Page 25 of Legacy Found

And I look back. Right at him, steady, the way you look at anyone you're in a conversation with, because it would be weird not to.

His eyes are sapphire and hard and, for just a second, thrown, like the floor moved under a man who's never once in his life felt it move. There's heat in it, and affront. The whole room is dead silent watching the two of us hold a stare that everyone but me seems to understand is not a normal thing that's happening.

"You don't defer," he says. It's not a question. It comes out low, almost baffled.

"To what?" I ask, genuinely.

His face jerks back like I've slapped him and he smirks like I’ve complimented him all in the same breath.

"That's enough for now," Jon says, and his voice cuts cleanly through whatever's building. "Miss Miller — three Merit Marks."

Three. The most he's given anyone all morning, and the room hears it too, another ripple, and I write it down — 3 — and underline it before I can stop myself, and beside me I feel Sophia's hand grip my knee under the desk. I think she is telling me good job, or maybe shut your mouth.

"For a genuinely uncomfortable argument, made well," Jon says, to the room now, "which is the only kind worth making. Mr. Ardent, you're welcome to answer it — properly, with your mind, not your rank. That's what the marks are for." And Ardent opens his mouth and finds, visibly, that he doesn't have a fast answer, that because it's the natural order isn't going to survive contact with a follow-up, and Jon lets him sit in that for exactly one merciless second before moving the class on.

I should feel triumphant. Three marks, first class. Instead I spend the rest of the hour aware of the back of Ardent's golden head like it's giving off heat, and aware — slowly, uneasily — that again I've done the thing my friends keep flinching at and I still don't know what it is.

I notice the second professor when the class is nearly over.

She's at the very back, in the top row, and I don't think she's a student — she's older, sharp-featured, and she's been sitting there the whole time with a folded coat and a small notebook, and she has not once looked at the board. She's been watching the room. Watching, I realize with a small cold drop, me. When I catch her at it she doesn't look away or pretend. She just holds my eyes for a moment, makes one unhurried note, and returns to watching.

When Jon dismisses us, he catches her eye across the emptying room, and something passes between them — brief, professional, and entirely about me. I don't imagine it. Two professors, one glance, and I'm the subject of the sentence neither of them said out loud.

The corridor outside is a crush of students, and the whispers are back, riding along with us the way they did after orientation, and I keep my eyes forward and my chin level and I do not look, because Sophia trained me this morning and I'm a fast learner.

I don't get far.

"You."

The voice comes from behind me, and it's his — Ardent's — and the corridor around us goes quiet in that now-familiar way, students slowing, pretending not to watch, absolutely watching.

I turn.

He's taller up close.

That's my first thought, which is annoying, because my second is that he's even better-looking from three feet away. Broad shoulders, sharp jaw, that unfair face.

I have the strangest urge to step closer.

Kiss him. Touch him. Like he’s addictive to me personally. Which is ridiculous. I don't even like this guy.

There's a large open space around him even here, in a packed hallway, everyone giving him a berth. His friends aren't with him — not the huge one or the green-eyed one. It's just him.

And he's looking at me with that same thrown, searching expression from class.

"Nobody talks to me like that," he says. Not shouting. Not even angry, exactly. Just stating a fact of his universe that I've apparently broken.

"Like what?" I ask. "Like you were wrong? Because you kind of were. Half wrong."

His jaw works. Somewhere behind me I hear Renzo whisper "oh my God" with the reverence of a man watching a building collapse in slow motion.

"Do you have any idea," Ardent says slowly, and there's that flicker again, that thing under the affront that I can't read, "who I am?"

And the honest answer, the only answer I have, comes out of me before I can dress it up.

"No," I say.

Chapter eleven