Caden stared at me.

Marco stared at me.

"You noticed that." Caden’s voice carried a different frequency now. Lower. Less performance. "About Rina."

"Percy noticed the pacing structure. I noticed the pattern. Rina deserves better than being last every day because the system is built for sprinters."

Something changed in Caden’s expression. The campaign sign behind him suddenly seemed irrelevant. Whatever he’d been performing for the past hour, the jokes and the slogans and the theatrical self-deprecation, the actual Caden who lived beneath all of it had surfaced for a moment to process what I’d said.

"I’ll think about it," he said.

That was more than I expected.

I took my coffee and moved toward the dining table where Percy sat with Rina, their notebooks and diagrams spread between them in a collaborative chaos that somehow made sense to both participants. Rina’s sheep mug sat at the table’s edge, her white hair catching the common room’s warm lighting while her purple eyes tracked my approach with the specific awareness of someone whose Aspect made her sensitive to the emotional state of everyone within proximity.

"You’re running." Rina said it without question.

"I’m running."

Her tail swished once. "Good."

Percy looked up from his Venn diagram. "Your candidacy introduces significant variables into my electoral model. I’m going to need to revise columns three and four."

"Percy, you’re literally running against me."

"Competing and analyzing are not mutually exclusive. I can advocate for my own candidacy while simultaneously maintaining objective assessment of the competitive landscape." His pen moved to the VARIABLES column with the precision of someone who had already mapped this conversation in his head before I sat down. "Also, you’re polling at twenty-five percent among the cohort according to Marco’s preliminary data. That gives you the second-strongest male position but insufficient momentum to overtake Theo without either reducing his support base or expanding your own coalition beyond the classmates who already view you favorably."

I sat down across from him. "Tell me more."

Percy’s eyes unfocused for half a second as Analyze activated. His brain ran calculations that would take most people hours to complete. When he spoke again, the stutter vanished completely. His voice came out clean and steady, the version of Percy that emerged when he stopped performing uncertainty and operated in the space his brain actually occupied.

"Theo’s support comes from three sources. First, genuine personal warmth that creates positive associations across the entire cohort regardless of subgroup. Second, his Kinetic Bank makes him the most physically imposing student in the class. That creates an unconscious association between physical capability and leadership suitability. Third, Theo has never made anyone uncomfortable. In a cohort full of volatile personalities and complicated interpersonal dynamics, that represents an actively desirable quality."

Rina nodded beside him. Her tail curled around her own thigh. "People trust Theo because he’s safe."

"Your support comes from different sources entirely," Percy continued. His finger traced a line connecting two nodes on his diagram. "Name recognition from the interview and your parents’ legacy. Perceived tactical intelligence from the training exercise results. And a quality that I can only describe as..." He consulted his notebook, found the phrase he’d written earlier, committed to it. "Magnetic chaos."

"Magnetic chaos."

Percy’s pen tapped the page. "You generate situations that people want to watch unfold. The kiss with Camille. The construct malfunction with Petra. The interview with Vasquez. Your arrival at every social gathering producing at least one moment that becomes the primary topic of conversation for the following forty-eight hours." The pen stilled. "People don’t vote for you because you make them feel safe. People vote for you because you make them feel like something is about to happen."

Rina’s purple eyes found mine across the table. For a moment the anxiety that usually covered her expression like a veil lifted entirely.

"He’s right, you know. About the something about to happen part." Her voice came out quieter than Percy’s but steadier than I expected. "When you walked into the common room on move-in day and just... waved at me. Like I was a normal person sitting on a couch. That was the first time in three years someone at an academy looked at me without looking at the horns first."

She touched the base of her left horn, a gesture so habitual that she probably didn’t notice she did it. The dark obsidian spiraled upward and caught the common room light, revealing those deep purple veins that matched her eyes.

"I’m voting for you," she said. "Not because of the chaos thing. Because you see people."

Percy wrote something in his notebook, his handwriting sharp and compact, the kind of script that looked efficient until you tried to read it. I caught the edge before he angled the page away from me in a movement that was less deliberate concealment and more habit of someone who processed everything through external documentation.

RINA ENDORSEMENT CONFIRMED. EMOTIONAL VECTOR. HIGH AUTHENTICITY.

He was running against me and he couldn’t stop breaking the room down into its component parts, categorizing every statement made, every dynamic that shifted, every piece of information that would go into whatever master analysis document he was maintaining somewhere. Even now he was studying his own candidacy like it was someone else’s data set.

"Percy."

He looked up. His pen stopped moving but stayed poised against the page, ready to continue the moment he had processed whatever interruption I was about to provide.

"You’re going to be a great representative someday." I let the sentence breathe for a second before I finished it. "Just maybe not this semester."

His brown eyes held mine for two full seconds. No muttering. No stuttering. No verbal processing sounds filling the space where certainty should have been. No immediate apology for taking up the conversational space I had just given him. Just Percy Mendoza looking at me with the same direct assessment he probably gave structural weaknesses when his Aspect was active.

"We’ll see," he said.

The pen went back to the notebook. The analysis resumed. Rina’s sheep mug came back to her lips, steam curling upward past her horns in a way that caught the afternoon light coming through the common room windows.

I pulled out my phone and typed a message to Sloane.

I’m running for class rep.

Her response came in four seconds.

OBVIOUSLY.

Then, a second later:

You better win. My boyfriend is NOT coming in second to anyone.