The room detonated.

Not literally, though with Sloane’s crowd it wouldn’t have surprised me. But the sound that came out of Class 1-B was the kind of noise that rattled the reinforced wall panels Radiant had installed. Eden stood on his chair with both fists in the air. Marco pounded the desk. Caden had his hands cupped around his mouth, howling something that got lost in the general roar. Theo was clapping, that generous whole-body clap of a man who’d lost the seat and didn’t care because the guy who won had just made him feel like belonging to 1-B meant something.

Percy had opened his notebook again. He was writing furiously, and when he glanced up at me his eyes carried something that wasn’t the flat assessment he usually gave. Something warmer. Something that looked a lot like the expression he’d worn when I told him knowing all the building exits was smart instead of weird.

Rina had both hands pressed to her mouth, her sheep tail swishing, her purple eyes bright. When I’d named her first, her whole posture had changed. I’d watched three years of some other academy telling her she was support-tier and comfort-provider and the-girl-you-send-to-hold-hands fall off her shoulders in real time.

Felicity was on her feet beside me. She hadn’t cheered so much as she’d stood, and when I looked at her she was watching me with an expression I didn’t have a category for, something between pride and calculation and a warmth she wasn’t performing for once.

"That," she said under the noise, just for me, "was not improvised."

"It was completely improvised."

"That’s worse. That’s so much worse." She was grinning. "You just did that off the top of your head. Diane would weep."

"Diane would critique my pacing and tell me I peaked too early on the Rina line."

"She’d be right. But it worked anyway."

Across the room, Camille had stopped pretending to look anywhere but at me. Her arms were down. Her jaw had lost its tight line. And whatever the other thing was that she hadn’t decided about, I could see her recalculating it in real time, the way she recalculated everything, reading me for stress fractures and finding a new answer than the one she’d walked in with.

Steele let the noise run for exactly ten seconds before she raised one hand. The room dropped to silence like she’d pulled a plug.

"Well." Her pink eyes had a gleam in them I didn’t trust. "That was a better speech than most active heroes give at their license ceremonies. Which is either a compliment to you or an indictment of the profession, and I haven’t decided which."

"Can be both," I said.

"It usually is." She looked at Petra. "Anything to add, Lang? Your co-representative just set a high bar."

Petra rose from the top row with the fluid grace of someone who’d been trained in deportment since before she could walk. She smoothed her skirt. Tucked a strand of black hair behind her ear. And when she spoke, her voice carried that precise, cultured, devastating calm that made every sentence sound like a verdict.

"Belmont speaks beautifully." She let that hang just long enough to sound like praise and just short enough that everyone heard the blade underneath. "And I look forward to the parts of this position that involve actual work rather than speeches. Faculty meetings. Curriculum feedback. The unglamorous administrative labor that determines how this cohort is actually treated." Her emerald eyes cut to me. "I’ll handle the substance. He can handle the applause."

The room made an ooooh sound. Somebody, probably Nyx, said "damn" with quiet appreciation.

She’d just called me an empty-headed crowd-pleaser in front of nineteen people while making it sound like a division of labor.

I had to respect it. It was clean. It was the kind of surgical strike Diane would have appreciated, the sort of comment that would age into resentment if I didn’t answer it right now.

"Looking forward to working with you too, Lang." I gave her the warmest smile in my arsenal, the one that had gotten me through an IHL registration and a live television interview and a room full of reporters. "I’m sure your substance and my applause will make a great team. Faculty love a good double act."

Her composure cracked for exactly a quarter of a second. A flash of something behind the emerald that wasn’t demure at all.

Then it sealed over, smooth as her conjured crystal.

"I’m sure they will," she said.

Steele looked between us like a woman watching a very expensive fire she’d deliberately started.

"This," she announced to the class, "is going to be the most entertaining year of my teaching career. Belmont, Lang, first strategy session is Friday at two in the faculty conference room, Building A, third floor. Don’t be late. Don’t be unprepared. And for the love of everything, don’t turn a curriculum discussion into whatever this was." She waved a hand at the space between me and Petra. "The rest of you, get to your next class. Nominations are over, the campaign’s done, go back to being disappointing at conditioning."

The room broke into motion, chairs scraping, bags zipping, the buzz of nineteen people who’d just watched something worth watching.

Caden reached me first, clapping both hands on my shoulders. "That was cinema. Absolute cinema. You didn’t have a speech, did you. Admit it. You made all that up standing there."

"Every word."

"I knew it. I knew it and I made you do it anyway." He looked genuinely delighted with himself. "You’re welcome. Also, as your first act as my duly elected representative, you’re going to explain to Steele why my conditioning schedule is scientifically inhumane, and as your loyal endorser I’m going to do exactly zero percent of your Combat Theory homework."

"You’re doing all of my Combat Theory homework."

"That is not the deal."

"It’s the deal now. I made it tradition retroactively."

Caden stared at me. Then he threw his head back and laughed, the real laugh, the one that only came out when Marco was in earshot, and slapped my shoulder again. "Marco. Marco, he turned it around on me. He used my own bit."

"You deserve it," Marco said without looking up from his phone.

Percy appeared at my elbow with his notebook. "Your speech contained four distinct rhetorical movements and landed the emotional peak on the Rina reference exactly as Felicity predicted." He paused. "My model gave you sixty-two percent. You won with seven of nineteen, which is thirty-seven percent of the vote in a four-way race, which is actually consistent with my projection." A beat. "I was not wrong."

"Never doubted you, Percy."

"You definitely doubted me."

"I definitely did."

Behind him, moving toward the door with her planner tucked against her chest, Petra Lang paused. She didn’t look back at me. She just stopped, one hand on the doorframe, her spine straight, her black hair catching the fluorescent light.

Then she turned her head, just enough for me to catch one emerald eye and the cold, patient thing living behind it.

"See you Belmont," she said.

And left before I could answer.