Somebody was in the kitchen when Cole woke up. Not Mia — Mia's steps had a rhythm he could pick out through two walls and a half-asleep haze, quick and clipped, like she was always one step from being late for something. This was slower. Unbothered. The specific unhurried pace of someone who had never once in their life worried about being somewhere on time, because everywhere they went simply waited.
He came out in yesterday's shirt, hair doing something structurally unsound, and found a woman sitting at his kitchen table eating his honey directly out of the jar with a spoon.
"That's mine," he said.
"Was." She didn't look up. Mid-thirties, maybe, though something about her felt older than the number, dressed like she'd wandered out of a much nicer building than this one and hadn't noticed the downgrade. "Iris Calloway. Kessington sent Ellis. Kessington got tired of Ellis. So now you get me."
"You broke into my apartment to eat my honey."
"Door was unlocked."
"It was not unlocked."
"It was after I got here." She finally looked up, spoon still in her mouth, and gave him a smile that had absolutely no business being that relaxed on a stranger sitting in someone's kitchen at eight in the morning. "Relax. I could've come in through the window. I have manners."
Cole looked at the door. The lock was, in fact, still in one piece, still latched, still exactly as it had been last night. He filed that away with the specific unease of a man realizing the front door had simply stopped being a meaningful barrier at some point without his input.
"Who are you," he said again, more carefully this time.
"Told you. Iris. I do the thing Ellis does, except I'm better at it and I don't wear a suit that expensive to a school gate like an idiot." She set the spoon down. Licked honey off her thumb, unbothered, like manners were a concept she engaged with selectively. "Also I'm S-Rank. Thought that might matter to you more than the name."
It did, a little. Cole did the math anyway, quickly, quietly, the way he did math on everyone — S-Rank meant resolved, meant clear, meant a Conviction so completely settled that whatever it was could probably level this building without breaking a sweat, and she was sitting in his kitchen eating his honey like that was the most interesting thing available to her this morning.
"Kessington sends the actual talent now," he said. "Should I be flattered or worried?"
"Bit of both, usually. That's how you know it's real interest instead of a form letter." Iris pushed the jar toward him, magnanimous, like she was doing him a favor by leaving any honey in it at all. "I watched your fight. The real footage, not the internet cut. Ministry has better cameras than the crowd did."
"And?"
"You didn't fight him."
"I fought him plenty."
"You disarmed a man's entire identity with two sentences and let him think he lost a fistfight instead. That's not fighting, kid. That's something else. I don't have a word for it yet, and I've been doing this a very long time."
Cole sat down across from her, mostly because his legs had decided the conversation required sitting whether he'd agreed to it or not. "Everyone keeps telling me that. That I don't have a word yet. Getting a little old, honestly."
"Welcome to being interesting. It's mostly people telling you what you're not."
"Sounds exhausting."
"It is." She stood, finally, stretching in a way that suggested the chair had been slightly too small for however long she'd actually planned to sit there, which might have been hours before he woke up. "Kessington wants to sponsor you. I don't particularly care whether you sign anything. I came because Ellis showed me the footage and I wanted to see the kid who caught a punch like he was bored of it."
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"And?"
"You're exactly that bored. It's very funny." She headed for the door, paused there, hand on the frame — the same pause Halden did, the same pause everyone in his life seemed to do lately, like doorways had become the only place people finally said the honest thing. "For what it's worth. Marek's not the real test. Whatever's actually watching you — and something is, kid, I could feel it the second I walked into this building — that's the real test. This fight's just homework."
Cole went very still. "What do you mean, something's watching."
"I mean exactly what I said. There's a weight in this building that doesn't belong to you, doesn't belong to your sister, doesn't belong to the walls." Iris tilted her head, studying him with something that wasn't quite pity and wasn't quite excitement, some third thing built out of decades of having seen stranger things than one confused eighteen-year-old. "You haven't noticed it yet?"
"I've noticed a hum. Once. At night."
"That's not a hum, sweetheart. That's someone listening at a door they think you can't hear." She opened the door herself, since apparently locks meant nothing to her either way. "Win your little sanctioned duel. Get your classification sorted, or don't, doesn't matter much either way. But you should start paying attention to the actual thing following you around, because it's a great deal more interesting than Marek Osei's wounded pride."
She left the honey jar on the counter, mostly empty, and was gone before Cole thought of a single follow-up question worth asking.
Mia came out ten minutes later, hair a disaster, staring at the honey jar like it had personally wronged her.
"Who ate all the honey?"
"Kessington."
"What?"
"Long story. Also, apparently something's been listening at our door and I've only just found out about it from a stranger who broke a lock without touching it."
Mia blinked at him. Set her bag down slowly, the specific slow-motion of someone deciding whether the day had officially gotten too strange before eight-fifteen to bother processing further. "You're going to have to say that again, but slower, and with actual context."
"S-Rank sponsor rep. Ate breakfast. Told me something's been watching this apartment. Then left."
"And you're just — telling me this? Casually? Over breakfast?"
"What was I supposed to do, keep it from you?"
"Yes! Obviously yes, Cole, that's a terrifying sentence to just drop on a person before school!" Mia's voice climbed, cracked slightly at the top, the specific crack of someone who'd been holding a great deal together for a great many days and had just found the exact wrong straw. "You keep doing this. Acting like everything's fine, like nothing's actually a big deal, and then you just — casually mention that something's watching our apartment like you're telling me we're out of milk."
"Would panicking help?"
"I don't know! Maybe! Maybe sometimes panicking is the correct response, Cole, maybe not every single thing needs to be handled with a joke and a shrug—"
She stopped herself. Breathed. Pressed the heel of one hand against her eye, hard, the way you press on something to stop it from doing what it wants to do.
"I'm not going to cry about this," she said, mostly to herself.
"Nobody said you had to."
"I know. I'm saying it because I need to hear it out loud." She picked her bag back up. Squared her shoulders, the specific posture of someone rebuilding a wall in real time, brick by visible brick. "I refuse to be the person who falls apart every time you mention something insane. That's not — that's not who I am."
Cole didn't argue with her. Didn't try to talk her out of it, didn't offer comfort she hadn't asked for, because he'd learned a long time ago that Mia's Conviction wasn't a wall you knocked politely on and asked about. It was a wall she'd built herself, brick by brick, and the kindest thing he could do was let her keep laying them her own way.
"For what it's worth," he said instead, "you're handling it better than I did, the first time something actually scared me this week."
"When was that?"
"Doesn't matter. Point is, you're doing fine."
Mia looked at him a long moment — searching, the way she did when she suspected he was managing her rather than answering her, which was, in fairness, occasionally accurate — and then let it go, because some mornings you only have energy for one real fight, and hers was already spent on a jar of missing honey and a stranger who didn't believe in locked doors.
"I'm telling Reeve about this," she said, heading for the door. "Somebody normal needs to know."
"Reeve's not normal."
"He's more normal than whatever just happened in our kitchen."
She left. Cole sat a while longer at the empty table, honey jar scraped nearly clean, turning Iris's words over slowly, the way you turn over a stone to see what's actually living underneath it.
Something's been listening at a door they think you can't hear.
He thought about the hum. The word fourth, which he still hadn't told anyone, not even Reeve. The photo in the surveillance car's folder, someone else's face, someone else's story running parallel to his without ever quite touching it.
Three weeks had started to feel like a very small window.
He got up. Rinsed the spoon Iris had left in the sink, because somebody had to, and went to get dressed for a school day that already felt, before it had even started, like the last easy one he was going to get for a while.
[End of Chapter 11]