Chapter 11: The Most Dangerous Seat in Apex
The second morning after Hana Haze's arrival at Apex begins differently from the one before it. The coverage hasn't slowed overnight. Social media is still flooded with recordings from the university, and the meeting between the two most influential young women in the world continues to dominate conversations in a dozen countries. What started as a reunion between childhood friends has turned into a subject of endless speculation, with every photograph and gesture examined as though it carried a hidden message.
Students who witnessed the encounter are still discussing it, and those who missed it are collecting every detail they can find. Some have watched the original recordings dozens of times. Others follow the arguments between Selen Astar's supporters and Hana Haze's, and a few have started treating the whole thing like the opening chapter of a rivalry that might one day affect two powerful families. Ordinary conversations in the corridors can turn, unexpected, into debates about the Ice Goddess, the Living Fire, and the quiet student who connects them.
I arrive earlier than I need to, because I want to see his face before anyone else does.
The main entrance is already busy. Security stands at the gates in its usual positions, watching for visitors who seem more interested in filming the campus than attending it. A knot of students near the steps is replaying yesterday on a phone, and when my convoy rolls in, they go silent in a ripple, one after another, like a row of lights switching off. I step out of the middle car and straighten my jacket. I had expected the attention. I hadn't expected a boy to walk into a lamp post because he was looking at me.
I give them a passing glance and a small smile, then keep walking. My mother's words from breakfast are still in my ears. You can't unsay it, Hana. I told her I wasn't trying to. I came back to spend time with an old friend, not to manage the opinions of thousands of strangers, and if they want to discuss me, they are welcome. I have a more important task. Someone has to make sure Soren Su doesn't spend every moment of university studying.
I know where he'll be. Third row, near the window, an hour before anyone else, with his notes laid out in a neat line like a surgeon's instruments.
I arrive early because I want an hour of quiet before the lecture, and I have no idea how wrong that is until the door opens.
My notebook is open, a few pages of reading are arranged beside it, and I am halfway through a paragraph on narrative distance when the room changes. Conversations slow down. Someone's pen stops tapping. A girl by the window turns her head so fast that her hair swings. I look up before anyone says a name.
Hana walks past a dozen empty seats without slowing. Her eyes move across the room until they land on me, and her whole face lights, as though I am the only thing in it worth looking at. She crosses the aisle as if the other students were furniture.
"Morning, Ren."
I wince. It is a nickname nobody at Apex has ever heard, and she says it at full volume. "Hana, don't start."
"What?" She tilts her head with an expression of perfect innocence. "I only said good morning."
"You know exactly what."
"I haven't done anything yet." She pulls out the chair on my other side and sits.
"That's what worries me."
A few students nearby exchange glances and try to make their interest look accidental. Nobody else calls me that, and she has said it with the ease of someone who has been saying it for years. There was never a moment she decided to use it. She simply has.
She puts her bag by the desk and leans towards me, studying my face. "You look tired."
"I am tired."
"Did you stay up reading again?"
I narrow my eyes. "How do you know that?"
"Because you always did. You'd say you were going to sleep early, and then I'd find you three chapters into something that had nothing to do with whatever you were supposed to be studying." She smiles at the memory. "You were terrible at pretending you weren't sleepy."
Somewhere behind me, a boy lowers his phone. Always. I can feel the word travel through the room faster than any whisper.
"You also forgot the time whenever you started an experiment," she goes on, oblivious. "Your family would be looking everywhere, and you'd still be trying to work out why a thing didn't work."
"You remember too much."
"Of course I do."
"That isn't necessarily a good thing."
"It is for me."
I shake my head and go back to my notes, but the corner of my mouth has already lifted, and she catches it. For a moment we are two kids on a garden wall again. Six years, and some habits survived without being asked.
The rest of the room is having a different experience. They have watched me for three days as the quiet one, the polite one, who answers when he is spoken to and never leads. Now I am sitting beside Hana Haze, trading old jokes as though the university has vanished, and I can feel their curiosity pressing against the side of my face. One boy has become suddenly interested in the contents of his pencil case. A girl across the aisle turns to the window, though she was looking straight at us a second ago.
Hana notices at last. "Are they always like this?"
"Not usually."
"Then why are they looking at us?"
"Because you're here."
She considers this. "That makes sense."
"It doesn't make sense to me."
"You're not supposed to understand everything."
"Thank you for the advice."
