She brought up the cohort interaction map.

“One and Two have developed some working respect. They have also built most of their understanding of each other under competitive pressure. The injury remains part of that history.”

“The capture exercise,” Morse said.

“Yes.”

Halvorsen looked around the table.

“Three and Four are roughly three weeks into integration. They’re uncertain about their own changes and still learning one another. What they see now will help define what they think this community expects.”

“You’re proposing to manage their first substantial contact,” Nkosi said.

“To structure it.”

Nkosi waited.

“The other option is to leave it to the dining hall and the corridors,” Halvorsen said. “Those encounters will happen regardless. We can record them. We can’t always shape them before someone establishes the terms.”

“Calder,” Patel said.

“Not only. But yes.”

Morse looked at the interaction map.

“Competitive drive isn’t inherently a problem.”

“No,” Halvorsen said. “A participant who expects every new relationship to establish a hierarchy can become one.”

She changed the display.

“Saturday evening. Commons Wing C, fully opened. All four cohorts. A brief opening activity to give them a reason to speak, followed by unstructured time. No assigned tables.”

“Nothing scored,” Patel said.

“Agreed.”

“No winners disguised as icebreakers.”

Halvorsen nodded.

“I’d also like to speak with some of the established participants beforehand,” Patel continued.

Morse turned toward her.

“About how to behave?”

“About what they remember.”

“You’re still priming the interaction.”

“Yes,” Patel said. “I’d rather they enter remembering their first week than their last match.”

***

The commons opened into a space Cohort Two had never seen.

Partitions withdrew into the walls, revealing neighboring rooms and the higher ceiling beyond them. Light spread across the exposed floor. The familiar common area became one part of something much larger.

Low furniture stood in loose clusters. Food occupied several tables, and it was food that required choosing: small pastries, skewers, unfamiliar things on toast. Plates too small for a full meal. Enough to keep someone’s hands occupied while they found a reason to speak.

The music had texture. A rough voice giving way to a bass line, a quiet track followed by something brighter. The transitions suggested a person making choices.

Cohort One arrived first.

They spread into the room with practiced ease. Rafe took a place near the center in a charcoal henley, sleeves pushed to his elbows. Kara moved toward the far edge, where she could see both exits. Soren passed along the perimeter, fingertips briefly brushing the back of a leather chair.

The positions were familiar even in different clothes.

Cohort Two entered a few minutes later.

Julian’s attention began sorting before he had cleared the door.

Cohort One at the far end. Faculty along the walls. Unfamiliar faces gathered near the closest seating cluster. Space between groups. Routes through them.

Nothing needed him to act.

The calculation continued anyway.

He had worn his running jacket without thinking. The collar was still faintly damp. Everyone else seemed to have chosen clothes for an evening, and the realization bothered him more than it should have.

Across the room, a new boy shifted his shoulders when someone looked at him. A girl moved half a step behind a friend.

Julian recognized the adjustments.

He had made them too, before there had been anything behind his eyes to point them out.

Aisha was already approaching the newcomers.

He watched her for a moment, then went toward the food.

He was not hungry.

The girl stood three careful steps away from the rest of her cohort.

Aisha noticed the distance first.

Then the cropped hair, the gray hoodie worn soft at the cuffs, the cracked face of a digital watch. Straight spine. Restless hands. Eyes tracking movement across the room.

Several explanations arrived with the details.

Aisha let them remain explanations.

“Hi. I’m Aisha. Cohort Two.”

“Umi. Three.”

“How long have you been here?”

“Three weeks.” Umi glanced around. “It’s…”

“A lot?”

“Yes.”

The answer came with a brief release of breath.

“The first couple of weeks were hardest for me,” Aisha said. “Everything felt slightly louder. I kept waiting for it to get louder again.”

“Did it?”

“After a while, it stopped feeling like that.”

“How do you know it stopped, instead of you getting used to the new level?”

Aisha looked at her.

The question had found one she had not finished asking herself.

