Chapter 90 Distant Orbit
Malia's POV
The halls seem longer than last semester.
Each locker slams like a judgment is being handed down, metal on metal resounding off walls that seem to extend infinitely no matter how I rush. The fluorescent lights overhead buzz—that ever-present, teeth grind now dulled to a background buzz but which still feels like it’s scraping at my nerves like sandpaper.
I really enjoy having Aiden escort me to class every morning. Presents himself at my dorm at 8:15, with his hands in the jacket pockets, offering a slight smile that doesn’t reach his eyes. We’re mostly silent as we walk in—our shoulders do brush occasionally, his hand finds mine for a few seconds before dropping away like he’s remembered something he’s not supposed to do.
He kisses my forehead when we reach the classroom door. Says “See you later” in a now automatic, robotic tone. Then disappears.
Later always seems to be a no later.
I can sense him slipping away like a boat gently setting off from the dock-still visible, still technically within reach, but the rope is slipping from my hands and I’m at a loss for how to grasp it more tightly without looking like I’m desperate.
Without substantiating Madame Vesper’s claims.
Classes suck. Supernatural Lineage 301 is the worst. Vesper rants with surgical precision: every word is a calculated strike. She never speaks to me personally after that first day, but she doesn’t need to.
Every instance of “disastrous hybrid bonds” seems aimed at my heart. Every example of “scholarship students who have not been able to keep up academically” feels like a personal attack. One
The rest of the students have begun to realize. I hear whispers behind hands, my phone is rotating just enough to the side as I walk, conversations that stop as soon as I sit down.
A girl named Charlotte—blonde, impeccably pressed uniform, family crest ring twinkling actually got up and switched seats when I took the one next to her in Advanced Mythology. Just grabbed her bag, gave a tight smile and moved three rows ahead.
After that, I gave up on trying to sit near people.
By midweek, I've learned to eat lunch alone. I pick a spot at a corner table at the library café, hidden under the\[sic\] behind the philosophy shelves where it's dark and cold and nobody goes in unless they're madly procrastinating. I set my books up in a fortress wall formation, earbuds even when I’m not listening to anything, making the universal symbol meaning "don't come close."
It works. Mostly enough.
By afternoon, I'm heading to my crash course—the first one, at 7 p.m. sharp, know-how-not-to-be-late—when I see them.
Madame Vesper stands in the hallway outside the faculty offices, chatting with Professor Aldrich, the elderly werewolf who teaches Territorial Politics and is known for snoring during lectures. She's wearing the same outfit as Monday—black blazer, white blouse, red-framed glasses—it's as if she has a closet full of the same outfit. A professional armor.
Despite their heads being bent together as they quietly talk, Vesper's voice is enough to hear. Sharp. Clipped.
"—we can't have another incident like last spring," is what she says. "The council was just really firm on keeping standards—"
She halts in the middle of a sentence.
Her eyes meet mine, across the hallway.
I freeze. I’m clutching books to my chest, my foot is in mid-step, caught like an animal in headlights.
Professor Aldrich follows her gaze, sees me, gives a vague grandfatherly smile. Vesper doesn't smile.
Her face doesn’t change at all, still perfectly neutral, perfectly controlled but something about her eyes sharpens. Focuses.
She studies me the way scientists study failed experiments. Clinical. Evaluative. Already writing the conclusion.
The glance lasts about three seconds. Maybe less. But it moves like ice cold water through my veins—beginning at my cranium, running down my back, dropping into my stomach where it sits heavy and cold.
Bone breaking. it's the only word for it. It’s like she’s peering into my skeleton and seeing every crack, every weakest point, every place I’m already breaking under pressure I didn’t know I was carrying. I make myself keep walking.
Head up. Steady pace. Don’t look back. But now as I unlock the door to the stairwell my hands are shaking and that odd sense I’ve been gathering all week—the sense of walls shrinking, of air thinning, of something off humming just beneath the surface of everything builds and builds until I can scarcely take it.