"You're welcome."
The professor walks in before I can answer. He sets his materials down, adjusts his glasses, and lets his gaze rest on Hana for a moment before moving on to me, then to the students pretending to look at their notes. He heard about yesterday. Everyone has. But he has no intention of letting a celebrity turn his lecture into an informal gathering.
"Good morning. Please open your notes. We have quite a bit to cover."
For a while the room behaves. He explains the material, pens move, and someone asks a question. Eyes keep drifting to our row anyway, sometimes through the reflection in a laptop screen, sometimes through a head turn timed to the professor facing the board. I try to ignore them.
Hana, apparently, is trying to do something else.
Halfway through the lecture, she tears a page from her notebook and bends over it. Every few seconds she glances at me, checking that I'm paying attention, and a few minutes later she folds the page into quarters and slides it across the desk.
I unfold it. It is a cartoon of me, asleep on a heap of books with one arm hanging off the edge. A tiny speech bubble over my head says, Five more minutes.
I look up. She is staring at the professor with an expression of absolute concentration.
"Focus on class," she whispers.
"You drew this during class."
"I multitask."
"You're not even listening."
"I can listen and draw."
"That's what you used to say."
"And I was right."
I look at the drawing again. "You never changed."
"Neither did you."
I try to swallow the laugh, and I fail. Hana looks smug. A girl in the next row nudges her friend and tries to read what is on the page.
"Is there something particularly interesting happening in the third row?"
The whole room goes still. I straighten in my seat. Hana lays her pen beside her notebook and looks at the professor as though the question has been addressed to someone else.
"Nothing, sir," I say.
His eyes move to the paper half hidden under my notebook. "Then I assume you've both been following the lecture."
"Yes, sir," Hana answers.
"Good. Perhaps you can tell us what I just explained."
She glances at the board, and answers the question accurately enough to end it, and he nods and carries on, although his eyes stay on the third row a moment longer than they need to. I lean towards her. "You're enjoying this."
"A little."
"You'll get us both in trouble."
"Then we'll be in trouble together."
I shake my head. The smile comes back anyway.
When the lecture ends, I fold the drawing and slide it into my notebook. Hana watches me do it. "You're keeping it?"
"No."
"Then why did you put it in your notebook?"
"So I don't lose it."
"That sounds like keeping it."
"Do you want it back?"
She pretends to think about it. "You can keep it."
"How generous."
"I know."
By the time we reach the main corridor, the attention has grown into something I can feel on my skin, like heat from an open oven. I'm used to being the center of a room. I have been trained for it. But I'm not used to being the center of a corridor with half a thousand people deciding at once to walk in the same direction.
I can see that Soren has noticed too. His shoulders have crept up towards his ears.
"Why are they following us?" he asks.
I look over my shoulder. "Maybe they're going the same way."
"All of them?"
"Perhaps they like the lake."
He gives me a flat, unconvinced look. I laugh. "What? It's a beautiful lake."
"You're enjoying this too much."
"I haven't done anything."
"You keep saying that."
"Because it's true."
He looks ahead and sighs. In two days he has learned that arguing with me gets him nowhere. I can be stubborn and energetic, and when I decide something is funny, I am nearly impossible to reason with. I also know he can't hide from everyone who recognizes him for the rest of his university life, and I intend to make that easier, not harder, however it looks.
The outdoor dining area sits beside the lake. It has rows of tables, shaded seating, and a view of the water, and most days it is quieter than the main hall. Today it fills as we arrive. I stop at a table and turn to him.
"Here."
He sets his bag beside the chair. "You could have told me where we were going."
"Would that have changed anything?"
"I might have picked somewhere less crowded."
I look at the students gathering along the path. "I don't think the crowd is here because of the food."
"That is precisely what I was afraid of."
I pull out a chair. "Relax, Ren."
He sits, still scanning the tables. Students are pretending to talk to each other while looking at us. A few are already holding their phones at an angle that is meant to look casual. He lowers his voice. "It's easy for you. They aren't all looking at you like you're a mystery."
"They were doing that yesterday."
"And the day before."
"Then you'll get used to it."
"I don't want to get used to it."
The answer doesn't surprise me. He has never wanted attention, and when we were younger, he preferred a few familiar people to a crowd of strangers. He used to sit under a tree for an entire afternoon and call it watching. I understand that. But I also know the attention won't disappear because he wishes it would.