“I don’t,” she said. “Not completely.”

Umi’s hands quieted.

“Can I ask what it does for you?”

“Catalyst?”

She nodded.

“Before, I could usually tell when something was off in a room. A tension no one was naming. Like hearing a conversation through a wall.”

Aisha thought about how to finish.

“Now I’m better at telling which room it’s coming from. Sometimes what they’re saying.”

“So you know what people think?”

“No. I can read more of what they show. I can still get the reason wrong.”

Umi considered that.

“Is it useful?”

“Constantly.”

Aisha glanced toward a nearby cluster, where someone laughed too loudly and immediately looked to see who had noticed.

“Occasionally unpleasant.”

Umi laughed.

Two of her cohort mates drifted closer. One pretended to examine a nearby bowl of snacks before staying.

Aisha made room in the conversation.

Across the room, Julian stood at the food table beside Kara Bloom.

Aisha noticed, then returned her attention to Umi.

“The salmon thing is better than it looks,” Julian said.

Kara turned toward him.

White button-down. Dark jeans. Hair pulled tightly back. She held a small plate as though she had not yet decided whether it was worth filling.

“I’ll take your word for it.”

“I’m Julian.”

“I know.”

“I know you know. I’m being sociable.”

She studied him, then took one of the salmon things.

His attention flicked toward Aisha before returning.

“You do that all the time,” Kara said.

“What?”

“Keep track of something else while you’re talking.”

Julian went still.

“Not in a rude way,” she added. “Like there’s a second conversation happening that doesn’t need words.”

He looked down at his plate.

“Yes.”

Kara took a bite.

“This is strange.”

“The salmon?”

“The whole thing.”

“Yes.”

She looked across the room at the new cohorts.

“We should have done this weeks ago.”

Julian thought of the arena. Her forearm driving into Ben. Leena on the ground. The ease with which the memory entered a room full of music and small plates.

He looked back at Kara.

“Yes,” he said. “We should have.”

She seemed to hear the difference.

For a moment, neither spoke.

Then Kara asked about his run, and Julian answered. The conversation began finding a footing that did not require either of them to pretend they had no history.

He stayed with what she was saying.

Some other part of him kept track of where Aisha stood.

Theo had found the east window.

He held a glass of water he kept forgetting to drink. His fingers tapped unevenly against it.

When Soren approached, Theo saw him first in the reflection.

Rolled sleeves. Pale forearms marked with old training scars.

Theo’s shoulders tightened.

Soren stopped a few feet away, leaving enough space that either of them could have claimed they were simply looking outside.

For a while, they did.

“The east path lights change sequence at eleven,” Soren said. “Do you know whether someone sets that manually?”

“Algorithmic.”

Theo answered before deciding whether to.

“Randomization over a base sequence. The variation is too consistent to be someone choosing it.”

“You checked.”

“First week.”

He heard how that sounded after saying it.

A girl from Cohort Four passed behind them. Tall, with long braids over one shoulder. She reached for a glass, overshot slightly, then laughed at herself.

Theo watched her reflection rather than Soren’s.

“The capture exercise,” Soren said.

Theo stopped tapping.

“You were in our wing.”

The doors in the room remained exactly where they had been.

The conversational exits felt fewer.

“I don’t know what you mean.”

“That isn’t true.”

Soren did not say it loudly.

Theo turned the glass between his hands.

“What makes you think that?”

“The changes fit our plan too closely to be random. But they weren’t ours.”

“Maybe you forgot making them.”

“I considered that.”

“And now?”

Soren looked toward him.

“Now I’m talking to you.”

Theo could hear the music behind them, the clink of a plate, someone asking where the drinks were.

“What do you want?”

“How long had you been watching us?”

That was not the question Theo had prepared for.

He looked at Soren properly.

“Weeks.”

A muscle moved near Soren’s jaw.

“You understood how we made decisions.”

“I had some ideas.”

“Enough to change the plan.”

Theo looked down at the glass.

