They went back to more experiments after lunch. Though the afternoon ones were more relaxed — testing Magnus's Telekinesis again, this time focused on floating and short-distance flight, and running Affective Discernment comparisons against the guys' self-reports. After a few hours of what could be classified as both productive and genuinely embarrassing, they went inside to start dinner for the girls.
The Council of Women came back around evening, shopping bags in tow, to chicken salad, fried chicken, and a kitchen that smelled considerably better than it had any right to given that four guys and a raccoon had been using it.
Dinner itself was the usual organized chaos — everyone crowded around the table, conversations overlapping, dramatic retellings of the day, Maya declaring at least twice that the chicken was excellent and she was reconsidering her earlier stance that Miguel was merely adequate. Miguel said nothing. Carmen honestly looked more pleased about it than he did.
By the time the dishes were cleared, couples were drifting back toward their respective rooms with the quiet mutual understanding of people who had unfinished business from the morning and knew it.
***
Magnus closed the door behind them. Alex was already sitting on the bed, arms crossed, but the set of her shoulders wasn't the same as it had been that morning. The morning had been performance — both of them aware of the audience, playing their parts in a drama that had become genuinely funny only after the fact. This was different. This was just them.
"Okay," she said. "For the record—"
"I know," he said.
"I wasn't trying to—"
"I know," he said again. "And for my record—"
"You were exhausted. Yes." She exhaled. "Three hours of sleep is not enough."
"It really isn't."
"But you're still not allowed to blame me like that in public ever again. I'm invoking my girlfriend's privilege."
He stared at her. She held his gaze.
Finally, he made a sound between a sigh and a chuckle. "Fine. Girlfriend's privilege noted."
Alex smiled brightly, and the rest of the leftover tension from the morning dissolved in the way it always did with them: quietly, like something that had been clenched finally deciding to let go. He sat down next to her and she leaned against his shoulder automatically.
"Sofia's going to tell that story forever," he said.
"Sofia's going to tell that story at our wedding." Alex shrugged. "I've already accepted it."
He blinked. Opened his mouth. Then decided not to examine that sentence too closely and closed it, letting comfortable silence pass between them.
"So," Alex began again after a moment, her tone turning serious, "we both ended up telling them about the potential of other System Hosts without planning to."
"Apparently." Magnus rubbed the back of his neck. "You heard the short version earlier. Miguel got lifted five feet off the ground, a ghost showed up and grabbed my collar, I nearly dropped him—I did drop him before barely catching him again. They were all looking at me, so I had to explain what just happened." He shrugged. "They took it better than I'd expected. Aaron already knew about the cardiac arrest spike. He'd heard about it independently. And once I explained the ghost, the other hosts, the quest penalty wording — they just accepted it. Ethan even raised the possibility of women being System Hosts."
Alex nodded. "Same with the girls. Though it was more a spontaneous decision on my part. They were asking—teasing, really—about what it was like to date Superman. I shot back without thinking that I might not be the only one out there. That got their attention. So I just figured, since we're already investigating whether there are other people with Systems like yours, more eyes and ears wouldn't hurt, especially since these are all people I trust. And so, I told them everything."
He absorbed this. "They're all surprisingly chill and accepting about it all."
She snorted. "Well, it helps that they all witnessed you performing a miracle live."
"I still don't get why everyone's making a big deal out of that. Anyone would have done the same if they were in my position."
Alex didn't correct him. She simply smiled and hugged him tighter.
***
Down the hall, Miguel and Carmen were quiet in the way they sometimes were. Their "fight" didn't end in a truce, because it wasn't really a fight so much as a mutual understanding dressed up as one.
As soon as they walked into their room, Carmen hugged Miguel from behind. "Thanks for today. I needed that, a day out shopping with the girls."
"I know," he said simply, his hands coming up to cover hers around his waist.
"And for cooking tonight."
"Figured you'd all be hungry."
They stood there like that for a moment, then Carmen began again. "That guy from three weeks ago, from that party we went to."
"You mean the one you dragged me to?" Miguel nodded. He didn't need more than that. The guy had been pushy with Carmen's friend even after she'd said no, twice — not threatening exactly, but wrong in a way that had put Miguel between them before he'd consciously decided to. The guy had backed off and left early. Two days later, they heard through mutual connections that he'd collapsed and died. Twenty years old.
"I thought about it at the time," Carmen said quietly. "And then I stopped, because there wasn't anything to do with it." She looked up. "Now there is."
"System related, you mean." Miguel nodded slightly. "He might've been desperate. Running out of time. Making bad decisions because he was scared."
"That doesn't make what he did right."
"No," Miguel agreed. "And it doesn't make what I did wrong. But—"
"It means there were things we couldn't have known," Carmen said. "And things that might have gone differently if someone had been paying attention." She leaned against him. "I don't know what we could have done. I just think about it differently now."
Miguel put his arm around her and didn't say anything, because there wasn't anything that needed saying. They sat with it together instead, which was usually enough.
***
In their room, Rachel and Aaron were having their version of the same conversation.
"I'm sorry," Aaron said. "Not about what I said, I stand by that. It's the objective truth. But I shouldn't have said it in public."
Rachel narrowed her eyes at him. "Fine. You're forgiven. That's the best apology I can get from you anyway."
She slipped off her dress as she walked to the wardrobe. "But I'm taking your shirt tonight, they're more comfortable."
He swallowed. "You want me to apologize again in a different way later, don't you?"
She smiled. "You say that like you don't want a rematch against Ethan."
"It wasn't a competition."
"Sure, it wasn't." She padded over to him in nothing but his half-buttoned-up shirt, which was revealing just enough in just the right way to short-circuit his brain. "Besides, we're gonna be busy again after Spring Break is over. Might as well make the best out of this vacation." Her hand came up to brush his arm before she cleared her throat, her tone suddenly changing. "But first, we should probably talk about the other thing."
