Wednesday morning came with the specific dread of a decision I couldn’t control anymore.

I’d done the work. Twelve conversations, one endorsement I’d earned through refusal, another I’d bought with snack promises and a genuine commitment to Rina’s conditioning problem. All that was left was watching nineteen people decide whether they trusted me enough to speak for them when it counted.

I hated this part. The waiting. The powerlessness of it.

Steele stood at the front of Room 214 with a marker in one hand and her coffee in the other, which told me the votes had already been counted somewhere I couldn’t see. She wasn’t tallying live. She was performing the reveal, which meant she’d decided the reveal mattered more than the count.

Classic Steele. Every moment a lesson wrapped in theater wrapped in more theater.

The class filed in slower than usual. Nobody joked. Even Caden kept his feet off the back of my chair, which was becoming a reliable barometer for how seriously the room took a thing.

Percy sat beside me with his notebook closed. Closed. His pen wasn’t moving. His brain had apparently decided that documenting this moment would violate some internal principle about not analyzing his own defeat in real time.

"You okay?" I asked him.

"My model gave you a sixty-two percent probability of winning the male seat." He stared at the whiteboard where Steele hadn’t written anything yet. "Which means there’s a thirty-eight percent chance my model was wrong, and I don’t handle being wrong well."

"You’ll be fine."

"That’s statistically unsupported reassurance."

"Yeah, well. It’s all I’ve got."

Felicity claimed the seat to my right and leaned close enough that her shoulder pressed against mine. Vanilla and something warmer underneath. She’d done her hair differently today, half of it pulled up, the rest falling loose around a face that had spent the past week telling me exactly what she thought I stood for.

"Nervous?" she whispered.

"No."

"Liar. Your jaw’s doing the thing."

"I don’t have a thing."

"You absolutely have a thing." She bumped my arm. "It’s cute. Don’t ruin it by getting self-conscious."

Steele set her coffee on the podium. The room went quiet in the way rooms only go quiet when twenty teenagers with dangerous powers all decide to hold their breath at once.

"So." She uncapped the marker. "You people made this harder than it needed to be. Fourteen nominations. Fourteen. For a position most of you barely understand and half of you will regret wanting by October."

She turned to the whiteboard and started writing. Names first, down the left side in her sharp military print.

PARK. BELMONT. MENDOZA. HOLT. on the male side.

ORTEGA. LANG. CALLOWAY. WHITFIELD. on the female.

Then the tally marks.

She built the male count first, and I watched the marks accumulate next to each name with the specific attention of someone whose stomach had relocated to his throat.

Theo got the first mark. Then another. He sat two rows down with his usual easy warmth, and I could see him doing the math the same way I was, watching his count climb.

Belmont got a mark. Then a second. Then a third.

Steele kept writing. Theo’s total settled at five. Mine kept climbing.

Six.

Seven.

She capped the marker and stepped back.

BELMONT: 7. PARK: 5. MENDOZA: 4. HOLT: 3.

The room exhaled. Someone whooped, probably Eden. Caden slapped the back of my chair hard enough that the whole thing shuddered.

I’d won.

I sat there processing the number seven against my name in Imara Steele’s handwriting, and the thing that hit me wasn’t triumph exactly. It was something closer to vertigo. Seven people had watched me fight and fail and improvise and lie for two weeks and decided I deserved to represent them. Seven people who knew me better than anyone at Halloran had looked at the version of Lukas Belmont I’d built out of gacha pulls and stolen confidence and a dead kid’s face, and they’d trusted it.

I’d wanted this. I’d examined that want in a hallway two days ago and found it ugly and simple and real. And now it was on a whiteboard.

"Congratulations." Steele’s pink eyes found mine. "You’re stuck with the paperwork now."

"Worth it," I said.

"We’ll see."

She turned back to the board for the female count.

Ortega got marks fast. Camille sat by the window with her arms crossed and her expression carefully neutral, but her total climbed the way I’d expected. Four. Five.

Lang matched her. Then passed her by one.

Then Camille pulled even again.

Steele built both counts to the same height, and for a second the board showed a tie before she added the final mark to Petra’s column.

LANG: 6. ORTEGA: 5. CALLOWAY: 4. WHITFIELD: 3.

Petra Lang had won the female seat.

The reaction was quieter than mine had been. Petra didn’t cheer or grin or slam anything. She sat in the top row with her leather planner open and her spine perfectly straight, and she inclined her head in a small, gracious acknowledgment that would have looked humble to anyone who couldn’t read the tight line of her jaw.

I could read it. With a hundred Intelligence and the Oracle Feed running micro-expression analysis whether I wanted it to or not, I could read every degree of the fury she was folding into that demure little nod.

She’d won. And she was seven votes to my seven votes furious about it, because winning by one over Camille wasn’t the same as winning at all in the arithmetic that ran inside Petra Lang’s head. She’d expected a landslide. She’d gotten a squeaker. And she was going to have to stand next to me in every faculty meeting for the rest of the year, the son of dead heroes with a fraudulent Aspect and a trending interview, the delivery boy she’d once told to make sure the bookshelf arrived by three.

Her emerald eyes found mine across the room. Held for exactly one second.

Whatever she was calculating behind that composed face, it wasn’t gratitude.

"Alright." Steele recapped the marker and dropped it in the tray. "Belmont and Lang. Your representatives, Class 1-B. Try not to let it go to your heads, and try not to kill each other before Friday’s strategy session."

"No promises," Petra said, sweet as anything.