Chapter 18

  The Beginning of the First Act (VII)

  Yvette scanned her ID at the entrance of the cafeteria, the beep sharp and approving as she kept stride and stepped into the warm surge of it all—the smell of grease and different spices greeted her first, then voices layered over more voices. There was an occasional pop of unrefined magic that made the air shimmer for half a second before it settled, followed by the yelling of security personnel.

  She grabbed a tray, mostly moving on autopilot while her brain put in the shift of a lifetime trying to bridge gaps that she didn’t even know existed until a little while ago.

  ‘Grace was his mom… but Alan was not his dad, and at first he wanted to put Jesse up for adoption…’

  She muttered under her breath as her feet found the Tex-Mex line, standing in it without her brain really deciding to. The grill hissed as the smell of chicken and steak wafted off it, hitting her—her stomach responded immediately with a low rumble. Fajitas were on the menu today.

  "Steak or chicken?"

  "Steak," she said, and watched the cook behind the counter load her plate. Grilled peppers, onions, and finally— “Ah, sorry, can I get some cheese, too?” The cook nodded, adding a generous handful of cheese that began melting across the meat before the plate reached her hands.

  She built the rest of the tray without much fuss, either. Salad bar next, with some croutons and vinaigrette from a squeaky dispenser. The motions were simple and easy, and that was fine.

  ‘You practically lived with us when you and I were babies.’

  She was backtracking. Conversations from months past, then years, maybe even further back if she could think back that far. She'd said that to him after they’d graduated, standing in his brand-new apartment after assembling his sleeper sofa. In fact, now that she thought about it, that was probably the first time she’d really noticed a change—it was inside that apartment.

  Of course, she couldn’t know then what she knew now. The sudden moving out, the money. Everything now looked more crooked than something as straight as ‘graduation gifts’.

  Yvette hit the dining commons and started threading through the tables lined with students, her tray balanced and her eyes scanning. She found Paul first—he was pretty hard to miss, sitting at the head of a long table like some sort of statue somebody had accidentally placed in the dining hall. Next to him were Felicity and Ruben—the familiar shape of her people.

  And then her eyes landed on Jesse—but more precisely, the person in the chair next to him. Her brows furrowed tightly together.

  It was Malika St. Claire, her wavy hair tucked neatly behind an ear. She was nodding at something Paul had just said, and Paul was smiling. Because, of course he was—for as long as she’d known Paul (literally less than twenty-four hours was enough to tell), he would probably smile at a natural disaster if it sat down next to him and tried to talk to him.

  ‘Why is she sitting with them?’ Yvette thought, and then, quieter and more honest underneath that: ‘And of all the chairs she had to sit in…’

  She crossed the distance. Her boots announced her arrival before her own presence did.

  Ruben spotted her first, and he began jabbing Felicity with his elbow, rapid-fire, until she slapped his arm with a scowl and followed his gaze. Her eyes widened just a fraction when she saw her. She said nothing and just let Yvette do… whatever she was about to do.

  She set her tray down.

  It wasn't aggressive, but she let its weight hit the table with a low drop. The plastic connected with a startling thunk and an aggressive vibration.

  Jesse flinched as his Frappuccino sloshed around its rim. "Jesus—" he breathed, shrinking back slightly.

  "Nope, just me~." Her voice carried an oddly sweet but pointed inflection as she dragged the chair beside Jesse back with a long, agonizing scrape of metal against linoleum. She dropped into it and crossed her arms after setting her drink on the table. She didn't look at Paul. She didn't look at Jesse. She just stared dead ahead across the table.

  Paul cleared his throat, his massive frame shifting awkwardly. "Hey, Malika stopped by and we were just, uh, clearing the air."

  Felicity said absolutely nothing, her eyes already darting between the two girls with Jesse seated between them. Ruben had physically rotated his entire torso sideways in his seat, as if he couldn't decide if he wanted to leave or not. Beside her, Jesse had gone completely still—not looking at her exactly, but she could feel his awareness locking onto her like a compass needle.

  Malika cleared her throat and leaned forward slightly around Jesse, offering Yvette a look that was working incredibly hard to be positive and optimistic.