“How you committed,” he said. “How something became harder to question once it belonged to all of you.”

Soren said nothing.

“If a change looked like it came from inside, you’d give it longer than you should. Even when it stopped working.”

“A strength with an edge.”

“Yes.”

Theo had imagined this conversation many times.

In most versions, he had been cornered. In a few, he had said something clever enough to recover the advantage.

None had included Soren standing beside him, listening.

“I don’t know how to apologize for it yet,” Theo said.

Soren waited.

“Part of me still thinks it was a good strategy. That’s the part I don’t trust.”

“Leena.”

Her name changed the pressure in Theo’s chest.

The stone. The sound. The body that had not moved afterward.

“Yes.”

“Rafe chose the hit,” Soren said. “That remains his choice.”

“I know.”

“The changed plan was part of what happened before it. That remains too.”

Theo could not tell whether the distinction helped. He was grateful Soren had not offered to make it simple.

After a moment, Soren said, “I saw the changes before the exercise.”

Theo looked at him.

“I didn’t know what they were. I didn’t ask.”

The admission sat between them.

Then Soren looked back toward the window.

“You used something we hadn’t learned to guard against. We know to look now.”

“You’re saying it won’t work twice.”

“I’m saying you spent it on a match.”

“On a match, if that’s how you think of it.”

“How do you think of it?”

Theo took a breath.

“I wanted you to know we weren’t just waiting for you to decide what happened.”

Soren absorbed that without answering.

Outside, the path lights moved through a sequence neither of them needed to watch.

“We’ll be in the same building for a long time,” Soren said. “We should figure out what that looks like.”

It was not forgiveness.

Theo did not hear a promise to forget, or even a promise not to act on what he now knew.

But there was a future in the sentence.

“Yeah,” he said. “Okay.”

Soren moved away from the window.

Theo watched his reflection cross the room.

Then he drank the water.

Kael arrived twenty minutes after the others.

He passed through the gathering without brushing anyone, stepping into spaces that had just opened. At the food table, he took his time choosing. Then he settled at the edge of the room.

No task appeared.

No change in the lighting signaled a test.

For once, the room seemed willing to let him remain where he was.

He stayed.

A boy near the far wall caught his attention.

Small for his age. Dark hair in need of cutting. Glasses he kept pushing up, though they did not seem to have slipped.

He was very still in the way people became still when they wanted to occupy less space.

Kael watched for a while.

Then he crossed the room and sat in the empty chair beside him.

The boy stiffened.

Kael set his plate on his knee and ate a piece of bread.

After a moment, the boy’s shoulders lowered.

“Hey,” Kael said. “Kael.”

“Isaac.”

He touched his glasses.

“Cohort Four. Eighteen days.”

“Gets quieter.”

Isaac looked at him.

“Not out here.” Kael touched his temple. “In here. It did for me.”

“Does it go away?”

“No. More like it stops feeling stuck on top of everything.”

Kael considered that.

“Sometimes.”

Isaac watched him with an attention that did not feel quite like the attention of the clinicians.

“The room seems to change around you,” he said.

Kael stopped reaching for his plate.

“And then you change, and the room changes again.”

Isaac said it without apparent concern. An observation he had not yet learned might require careful language.

“Is that what you see?” Kael asked.

“I think so.”

“How?”

Isaac frowned.

“I don’t know yet.”

They sat with that.

Across the room, two other new students left the wall and chose seats near them.

Kael did not try to improve the silence.

Ben had established himself at the dessert end of the table.

It was the most defensible position in the room. Good sightlines. Reliable supplies.

He was halfway through a small pastry he could not identify when a boy sat beside him.

Cohort Four. Thirteen, perhaps. The expression of someone who had decided to ask a question before losing the nerve.

“You’re Cohort Two.”

“I am.”

“What’s your thing?”

“My thing.”

Ben considered the pastry.

“Aisha reads people. Mateo does probability. Theo looks at a system and the system confesses.”

He ate the last bite.