I rest against the concrete, lay my forehead on the cool wall, attempt to breathe.
My phone buzzes. Finally.
I snatch it up so quickly that I almost lose hold of it.
Aiden: Totally can’t do dinner tonight. Did you get a meeting with your team? Tomorrow?
My chest hollows out. I look at the message, I read it three times, I try to warm myself from the heat that isn’t in it.
Me: Yeah. Tomorrow's fine.
Three dots appear. Disappear. Appear again.
Aiden: Miss you.
Two words. They are supposed to help. To fill a little of the nothingness. Instead they just make it worse—make the distance feel more real, more tangible, like he’s already writing from somewhere far away.
Me: Miss you too.
The dots don't come back. I toss the phone in my pocket and head downstairs to Room 102.
Basement level smelling of old books and cleaning solution. The lights are dimmer in here, half the bulbs burned out and never replenished. My feet echo on the linoleum that is cracked and stained yellow by age.
Room 102 is at the end of the hall. The door is half-open, light pouring out.
I knock anyway. Wait.
“In,” calls Vesper 's voice.
I push the door open. The space is cramped barely larger than a supply closet. One table, two chairs facing each other, a filing cabinet in the corner, a single window, placed high in the wall, revealing a slab of twilight. Vesper in one seat, portfolio open, red pen aloft like a weapon.
“Sit,” she says without raising her eyes.
I sit.
She slides a packet across the table. Twenty pages, stapled, entitled “Hybrid Lineage: Historical Failures and Modern Implications.”
“Read,” she says. “Annotate. Be prepared to discuss on Tuesday.”
“This isn’t on the syllabus -”
“This is remedial work, Miss Reed. It is by definition more than a standard curriculum.” She finally lifts her head, her glasses glinting in the light. “You are behind. Significantly. If you want to stay enrolled, you will get caught up. Quickly.”
I pull the packet toward me. The first page alone is thick with text, academic jargon, and citations in footnotes that surpass the length of the paragraphs themselves.
She asks, “Any questions?”
A hundred. But I swallow them. “No ma'am.”
“Good.” She snaps her portfolio shut. “That’s it for today, then. Tuesday. Seven p.m. Don’t be late.”
I rise, collect my belongings, and make for the door.
“Malia.”
I stop. Turn back.
She’s looking at me with that same clinical look. “Your connection to the Moonfalls is recorded in your file. I assume you understand that being emotionally involved is no excuse for being academically deficient.”
I bite my fangs against my lower lip.
“I get it,” I say softly.
She nods once. Dismissal.
I go out before I can start to lose my voice.
The walk back to my dorm is a blur. Streetlights turn on as the sun goes down. Students are passing one another in groups, laughing, talking, living normal college lives in which professors don’t regard them as errors waiting to be fixed.
My phone remains silent. Nothing to do with messages or calls. No messages. No calls.
I open my door, sling my bag down on the floor, and fall on the bed, still with my shoes on.
The moonstone hanging pendants nuzzles at my collarbone—cold, weighty, urgent. I grasp it with my fingers, I hold tight as if it’s the anchor that’s keeping me from floating away completely.
But I can feel it happening anyway. The gradual, inevitable separation. Aiden pulling back. The brothers keeping distance. Vesper's eyes raking through my shortcomings. The whispers in hallways. The empty seat next to me in every class.
The island seems like a long-ago dream now. Just something I dreamed up in the space between sleeping and waking too bright, too perfect, too impossibly good to have been real.
Maybe it wasn't.
Maybe this is real. This isolation. This weight. This odd, marrow-freezing feeling that something’s breaking and I don’t know how to fix it.
I close my eyes.
Usually, when we’ve got nothing to hide, we save the best place in Aiden’s laugh.
Can't quite catch it.
The memory slips away like water, like sand, like everything else that I'm losing without knowing how to hold on.
My phone buzzes once. A notification. I don't check it. Outside the bell tower on the campus chimes eight o'clock.
I wait for daybreak in the darkness.
And I think, how many more mornings could I survive feeling this alone?