Chapter 3: Seven Days Behind a Locked Door

Chapter 3: Seven Days Behind a Locked Door

Silas began with the vial.

The body remembered how to reach for it. He found the familiar pull behind his eyes, closed it around the glass, and nearly put the vial through the ceiling.

It shot past his ear and struck hard enough to leave a white mark overhead. He caught it on the way down, fumbled the grip, then lowered it onto the desk. A fine crack ran along one side. He turned the glass carefully with his shaking fingers to check that it still held together.

"Right. Double means double."

The original’s habits came back whenever Silas lost concentration. He would tighten his grip and pull too hard, as though everything needed to be dragged across the room. He moved the vial farther from the edge of the desk before trying something lighter.

Silas set a sheet of paper on the floor.

He tore the first four. The fifth folded itself diagonally. On the eighth attempt, the page rose flat and stayed level until the ache behind his eyes forced him to lower it.

[Assimilation: 11%]

"You had this for two years," he muttered.

Then he tried again.

By the next afternoon, Silas could turn the pages of a manual one at a time. He learned to spread his hold across an object after bending a spoon nearly in half, and spent an unreasonable amount of time moving the empty vial between the desk and shelf without letting the glass click against either surface.

He also opened the original’s records.

The academy terminal contained a disciplinary warning, several ugly message threads, and a neat file of dates and payments under the name E. Marsh.

Six silver. Four. Twelve.

The body supplied the value without being asked. Elin Marsh was a common-born sponsored student. Her allowance covered a bed, meals, and the consumables required for practical evaluations if she counted every coin. Six silver could feed her properly for two weeks.

A memory surfaced with the number. Elin standing in a stairwell with her arm extended, coins in her palm and her gaze fixed somewhere over Silas’s shoulder. The original had told her not to look embarrassed. Everyone paid for something.

He had enjoyed saying it.

Silas closed the file and pushed his unfinished meal away. Six silver was still enough to feed her for two weeks, however small it looked in the record.

She’s not paying me again.

He reopened the file to check the next collection date, then left it on the terminal. He would need to remember her name.

Training swallowed the rest of that day and most of the next. The room’s doubled recovery made him careless. After hours of practice, he stood too quickly and found himself on his hands and knees with his forehead against the rug. His sight returned slowly. He needed sleep and food. The room had been helping him function well enough to ignore both.

He rested for twenty minutes. He wanted to get into bed and sleep until he woke up hungry, and it pissed him off that he was having to argue himself out of it again.

Once I get through this week, I’m sleeping as long as I damn well like.

Then he went back to work.

Midway through the week, another delivery arrived from House Rooke.

Silas felt the compartment beside the entrance open and close. Inside waited a sealed case bearing the house colors and the steward’s mark. Thirty pale-glass vials rested in straw, identical to the one he had found after waking.

He placed the old vial beside them.

The glass and seal matched. He lifted a new vial to the light, looking for sediment or a difference in color, then put it back unopened. Whatever the comparison could tell him, he was going to need more help than this.

A note had been folded with the manifest.

Take one every morning, with water, not on an empty stomach. Write to me when you can.

The handwriting tugged at a memory that refused to open. Silas turned the note facedown, locked the delivery beside the original vial, and ordered ordinary academy medicine and food through the campus network. He left the deliveries active. Cancelling them might cause someone at House Rooke to start asking questions.

The following morning, three hesitant knocks touched the door.

The cup and two spoons Silas had been holding dropped onto the rug.

His awareness ended at the threshold. He knew exactly where the knock had landed, but nothing about the person beyond it.

They came back to check whether I’m dead.

Then a frightened voice passed through the wood.

"Young Master Rooke? It’s Elin Marsh. I—I have it. I know it’s late. The evaluation fees came out, and I couldn’t..." Coins shifted inside a pouch. "I have all of it now."

Silas looked at the lock.

He almost said she could keep it. The words sounded harmless in his own voice. In this one, she would wait to hear what he wanted instead.

Elin shifted outside. He could hear the coins again.

All right. Say it how he would.

He found the original’s bored, downward-pitched voice in the body’s memory. It made his skin crawl.

"Marsh." Silas waited a moment before continuing. "Keep your miserable coins. This young master is tired of counting scraps like a shopkeeper."

Nothing moved on the other side.

He forced himself to continue. "Bring another payment to my door and I’ll consider it an insult. Now leave."

Please leave. Please don’t make me say anything else.

The silence lasted long enough for him to wonder whether he had made it worse. Then Elin’s footsteps retreated, slow at first, then hurried.

Silas sat against the door, listening until he could no longer hear her. He had meant to sound dismissive. Now he wondered whether she would be afraid to spend the money.

There was no useful way to call her back.

He picked up the cup and spoons.

By the sixth night, he could keep several objects suspended, pour water without spilling it, and stop a falling glass before it struck the floor.

[Assimilation: 78%]

The number refused to rise further.

Silas’s hands shook even when he was not using the Talent. He forgot why he stood up, reread sentences without understanding them, and slept in scraps whenever his body overruled him. He could seize multiple targets, but part of him still treated every use as one large grip. When he tried to make two objects perform different, delicate movements, his intentions bled together.

He woke at the desk late on the seventh day. Amber light filled the studio. Voices, carriage wheels, and hundreds of unfamiliar footsteps drifted through the window.

The new term had begun.

Silas put a sewing needle and a length of thread on the desk.

He raised the needle and held it upright. When he lifted the thread and guided it forward, the needle followed. Again. On the fourth failure, the thread brushed the eye and dragged the needle sideways.

Silas lowered both and rubbed his face.

Two objects. Two grips. Stop forcing them into the same damn fist.

He lifted the needle again. This time he held it with several small points of pressure, balanced against one another. He formed a second hold around the end of the thread and kept the two intentions separate in his mind.

The needle remained still.

The thread moved. Its end passed through the eye, and Silas drew it through before setting both objects down.

[ASSIMILATION COMPLETE]

[Talent permanently acquired: Remote Grasp — C / Common]

[External use unlocked]

[Temporary Talent Slot released]

Silas read the acquisition message, then the line beneath it. External use. He could take it with him.

He tried to stand, meaning to test it at the door. His legs folded before he could reach the desk for support.

Silas struck the floor beside the desk and did not get up. Outside, the entrance bell rang across Crownless Academy, welcoming hundreds of students to the first day of a story that killed Silas Rooke in every known route.

The threaded needle lay on the desk above him.