“Mine’s failure.”

The boy waited.

Ben let him.

“Failure?”

“I’m extremely good at being bad at things. For about ninety seconds.”

He held up a finger.

“Give me something I can’t do.”

The boy looked around, then pointed toward someone balancing a tray on one hand.

“That.”

“Ambitious use of the room. Fine.”

Ben took a clementine from the table and tried to balance it on the back of his hand.

It rolled off immediately.

He caught it against his leg, dropped it anyway, and bent to retrieve it.

The boy’s mouth twitched.

“Excellent,” Ben said. “Already educational.”

Underneath the joke, the failure was coming apart.

Wrist angle. Placement. The little corrective jerk that had helped the fruit fall.

The next attempt lasted longer.

The third held for almost a second.

On the fourth, the clementine stayed.

Ben kept his hand level.

“That’s practice,” the boy said.

“That’s the point. Everybody practices. I get to keep more of what the bad attempt teaches me.”

He tipped the fruit into his palm.

“Being wrong is unusually productive.”

“So you don’t get embarrassed?”

“Oh, I get embarrassed. I just try not to waste it.”

The boy looked down at his hands.

“I keep getting things wrong. Since the implant. Stuff I used to be good at.”

Ben set the clementine aside.

“Yeah.”

The lightness stayed in his voice, but he stopped performing quite so much.

“That part’s rough. You know how something should feel, and suddenly it doesn’t.”

The boy nodded.

“For me, a lot of it came back different. Better, sometimes. Some things took longer.” Ben pushed the pastry plate toward him. “Tell your clinician which things. You don’t have to wait until you can make it sound impressive.”

The boy took a pastry.

“What is it?”

“No idea.”

He looked at Ben.

“I’ve narrowed it down to food.”

The boy bit into it.

“It’s good.”

“See? A risk rewarded. Don’t let it become an expectation.”

This time the boy laughed.

Rafe stayed polite for forty-five minutes.

He knew because he had checked the time twice.

The newcomers moved between eager and apprehensive, some approaching the older students in pairs, others pretending to study the food.

One girl from Cohort Three did neither.

Blond hair tied low. Arms loose. Weight slightly back. She seemed to let the room reach her before deciding what to do with it.

When she came to the snack table, Rafe moved beside her.

“Trying to work out which one won’t taste wrong?”

She gave him a sidelong look.

“What?”

“Food after implantation. I tasted metal for a week.”

“You diagnosing me?”

“No. Remembering.”

He picked up a wrapped granola bar.

“This one stayed normal. I’m Rafe.”

She studied him.

“Freya. Cohort One?”

“Yeah.”

“What’s it like when you’ve been here longer?”

He shrugged.

“Harder in some ways. Less scary in others.”

She held his gaze a moment, then looked around.

“Who’s worth knowing?”

“Kara.”

He nodded toward the food table.

“Soren. He usually knows what you’re asking before you finish. Nyx knows things you didn’t know there were questions about.”

“And you?”

Rafe turned the granola bar in his hand.

“I’m the one everyone’s decided they know.”

“Are they right?”

He almost gave the easy answer.

“Sometimes.”

Freya smiled slightly.

She took the bar and moved back into the room without waiting for him to follow.

Rafe watched her go.

A few minutes later, she returned with a question about the training spaces.

He found he was glad she had.

Across the commons, the older students had become points around which the newcomers gathered.

Nyx stood beside the drinks, offering precisely as much information as she intended to.

“Is it usually like this?” a freckled boy asked.

“No. Usually it’s more structured.”

He looked around the carefully arranged room.

“This isn’t structured?”

“This is Patel’s version of unstructured.”

The boy smiled, then admitted that his Catalyst still felt loud. Present all the time.

“Mine did too,” Nyx said. “Sometimes it was working on something. Sometimes I was paying too much attention to it.”

“How could you tell?”

“I usually couldn’t until afterward.”

