I pull the conversation back before it leaves me entirely. "Nobody cornered me. I chose to come in here."
Ryder's eyes move to me. "Did you."
"Yes."
"And how's that working out."
"I was managing fine until thirty seconds ago."
Something moves across his face, quick and gone. He looks back at Thane. "We're done here."
"She used my fire signature," Thane says. His voice hasn't changed, still controlled, but there's weight behind it now, the weight of something that matters. "In front of the whole arena. You know what that looks like."
"I know exactly what it looks like." Ryder crosses his arms. "Which is why this conversation ends now, before it looks like anything else."
Thane's eyes go back to me. That gold edge again, slower this time. "You should have been sorted into one house," he says, and it doesn't sound like an insult anymore. It sounds like something he's trying to solve. "You should have been something I could categorize."
"Sorry to inconvenience you," I say.
He leaves. He pulls the door open and he leaves, and I hear his footsteps in the corridor, even and controlled, the walk of someone who has decided to take his questions somewhere private.
The room is quieter with just the two of us in it.
Ryder doesn't move immediately. He's still standing where he stopped, arms crossed, and he's looking at the door Thane walked through.
"You absorbed his specific fire signature," he says.
"I know."
"And then reproduced it with enough precision that it was identifiable on a scorch mark from twenty feet."
"I was there. I saw the scorch mark."
He turns to look at me. "Are you hurt?"
The question throws me enough that I answer honestly. "No. The fire didn't burn me."
"Of course it didn't." He exhales through his nose, short and hard. "How long have you been holding his signature?"
"About a week, apparently. I didn't know I was doing it."
"You didn't know." He looks at the ceiling briefly, which on Ryder Ashford is the equivalent of someone else putting their head in their hands. "You've been walking around with a dragon prince's bloodline signature stored in your body for a week without knowing."
"It didn't come with a notification."
"This is not something to be sarcastic about."
"I'm not being sarcastic about the thing itself. I'm being sarcastic about the way you're describing it, which implies I had a choice."
He looks at me. His eyes are dark and direct and there's something behind them that isn't academic, isn't professional, isn't the tone he uses when he's being deliberately cold. It's the tone that surfaces occasionally and then disappears so fast I'm never sure I saw it right.
"You need to be more careful," he says.
"Valorix said the same thing."
"Valorix said it because he's worried about what it means for him. I'm saying it because—" He stops. Starts again. "The arenagallery was full. People saw. By dinner, every student in this school will have a version of what happened, and half of those versions will be wrong, and the wrong versions are going to be more interesting to certain people than the accurate one."
"Certain people," I say. "Meaning the ones who already want to know what I am."
