Chapter 121: Unnecessary Copying

Chapter 121: Chapter 121: Unnecessary Copying

Chapter 121: Unnecessary Copying

The chill from the ring on Cyrus Calder’s hand was what finally broke the doll-like emptiness.

Awareness returned all at once.

It felt less like waking from sleep and more like surfacing from a dark pool without remembering when he had fallen in. The first thing he saw was Audra Sloane standing in front of him, one hand resting near her collar, her expression thoughtful rather than surprised.

"How long was I out?"

"About five minutes."

Audra answered as if she had already expected him to wake on his own.

Cyrus lowered his eyes to the plain ring on his finger.

So that was how it worked.

His ring had not prevented the glamourkin artifact from controlling him outright, but it had pulled him back after a while. Some kind of protection existed. Not enough to make him safe. Enough to keep him from being completely at someone else’s mercy forever.

That was useful.

Audra watched him quietly.

Cyrus was the first boy she had ever controlled with the ring. After repeated uses, a little resistance appearing in him did not seem impossible. In fact, it might explain why he did not feel the ring’s backlash when he used it on her.

That thought stayed behind her lips.

There was no need to tell him everything.

Cyrus nodded as if he had confirmed something for himself.

After their brief, messy research into the ring, they returned to class separately, one after the other.

Lunch break still had a little time left.

Cyrus sat in his usual corner and propped his cheek against one hand, watching the school grounds outside the window. With his other hand, his thumb brushed lightly over the ring on his finger.

The ring truly had some protective effect.

That woman had calculated even this.

She had known he might run into trouble he could not handle alone. If not for the ring, the glamourkin he encountered before might have left him with a much uglier ending.

Fine.

Isolde Calder was impressive. He could admit that much without forgiving her.

Cyrus let the thought pass and shifted his attention back to the classroom.

Faye Larkin sat upright in the row ahead of him, the way she always did. Her posture was neat, quiet, and a little too controlled. Her hand moved steadily across a page, writing something with no sign of stopping.

Since the school event, their presence in class had returned to its usual low level, except for the sudden trouble with the missing money. Cyrus had spent enough time watching the classroom to notice that Faye’s invisibility was even stronger than his own.

Owen spoke to him now and then. Audra had reasons to approach him. Daphne had too many reasons.

Faye seemed to pass through the day without anyone reaching for her at all.

From the start of school to dismissal, almost no classmate called her name unless a teacher forced a group activity. She could sit in her place, finish her work, eat what she brought, and leave without changing the flow of the room.

Cyrus felt a faint concern about that, but he did not know what he was supposed to do with it.

Maybe she did have friends who spoke with her when he was not around.

That was possible.

It would be better if that were true.

In the afternoon, gym class began with attendance and a few instructions from the gym teacher before everyone was released into free activity.

Cyrus took his usual place on the steps near the edge of the field.

The sky above St. Alder was a bright, clean blue, with clouds moving slowly enough to cover the sun every few minutes. The temperature had dropped a lot compared to a month earlier. The air no longer pressed against his skin like a damp hand. It moved around him with a crispness that made breathing easier.

He wished the weather could stay like this. Colder would be even better.

He sat with one knee drawn up, studying his palm.

The letter Audra had written was still there.

The marker had survived handwashing with insulting confidence. The elegant A rested against his skin like evidence from a scene he had not experienced. If any student noticed that he and Audra had marks on their palms at the same time, the class would probably gain another useless topic to chew on.

At this point, Cyrus could tolerate the risk.

The ring was connected to his future safety. Audra’s reputation causing him trouble was annoying, but annoyance had a lower priority than a possible tool against Isolde.

Another cloud crossed the sun.

The field dimmed briefly, and Cyrus let his thoughts drift.

Then he realized something.

He had not seen Faye during gym class.

Not once.

Cyrus lifted his head and scanned the field.

Students were scattered across the open areas. A few played basketball on the outdoor court. Others kicked a soccer ball back and forth with more conversation than effort. Some had chosen the walking loop and were using it as an excuse to gossip while technically moving. The gym teacher stood near the equipment cart, half watching and half answering a student’s complaint about a borrowed volleyball.

Faye was nowhere.

Cyrus stood and brushed dust from his pants.

He walked past the courts, then the walking loop, then the patch of grass where students who disliked exercise pretended stretching counted as participation. He checked the shade near the fence and the benches by the water fountain.

Nothing.

Faye had a talent for reducing her presence, and the moment class broke apart, she had disappeared so smoothly that even looking for her on purpose did not help.

Had she gone back to the classroom?

Not knowing irritated him.