  "I was hoping I'd run into you. I think we definitely got off on the wrong foot earlier, and I wanted to apologize—"

  "Apology accepted." The words shot out of Yvette's mouth, cutting the brunette off. "You can leave now."

  "Yvette, can you just listen—" Paul started, his peacemaker instincts overriding his survival instincts.

  "No, actually. I won't." It was as honest as it was blunt, and her frustration felt like the only real thing about her in this room right now. "Because I don't do whatever this is—the part where we act like everything's fine less than an hour after you yelled at us like we were high school freshmen in a sim and you were the only one with any experience. I've met enough people who apologize better than they change." She tilted her head, finally locking eyes with Malika. "I don't know you well enough yet to know which kind you are. No offense. But I'm not remotely interested in finding out."

  Something flashed behind Malika's eyes—not anger, but something faster, sharper, and significantly less comfortable. The recognition of hitting a wall she hadn't anticipated.

  "Okay," Malika said, carefully reeling herself in. "Look, I just want to get us on the right track. We have to work together. Is that so unreasonable?"

  "Hmm." Yvette made it apparent she wasn't thinking very hard about it. "Actually, I'm not interested in being in your group anymore, either. I've seen enough of how you treat people you don't even know. All I want right now is for you to take your apology and shove it so far up your—"

  "Alright." Jesse's hand came up between them, cutting off the conversation mid-flow.

  Yvette closed her mouth. She turned her face away from Malika and toward the table, jaw set. There was more she wanted to say.

  "I have this splitting headache," Jesse muttered, pressing his thumb and middle finger hard against the bridge of his nose, "and all of this is making it significantly worse, so can we just—" He exhaled, long and ragged, then shook his head. "God. We are fixing this."

  He reached into his bag.

  When his hand emerged, he was holding a pair of reading glasses—thick black frames that looked like they belonged to a tired professor. Yvette had never seen him wear glasses before. She watched him unfold them with a quiet click, settle them onto his face, and then reach down and pull out a tablet.

  For a few seconds, everyone at the table just watched him scroll, until he stopped. Then, as he read his notes, his expression shifted into something oddly focused. When he looked up, the anxiety and frustration that had been written all over him moments ago were gone.

  "Okay. Quick question for the table," Jesse said, his tone perfectly level. "What does anyone actually care about when it comes to forming a group? Genuinely." His eyes moved from Malika to Ruben, deliberately democratic, as if they were in a lecture hall rather than a cafeteria.

  Malika's jaw visibly tightened at the sudden redirection. "Reliability."

  "Okay. But what makes someone reliable? Looking for a specific word."

  "Trust?" Ruben offered from across the table, his voice a little squeaky. He looked surprised he'd spoken out loud and immediately seemed to regret it. Jesse pointed the back of his digital pen at him.

  "Yeah. Exactly."

  Ruben chuckled, glancing sideways—then stopped as Felicity glared at him.

  Jesse glanced back at his screen. "Reliability in this context is basically just trust with a job attached to it. This means if we're asking why the group fell apart today—and I was watching the feed upstairs, that was our assignment, just in case you were wondering how I knew—the actual problem probably had nothing to do with the formation."

  Yvette furrowed her brows. "You watched us?" Jesse nodded simply. She leaned back and let out a slow breath. "Great." She'd had an audience and hadn't even known it. Though honestly, it probably would have changed nothing.

  Malika folded her hands on the table, knuckles straining. "Then what was the problem, in your opinion?" The challenge was right there under the surface of her voice.

  Jesse looked at her. He pressed his teeth to the inside of his cheek for a second. Yvette could see him deciding not just what to say, but how far to take it.

  "Well, it was you trying to lead others who had no real reason to follow you yet," he said. It was not delivered with any real heat behind it, just a quick, simple fact. "Not because you were wrong about the formation or anything like that. I actually think you probably were right; but being right about the formation doesn't matter if the people who are supposed to be in it have not decided whether they trust the person calling for it." He paused. "You started at the top and worked down. And that order doesn't really work in this kind of environment."

