Chapter 10: "Watching Means Watching" (I Did Not Listen)

Anika called her brother twice outside room 314 and got no answer. A message claimed Jett was safe at the scholarship center, but it did not explain why he wasn’t answering or why the school records said he had moved out. She sent the message and call log to Miss Vale. "He usually makes me regret picking up within ten seconds," she told Dante. "Now he’s suddenly considerate."

She included his room number and the belongings he had left behind, then confirmed that security was coming. The missing student now had a name and a sister standing beside Dante, trying not to sound scared. He wanted to help her more than he wanted another look at the mysterious room.

Posey repeated Jett’s promise to help her move. Dante offered to come along, but Anika told him to stay reachable while she found her brother.

Anika waited with Mrs Han for security and warned them away from Jett’s room. Posey walked Dante across to 315 before returning to her room, leaving him listening for footsteps with his phone beside the bed and the cube’s empty chair occupying his thoughts.

By Saturday breakfast, Anika had only asked them to report any contact from Jett. Posey set her phone beside her plate after showing Dante, and they agreed to ask Miss Vale after his medical appointment.

Toast crawled from the tray while he reached for the butter, until Posey pinned it with her knife. She explained that the kitchen charm kept breakfast warm, although nobody had persuaded it to stay on a plate.

"I think it knows what the butter means, poor thing," she said, reaching across him while her cream sleeve brushed his chest. He remembered her warmth against his chest on the bed and missed the butter completely, scraping his knife across his plate.

"You went quiet. Were you thinking about breakfast?" she asked, smiling when he said he had been reviewing yesterday’s accidents. "Oh, I was hoping we could manage breakfast sitting up this time. I think your mom already has the wrong idea."

At medical, the nurse checked the intact blisters beneath his dressing and wrote permission for brief supervised casting. She told him to stop immediately if his fingers became painful or excessively hot, which sounded clearer than anything Admissions had offered.

Miss Vale was occupied with Jett’s case, so Dante left a message at reception asking for news before Posey led him to basics. His visitor pass got him through the classroom door, where Professor Bell read the nurse’s note before allowing him to sit beside her.

Bell was short and broad, with a bald head and ink stains on his lab coat. He set the nurse’s note beside his register and told Dante to watch first. Then he drew three joined loops with his finger, leaving white lines hanging in the air.

"Balgeun byeora, bambit balkyeora," Bell said, joining the last line as he finished the words. The shape flashed and vanished, leaving a white light above his palm. "The shape tells the magic what to do, and the words start the spell," he explained. "Today we’re making a light, not summoning the sun. If you can read your notes, you’ve done enough."

Dante’s drawing looked embarrassingly like something he shouldn’t show a woman he had just met, but Posey called it a stomach and turned his notebook around. He thanked her for protecting his reputation while she suggested closing the loop before assigning it any organs.

The student at the next table already had a steady light above his pale pink hair. Bell called him Lucan while correcting his work. Tall and broad-shouldered, Lucan looked used to being the person others watched, and a girl beside him had stopped working to admire his spell.

Posey finished the same spoken words and made a smaller light above her notebook. She began showing Dante the last line of the spell shape, but he was watching the light itself. He pictured one above his own page, and warmth spread through his fingertips before he remembered Bell had told him to wait.

A light appeared above his blank page, and Posey stopped explaining while Bell came to their table. Dante waved his good hand underneath it, finding nothing to hold and no drawing to explain why it worked. Bell checked for pain, then ordered him to release it.

Dante stopped picturing the light, and it vanished. He admitted what he had done, then held his hands still while Bell allowed two brief tries under supervision. Both times, thinking of the light made it appear. He needed no drawing and no spoken words, even though everyone else in the class used both.

Lucan crossed over and asked which charm Dante had prepared. "He can’t explain the first stroke, so somebody should check what he’s carrying," he said, inspecting the notebook until Bell sent him back.

"I usually avoid announcing everything I’m about to do," Dante said in his practiced voice. The girl who had been watching Lucan laughed, and Posey looked as though she believed him. He knew he had only copied what he saw, but being impressive felt so much better than admitting that he didn’t understand it.

Posey touched his sleeve to ask whether the warmth had faded, and he confirmed it had while resisting several unsuitable suggestions about where else she could check.

Bell demonstrated lifting a wooden ring onto a peg, then let Lucan repeat the sigil and words while Dante watched. Dante pictured his own ring following it before asking permission, and it settled perfectly as Bell reached over to remove the rest of his equipment.

"Watching means watching until I tell you otherwise," the professor said, checking his hand again before ending his casting for the morning. Lucan pointed out that copying a result didn’t mean understanding its cost, which irritated Dante more because Bell agreed with him.

After class, Bell kept Dante by the screen while Posey waited at the door. "You can make a spell after seeing someone else do it," he said. "That is what we’ve seen today. We haven’t learned how you do it or how much it takes out of you, so I still need you to stop when I ask."

"I thought I’d skipped the difficult bit," Dante admitted, wishing Bell looked happier about it. The professor explained that without understanding his method, they couldn’t know its limits, so further demonstrations needed supervision rather than recruiters.

Dante agreed, looking at the dressing around his fingers. He wanted to learn this properly, not spend his first week collecting injuries. Bell turned to save the lesson recording for Miss Vale, but an error replaced the preview before he could finish.

The professor checked another menu, then unplugged the network cable while Dante asked whether that meant the lesson had been deleted. Posey’s phone chimed before Bell answered, and she returned with a scholarship advert playing the recording he could no longer open.

The ad used their classroom recording, cut to show only Dante casting without words or drawings. Bell’s warnings and Dante’s mistakes were gone. A caption called him the scholarship program’s newest success story, although he had not joined it. Someone was using his real lesson to sell a false story about him.

Below the video, people could book private demonstrations with Dante. He had not offered any. As Bell scrolled down, a booking changed to CONFIRMED for a customer whose name was hidden, and Dante realized someone had just promised to send him somewhere without asking him.