Monday didn't announce itself the way Mondays usually did.
No dramatic dread. No countdown to anything. Just a quiet, ordinary morning that felt, for the first time in longer than I wanted to admit, slightly too calm. The kind of calm that made you check your pockets twice before leaving the house, not because anything was wrong, but because nothing had been wrong for long enough that you'd started distrusting it.
I lay in bed for a few extra minutes before getting up, running through the week ahead the way I'd started running through missions — methodically, in order, looking for the gaps.
Wednesday: the gala. Kenzie's house. Her father's house, technically, though she never called it that.
I still hadn't told anyone.
Not Bella. Not Sky. Definitely not TRAD, though something told me TRAD already knew, the way TRAD always seemed to know things before I'd finished deciding whether to mention them.
I got up. Made coffee. Went to school.
The morning had the particular texture of a week trying to remember how to be normal after a weekend that had been anything but. Sky met me at the stairs with noticeably less volume than usual — not subdued exactly, just calibrated, like a radio turned down half a notch.
"You're quiet," I said.
"I'm conserving energy," he said. "Yesterday took a lot out of me. Emotionally."
"You ate noodles and theorised about my personal life from a safe distance."
"That's emotionally taxing work." He fell into step. "Also I'm thinking."
"About?"
"About how you have apparently become the kind of person who casually rescues people from mall altercations and then has lunch with them like it's nothing." He glanced at me. "That's not normal Marx behaviour. Normal Marx behaviour is quietly existing at the edge of things and occasionally saying something unexpectedly sharp in Ethics class."
"Maybe I'm expanding my range."
"Maybe you're hiding something."
I didn't answer, which was, in itself, an answer. Sky let it go — for now — the particular grace of someone who had decided that pushing wouldn't get him anywhere today and was saving his energy for a better angle later.
Osei's class started with a quiz neither of us had been warned about, which produced a collective groan loud enough that Osei had to wait it out before continuing.
"I did warn you," he said, unbothered, distributing papers. "Three lessons ago. I said, and I quote, there will be a quiz on this material before the end of the month."
"That's not a warning," someone muttered. "That's a prophecy."
"Take it as motivation."
I got through it fine. Bella, two rows over, finished hers in roughly half the allotted time and spent the remainder reading something on her own, which seemed to be less an act of confidence and more a simple statement of fact — she'd known the material, she'd answered the questions, there was nothing left to verify.
Camilla finished a close second. She didn't read afterward. She sat with her hands folded, gaze fixed somewhere just past the front of the room, in the particular stillness of someone doing arithmetic that had nothing to do with the quiz.
I caught her eye once, briefly. She held it for a half-second longer than necessary, then looked away.
Neither of us mentioned yesterday.
Ferb was at lunch today — present, notebook open, pen moving with renewed enthusiasm that suggested whatever absence had occupied his weekend had been productive in ways he wasn't sharing.
He caught me watching him.
"You're staring," he said, without looking up.
"You seem busy."
"I am busy." He turned a page. "There's a lot happening that people don't notice. Someone has to notice it."
"Anything interesting?"
He looked up then, and for a half-second something passed behind his glasses that wasn't quite mischief and wasn't quite warning — something closer to a held card, the specific satisfaction of a person who knew something and had decided, for now, not to play it.
"Always," he said, and went back to writing.
Sky, beside me, watched this exchange with the particular unease of someone who had started noticing patterns he didn't have names for yet.
"He's getting weirder," Sky said quietly, once Ferb had moved on to a different table. "Weirder than his normal weird."
"He's always been like this."
"No, this is different. This is—" Sky searched for the word "—purposeful weird. Like he's not just curious anymore. Like he's working on something."
I thought about Bella's voice on the balcony, days ago now. He's sharper than he looks. He already suspects something. Not what — just that there's a what to suspect.
"Maybe he is," I said.
Sky looked at me. "That's not reassuring."
"It's not supposed to be."
The afternoon moved the way Mondays were supposed to move — slow, a little grey, full of the kind of lessons that asked for attention without quite earning it. I gave what I could spare. The rest of my attention sat somewhere two days ahead, in a house I'd never seen, at an event I'd agreed to attend without thinking through what it might cost.
After the final bell, I took the long way back. Past the garden nobody used on weekdays. Past the stream Sky had once called the spot for clearing your head when things get intense.
It helped, marginally.
My phone buzzed once on the walk.
Kenzie.
Excited for Wednesday. You have no idea.
I looked at it for a moment. Typed back something short and warm, the kind of reply that didn't commit to more than it needed to.
Then I put the phone away and kept walking, the city settling into its evening colours around me, Monday quietly finishing the job of being a day that hadn't asked too much of anyone.
Which, I was starting to understand, was exactly what made it dangerous.
The easy days never warned you. They just let you get comfortable right up until the moment they didn't.