Elias found Room 204, a space barely large enough to contain the chaotic energy of two dozen teenagers, and slipped into the only empty seat at the back. Mrs. Davies, a woman whose kindly eyes were utterly betrayed by the deep, permanent crease of frustration between her brows, was already mid-lecture on the complex social structures of the Roman Empire. The noise was an assault. The rhythmic clicking of a pen, the soft scrape of shoes, the low, constant hum of the fluorescent lights, the muffled bass from someone's earbud—it all merged into a screaming static in his head. Back home—back Up—sound was always pure, distilled, and purposeful. Here, it was just clutter. He tried to focus on the textbook, a relic whose paper fibers felt coarse and dead beneath his fingertips. The subject was history. A concept that, to an entity who had seen epochs rise and fall like dust motes in a sunbeam, was frankly hilarious. But the clutter wasn't just auditory; it was psychic. Every human mind in the room was broadcasting its noise: I'm hungry, I hate this class, will he text me back, seven more minutes, I need to sneeze, what if I fail? The combined stream of mundane anxiety was nearly unbearable. He gripped the edge of the cheap plastic desk, trying to anchor himself. Control, he commanded his new body. Focus the perception. He tried a technique from his Ophanim days, a method of filtering light and sound down to their elemental truth. Instead of calming the storm, the focus made it worse. He didn't just hear the thoughts; he began to see the equations. The trajectory of the teacher's chalk as she wrote on the board was a perfect, parabolic arc of y = a(x-h)^2 + k. The low vibration of the HVAC system was a complex Fourier series of sine waves. The girl two desks over, who was nervously tapping her foot, was generating a precise, measurable kinetic energy that he could track, calculate, and, theoretically, redirect. He saw the world not as objects, but as forces. This new layer of perception, this sudden ability to read the universe's mechanical blueprint, was the direct result of the power surge by the locker. It felt like his mind had grown a new, razor-sharp lobe dedicated solely to the physics of his current reality. He closed his eyes, his breathing shallow. Too much. It's too much. He needed a grounding point, a stable frequency in this chaotic symphony. His mind, panicked, latched onto the only thing that felt solid: the memory of that brief, strange interaction. Lena. He didn't know her full equation, but she was a powerful variable. When his consciousness sought her, the static in his head momentarily cleared. Her presence—even just the memory of her—felt like a disruption in the local field, a beautiful anomaly. He realized she was just two classrooms down, her energetic signature a bright, slightly angry-sounding red in his psychic spectrum. The distraction was enough. The chaotic forces began to settle, the mental noise receding to a manageable hum. He opened his eyes and found the teacher, Mrs. Davies, looking right at him. "Mr. Thorne?" Elias blinked. "Yes?" "You're slumping like a sack of rocks," she said, though her tone was more weary than chastising. "Eyes up. Now, where did the Romans establish their first major colony on the Iberian peninsula?" He didn't know the answer. He had been calculating the decay rate of the concrete outside. Suddenly, a voice whispered in his ear, clear as a chime and utterly non-physical. Tarraco. He looked around wildly. No one was close enough. "I asked you a question, Mr. Thorne." "Tarraco," Elias said, the word strange and dry on his tongue. Mrs. Davies raised an eyebrow, a flicker of surprise breaking through her usual weariness. "Correct. Very good, Elias. You can sit up now." A profound chill went through him, not of fear, but of absolute, bone-deep certainty. The whisper had not come from another student. It had come from within the walls. He focused his new perception on the space directly behind his head—the wall, the ceiling, the intersection of matter and material. The physical structure was dead, inert. But interwoven with the wires and the piping was a faint, cold echo of his own celestial energy. It was a resonance. A minute piece of his power—the coercion that had manipulated the locker—had seeped into the building itself. And the power, now housed in the school's static energy, had just talked to him. It had accessed the vast, aggregated knowledge of the school's textbooks and whispered the answer. My power isn't just a hammer, Elias realized, horrified. It's a symbiotic infection. And it learns. The rest of the day was a blur of calculated movements and careful breathing. He successfully navigated the labyrinthine hallways by reading the flow of the other students, like tiny, predictable particles. He sat through lunch, an appalling ritual of noise and processed carbohydrates, and felt the power—the residue of his self—spreading slowly, intelligently, through the school's electrical grid, its Wi-Fi signal, and even the pressurized steam in the radiators. It was gathering data. After his final class, Biology, Elias hurried out to the courtyard, desperate for the relative silence of the city. He needed to be away from the amplifying structure of the school. He stopped short at the gate. Lena was waiting, leaning against the wrought-iron bars, a bright splash of red against the gray afternoon. Her expression was neutral, but her green eyes were piercing. "You're Elias Thorne," she said, stating it as a fact, not a question. "Yes." "You didn't answer me this morning. You just… stared. Like you were calculating the velocity of my approach." He felt the familiar, uncomfortable heat rising in his neck. "I was… tired." She pushed off the gate and stepped closer. "Right. Listen, Elias. When you touched the locker this morning, the lights in the hallway dimmed for a blink. Not enough for anyone to notice, but enough for me. And when you were in History, the fire alarm panel in the hall outside was flickering, like it was trying to write out a sentence in Morse code." Elias's breath caught. She had seen the flicker. She had noticed the power. She wasn't just human. He held her gaze, his obsidian eyes flat and impenetrable. "I don't know what you're talking about." Lena smiled, a slow, knowing, utterly predatory thing that made her look like a flame in the darkness. "Sure you don't. We all have secrets, Elias. Yours just smell like ozone and a paradox. I noticed the fractal on your locker, too. You see, I'm trying to figure out the equations of this terrible, broken place. And I think you might be the biggest, most unstable variable that's walked through that door. So, let's start over." She extended a hand. The gesture was simple, but in Elias's over-sensitized perception, he could see the intricate web of her fingerprints, the minute tremor of her pulse, and the surprisingly powerful electromagnetic field radiating from her skin. "My real name," she whispered, her voice conspiratorial and dangerously inviting, "is a little more complicated than Lena. But for now, you can call me the only person who knows what you are." Elias looked at her hand, a million years of solitude warring with a sudden, aching need for an ally. She is a risk, the ancient Ophanim part of his mind warned. But she is also an anchor. He took her hand. It was warm, dry, and startlingly strong. "What is it you want?" he asked. "I want to know how you fell," Lena replied, squeezing his hand. "And I want to know what you plan on doing with all that wonderful, destructive power now that you're here."
