The next three hours taught me something about politics that Diane had tried to explain for nine years and I’d never fully absorbed until I lived it.

Campaigning was not about convincing people you were the best option. Campaigning was about making people feel like they’d already decided to vote for you and you were simply confirming their excellent taste.

I started with the easy ones.

Finn sat in the common room threading invisible filaments between his fingers in geometric patterns that caught the light when the angle was right. He didn’t look up when I dropped onto the couch beside him, but the pattern he was weaving shifted by about two degrees, which was Finn’s version of rolling out a welcome mat.

"I’m not going to give you a speech," I said.

"Good. I hate speeches."

"I just want you to know that if I win, the first thing I’m bringing to faculty is the equipment checkout system. Three forms for a set of training weights is two forms too many."

Finn’s filament pattern paused for a full second. That was the equivalent of a standing ovation from someone whose emotional range typically operated between mild interest and slightly less mild interest.

"That’s been bothering me since Tuesday," he said.

"I know."

"How."

"Because it’s been bothering me since Tuesday and you’re the only other person in this building who cares about unnecessary process overhead."

The filament pattern resumed. Finn didn’t say anything else. He didn’t need to. The vote was locked.

Maribelle required a different approach altogether. I found her in the third floor hallway carrying what appeared to be a fruit smoothie in one hand while scrolling through her phone with the other, her honey-blonde waves catching the late afternoon light streaming through the corridor windows. The sundress from earlier had been swapped out for a fitted tank top and shorts that showed off legs that could have sold running shoes in a catalog, but the real attention-grabber was her tail. It swished behind her with the lazy confidence of someone who’d stopped apologizing for her Branded features sometime around middle school and never looked back.

"I’m going to be direct," I said as I approached.

"Baby, you don’t know any other way." Her golden eyes swept me from shoes to hairline in approximately one point three seconds, cataloging and dismissing whatever she found there in the same motion. "You’re here about the vote."

"I’m here about Rina."

That stopped the tail mid-swish. Maribelle’s expression shifted from casual assessment to genuine attention.

"Rina’s struggling with the conditioning schedule," I continued. "The pacing structure doesn’t account for Aspect types that prioritize sustained deployment over burst output. If I win, I’m bringing that data to faculty. Percy’s already mapped it."

"Percy mapped it."

"Percy maps everything. That’s what Percy does."

Maribelle’s golden eyes studied me for a long moment. The bioluminescent quality of her irises made the assessment feel more intense than a standard visual evaluation, like being appraised by something older and wiser than the eighteen-year-old body it occupied.

"Rina told me you sat with her on a bench at one in the morning because she couldn’t sleep."

"She mentioned that."

"She tells me everything, Belmont. I’m her girl." Maribelle took a long pull from her smoothie. "You’ve got my vote. Don’t make me regret it."

She walked past me down the hallway, her tail resuming its lazy metronome swing, and I watched her go for exactly one second longer than was politically appropriate before redirecting my attention toward the next name on my mental list.

By six o’clock I’d spoken with twelve of the nineteen people whose votes I needed to secure this.

Some conversations lasted thirty seconds—Eden’s promise to advocate for more training dummy variety because he was sick of melting identical foam targets, which was reasonable enough that I agreed immediately. Some stretched to ten minutes.

Nyx cornered me near the vending machines and asked three pointed questions about institutional transparency and curriculum reform that required actual answers instead of politician-speak. I gave her honest responses.

Not complete honesty, because complete honesty would have involved explaining the Oracle Feed and the gap between my registered status and my actual loadout, but honest enough that she raised one eyebrow in what I’d learned to recognize as Nyx’s version of approval. From her, that eyebrow represented the rough equivalent of a campaign endorsement and a fruit basket.

Hiro watched me work from his designated corner of the common room without approaching or being approached.

His dark eyes tracked every interaction with the specific quality of someone cataloging data for future analysis, logging my pitch structure and my success rate and probably my body language tells into whatever internal file he maintained on people he found tactically interesting.

When our eyes met across the room, something passed between us that had nothing to do with elections and everything to do with the fact that we’d spent four evenings trying to knock each other unconscious on an abandoned field.

We’d developed the particular respect that only comes from repeatedly punching someone you genuinely disagree with and discovering that they punch back with precision.

I made a mental note to deal with Hiro later. Right now I had a more complicated problem.

I pulled out my phone and opened the Class 1-B group chat, scrolling past seventeen unread messages from Caden about snack policy reform until I found what I needed. Camille Ortega’s contact number, visible in the chat header alongside nineteen other names and profile pictures. I’d never texted her directly. Every interaction between us had occurred in public, in hallways, on training fields, during exercises, or in the aftermath of exercises that generated enough surveillance footage to fuel gossip for months.

I typed the message before I could overthink it.

Hey. You free tonight? Want to come by my room. Low key. Just chill.

The three dots appeared immediately. Disappeared. Appeared again. Disappeared for eight seconds that felt considerably longer.

Why.

Because we need to talk and I’d rather do it without twenty people watching.

The dots cycled through two more rounds before her response arrived.

Fine. 9. Don’t make it weird.