Chapter 27: May Forces the Odds.
I read the notification and my brain imdiately started working the problem.
Private space. Five minutes. No audience. We were in a school dining hall during lunch hour with every student and two administrators within eyeline. The math was not cooperating.
[Atmosphere under influence.]
Miss Brown walked through the entrance. She wasn’t alone. Beside her was a woman in her early fifties, tall, cream bell-bottom pants, navy blue top, high heels, sunglasses pushed up into hair that was pulled back with the kind of precision that said everything about how she moved through the world.
Beautiful and composed in the specific way of soone who had been both for long enough that they’d stopped thinking about it.
They walked to the center of the dining hall and stopped.
"Has the dean ever co to the dining hall?" soone at the next table murmured.
I looked at May. She was still at the table. Technically. But her attention was sowhere else entirely. Her finger was tapping the table in a small steady rhythm, sothing between a countdown and a calculation, and her eyes had the slightly distant quality. Sothing was happening that I didn’t fully understand yet.
"Good afternoon," Miss Brown addressed the hall. The room settled.
"I’d like you to et my ntor, Sophia Vale."
Sophia. The na landed with a click. The woman from the conversation behind the building. Bagins’ contact. Here to assess, here to decide whether Miss Brown was worth poaching, here to set a sequence of events in motion that none of the people in this room knew about yet except .
"Whatever I am today is because of this woman," Miss Brown said, with the genuine warmth of soone who ant every word. "But she didn’t co to pay
a visit. She ca with a team to supervise Hogsby. So I’d ask all of you to be on your best behavior." She smiled. "We’ll also be conducting ability scans for the seniors this evening."
[High influence. Watch the room.]
I watched the room. My eyes found Mute.
Sothing was wrong with his face. Not dramatic, not announced, just a slow visible change, color rising, jaw setting, the specific look of a man whose feelings had just arrived sowhere they’d been heading for a while. He was looking at Mable across the room. He stood up.
[Host under influence. Trust the read.]
My body moved before my brain finished the sentence. I crossed the floor and stepped directly into his path and pushed him into the nearest table, not hard, enough.
The dining hall went completely silent. Miss Brown, Sophia Vale, every student in the room, all of them looking at
standing over a boy who had just been minding his lunch a second ago.
Mute got up. He didn’t swing. He looked at
with the expression of soone deeply confused about what had just happened to his afternoon.
"What’s wrong with you?" he said.
I had no answer that I could give out loud.
"Abram." Miss Brown’s voice was level and final. "Can you explain your actions?"
I stood there in front of the dean of Hogsby, the supervisor who had co to evaluate the school’s future, every senior student, and the woman Bagins was trying to maneuver into offering Miss Brown a promotion, with absolutely no explanation available.
"Two hours detention," Miss Brown said. "Now."
Three minutes since May had told
ninety nine point nine percent. I looked around the room. Sherry’s face said everything her voice wasn’t saying, which was: *what in the world is wrong with you.*
Mute leaned toward
as he walked back to his seat.
"I’m visiting you tonight," he said quietly. Packaged and delivered.
"Del," Miss Brown said, to almost no one.
A man appeared from nowhere, landing in the dining hall from a teleport like he’d been waiting just outside reality for the call. Tall, unhurried, the specific calm of soone who removed students from situations professionally and had stopped being interested in why.
[Del Slater. Teleportation, Level 9.]
Level nine, I thought. School security. Of course.
He walked toward
and reached out.
"Don’t you dare lay a finger on him." May’s voice cut across the hall, clear and sharp. "He didn’t do anything that—"
"Detention," Miss Brown said, cutting her off. "Both of them."
Del touched my arm and the dining hall was gone.
***
The detention room was small. White walls, because apparently Hogsby had one aesthetic and committed to it. One window. No tir this ti. Just two chairs, a table and the specific quiet of a room that people got sent to.
I sat. My brain was still running the sequence. CGI headquarters. Expulsion. Bala’s face when I ca back through the gate having failed my first assignnt. The plain waiting on the other side of everything I’d built in three days.
"Relax," May said.
I ca back to the room. She was sitting across from
with the easy posture of soone who had arrived exactly where she intended to be.
"The probability was always inevitable," she said.
I looked at her. Then I looked at the room. Then I started doing what she had already done.
What is the probability that the dean walks into the dining hall during lunch? What is the probability that Mute loses control in front of authority at that exact mont? What is the probability that Mute, who cares deeply about Mable, moves toward her in a way that requires soone to intervene? What is the probability that a boy and a girl, specifically that boy and that girl, end up in a detention room alone together?
Each one: nearly impossible.
All of them together, in sequence, in five minutes: zero. Unless soone had been running the numbers and pushing the variables.
"Get out of your head, Abram," May said, with the sa pleasant directness she brought to everything. "We have sowhere to be and we’re already here."
I looked at her.
"Is there any chance Del cos back before we’re done?" I asked.
She looked at
with the patience of a mathematician explaining sothing elentary.
"No chance," she said.
[LEWD LEVELING SYSTEM]
[May: Probability manipulation, level 4. First encounter. Full charge.]
[She moved the whole room for this. The least you can do is show up.]
I stopped thinking and showed up.
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