CADEN
Something fell.
He didn't see it happen. He just heard the small clatter of a bottle hitting the tile and felt her pull back fast, both hands off him at once, and the spell or whatever it had been broke clean down the middle.
He stepped back.
She stepped back.
Two feet of bathroom between them suddenly, and both of them using it like it was twenty feet.
He looked at her. Really looked, the way he hadn't let himself look in the last few minutes because looking had been the problem. Towel wrapped and tucked. Wet hair. Red face. Hands gripping the terry cloth at her chest.
Something was wrong.
Not wrong, bad. Wrong in the way a word sounds wrong when you've said it too many times, when the familiar thing starts reading as strange. He'd been in close quarters with males his whole life: training partners, packmates, and bunkmates at Vordrak for four years. He knew how they were built. He knew the specific geography of it.
His hands remembered something different.
He pushed the thought sideways before it finished forming.
She's—he's—Ash was standing right there and was clearly male, and Caden was clearly losing his mind.
"Why are you so soft?" he said. Didn't mean to say it out loud.
Ash's face went from red to a deeper red. "Shut up."
"I'm just —"
"Shut up. Please."
He pressed his mouth closed.
Ash tucked the towel tighter, not meeting his eyes, jaw set. "I'm not. You're not. So for both our sakes, just forget whatever you think you noticed."
Caden looked at him.
"Not gay?" he said slowly.
"Are you?"
"No."
"Right. Same." Ash finally looked at him briefly, with one sharp grey glance. "So we're good."
They were not, Caden thought, entirely good. But he picked his jacket up off the floor and said nothing and looked at his roommate one more time — the jaw, the skin, the way the towel sat — and felt something in the back of his head turn over quietly like a page.
"Finish your shower," he said. "I need another run."
He went out the window.
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NOVA
She waited until she heard him hit the ground outside.
Then she sat down on the bathroom floor with her back against the wall and stayed there for a while.
Three days later the feeling still hadn't gone anywhere useful, so she did what she always did. She worked.
The east grounds had a combat conditioning strip, long and open, used for agility drills and solo weapon work. She'd been there since first light, running blade balance exercises. Not throwing — she wasn't there yet with blades; her accuracy was inconsistent, and she knew it — just footwork, weight transfer, and muscle memory. The kind of repetitive grinding work that emptied the head properly.
It wasn't emptying her head.
She reset her feet. Ran the sequence again.
"Well, well."
She kept moving.
"Ash Darvin, everybody," Bren's voice, that performance pitch, aimed at whoever he'd brought with him. She heard four sets of feet on the dirt behind her. "Still working on the basics."
She finished the sequence. Reset.
"Not a bad idea, actually," Bren said, closer now. "Given how you're moving. Bit shaky today, yeah?"
"Go away, Bren."
"Can't. We're using this strip next." He stopped a few feet to her left. His friends fanned out behind him. Dex. Calloway. Number Four, whose name she still hadn't learned. "Besides, I want a rematch."
"Training ground's available every morning."
"Not that kind." He nodded at the conditioning posts along the strip, each one fitted with a hanging target disc at varying heights. "Blade accuracy. First to three clean centre hits. The Loser kneels down and cleans the winner's boots." He smiled. "In front of everyone at morning assembly."
Nova looked at the nearest post.
Looked at the blade in her hand.
Walk away. She knew it clearly. She had nothing to prove to Bren, and getting into it with him over boot polish was exactly the kind of visible stupidity she couldn't afford. Walk away, eat, and get to class; do not do this.
"I've got nothing to prove to you," she said.
"Scared?"
"Of you? No."
"Then you're on." He stepped up, pulled his own blade, and tested the balance with the ease of someone who'd been doing this since childhood. "Unless you'd rather keep practising alone. No judgement."
His friends laughed.
Nova looked at him for a moment. Thought about walking away seriously, the way she used to think about it before she understood that walking away just meant the same conversation in a different place later.
She reset her feet.
"Set the targets," she said.
Bren smiled with all his teeth.
From somewhere near the strip entrance, she heard Rhen exhale in a way that wasn't quite a word but had the shape of one.
She ignored it.
Three centre hits.
She could do three centre hits.
Her grip on the blade tightened, and she looked at the target disc swinging slightly on its post and told herself she could absolutely do this and mostly believed it.
