“After tomorrow’s registration, you’ll receive official exemption documentation listing you as my research assistant. It provides a legitimate framework to explain any observed shadow anomalies as experimental techniques under controlled faculty supervision.”
Relief washes through me like stepping into a warm room after hours in the cold. “That’s brilliant.”
“It’s temporary protection at best.” His thumb traces one slow circle against the inside of my wrist — unconscious, I think, or maybe not — before he catches himself and withdraws his hand. “But it gives us room to continue developing your control.”
The barrier dissolves. Blue-pulsed reality floods back in, harsh after the soft darkness. Constantine straightens, adjusts his robes, and the professor clicks back into place over whoever he was thirty seconds ago.
“Thank you for your assistance with the research organization, Miss Dawn. Your attention to detail is commendable.”
“Happy to help, Professor.”
Sleep is a joke.
I lie in bed staring at the ceiling while monitoring crystals sweep their blue pulse across the room and my mind loops through tomorrow’s demonstration until the choreography is burned into my brain. My shadows press against the floor in perfect textbook stillness, and the effort of maintaining suppression even now — even in darkness, even with no one watching except machines — sits behind my eyes like a low-grade fever.
Dawn creeps through the stained glass, painting my sheets in bruise-colored light, and I haven’t slept at all.
In a few hours I walk into a room designed to catch exactly what I am and give the performance of my life.
They’re looking for the crimson ascendant.
I’ll show them an ordinary shadow student instead.
And if that fails, they’ll learn exactly why the prophecies called me harbinger of change.
CHAPTER THREE
Ashley
By Friday,I’m running on fumes and spite.
A week of registration demonstrations, enhanced surveillance, and relentless shadow suppression has ground me down to something that barely qualifies as functional. My head hasn’t stopped aching since Monday — a persistent throb behind my left eye that no amount of water or sleep or painkillers can touch. The cause isn’t dehydration or fatigue. It’s the sustained effort of keeping something powerful locked inside a box that’s too small for it, hour after hour, day after day, while people trained to notice the box look directly at me and measure its dimensions.
My muscles feel like I’ve been clenching every one of them for seven straight days. Which — considering I basically have been — tracks.
Food tastes like nothing. I eat because not eating would draw attention, spooning stew into my mouth at dinner and registering texture without flavor, chewing bread that might as well be packing material. Sleep comes in snatches that never quite reach deep enough to rest, interrupted by monitoring crystal sweeps that flash blue across my eyelids every forty-five seconds like a strobe light designed by sadists.
I survived Hunter Calloway’s registration session on Monday morning. That’s the headline.
The man sat across from me in a windowless assessment room with eyes the color of old ice and hands that never stopped moving — adjusting his recording crystals, making notations on his tablet, fingers tapping rhythms against the desk that might have been nervous habit or might have been some kind of detection technique I’ve never encountered. He asked me to demonstrate “maximum capacity” while three separate recording devices documented every shadow movement from different angles.
He pushed. Kept pushing.
Requesting increasingly complex demonstrations, probing for the ceiling of my abilities like a dentist searching for a cavity he’s already convinced exists. “Show me your defensive formations.” “Now offensive.” “Faster.” “More density.” Each request designed to make me reach just a little further, reveal just a little more.
Constantine intervened when the questioning veered from professional assessment into something that felt uncomfortably like interrogation, citing faculty protocols and student welfare guidelines with the calm authority of someone who’d rehearsed the arguments in advance.
My official classification now reads “Advanced Practitioner — Research Track” with a note about faculty-supervised experimental techniques. The perfect cover. Any future slip, any shadow behavior that exceeds standard parameters, gets explained by Constantine’s advanced curriculum rather than the fact that my shadows are developing consciousness at a rate that would make the entire Hunter Council shit themselves in unison.
But the cost of maintaining this performance all week is eating me alive from the inside out.
“You look like death warmed over,” Iris says at dinner, her concern so genuine it actually hurts to look at. She’s been tiptoeing around me all week, empath senses screaming that something is deeply wrong without being able to pinpoint what. “Seriously, Ash. When’s the last time you actually slept?”
“Constantine’s research project,” I say, pushing a piece of potato through gravy that smells like rosemary and tastes like nothing. The lie comes easier every time, which should probably worry me more than it does. “It’s intense.”
“You’re going to make yourself sick.”
“I’m fine.”