  Malika just stared at him. Her expression was painfully blank. "Did it ever occur to you and your little assessment that maybe—just maybe—that was kinda part of the exercise? Testing our ability to work cohesively with people we don't know, the way we might have to in the field? Meaning all of this is essentially an interlude for our actual team building we will be doing over the course of the entire semester—or even academic year?"

  Jesse looked at her for a moment and then nodded. "That's a good point if the objective was cohesion under pressure," he said. "Though it doesn't really change what I saw."

  Malika’s stare slowly turned into a glare. “Right.” She let a short exhale leave her nostrils and smirked, pushing her chair back and standing up. Jesse had diagnosed a mechanical failure, sure—but in doing so he had completely ignored the fact that he was dissecting a proud, highly defensive individual in front of a now-perceived hostile audience.

  "Maybe you can use that big brain of yours to also tell me how that resulted in your girlfriend shoving me." Her voice had dropped a full octave. The control was gone. The edge underneath had sharpened into a razor.

  Ruben and Felicity recoiled. Paul now looked oddly small as he leaned forward, sighing at the situation. Jesse just blinked, the clinical focus shattering instantly. "She's not—"

  She shoved her chair back into the table, drawing stares from their surroundings, but she kept going, cutting him off. "I'm not asking you to critique me like you're my instructor or coach—I don't even know you!" Malika pressed, leaning into the space over the table, the seams of her composure finally tearing open. "And you sure as hell don't know me. You weren't even in that room. You watched a video, and you're sitting here telling me I don't know how to lead. Tell me, Jesse, whatever your last name is—why should I even listen to you?"

  She gestured sharply at him, then threw her hand toward Yvette, the motion forcefully chaining them together. "And maybe if she wasn't already coming to the table hot, we could have had an actual conversation."

  "She's not my girlfriend," Jesse said flatly, his voice tight.

  "She's sitting right here," Yvette snapped at exactly the same moment, with a completely different, volatile energy.

  The table went entirely, profoundly quiet. Yvette and Jesse almost instantly shared a look. Ruben's half-eaten pizza slice hung suspended in his hand. Felicity's eyes tracked slowly from Jesse to Yvette and back to Jesse.

  Yvette felt her face flush before she could stop it. She quickly looked away—but it wasn't out of embarrassment. It was more specific: a crawling discomfort of being defined by a stranger who had no more than simply looked at two people and attempted to fill in a story without possessing even a single actual fact. Inadvertently, that very person also just so happened to lob that story directly into a raw, open wound at the same time.

  She stabbed a piece of steak covered in cheese, brought it up to her mouth, and chewed, but she couldn't enjoy the taste.

  The worst part wasn't that Malika had been entirely wrong. The worst part was that she'd said it so easily, like anyone looking at the two of them would just assume that.

  ‘Fuck,’ she muttered inwardly as she closed her eyes.

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  Malika pulled back slightly. Her blind swinging had clearly struck something personal, and that was definitely not something she would try to assume or name. The silence made it explicitly clear she'd landed on some sort of landmine. She picked up her tray, slowly backing away.

  Jesse slowly reached up and set his tablet face-down on the table. He pulled the thick glasses off his face—the clinical focus dissolving, leaving behind just an exhausted guy with a headache. He folded them once with a sharp clack and set them beside his Frappuccino.

  "Jesse Parks," he said. Malika paused her steps as she listened. His voice was incredibly quiet, stripped of all its prior confidence. "Logistics and Planning. I want to be an operations director. Sorry for being blunt, I didn’t mean for it to sound like you can't lead, because that’s not true. Anyway, that’s the only part that was the problem."

  He didn't wait to see how she took it. He packed his tablet and glasses, stood up, grabbed his bag and tray, and walked away without looking back.

  Malika remained for just a moment, contemplating to herself, before sighing and walking away.

  Yvette just stared at her plate and said nothing. Ruben and Felicity stayed faithfully silent, not trying to fill in the awkwardness with any talking. Paul, sitting across from the wreckage, slowly lowered his hands. His eyes moved between the three silent figures at the table before he said, very carefully, "So… the avocado in this wrap is honestly better than I expected."