She didn't need to specify which "other thing," Aaron was already clearing his throat and turning away to open his laptop.
"Youth cardiac arrests, clustered by age range and timeframe," he said. "If there's a pattern, it should be visible in the data. Hospital records, death certificates, news reports. Between us we have enough background to know what we're looking for."
"We could cross-reference with enrollment data if we can get it," Rachel said. "If it's college-age hosts, university health centers might have seen spikes."
"That's harder to access."
"But not impossible."
Aaron looked at her. "You're not surprised by any of this."
"Oh, I'm surprised," Rachel said. "He healed a gunshot wound to the chest in front of us, rewriting everything we know about medicine and the human body. So I'm… reorganizing. Taking information I already had and putting it in a different order. You've also been doing the same thing. Don't pretend otherwise. The world has shown us it has more in it than we thought. That means we either update or we get left behind."
He smiled and turned back to his laptop. "Alex's been investigating this alone?"
"Apparently," she confirmed. "It's a good thing they shared. We'd be more efficient — not just because we have access to more resources, but because we know what to look for and where."
***
Ethan, meanwhile, had taken a much more proactive approach compared to the other guys. As soon as they walked into their room, he had pinned Camila against the door and kissed her until she was dazed, wild-eyed, and forgave him because her brain had completely forgotten about the argument.
"You're cheating!" she said between kisses. "I'm forgiving you way too easily these days just because you're a good kisser!"
Sometime later, Ethan was lying on his back staring at the ceiling. Camila had learned to recognize by the way he looked that he was actually thinking, so she nuzzled closer to him, tracing idle patterns on his chest.
"What's on your mind?" she asked.
"Okay, here's a question." He sighed. "What if it had been me?"
"What do you mean?"
"What if I'd gotten a System like Magnus's?" He turned his head toward her. "What would I have done?"
"Thinking about being a superhero?"
"I would be a pretty good superhero, wouldn't I?" He chuckled. "And yeah, I'll admit, I was a bit jealous learning he had superpowers." Then his tone shifted. "But no, I mean about the—"
"—the cost. Yeah, I know," Camila cut him off, then sighed. "You would have panicked."
"Obviously. But after the panic?"
She thought about it. "I think you would have tried to find a way out. A loophole. Something clever."
"And when there wasn't one?"
She was quiet for a moment. "I think you would have told me," she said. "And then we would have panicked together."
Ethan looked back at the ceiling. "He just… kept going," he said. "Week after week. Quests that would wreck most people. And he's still—he's still him. You know? If his secret hadn't come out when he healed Chloe, if they hadn't told us, none of us could have guessed they were going through all that on a weekly basis.
"I know."
"I don't know if I could do that," Ethan said. "Stay good. Stay sane. Under all of that." He paused. "I think I could try. But I'm genuinely not sure."
Camila leaned over and kissed his temple. "You probably could," she said. "But I am absolutely not Alex."
"No?"
"Life-stakes or no," she said, "I'm dumping your ass if you sleep with a different girl every week."
He laughed and propped himself up over her. "Oh really?"
"Yes, really. That's non-negotiable."
"Not even if I apologize like this?" He leaned down and kissed her.
Camila melted into the kiss. When he pulled back several minutes later, she was panting.
"Nope. Still non-negotiable," she finally managed.
"What about like this?" He leaned down again.
Camila's hands came up to wrap around his neck and fist in his hair this time.
"Okay." She whimpered softly when they finally broke apart for air. "Maybe I could be persuaded to follow Alex's examples."
***
Back in Magnus and Alex's room, the conversation had somehow wound up being about Tony. At this point, Magnus was convinced all conversations would eventually lead back to Tony.
"He wanted you to what?"
"He wants me to climb up to your third-floor window. On campus. He says it would be romantic." Magnus delivered this with the flat exhaustion of a man who had heard it from a raccoon several hours ago and still hadn't fully processed it. "He also suggested it would be good practice in case of aggressive birds blocking the stairs."
Alex stared at him for a long moment. Then she started laughing — genuinely, the kind that came without warning.
"I mean," she managed, "it would be kind of romantic."
"Alex—"
"In a slightly creepy, slightly heart-attack-inducing sort of way." She was still laughing. "Imagine waking up at 2AM to someone outside your third-floor window."
"It would be me. You'd know it was me."
"I'd still have a heart attack!"
"That's why I said it was a bad idea," Magnus said. "Tony was unmoved."
"Tony is always unmoved by reasonable objections," Alex said, wiping her eyes. "He gets that from you."
"He does not—"
"You're both very committed to your plans once you've decided on them. Remember Harper?"
"Hey, that fight's over! You agreed I did the right thing back then."
"You did do the right thing. And I did agree to that—I still do. But I never agreed to not bringing it up as an example in our future arguments and discussions when it's relevant."
Magnus opened his mouth. Closed it. "That's not—I'm nothing like Tony."
"You're a little like Tony."
"I'm going to tell him you said that."
"Please do," she said. "He'll be delighted… and insufferable about it."
He looked at her — laughing, leaning against him, the day's weight finally off her shoulders — and smiled.
"You're enabling him," he muttered, shaking his head.
"Practice your wall-climbing," she said. "If you make it to the third floor without falling, I'll consider leaving the window unlocked."
"That's not—"
"It's very romantic, Magnus."
He put his face in his hands. She laughed again and settled against him. Outside the beach house, the night had settled into something quiet and unhurried. Despite the ghost's warning that morning, Magnus found himself relaxing anyway — nothing was on the line, at least for the time being.