"Camille hasn’t looked at anyone since she walked in. Petra’s planner has been open to the same page for six minutes without her writing anything. Rina’s tail hasn’t moved since she sat down."

Felicity’s observational capacity when she dropped the bubbly exterior was genuinely terrifying.

The rest of 1-B filtered in with the same subdued energy. Theo took his front row seat but didn’t lean back with his usual comfortable sprawl. Lyra appeared in the second row with less subtlety than usual, meaning she was distracted enough that people actually noticed her arriving. Nyx sat beside Maribelle and neither of them whispered. Even Hiro, whose aesthetic confidence had survived everything this academy had thrown at him, looked marginally less self-assured than his baseline. He caught my eye as he sat down. The faintest nod. An acknowledgment that whatever was about to happen, we’d face it from positions strengthened by four evenings of beating the hell out of each other in an abandoned field.

Camille sat at the far end of the row. She wore the standard Halloran uniform like armor, every button fastened, collar precise, skirt at regulation length. Her two-tone hair fell across one eye in a way that communicated she wanted a barrier between herself and whoever might try engaging her in conversation. She didn’t look at me. Hadn’t looked at me for more than half a second at a time since Sunday, when I’d caught her watching me cross the cafeteria with an expression that flickered between residual anger and something she was still refusing to name.

Petra descended the stairs with her usual unhurried grace and claimed her seat in the top row. She opened her planner. Closed it. Opened it again. Her fingers trembled on the leather cover by a degree that most people wouldn’t have caught at that distance. My hundred-point Intelligence caught it from forty feet.

At 8:58, the door opened.

Imara Steele entered Room 214 the way she entered everything. Like she’d been awake since four and considered the rest of us late to a party that started before we were born. Her gold athletic jacket caught the fluorescent lighting at precisely the angle that made it impossible to look away from her. Her pale blonde hair framed a face that was too angular to be conventionally attractive and too magnetic to call anything else. Those pink eyes swept across twenty seated students with the evaluative intensity of a retired A-rank Hero who’d spent three years converting anxious teenagers into people who could survive what the world intended to throw at them.

She carried a tablet in one hand and a coffee in the other. Standard Steele procedure. The coffee was always there. The tablet appeared only when the information it contained would change something permanently.

She set the coffee on the podium with deliberate precision. Held the tablet against her side. Let the silence build while twenty teenagers who’d endured two weeks of conditioning sat in their seats and wondered whether the next sentence out of her mouth would determine the rest of their careers. Combat assessments, tactical exercises, positioning drills, media training, brand lectures, agency logistics courses, and a visit from America’s number one Hero. Two weeks of relentless evaluation compressed into a single moment.

Twenty students. Twenty held breaths.

Steele let the silence hold one beat longer than comfortable. Then another. Then she smiled.

Not the warm smile she deployed when someone exceeded her expectations. The other one. The smile that meant she’d designed something specifically calibrated to make us uncomfortable and was about to enjoy watching it work.

"What I am about to announce," she said, "will determine the trajectory of your entire experience at Halloran. How you respond will tell me more about who you actually are than every assessment, every conditioning session, and every tactical brief you’ve submitted in the past two weeks combined."

The room stopped breathing.

Caden’s hand found the back of my chair. Not resting on it. Gripping it. The class clown’s knuckles were white.

Percy’s pen appeared in his hand from nowhere, held so tightly the plastic creaked.

Rina’s sheep mug sat on her desk untouched. Her tail had wrapped around her own waist like a child hugging itself.

Camille’s orange glow flickered at her fingertips before she clamped down on it. A physical tell she never allowed in public.

"Class 1-B requires two representatives." Steele consulted her tablet with deliberate slowness, the kind that meant she had the information memorized and was simply enjoying our collective panic. "One male. One female. These representatives will serve as the primary liaisons between the cohort and the faculty for the remainder of the academic year. They will attend monthly strategy sessions with faculty leadership, which means they will be in the room when decisions about this class are being made, not hearing about those decisions afterward. They will have direct input on training schedules, curriculum feedback, cohort welfare decisions. They will represent 1-B’s interests during inter-class events, including the joint practicals with 1-A that begin in three weeks, which Cole Dravid will absolutely weaponize against us if he thinks 1-B’s representation is anything less than competent."

The tension in the room shifted character. What had felt like dread became something else entirely. Something sharper.

"Representatives are not appointed by faculty," Steele continued, and several students who had already started calculating whether they should pre-emptively step forward immediately recalculated. "They are elected by their peers. Which means this is not about who I think deserves the position. This is about who you trust enough to speak for you when the people making decisions about your futures are sitting across the table. Who you believe will represent what this class actually needs rather than what sounds impressive in a formal meeting. Who you would be comfortable knowing has access to information about curriculum changes, training adjustments, or institutional decisions before the rest of you hear about them."

She paused, letting that settle.

"You will nominate candidates today. You will vote by Wednesday morning. The results will be announced Thursday, and whoever wins will attend their first strategy session with faculty leadership on Friday afternoon." Her smile widened fractionally. "I suggest you choose carefully. Because once you elect someone, you are stuck with them until the end of the academic year, and I promise you that I will hold them accountable for how well they represent the collective intelligence and tactical maturity of this cohort."

She set her tablet on the podium beside her coffee.

"Nominations open now. Voting closes Wednesday morning."

The silence lasted about two seconds.

Then everyone started talking at once.