  Nobody took him up on it besides Ruben, who just gave him a thumbs-up.

  ~~~~

  I felt it coming right as I made the decision to leave the table.

  The nausea was the most immediate issue, but there was definitely something else wrong—that pressure behind my skull, shifting and moving.

  It hit the back of my throat: that flood of bile and hot saliva the body sends ahead like a warning shot. I am going to throw up. I walked faster, ditching my tray on a conveyor belt by the exit and bolting for the nearest bathroom.

  The noise and sounds all sharpened into something unbearable, every frequency and smell fighting for the same space inside my head. The overhead lights were doing something they probably weren't—pulsing at the edges of my vision.

  I barreled through the heavy wooden door of the nearest men's room, throwing my weight against it and practically diving into the first open stall just as my mouth surged with a disgusting fluid and the vile taste that came with it.

  I was gagging before I even got the door slammed shut behind me. I dropped to my knees, hands bracing against the cold porcelain, and threw up. Then again. And finally, a third, violent heave emptied out whatever was left of my lunch.

  Jesus Christ.

  I coughed, spitting stringy saliva into the bowl until that acidic taste finally stopped burning the back of my throat. The worst part, the part that scared me more than the nausea, was the sound. A high-pitched ringing shrieked through my ears. It felt tight and pressurized, like something had gotten into my skull and was screaming as it dug its way out from behind my eardrums. I groaned, breathing hard as tears formed in my eyes.

  "Hey." Someone knocked tentatively on the metal stall door. "You okay in there, man?"

  I spat one last time and hauled myself slowly off the floor, hitting the handle to flush the toilet before slumping down onto the closed lid.

  "Yeah," I managed. "Just an upset stomach. Thanks."

  "...Aight. Feel better, dude." I heard his footsteps trail away, followed by the sound of the bathroom door closing.

  I sat there for a moment with my elbows on my knees and my head dropped forward, just breathing. The ringing had dialed back to something slightly more survivable, but the pressure hadn't.

  What the hell was happening? What was causing this?

  It felt similar to a bad experience with the Draft, but I hadn't read it since Friday—three days ago now. Sure, I had spent the last three months reading it every other day. Those three months were filled with nosebleeds and terrible headaches, all while Alaric told me I was improving. Eventually, the headaches got shorter once my focus got sharper. I'd gotten better at it; I knew I had. I could tell the difference between the early sessions, where it felt like eating static, versus now, where I could get things to resolve into something usable.

  That still didn’t answer the question: what was to blame? Oddly enough, I didn’t think this was some delayed reaction. The culprit had to be the newest addition to my arsenal.

  I reached into my backpack and pulled out the glasses.

  I opened the case, exposing the thick black frames. They were completely ordinary-looking. I turned them over in my hands, looking for cracks or chips—anything that would explain what had just happened. Because it had to be these, right?

  I couldn't find anything, though. They looked exactly as they had when Alaric handed them to me this morning. Was I using them too much? But twice in one day for less than two whole hours couldn't have been that bad—they would be useless to me if that were true. That was barely enough time to take two classes.

  I put them back on. It was probably a stupid thing to do, and I knew it even as I was doing it, feeling like a Mack truck had run over my skull.

  For two, maybe three seconds, nothing happened. My eyes searched the bathroom, looking for something to focus on so they would activate. The grout lines between the tiles. A water stain on the drop ceiling that looked vaguely like a brown dog.

  Suddenly, the edges of my vision shifted. This was new. It didn’t happen the way it did in the cafeteria. It was a kind of sharpening, a subtle deepening of contrast, like someone had adjusted a setting I hadn't known existed. The grout lines all looked different; the water stain looked different. I became acutely aware of them—the maintenance schedule of this building, the fact that this tile pattern was original to the construction, the specific chemical composition of the disinfectant they used on it, the exact location in the roof where the leak had sprung to form the water stain—

  I ripped the glasses off.

  The information cut out instantly. I sat blinking in the now-ordinary light, my heart pounding in my chest like crazy.

  ‘There’s something seriously wrong with this. There has to be.’

  I fumbled in my pocket and pulled out my phone, tapping Alaric's contact. I brought it to my ear, wincing as the remaining ringing in my head fought against the dial tone.

