Page 40 of Legacy Found

He studies me for a second, and I brace for him to push, because he could. Instead he just nods, lets me go, and quietly steers Sophia's attention elsewhere so nobody watches me leave.

I love him a little bit for that.

I end up in one of the small gardens tucked between the older buildings — a quiet square of hedges and worn paths and an old stone bench going soft green at the edges, the kind of forgotten place I gravitate to on instinct. I sit down, and I pull out my actual paper notebook, the one where I've been tracking everything since day one, and I do the math again.

Maybe I forgot some. Maybe I added wrong. Maybe there's a class I didn't count.

I go through it line by line. Every mark earned, every mark lost. Jon's classes, the essays, the questions answered, the Faris bloodletting, combat, combat, combat.

The numbers don't change.

And here's the thing that actually stings, sitting alone on a cold bench: it's not the academics. I'm good at the academics. I like them. I read ahead, I stay late, I ask the questions everyone else is embarrassed to ask. On paper I should be near the top with Freya.

Mostly it's combat. It's only ever combat.

And it's not that I'm weak, or slow, or uncoordinated. Years of hauling myself up mountains gave me legs that could kick through a wall and a body that learns movement fast. I understand the techniques. I can drill them clean. I get it, all of it.

Right up until someone throws a strike toward my head.

Then, for one single humiliating instant, my whole body just — stops. Flinches. Freezes. That one split second where I should be slipping or blocking or moving, and instead there's a flash of the arena, the fist I never saw, the sand rushing up, waking up under a light with a stranger's voice — and by the time my body remembers it's allowed to move, I've already taken the hit, or frozen long enough to lose the exchange, and there go the marks.

I'm gun-shy. That's the word for it, and I've been avoiding it for weeks, and sitting here alone I finally just admit it to myself.

I got hit once, badly, and now a part of me won't stop bracing for it. And I hate that. I hate that a single bad second on day one is still costing me, over and over, weeks later. I hate that it's the one thing between me and the number I need.

"You're doing the math wrong."

I nearly come off the bench.

I whip around, and Luke is standing at the edge of the garden — dark hair, green eyes, hands in his pockets, watching me with that unreadable calm — and I have absolutely no idea how long he's been there, because I didn't hear a single footstep.

"I didn't hear you," I say, pressing a hand to my racing heart.

"I've been here a minute." He says it without apology.

I narrow my eyes. "Are you following me?"

His expression doesn't flicker. "I saw you leave the assembly."

Which isn't quite an answer, and isn't quite not one, and I decide I don't have the energy to interrogate it. I gesture at the empty end of the bench.

He crosses and sits — not too close, a careful, deliberate distance — and for a moment neither of us says anything. It's oddly not awkward. And I notice, the way I've noticed before and haven't examined, that the low restless hum I've carried around for weeks eases a little with him sitting there. I don't understand it.

His eyes drop to the notebook in my lap.

"You think your problem is Merit Marks," he says.

I sigh. "Isn't it? I'm thirteen behind pace. I did the math four times."

"No." He says it flatly. "It's combat."

I look away, at the hedges, at anything.

"You hesitate," Luke says.

I let out a soft, humorless laugh. "I got knocked unconscious on my first day."

"I noticed."