"Then don't pay any attention to them," I say. "We're having lunch. That's all."
He looks at me, and then he nods. "Fine."
We order. For a while the conversation moves the way it did on the phone, easily, from his classes to his professors to something he wants to try with an old clock he found in the library. I tell him about a book I've been reading and a question it left unanswered. He listens with his chin on his hand, and I realize I've been talking for four minutes straight and he hasn't glanced at the crowd once.
At the next table, a boy leans towards his friend. "Look at them."
"I am looking."
"They're acting like nobody else exists."
"Maybe that's how they are when they're together."
A third student joins in. "How long do you think they've known each other?"
"Long enough for her to call him that."
"Ren?"
"Nobody else calls him that."
"Maybe it's a childhood nickname."
"Obviously. Then why is everyone surprised?"
"Because none of us knew."
I look over at them and smile politely, and all three stare at their trays. It isn't annoyance. I simply don't see why they should have to feel bad about being curious, and the trouble with that gesture is that it makes them more aware than ever that someone has noticed.
Halfway through the meal I put my chin on my hand and study him. Something has been waiting in my chest since the corridor.
"May I ask you something?"
"You just did."
"You know what I mean."
He smiles. "Go ahead."
I look at the lake first. "What does she actually like?"
He doesn't ask who. Two tables away, a spoon stops moving. Another student suddenly discovers something interesting on his phone. The whole dining area, I realise, has gone listening.
He takes a moment. Most people know Selen Astar as a legend, a force of nature, and a woman who can make a billionaire sweat through a three-thousand-dollar shirt. They know her from interviews, quarterly reports, and clips of her ending a negotiation with a sentence. Very few of them have seen what she's like when there is no one to perform for.
"She's caring," he says.
I blink. "Nobody on Earth would use that word."
"I know." He laughs quietly. "I'm serious."
"I've seen videos of her making executives look like they're facing final judgment."
"She does that too."
"That's more believable."
He shakes his head, helpless. "People only see what she shows them."
"And what do you see?"
He doesn't answer at once, and I watch him decide. He is not a person who describes someone in one word. She is strict, he says eventually, and demanding and frightening if you threaten something she cares about. She holds a sense of responsibility so heavy that the people around her can barely lift it. But there is another side, a quieter one. She checks whether he has eaten, though she never asks directly. She notices when his routine changes. She does not always wait for him to say he needs help. She simply makes sure it is there before he realizes he does.
"She worries more than people think," he says.
I watch the lake. Yesterday I stood in that courtyard while a woman in a charcoal coat stayed beside her car long after the boy had gone inside. I noticed it at the time, the way she stared at the doors as if they might open again, and I did not know what it meant. I'm beginning to.
"Does she always worry about you?"
"Probably."
"Even when you're doing something ordinary?"
"Especially then, sometimes."
I turn back to him. "You really care about her."
"Of course."
"She looks after you?"
"In a way."
I look at him for a long moment, and something in me eases. I had expected a polite answer, the kind people give about a sister who owns half the world. I had not expected a boy to describe her like someone he would carry across a river. It explains the way he said her name on the phone and the way her hand closed around mine at the handshake. She wasn't trying to win. She was trying to see whether I was safe.
"She must trust you," I say.
"Why?"
"Because she lets you be yourself."
He thinks about it. "I think she wants me to be myself."
I nod slowly. Most people I know with that much power surround themselves with people who agree with them. He talks about her as someone who would rather have him stand on his own, even if it keeps her awake. I grew up in a world that measures affection in influence and expectation, and I can recognize the real thing when I see it.
"I'm glad," I say.
He looks surprised. "That I trust her?"
"That someone takes care of you."
He smiles. For a moment the dining area seems far away, the lake moving quietly behind him, the voices thinned to a hum. It is the first time since I arrived that anything has felt ordinary.
Then I reach across the table and take a piece of food off his plate.
He looks down. Then at me. "Seriously?"
I eat it. "What?"
"You have your own food."
"Yours looked better."
"They're the same."
"Not anymore."
"You haven't changed at all."
"And you still complain about everything."
"I don't complain about everything."
"You just complained about me taking your food."
"Because you took my food."
I laugh, and he laughs despite himself, and for the next ten minutes we argue about nothing while a thousand people pretend not to watch. I know what the cameras will say. A close friendship. A girl who steals from his plate and a boy who lets her. A few of them will notice he is more at ease with me than with anyone else at Apex.