Near the center of the room, Mateo sat opposite a Cohort Four boy who watched him for almost a minute before speaking.

“You’re doing math.”

“Social math.”

“That sounds worse.”

“Depends on the math.”

“What are you counting?”

Mateo considered how much of the answer could be given without making the boy sorry he had asked.

“Groups. Movement between them. Whether people are getting more comfortable.”

“And?”

“So far, yes.”

“Don’t new people mess up the model?”

“They should change it.”

Mateo looked toward a nearby cluster as Aisha joined it. The conversation loosened. A boy from Cohort Three began explaining something with both hands.

Julian glanced that way.

Then deliberately looked back at Kara.

Mateo noticed the glance and the decision that followed it.

He kept both to himself.

Ben passed Julian carrying a fresh plate.

“This is going alarmingly well,” he said. “I might have to call it useful.”

He continued walking before Julian could answer.

Leena chose the corner nearest the sound baffles.

Her cream sweater was soft from years of washing. She had picked it because she knew how it would feel against her skin, one less unfamiliar thing in a room offering so many.

The room had a pulse.

She let her attention open slowly.

Forty-eight participants. Forty-eight implants at different stages of integration. Conversations crossing music. Shoes dragging on carpet. A fork striking the edge of a plate.

Beneath it, the carrier layer felt denser than she had known it could.

She could not separate every part, and some of what she thought she recognized might have come from the people themselves. Julian turning at the right moment. Ben making another attempt at something near the desserts. The new students pausing when their bodies arrived somewhere sooner than expected.

Together, the signals formed something almost physical.

It could have been too much.

For a little while, from this chair, it was beautiful.

Tamar sat beside her without speaking.

Near enough for company. Far enough to leave room.

After a moment, she said, “Three of the new students keep adjusting where they sit.”

“Sensory?”

“Maybe. The girl near the window has moved her chair four times. About four minutes apart.”

Leena found her.

A wiry girl with twin hair puffs. Each small change of position seemed to help briefly, then stop helping.

Leena remembered asking the others to let her be overwhelmed sometimes without immediately intervening.

She also remembered that a person could want that and still want someone to notice.

She crossed the room.

“Hi. I’m Leena. Would you mind if I sat here?”

The girl shook her head.

Leena took the neighboring chair.

“I used to do that,” she said.

“What?”

“Keep moving the seat. Looking for an angle where everything was quieter.”

The girl’s hand remained on the chair’s edge.

“Does it work?”

“Sometimes. The baffles over there help me.”

Leena nodded toward her old seat.

“But some of it followed me wherever I went. Too much arriving at once.”

“How did you stop it?”

“I got better at letting some things stay in the background. It took time. I’m still learning.”

The girl looked toward the crowd.

“What if I can’t?”

“Then we find something else that helps.”

Leena let the answer remain small.

Across the room, Kael sat with Isaac and two other new students. No one in the little group appeared to be speaking.

The girl watched them.

“Is he always like that?”

“Quiet?”

She nodded.

“Often. That’s Kael.”

“He doesn’t look like he’s trying.”

“He might be doing more than it looks like.”

The girl considered that.

“I’m Nadia.”

“Nice to meet you.”

“So you’re Cohort Two.”

“Yes.”

Nadia looked from Leena to Kael, then toward the rest of the room.

“You all seem to know what to do.”

Leena almost laughed.

“We’ve had more time to get things wrong.”

Nadia’s fingers loosened on the chair.

“Do you want the quieter corner?” Leena asked.

After a moment, Nadia nodded.

They moved together.

Patel sat at a console along the eastern wall.

Not quite three hours into the event, her notes ran to forty-one pages.

Some were observations. Some were questions. She had begun marking the difference more visibly.

She was watching Rafe when Halvorsen stopped beside her.

“Well?”

“He’s been speaking with Freya for most of the last twenty minutes.”

“What do you see?”

“He’s listening. Letting her interrupt. I haven’t seen him turn the conversation into a contest.”

Patel watched Freya say something that made him laugh.

