Chapter 694 | The Consistency Problem

Chapter 694: 694 | The Consistency Problem

Caden’s feet, conspicuously absent from the back of my chair, twitched once.

"The Invitational is not a test." Steele set her coffee down the way you’d set down a grenade. "It’s a window. Every agency scout in that building will be putting together a file on you before you finish your first demonstration. Your ranking, your output, your body language, your costume, the way you talk to your partner, the way you respond when your partner fails. All of it goes into a profile that decides whether your name shows up on a shortlist eighteen months from now, or on nothing at all."

Nobody in the room moved. Twenty teenagers sat there taking on the weight she’d just put on their shoulders.

"Class One-B." She smiled, and the burn on her forearm caught the fluorescents. "Do not embarrass me."

After class Percy appeared at my elbow with his notebook already open. He’d mapped the entire Invitational schedule, cross-referenced it with historical scout attendance, and found seventeen strategic windows when high-value observers would be bunched up in specific spots.

"The southeast gallery has a sight line to both combat demonstration fields and the support track exhibition," he said, pen moving in tight strokes. "Historically, three of the top five agency directors in California have positioned themselves there by the second hour. If you want exposure to Crestline, Halcyon or the Lang Agency, your showcase demonstration needs to happen between ten-fifteen and eleven-thirty on day one."

"Percy."

"The alternative window is fourteen hundred to fifteen-thirty, but that conflicts with One-A’s combat finals, which will pull seventy percent of media attention to Field Alpha no matter what One-B does on Field Beta."

"Percy."

He stopped writing. His brown eyes came up from the notebook, and for a second the constant processing behind them went quiet.

"Yeah."

"You’ve been doing this since four-thirty."

"Since four-twelve. The scheduling data refreshed at four, and it took me twelve minutes to integrate the new variables." He paused. "I also worked out optimal breakfast timing for the morning of the event. Protein-heavy, with complex carbohydrates, between six and six-forty, assuming standard Steele conditioning at six. Oatmeal is ideal, but the cafeteria oatmeal has a consistency problem on Thursdays."

"It’s November."

"The Invitational is in December. I’m planning ahead." The pen started up again. "Rina says I should sleep more. She says it in a voice that makes my hands stop shaking, which is statistically interesting, because nothing else does that."

The notebook went still. Percy looked down at his own hands.

"I told her about the laugh thing," he said quietly. "The acoustic properties observation. From the common room."

"How’d she take it?"

"She turned pink." He blinked. "Not her normal pink. A different one, darker. It started at her ears and went down her neck, and she made a sound that was either mortification or something else, and then she asked me to say it again."

"Did you?"

"I said it four more times, because she kept asking." His ears had gone the color he was describing. "Caden says this means something. I’d like your assessment of what it means, because my model keeps returning a confidence interval I don’t trust."

I looked at Percy Mendoza, who’d spent three months mapping routes and analyzing insurance frameworks, and who had just found out that a girl with sheep horns wanted to hear him describe her laugh on repeat.

"It means she likes you, Percy."

He wrote something in the notebook. Crossed it out. Wrote it again.

"I’d arrived at that conclusion independently," he said. "But the margin of error is fourteen percent, and I’d prefer single digits before I commit to any action with irreversible social consequences."

"Ask her to dinner."

"Where?"

"Lin’s."

His pen stopped cold. "The restaurant on Halverson."

"Grandma Lin will feed you both until you can’t move, and she won’t charge Percy Mendoza a single dollar, because I’ll have told her you’re the smartest person I know. She respects brains the way most people respect money."

Percy’s mouth opened and shut twice before anything came out.

"You would do that."

"I’m your neighbor. Room two-oh-four. You bought me a desk chair."

"I didn’t buy you a chair. I purchased a tactical investment in adjacency-based social infrastructure."

"Percy."

"Yes."

"Ask the girl to dinner."

He stood up, closed the notebook and tucked his pen behind his ear, where it caught in his navy hair and stuck out at an angle that made him look like a professor born twelve years too late. Then he nodded once.

"I’ll prepare a proposal," he said.

"Don’t call it a proposal."

"A request for shared dining with structured social parameters and a time-limited commitment."

"That’s worse."

"I’ll iterate." He headed for his door, stopped and turned back. "Lukas."

"Yeah."

"The Invitational showcase window. Ten-fifteen to eleven-thirty, day one." His brown eyes held mine with the steadiness of somebody who’d already run the numbers, didn’t like all of them, and had committed anyway. "That window is optimal for you, but it’s also optimal for Hiro. His Corona reads best at the morning light angle. If you both demonstrate at the same time, the scouts split their attention, and the coverage dilution cuts your individual impact by approximately thirty-one percent."

"So one of us has to move."

"Yes." Percy opened the notebook to a page I couldn’t see, then shut it again. "I’ve already spoken to Hiro. He’s agreed to demonstrate at fourteen hundred."

I stared at him.

"You talked to Hiro Sato. About scheduling."

"He was receptive to data-driven arguments about optimal showcase positioning." Percy’s mouth did something that on another face would’ve been a smile. "I also told him that in the morning window his silhouette would be backlit by the southeast gallery glass, which would wash out his Corona on camera. He found this unacceptable."

"You weaponized his vanity."

"I provided actionable intelligence about photographic presentation. He drew his own conclusions." He paused at his door. "The ten-fifteen window is yours. Do something with it."

He disappeared into Room 205. Through the wall I heard his pen start moving.

The Invitational was six weeks out, and I had to fit everything else around it.