Chapter 12 CHAPTER TWELVE: How to Get Close to Someone Who Does Not Want Company
CHAPTER TWELVE: How to Get Close to Someone Who Does Not Want Company
The problem with getting close to Sable Voss was easy enough to name but genuinely hard to solve.
He did not want company.
I watched him for three days after my conversation with Davan. Not in an obvious way. I watched him the way I used to watch the movement of an enemy camp before a strike: from a distance, without any pattern to my positions, never from the same angle twice and never long enough to be noticed.
Sable moved through the academy like someone who had already memorized it. He knew every corridor, every schedule, every staff member by name. He walked ahead of his group rather than beside them, and the two students who kept near him were always slightly behind, never fully level. He did not encourage closeness and he did not ask for it.
He ate alone at the upper table most mornings.
He trained at the third hour with the top fifty, in the upper training hall, which low-rank students were not permitted to enter.
He had no visible weak points.
But everyone has something. In my past life I had learned that the way to find a person's opening was not to look at what they showed the world. It was to watch what they quietly and consistently avoided.
Sable Voss avoided two things.
The first was questions about his family. I noticed this in Aether Theory when Proctor Aldric, who taught the upper sessions, apparently asked about the Voss bloodline as a demonstration topic. I was not in that class. But one of the upper-rank students, a girl named Yeva who sat near the door, repeated what she heard to someone in the main corridor after. Sable had answered the question with three words and then redirected the class completely. Smooth and fast, the way you redirect something when the real answer is not for public use.
The second thing he avoided was the east corridor on the third floor.
Every other student used it as a shortcut between the main dormitory block and the lecture halls. It saved about four minutes. Sable went the long way every single time, around the outer ring, which added those four minutes back and then some.
I walked the east corridor on the third floor on the morning of day seven.
There was nothing wrong with it that I could see. Plain stone walls, window at the far end, a door on the left marked ARCHIVE: RESTRICTED. That door had a lock on it.
I stood in front of it for a moment.
Then I kept walking.
That evening I told Ren I needed to borrow a book from the main library.
This was true. But the library also shared a wall with the archive.
I spent an hour in the library reading a volume on advanced core theory. Not because I needed it. Because I needed to be there without a reason that would draw attention.
The archive door, when approached from the library side, had a different lock. Newer. Heavier.
I did not try to open it. Not yet.
I put the core theory book back and went to dinner.
At dinner that night, something changed.
I came in with the low-rank group as usual, at the end, when the food was already cold. I sat down at the far table with Ren. I picked up my bread.
And then I heard a sound I was not expecting.
A chair scraping at the upper end of the hall.
I looked up.
Sable Voss had stood up from his seat at the upper table. He was looking at something near the serving counter. A younger student, maybe eight years old, first-years who came in mixed ranks during the evening meal, had dropped his tray. The food was on the floor. The boy was standing there frozen with the look children get when they are trying to decide if crying is allowed.
One of the upper-rank students near the counter laughed.
Sable looked at the boy. Then at the student who laughed. His expression did not change. But he walked to the serving counter, picked up a clean tray, put food on it himself, and set it down on the nearest open table. Then he looked at the younger boy and said something I could not hear from across the hall.
The boy sat down and ate.
Sable went back to his seat without looking at anyone.
The student who had laughed went quiet very fast.
I watched all of this.
I looked at my bread.
I thought: there it is.
Noble-born, cold, unreachable Sable Voss could not watch a child be humiliated in front of a room full of people without doing something about it.
He had not done it for the attention. He had not done it to look good. He had done it and gone back to his seat like it was simply the correct move and now it was finished.
I understood that. Completely. In a way I had not expected to.
He was not just the product of someone else's engineering. He was also himself.
That made things harder in one way. And much simpler in another.
I was not going to find an opening by looking for a weakness. I was going to find one by finding something real. Something that already existed underneath everything Thane had built around him.
Three days later, I was in Combat Fundamentals when Proctor Vayne announced a change.
"From this week forward, low-rank students will join the general combat session once per week. Mixed ranks. The purpose is exposure to varied fighting styles." She looked at us without warmth. "This is not a promotion. You will be outmatched. That is the point."
Ren leaned toward me and said, quietly: "That is either a great opportunity or a way for the upper ranks to hurt someone and call it education."
"Both," I said.
He looked at me for a second. Then he nodded slowly. "Right. So we stay ready either way."
The first mixed-rank session was in two days.
I sat with that for a moment. Two days was not much. But a general who needed perfect conditions before moving never moved at all.
I thought about Sable Voss. His core running hot and fast and wrong. The timer Davan had described. Three months, give or take.
Two days to find a reason to stand in the same room as him.
Two days was enough to work with.