A pause.
A student who was the object of a professor’s inappropriate attention. Confused. Uncomfortable. Appropriately traumatized by the revelation that someone she trusted crossed professional boundaries.
Another pause.
I’ll give her the victim she expects to find. Someone whose development was influenced by a professor’s obsessive attention rather than by abilities that exceed classification parameters.
Through the bond, I feel the weight of what she’s describing.
Another layer of performance stacked on the architecture of concealment that has defined her existence since enrollment. Another lie woven from real emotions: the confusion is real,the discomfort is real, the sense of betrayal is available because being protected against your will carries its own variety of violation.
She’ll walk into that interview carrying genuine emotional complexity and channel it into a narrative that makes her smaller than she is.
That makes what we built together sound like something done to her rather than something we created.
The thought of her describing our relationship as victimization — framing the fire-shadow integration as unwanted contact, the almost-kiss as boundary violation, everything we chose together as something imposed — produces a specific nausea that has nothing to do with physical sensation and everything to do with watching love be repackaged as pathology for institutional consumption.
You shouldn’t have to perform grief about something that isn’t grievable,I send.
I perform everything else. This is just one more role in a building full of stages.
Through the bond, her voice carries the exhaustion of someone who has been acting since September and is running out of distance between the performance and the person underneath.
The hardest part won’t be convincing Davin. It’ll be saying things about you that aren’t true while knowing you can hear them through the bond.
I can mute my end of the connection during the interview. Reduce transmission so you don’t have to manage my response while you’re performing.
No.
The word arrives with immediate force.
I want you there. Even if what I’m saying sounds like betrayal — I need to know you’re hearing the truth underneathit. That you know the difference between what I tell Davin and what I tell you.
The bond settles into the sustained hum of three people processing a shared situation from different positions — me confined, Ashley exposed, Bael invisible.
The triple frequency carries information and emotion in equal measure, each person’s assessment feeding into a collective tactical picture that none of us could build alone.
Seventy-two hours.
The misconduct narrative held its first test. Davin recategorized the investigation from potential conspiracy to psychological misconduct. The vessel research notes are contextualized as grief-driven obsession rather than active intelligence gathering.
The search team found nothing the narrative can’t explain.
But the interview with Ashley is coming.
And Davin is not a person whose analytical rigor accepts surface readings when deeper investigation is available.
She will sit across from the woman I love and look for the truth beneath the performance, and Ashley will have to convince her that there is no truth to find — that the student sitting in front of her is exactly as ordinary as the filed records claim, and the professor who loved her was exactly as delusional as his confession suggested.
I sit in my quarters and wait.
The bond pulses.
The fire crystals hidden in the false-bottom case carry Ashley’s frequency in their crystalline structure — evidence of something the misconduct narrative can’t explain, preserved behind a ward that held against military-grade scanning.
For now.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
