I walk over to him, stepping into his space even as the Black Current starts to hum in his marrow. I put my hands on his chest, feeling the frantic heat of him. "Go. If you stay, he’ll know something is wrong. He’ll come here. And I need to meet Mira."
"Asa—"
"I’m an associate professor, Jorak. I’m going to a library. It’s literally the safest place in the city for a man like me." I try to make it sound like a joke, but my voice is too thin. I can see the way his jaw tightens, the way his fingers twitch as if he’s imagining wrapping them around Mercer’s throat.
He grabs me, pulling me into a kiss that is anything but gentle, and when he pulls back, his eyes are glowing with a faint, entropic light.
"The university," he says, his voice a low, dangerous warning. "I’ll meet you there as soon as I’m clear of the node. If you see anyone from the facility, any of Mercer’s suits, you run. Do you hear me?"
"I hear you," I say, trying to steady my hands. "I have class in three hours anyway. If you don't show up, I’m failing you on the midterm."
He doesn't smile. He just looks at me one last time, a look that says he’s memorizing the way the light hits my face in my own bedroom, before he turns and walks out the door. I dress quickly, pulling on a clean sweater and the heavy wool coat mygrandmother bought me years ago. I still smell like him. No matter how much soap I used, the cedar and whiskey is buried in my pores, a permanent record of the last two days and fuck if I don’t love it.
Asa
The weekend silence of the university library is usually a sanctuary, but today it feels like a countdown. The air in the stacks is cool and smells of decaying pulp and old adhesive, which usually grounds me. Today, it just makes my skin prickle. I’m still tender, a lingering physical ache in my hips and a heavy, honeyed warmth in my core that refuses to dissipate. Every time Jorak moves behind me, his hand glancing against the small of my back or the nape of my neck, my body tries to dissolve into him again.
I barely made it to campus before Jorak pulled up in his own car, spouting some bullshit about ‘another Esper can take care of that, you’re more important’. I didn’t complain but now he’s close,veryclose.
"Focus, Asa," Mira whispers. She doesn't look up from the microfilm reader. "We need to find the original classification protocols before Mercer decides to reclassify you into a cage."
I try to pull my thoughts away from the memory of Jorak’s mouth on my shoulder, away from the way he smelled in the nest, dark cedar and the sharp, metallic bite of whiskey. He’s standing two feet away in a tactical jacket that looks entirely too aggressive for the humanities wing. He hasn't spoken in ten minutes, but I can feel his gaze tracking the pulse in my throat.
"I'm focused," I lie, my fingers trembling as I leaf through a stack of requisition forms from 1994. "I just don't understand why these aren't digitized. The ESA is obsessed with data. Leaving paper trails like this is... inefficient."
Mira pauses, her hand hovering over the dial of the reader. "It’s not inefficient if you want the data to disappear without leaving a deletion log. You can't scrub a hard drive without someone noticing the gap. But a box of papers in a flooded basement? That’s just a tragedy. Luckily for us, the university’s preservation department is staffed by people who hate the ESA even more than I do."
She gestures toward a narrow, unassuming door at the back of the restricted archive. It’s tucked behind a shelf of oversized cartography folios, the kind of door that people look at every day and never actually see. Mira leads the way, her boots clicking softly on the marble, and I follow with Jorak at my back. The temperature drops as we descend a cramped spiral staircase, the air growing thick with the scent of stagnant humidity and dust that has been undisturbed for decades.
"I found this section by accident while I was looking for the old node maps," Mira explains, her voice hushed. "It’s not in the library directory. Everything in here is from the pre-standardization era. Before the ESA decided the modern class system was the only language worth keeping."
The room at the bottom of the stairs is small, lined with industrial steel shelving that sags under the weight of grayarchival boxes. A single, low-wattage bulb hangs from the ceiling, casting long, shivering shadows across the floor.
Jorak moves past me, his presence taking up too much space in the narrow aisle. He runs a gloved hand along the edge of a shelf, his eyes narrowed as he scans the labels. He looks like a man expecting an ambush. I suppose, in his world, he usually is.
"These aren't student records," Jorak says. "These are field reports. Casualties. Burnout rates from the first generation of suppression nodes."
Mira pulls a heavy, leather-bound volume from a box labeled RED-DEPT-ALPHA-ZERO. The cover is cracked, the gold leaf lettering worn down to nothing. She lays it on a small wooden table and opens it to a bookmarked page. I lean in, my shoulder brushing Jorak’s arm. The contact sends a jolt through me, a sharp spike of heat that settles right in the center of my chest. He doesn't move away. He leans closer, his scent wrapping around me like a blanket.
"Look at the terminology," Mira says, pointing to a hand-annotated chart. "They don't use S-Class or F-Class here. They use output variables. And they mention a subtype that isn't in any of the modern textbooks."
I squint at the faded ink. The handwriting is precise, clinical, and utterly devastating.
Subtype: Anchor. Rare. Mechanism: Origin-point stabilization. Notes: Unlike traditional Guides who function through energy absorption or redirection, Anchors act as a structural lock. They do not drain the Esper. They stabilize catastrophic output at the origin point.
I read the words again. Then a third time. The air in the room suddenly feels much too thin.
"Origin-point stabilization," I whisper.
"It says they’re difficult to test," I continue. "Useless in ordinary low-level exams because they require a catastrophicthreshold to activate. The system doesn't register an Anchor because an Anchor has nothing to anchor until the world starts ending."
Jorak stiffens beside me. I can feel the tension radiating off him, the way his power, the Black Current, begins to stir in response to my agitation. A low, electric hum fills the small room, the scent of ozone and black cedar sharpening until it stings my nose.
"Anchors," Jorak says, the word sounding like a curse on his tongue. "I heard stories about them in the facility. Stories about Guides who could hold an S-Class through collapse without dying. I thought they were just fairy tales. Something to keep us from losing our minds before we burned out."
"Stories come from somewhere," Mira says. "And if the ESA erased the word from every modern textbook, there’s a reason."
I look down at the page, at the cold, clinical description of what I am. All those years of feeling like I was failing a test I didn't understand. All the times I’d apologized for being inert while my skin felt like it was humming with a frequency nobody else could hear.