I don't mind. For once, I would like them to see it.
By the time lunch is over, the videos are everywhere.
Some show Hana pulling Soren towards the dining area. Others capture their conversation beside the lake, though the distance makes it impossible to hear a word. One clip, four seconds long, shows her laughing while he shakes his head. Another catches the moment she steals food from his plate. Within an hour, the comments have arrived, and they are not unkind. Many viewers are delighted to see Hana behaving naturally with an old friend. Others begin comparing the scene with the footage of Selen from the day before, and the two camps start building their cases again.
Hana Haze is not merely visiting Soren Su. She is comfortable around him.
That, more than the handshake, is what makes people curious.
The report arrives at 1:12 p.m.
I am reading a contract when Min-jun comes in, tablet in hand, and sets it in front of me without a word. A file has been highlighted. APEX UNIVERSITY. Attendance records, security observations, and media developments. Nothing significant involving my brother is supposed to reach me late.
I scroll past the attendance sheet to the activity summary. Lunch: outdoor dining area. Student crowd estimate: 1,200. Online engagement increase: 340%. New videos uploaded: 47,000.
I read the numbers twice. I do not change my expression. Then I open the photographs and look at the images instead, most of them showing the crowd, one of them not. In that one they are sitting at a table beside the lake. Hana is smiling. My brother is leaning on one hand, looking relaxed, but a little tired, the way he does when he has been laughing and has not yet stopped.
I look at it for a few seconds longer than I intended.
Min-jun waits. He has worked for me long enough to know that silence is not the end of my thinking. Eventually he asks, "Additional instructions?"
I give him the tablet. "Continue monitoring. Keep the existing security. I don't want any change around the university that would be noticed."
"Yes, ma'am."
"And make sure the team doesn't interfere with his day. Their job is to protect him, not make him feel followed."
"I'll remind them."
"If the media approaches him, coordinate with the administration. No one is to use his personal information for publicity."
"Understood." He turns towards the door, then hesitates. "Some commentators are comparing today with yesterday's meeting. Others are speculating about the relationship between the two families."
"Let them speculate."
"Should we issue a statement?"
"No."
He nods. He expected the answer, and he left. I look back at the contract, but the sentences slide off the page. I have no reason to interfere. He is entitled to his own friendships, his own memories, and his own choices. I never wanted a brother whose every acquaintance needed my approval, and I told myself that on the first day I let him walk through a university gate without me.
It is easier to believe when the photograph isn't open on the other screen.
I close it. I read the next clause. I read the one after that. At no point in the next six minutes do I turn the photograph over in my mind, and I would deny it if anyone asked.
Lunch ends. University staff move through the dining area, directing students towards their next classes, and the crowd thins reluctantly, some hoping for another photograph, others hurrying away to share what they've already taken. Soren finishes his meal, sets down his cutlery, and looks at the building where their next lecture will begin.
"Ready?" Hana asks.
He picks up his bag. "Do I have a choice?"
"Not really."
"At least you're honest."
They walk towards the main building. He sees a few phones lift and decides not to react. Hana matches his pace, saying nothing about the cameras or the whispers. Instead, she tells him about the book again, the question it never answers, and he listens, offering an idea of his own at the end of every sentence. For a while the world gets smaller. It is a boy, a girl, and a path along the lake.
At the entrance, Hana looks at him sideways. "Ren?"
"What?"
"Tomorrow, we should do something different."
His eyes narrow. "What do you mean?"
"Nothing."
"That never means nothing when you say it."
She laughs. "You'll find out."
He sighs, plainly regretting the question, and goes through the door ahead of her.
By the end of the afternoon, the rumors have multiplied.
Hana Haze has returned. She has found Soren Su. She calls him by a name nobody else uses, sits beside him in lectures, shares lunch with him, and behaves as though the years between them had never existed. The more people watch, the more they ask, and the less likely it seems that Apex will return to its routine anytime soon.
Far away, in an office above the city, Selen Astar keeps reading and keeps her attention where it belongs. She hasn't interfered with the friendship and has given no one reason to think she will. Yet a photograph of a lake sits somewhere in her mind that she can't quite dismiss.
The world has started watching Soren. Now it is beginning to watch the people around him too.
And the most dangerous seat in Apex is no longer simply a place in the third row. It is the seat beside him.