  I leaned down and checked the surrounding stalls for feet or any sign of someone else in here. I saw nobody, then the line connected.

  "Jesse." Alaric’s voice carried over the receiver, thick and composed.

  "Hey, Alaric." My voice came out rougher than I expected, still ragged at the edges. Cold sweat stung the corners of my eyes. "Uh, I wanted to ask you something. What's the deal with these glasses? Because I feel like absolute shit. I’ve only used them for less than two hours total today, and I just puked my guts out."

  "You threw up." He repeated it, not so much a question as a logged data point. "Are you alone right now?"

  "Yeah, I’m in a bathroom in the Campus Center. I checked the stalls." I pressed the heel of my hand against my temple, which helped approximately nothing. "And before you tell me it's not the glasses—I assure you, it is. They're the only thing that’s changed today."

  "Fine," he answered with a heavy sigh. "Then what, precisely, were you doing when the symptoms started?"

  "The breakout session. You texted me to use them, so I did. I put them on."

  "You would have had them on for how long? An hour?"

  I tried to think back. The breakout felt like it had happened to a different person a lifetime ago. "I don't—uh—maybe forty minutes? Somewhere around there. I put them on when the instructor started the demonstration. Afterwards, though, I got a serious headache."

  "Did it begin while they were on, or after you removed them?"

  "After." I shifted on the lid, the cold porcelain of the tank pressing through my jacket. "While I had them on it was... it wasn't terrible. But once I took them off, there was this massive pressure building up right behind my eyes. I figured it would pass."

  "But it didn’t?"

  "No, it only got worse. By the time I got to the cafeteria it was a full-on migraine." I swallowed, my throat protesting. "And then I put them back on."

  “And did putting them back on fix the headache?”

  "Well, no, not really," I said, cutting him off before he could lecture me. "I actually put them back on to help settle an argument. Yvette and Malika were going at each other—it was escalating—and I thought the glasses would help me think straight. I had them on for maybe five minutes… when they came off it really made it worse. That's how I ended up here puking my guts out."

  "You used a localized information conduit to settle an argument?" Frankly, he sounded more surprised than anything.

  "Yeah." It came out sharper than I meant. "I feel like you're judging me right now. Can we please just skip this part and get to where you tell me what's actually happening to me?"

  After a moment’s pause, he continued, his tone shifting into something far more clinical. "Well, if I could help you right now I would, but I am mostly just lost based on your ramblings. What is the problem here? How are the glasses making you sick?"

  "I—" I stopped. Actually attempting to form the abstract, overwhelming sensation into words was difficult. "It's like—" I started, then dropped it. "Well, no. It's more like... when I put them on, I just understand what I'm looking at. But it’s also like the—" I pressed my free hand flat against my thigh. "God. I don't know how to explain this clearly."

  "Try."

  "It's the comprehension part that is fucking with me," I said finally. "When things just become—I don’t even know—legible, I guess? When that happens it makes me feel so sick to my stomach. But it's not just the knowing, it's the... emotional stuff. Whatever I focus on, the entire weight of it arrives. Not piece by piece. All at once, fully formed, like I already knew it and the glasses are just—" I waved a hand at nothing. "Confirming it."

  I wasn’t even sure if I was making sense to myself when I was talking, but the silence on the other end of the line did little to ease my anxiety in the moment.

  "What of the overlay?" he suddenly asked me. "There should be textual data to support you. I designed those frames to project summaries of what it’s able to read directly onto your retinas. Is it malfunctioning in that sense?"

  I frowned at the floor. "Projections? I don't—I don’t see anything like that."

  "Nothing? No visual component at all?"

  "No. There are no visuals, it's just like the glasses make me... smarter, somehow, I guess." I stopped again, my stomach doing an uncomfortable roll.

  "How can that be…?" Alaric asked. His voice was entirely stripped of its usual professorial edge. “Very well, go on. What else do they do to you?”

  I looked at the glasses in my hand, turning them over as I spoke.

  "In the breakout this morning it was manageable," I said, watching the harsh fluorescent light catch the lens. "I mostly used them on the group and for what I needed to keep track of, but in the cafeteria it was very different. Uh, when I was looking at Malika, Yvette, Paul, Felicity, and Ruben..." I set my thumb against the hinge, pressing lightly. "It felt like I suddenly got a good grasp on them, like I knew things. The glasses did a good job of conveying what they felt and where they were emotionally, giving me a good grasp on body language. I could feel the exact shape of her frustration. I… I understood her defensiveness, you know? So they are super useful, and I want to keep using them."