“I wouldn’t have predicted that.”

“Morse would point to the environment. We removed the competitive frame.”

“He’d have part of it.”

Patel dimmed her secondary display.

“She doesn’t have a history with him. She can ask who he is without already preparing to disagree with the answer.”

Halvorsen looked toward Julian and Kara. They had moved to adjacent chairs. Their plates sat abandoned on a low table.

Then toward Kael’s corner.

“The established cohorts needed each other under pressure,” Patel said. “Tonight they’re being needed differently.”

Leena was helping Nadia find a place near the baffles. Ben had acquired two more listeners at the dessert table. Umi stood in a conversation without keeping the earlier distance from the others.

“They remember something when the new students ask,” Patel continued. “Not just how they were tested. How it felt before they knew what any of it meant.”

Halvorsen remained quiet.

Patel looked back toward the notes.

“We shouldn’t confuse one evening with resolution.”

“No.”

“But it gives them another experience of one another.”

Across the room, Kara leaned forward to say something. Julian laughed.

Halvorsen watched him.

“Well,” she said softly.

The event officially ended at twenty-two hundred.

No one left at twenty-two hundred.

At half past, Halvorsen’s voice moved through the room, reminding them that the residential schedule still existed.

Conversations resisted ending. Someone went back for a glass. Someone else remembered a question only after saying good night.

The arrivals had come as cohorts.

The departures scattered.

Julian fell into step beside Kara.

Their conversation had lasted far longer than he would have believed possible at the food table. Now it continued in a quieter form as the music faded behind them.

“That wasn’t what I expected,” she said.

“No.”

She rolled one shoulder, as though discovering how long she had held it in the same position.

“I think we’ve spent a lot of time trying to look like we knew exactly what we were doing.”

Julian looked at her.

“Yeah.”

They reached the fork between the wings.

“I’ll see you,” Kara said.

“You too.”

She turned left.

He watched her move into the green-tinged corridor light. Her shoulders looked lower than they had at the beginning of the night.

Then he turned and almost collided with Aisha.

She came around the corner from the other direction. They stopped close enough that his first attempt to give her space nearly put him in her path again.

“Hi,” she said.

“Hi.”

His pulse had changed.

Catalyst offered details he did not need: the slight rise in her breathing, the angle of her balance, her attention resting fully on him.

It offered no useful conclusion.

Julian looked briefly toward the ceiling.

“Good night?”

“Useful,” she said.

He looked back at her.

The word seemed to mean more than successful attendance at a mandatory social event.

“Yeah. Same.”

She held his gaze.

Half a second longer than he expected.

He thought she might say something else. Her chin tilted slightly, then settled.

“I’ll see you tomorrow.”

She slipped past him.

For a moment, he stood in the corridor with the feeling that an exchange had taken place without his quite knowing what he had contributed to it.

Then he went back to the common room.

Kael sat on the couch in the dwindling light.

His gray journal lay open on his knee. He was neither writing nor drawing.

Julian sat at the other end.

“Good night?”

Kael looked at him.

“Useful.”

Julian stared.

“Ben said that too. Aisha just said it. Apparently we agreed on a word.”

“It fits.”

“Better than good?”

“More room in it.”

Julian leaned back.

Beyond the walls, doors opened and closed as the new cohorts found their way through unfamiliar residential corridors. A voice rose, then lowered. Somewhere, someone dropped something and laughed.

Before tonight, the spaces between the cohorts had felt mostly like distance.

Now Julian could picture people inside those spaces.

Umi speaking to Aisha. Freya returning to Rafe. The boy sitting beside Kael without needing the silence repaired.

Kara turning toward her own wing.

Aisha stopping in front of him.

He returned to that last moment despite himself. The closeness. Her eyes. The extra half second.

He could have asked Kael what he thought.

Instead, he let the question remain his for a little longer.

Beside him, Kael turned a blank page.

Julian sat with the not-knowing and found it less uncomfortable than he expected.