Soren made the decision at two in the morning because that was when the math stopped working.
He'd been sitting on the floor with his back against the bed running numbers in his head for three hours straight, and every version ended the same way.
Joan files her report in thirty-six hours.
The Bureau escalates and the investigation locks him down in administrative review while the Fracture eats the building.
Waiting was the wrong play.
He stood up and pulled on his boots.
Selah rolled over and looked at him with the face she used when she was pretending she hadn't been listening to every sound he made for the last hour.
"Stay here," he said. "Don't let Grimm follow me."
"What are you going to do?"
"Something stupid."
"That's not an answer."
"It's the only one I've got."
He was at the door before she could argue. Grimm lifted her head from the foot of the bed and her sealed eyes tracked him and her tail went still.
He looked at the wolf. The wolf looked at him.
Stay.
Grimm put her chin back down on her paws but her ears stayed up and her body stayed rigid. She'd hold it for about twenty minutes before she came looking.
Twenty minutes. Enough.
◆◆◆◆
Joan's temporary office was on the second floor of the admin block. Light coming through the gap under the door at two in the morning.
He didn't knock, just tried the handle. It was unlocked.
Joan was standing at the window with the tablet in her hand, her back to the door, and she didn't turn when he walked in.
She'd heard him on the stairs. The corridor nodes had tracked his body heat from the third floor down.
"I was going to give you until morning," she said.
"I don't have until morning."
She turned.
Her coat was open at the collar and she had a pen behind her ear that she'd forgotten about, which was the first human thing he'd seen from her.
She looked at him for three seconds, reading whatever her scanner had already fed her about his vitals.
"Sit," she said.
"No."
She raised an eyebrow.
"I'll talk but I'm not sitting across a desk from you so you can run the interrogation frame."
Joan set her tablet down slowly. "Then where would you like to have this conversation, Mr. Kane?"
"Right here standing, just two people who need something from each other."
She crossed her arms. "Go ahead."
"A Fracture. Dimensional boundary collapse. This academy, this building, approximately sixteen days from now."
Joan didn't write it down. That was different.
"The Bureau has a prediction model," she said. "Our projection for this site puts the earliest window at ninety days."
"Your model is wrong. The timeline deviation at this academy is at forty-one percent and accelerating. The variable your model doesn't account for is me."
"Explain."
"I have a trait called the Primordial Tamer's Heart. It creates resonance events that destabilize dimensional boundaries. My bonds with Grimm and Selah have already produced two unclassified events on your logs. If the Fracture arrives before I'm strong enough to stabilize the boundary, everyone in this building dies."
Soren held her stare. "Including you."
Joan was quiet for a long time. She looked at the window, then at the corridor readings on her tablet, then back at him.
"Show me," she said.
"Show you what?"
"Your soul reading right now. Open your system feed and let me see the integrity number."
He could've refused. She couldn't force him to display system data but he'd come here to make a deal, and deals cost something upfront.
He pulled the system feed into visible range and turned his wrist so she could read the projection on his skin.
[Soul integrity: 76%. Spiritual Friction aggregate: 26%.]
Joan looked at it and her face changed by about a quarter of an inch. She put her tablet down.
"Seventy-six," she said. "You're running at seventy-six percent soul integrity and you're walking around campus attending classes."
"I'm managing it."
"You're hemorrhaging. The aggregate friction alone..."
She stopped herself and picked up her pen then put it back behind her ear without using it.
"You're asking me to delay a report that protects this institution, based on the word of an F-rank student whose wolf reads higher than my scanner can classify."
"I'm asking you to choose between a clean report that arrives after the Fracture kills everyone, or a messy one that arrives after I've fixed the problem."
"Those aren't the only two options."
"Name a third."
She looked at him and he could see the math running behind her eyes, the same math he'd been running all night, but hers had more variables because she knew things about the Bureau's response protocols that he could only guess at.
"I delay the preliminary report," she said. "But I need insurance."
"What kind?"
Joan opened the top drawer of her desk and pulled out a device he recognized from the novel.
A monitoring seal.
Crystalline disk about the size of a coin, Bureau insignia etched into the surface, designed to bond directly to a tamer's soul signature and transmit real-time readings to a paired tablet.
In the novel, Joan had used one of these on Troy during chapter eighty-something.
Soren hadn't expected to see one this early.
"Real-time tracking," Joan said.
"Your soul integrity, your bond outputs, your proximity to fracture-class events. If your integrity drops below fifty percent, my system files everything automatically without warning"
"You want to wire me?"
"I want to keep six hundred students alive. You want to keep your secrets. This is the middle ground."
She held the seal out.
Soren looked at it.
The crystal caught the overhead light and threw small refractions across Joan's desk.
Cooperation on her terms, surveillance on his skin.
But he'd walked in here at two in the morning because he'd already decided to pay a price, and this was the price on the table.
He took the seal from her hand.
"Where does it go?"
"Over the heart. Direct contact."
He unbuttoned the top three buttons of his shirt and pressed the crystal flat against his chest.
The cold hit first when it touched his skin, then the heat came through, then a pulling sensation through his chest from front to back that he couldn't explain.
The seal sank into his skin until the surface sat flush, and the crystal turned from clear to a faint blue that pulsed in time with his heartbeat.
Joan watched him absorb it without flinching.
She looked at his chest for two seconds longer than she needed to.
"Voluntary cooperation," Soren said, buttoning his shirt back up. "Weighted in your assessment."
Joan picked up her pen. "Get out of my office, Mr. Kane."
He walked to the door.
"One more thing."
He stopped.
"If your shadow entity tries to remove the seal, it triggers an emergency submission to three Bureau offices. The seal is bonded to your soul signature. Only I can deactivate it."
"She won't touch it."
"Good."
"She'll touch you, though. If you give her a reason."
Joan's mouth moved to the closest thing to a smile he'd seen from her.
"I'll keep that in mind," she said, and went back to her tablet.
◆◆◆◆
Selah was awake when he got back. She was sitting up in bed with her arms around her knees, frost past her wrists, watching the door.
"What did you do?" she said.
Soren unbuttoned the top of his shirt and showed her the seal glowing faintly blue against his chest.
Selah stared at it while blushing.
"You let her put a Bureau seal on you."
"I let her think she put a leash on me." He buttoned the shirt back up. "She delayed the report. We have time."
"How much time?"
"Enough. If we don't waste it."
Grimm climbed off the bed and pressed her head into his hand. Through the bond, Yara's voice came through.
"I can feel the seal. It's cold."
"Don't touch it," Soren said.
The shadow on the wall moved once.
"I won't," Yara said. "But I want to."
[DING! — Monitoring seal: ACTIVE. Joan Sawyer now has real-time access to soul integrity, bond output, and proximity data. Current soul integrity: 76%. Threshold for automatic report: 50%.]
[DING! Quest timer: 16 days to Fracture. 25 days to Obsession cap collapse.]
[DING! Obsession Index — Yara: 49/50. Selah: 18/50.]
Soren sat down on the floor with his back against the bed, put his hand on Grimm's head, and started rewriting the plan from scratch.
He opened the training notes he'd started last night, crossed out the first three lines, and started over.