Morning training left me sore in the specific way that meant Steele had actually put effort into designing our suffering. Hill sprints, partner drags, and a thirty-minute core circuit that made my abdominal muscles file a formal complaint with management. The Demigod trait would erase all of it by lunch, which was the only reason I hadn’t started plotting Steele’s dramatic demise somewhere around burpee number forty.

Breakfast had been ramen and eggs and Percy delivering unsolicited data about the campus water pressure fluctuations. Normal. Comfortable. The kind of routine that lulled a person into thinking their life wasn’t held together by fraud and gacha mechanics.

Then Felicity found me in the hallway.

She looped her arm through mine the way she always did, chin tilted up, blonde hair caught in a loose braid that had clearly taken deliberate work to look accidental. Her uniform blazer sat unbuttoned, her white shirt straining exactly one degree past regulation, and she smelled like vanilla and something floral I couldn’t name and didn’t want to think about too hard.

"Okay bestie, you are giving Steele-truck-hit-you energy right now," she said cheerfully, her voice carrying that specific bright quality that meant she was enjoying herself. "Like, full-on roadkill chic."

"Steele is worse than a truck," I said. "A truck has mechanical limitations. Steele has enthusiasm and a whistle."

She laughed, the sound bright and easy and completely unaffected, which was what actually got me. Because yesterday had happened.

The theater.

Her in my lap, breath warm against my neck, her fingers digging into my shoulders while I held completely still and tried to pretend the whole thing wasn’t rapidly approaching territory neither of us had explicitly agreed to enter.

The illusion-covered near-disaster with the campus employee who’d walked past too close to where we shouldn’t have been.

All of that had happened, and she was walking beside me now acting like nothing fundamental had shifted at all.

That was the part that landed wrong.

Not wrong in a bad way. Wrong in the specific way that meant I’d calibrated for the wrong outcome.

She wasn’t different.

There was no awkwardness threading through her usual warmth, no clingy recalibration where she’d suddenly need constant validation, no shift into some possessive new frequency the way I’d quietly braced for when I woke up this morning and remembered what her Temptation Gauge had been doing.

She was the same Felicity who’d dragged me shopping two weeks ago and monologued about the correct shade of chartreuse for seventeen uninterrupted minutes. Physically affectionate in ways that registered as completely natural to her and mildly overwhelming to everyone else. Impossibly, relentlessly herself.

I’d spent the walk from the dormitories to homeroom quietly grateful for that continuity, which was probably the first genuinely dangerous thought I’d had all morning.

Because gratitude was one comfortable step from trust, and trust was one unguarded moment from telling her everything, and telling anyone everything was exactly how a guy with a fake Aspect registration and a system-mandated harem protocol ended up in a government research facility with electrodes attached to his skull and a file stamped ANOMALOUS ENTITY - CONTAINMENT PROTOCOLS AUTHORIZED.

"You’re doing the thing," Felicity said.

"What thing."

"The thing where your eyes go flat and you stop blinking." She poked my ribs. "Percy does it too, except Percy mutters. You just look like a very handsome computer buffering."

"I’m not buffering."

"You’re absolutely buffering." Her fingers drifted lower on my arm, tracing along the fabric with a casualness that would’ve fooled anyone who hadn’t spent yesterday afternoon learning exactly what her hands were capable of. "So."

"So what."

"So." She dropped her voice, still smiling, still bubbly, still my friend in every way except the specific way her thumb was now pressing into the inside of my wrist. "How many rounds did you and Sloane go last night."

I choked on nothing. "Felicity."

"It’s a fair question."

"It is aggressively not a fair question."

"I’m just gathering data." She widened her eyes at me, all fake innocence and zero actual innocence, which was somehow worse than open filth. "For research purposes."

"You sound like Sloane."

"I’ll take that as a compliment and file it away for later." She squeezed my wrist. "Come on. Ballpark it. Two? Three? You had that whole exhausted-but-satisfied thing going during breakfast that I find personally very rude to look at before I’ve had coffee."

The Temptation Gauge flickered at the edge of my vision. Thirty-eight percent. Attached. I ignored it, which was becoming my full-time job.

"I’m not answering that."

"That means more than three." Her smile turned wicked. "Interesting."

"That means I have some dignity."

"You have no dignity. I’ve seen your dignity. It’s in a theater basement under a filing cabinet." She leaned in close enough that her braid brushed my shoulder. "I just want to know the number so I know what I’m working with."

"Working with for what."

"So I can top it. Obviously."

I stopped walking. She kept going two steps, turned, and gave me a look that was ninety percent challenge and ten percent genuine delight at having broken me in the hallway before nine in the morning.

"You’re a menace," I told her.

"You keep saying that." She spun on her heel and kept walking, ponytail swinging, entirely too pleased with herself. "And you keep not stopping me. Come on, class rep. You’ll be late to your own faculty overlords."

I followed. Because of course I followed. Following Felicity Hardy toward inevitable chaos was apparently just my life now.

Room 214 had the specific charged quiet of twenty exhausted teenagers who’d been beaten into the pavement four hours earlier and hadn’t recovered. Caden had his head down on his desk. Marco was eating something suspicious from within his uniform. Percy sat beside my usual seat with his notebook already open, and when I dropped into the chair he flipped a page without looking up.

"Your resting heart rate during the core circuit was elevated by twelve percent compared to Monday," he said.

"Good morning to you too."

"It’s data. I thought you’d want to know."

"I really didn’t."