Worse possibilities arrived faster than reasonable ones. Maybe someone else had been involved in yesterday’s accusation. Maybe some classmate had taken the chance to target Faye because she was too gentle to fight back. Maybe the missing-money incident had ended publicly, but the private malice had not.

The image from the school event returned to him: Faye sitting alone at the front of the classroom, quiet and isolated, as if everyone else’s noise belonged to a different room.

Cyrus could not ignore that.

Faye was kind. That did not make her weak, but it did mean certain people would assume she was safe to hurt.

She had looked after him before. According to human logic, that probably counted as a debt for a meal, or something close enough. Cyrus might be cold in the literal sense, but he was not so cold that he could no longer tell the difference between good and bad.

Even if this turned out to be useless worry, he needed to confirm that Faye was not being bullied before he could let it go.

He walked away from the field.

By chance, his route took him past the building that held the school nurse’s office. Thinking Faye might have felt sick, he slowed and glanced through the window in the door.

Inside, several girls were openly using the room to avoid gym class. One sat on the edge of a cot, swinging her feet while another scrolled on her phone and whispered some fresh piece of gossip. The third had an ice pack resting on her knee with no visible injury.

At the desk, Vera Sable drank from a plastic cup of iced coffee, smiling as she listened.

She looked entirely too pleased to be collecting gossip from students who believed the nurse’s office was a safe place to complain.

Cyrus took in the scene with one quick glance and continued walking.

Faye was not there.

His suppressants were running low, though. He should find a chance to ask Vera about them soon. The school nurse was not the hospital pharmacy, but Vera knew more than most adults at St. Alder pretended to know, and Cyrus could use whatever route kept his body manageable without drawing the wrong kind of attention.

A few seconds after Cyrus left, Vera looked toward the small window in the door.

Had someone been there?

One of the girls noticed her attention.

"Ms. Sable, did you hear something?"

"I must have imagined it," Vera said lightly. "Keep going. You were getting to the interesting part."

The girls resumed talking.

Vera smiled and took another sip of iced coffee.

Life here was so much better than a clinical department. Hospital work had charts, paperwork, and people determined to lie about how much pain they were in. School work had gossip, minor injuries, dramatic friendships, and teenagers making disasters out of problems that would look small in a year and enormous until then.

Youth was embarrassingly visible.

Cyrus moved down the third-floor hallway without making much sound.

From outside, the noise of gym class drifted through the open windows: a whistle, laughter, the bouncing of a basketball, someone calling for a pass. Inside the building, the main sounds were teachers speaking in classrooms and the low murmur of students responding.

Cyrus kept to the side of the hallway.

He did not want to interrupt classes. Gym students were not supposed to return to the academic building during free activity, and he had no good explanation if a teacher stopped him. He only needed to check whether Faye was in their advisory room.

If she was not there, he had no next step.

Fortunately, when he returned to the classroom, he saw her immediately.

Faye sat alone in the corner of the empty room, bent over her desk and writing with intense concentration.

The classroom felt bigger without the rest of the students. Desks stood in neat rows, abandoned notebooks and water bottles marking the places where people would return after gym. Outside the windows, distant shouting and laughter moved across the field, but none of it seemed connected to the girl inside.

A thin breeze slipped through the cracked window and stirred the hair at Faye’s forehead.

For a moment, Cyrus saw her face clearly.

Her features were delicate enough to hold their own against anyone in the class, but her eyes looked empty from repetition. She kept copying, line after line, as if her hand had become separate from the rest of her.

Cyrus walked toward her desk.

Faye did not notice until he was beside her.

The moment she looked up, she covered the page with one hand.

"Cyrus, why did you come back too? Are you feeling sick?"

"Yes, a little," Cyrus said.

He accepted the excuse she had handed him, then asked in the same even tone, "What are you writing?"

He had already seen enough.

She was recopying her own class notes.

Not fixing one page. Not organizing one section. Rewriting them from the beginning.

The movement of her hand had the steady rhythm of punishment.

Faye kept her palm over the page and lowered her eyes.

"It is nothing important. I am only copying my notes again so I can remember the lesson better."

"I understand."

Cyrus did not press her.

He walked back to his seat, lowered himself into the chair, and folded his arms on the desk as though he had returned only to rest.

From there, he faced away from her.

If the goal was memory, she would not need to start over from the very beginning.

The notebooks on her desk looked too full. More than one had already been copied through, their pages stacked with neat writing and the exhausted patience of someone repeating work that did not need to be repeated.

Cyrus lay still with his head on his arms.

Outside, the school kept moving. Students shouted on the field. A teacher’s voice rose faintly from another classroom. Somewhere in the hall, a locker shut with a flat metallic sound.

Closer than all of it came the scratch of Faye’s pen against paper.

Steady, quiet, and wrong.