  I stopped pressing on the hinge. I put the glasses face-down on my knee.

  "Now, when you say understood," Alaric said, very carefully, "are you implying an empathic resonance?"

  "I don't know what you want to call it. If that’s what it means to know someone like that, then yeah."

  "Has this happened before? Outside of today?"

  I opened my mouth to say no.

  Then I didn't say anything.

  Because I was suddenly back in the past three months. The grueling sessions with the Draft.

  But then there was the other thing. The smaller things I'd been attributing to just paying closer attention. Conversations that had more texture than they should. Moments where a thought arrived that was too specific to be intuition and too accurate to be coincidence. A look at someone across a room and a sudden, flat certainty about what they were feeling that I had no business having.

  I'd explained all of it away. Good days, lucky reads, the natural byproduct of three months doing something strange with a magical book in a kitchen. I'd explained it away because the other option—that the Draft was fundamentally mutating my unpowered brain—had been sitting right there, and I hadn't wanted to look at it directly.

  "No, why?" I whispered.

  "No?" he repeated. The word sounded impossibly heavy.

  "I don't—I mean, for sure I have not been able to do this before, obviously. Unless I use the glasses, I don’t feel or see anything like that, at all.” My free hand found the back of my neck. The skin there was still damp. "Look, Alaric. You designed these things. If they're supposed to project shit or whatever, then they are not working right. I mean, like I still get the whole smarty-pants effects to do what I need, but these migraines and headaches and the whole queasy bullshit does not make this viable at all. Just in general, it sounds like these need to go back to whatever lab you built them in for a rework.”

  The silence that followed was the longest one yet. Long enough that I checked the screen to make sure the call hadn't dropped.

  “Jesse," he said finally, "I think you are correct. There is something interfering with the glasses."

  "Okay, so what should I do? Come find you?"

  "No," he responded quickly, "but what we will have to do requires me to be looking at you, and at the glasses, and absolutely at the Draft, before we can fully dissect this. Take it easy for the rest of the day, don’t overexert yourself, and hydrate. I will find you once my breakout is concluded at four o’clock. We will look at this properly together. Do not use the glasses or the Draft for that matter until then. That is not a suggestion."

  "You think something's wrong with me."

  "I think," he said, placing each word with deliberate, almost physical care, "that there is perhaps some sort of variable at play that I may have severely miscalculated, and I would much rather we find it together than have you spend the rest of the afternoon speculating alone sitting on a toilet." He said it like he believed he could fix it.

  Almost.

  "Okay," I said. "Thanks."

  “I have to go. Will talk soon.” He hung up. I sat in the quiet he'd left behind with the phone in one hand and the glasses in the other, the ringing still stubbornly present in my ears.

  Alaric had a response for everything—fast, precise, delivered with the quiet certainty of someone perpetually ahead of the curve. In three months, through every session with the Draft, every late debrief we held once we found our answers in the kitchen, every moment I'd caught him recalculating in real time, it had been a constant. Not arrogance. Just the natural bearing of someone who had never been handed a question he didn't already have the shape of an answer for.

  Yet somehow… he had not even a shape of an answer for this.

  I looked at the glasses for a moment. 'What could you possibly be doing to me?' I thought, then folded them and slid them into their case.

  I stood, unlocked the stall, and went to the sink. Washed my hands. Rinsed the lingering taste of vomit out of my mouth. The face that came back at me in the mirror was pale and clammy, wrung-out and not particularly happy to be examined. I tilted my head out of habit and parted my hair. The grey streak at my temple sat where it had been growing.

  I turned the cold tap all the way up and bent into it, pressing both hands full of water against my face until cold was the only thing I was thinking about.

  The door swung open behind me. A few guys pushed through, loud and mid-argument about something that had nothing to do with magic books, or tools, or any of this bullshit I was currently drowning in. I straightened up and watched the last of the water run off into the basin.

  I stepped back from the mirror.

  'What a fucking day.'