The word had come out of Maya's mouth the night before, and it had been sitting in the back of my skull since.
Permanent.
I'd looked it up anyway. Not the dictionary definition. The system's.
The system didn't answer.
That was new. Usually it at least gave me a status log. An "inquiry noted." Something transactional to chew on. This time: nothing. Which meant either the permanent state was self-explanatory, or the system didn't feel like elaborating.
I was starting to understand the difference between those two possibilities. I didn't like either.
Claire was waiting for me outside the campus health center.
Not because I'd asked her to. She just had a habit of appearing in places where things were going wrong, like she operated on some kind of moral proximity sensor.
"I heard about last night," she said.
"From who?"
"Does it matter?"
It didn't. The people who'd been in that room were not known for keeping things to themselves. Not maliciously. Events like that had weight, and weight needed somewhere to go.
"Maya's okay," I said.
"I know. I talked to her." Claire looked at me. "She said you crouched down to be at her level."
"That's a weird detail to pass on."
"She thought it was worth mentioning."
I didn't know what to do with that. I filed it.
The health center doors slid open and a third-year I vaguely recognized walked out, saw me, and immediately looked somewhere else. That had been happening more. The lateral glances. The deliberate not-seeing. I was becoming a thing that people noticed and then decided not to acknowledge, which was its own kind of strange.
SYSTEM NOTICE
MYTHIC TRAIT: BLEED RADIUS
Passive acknowledgment: detected in 3 bystanders.
Status: ambient.
No action required.
The system was telling me people were noticing, without telling me what to do about it.
Thanks.
I looked back at Claire. "I need to tell her it's not reversible."
"She already knows."
"She knows the theory. I need to say it out loud. Like — officially." I paused. "I don't know why it matters but it does."
Claire was quiet for a moment. "It matters because she deserves to hear you say it instead of having to assume it."
That was the most Claire sentence possible.
We walked to the courtyard where Maya had said she'd be. She was sitting on a bench with a coffee that had probably gone cold. She looked up when she heard us.
I sat across from her. Claire stood slightly to the side — there, but not inserting herself into the part that was mine to do.
"I talked to the system this morning," I said.
Maya nodded.
"It didn't give me a reversal path. It didn't give me a mitigation window. It didn't give me anything." I held her gaze. "What happened last night — the thing you understood, the shift — that's permanent. I can't undo it. I didn't know the radius was that wide, but that's not the same as it not being my fault."
She was quiet for a long time.
Long enough that I noticed the wind picking up across the courtyard. Long enough to wonder if I'd said it wrong. Long enough to resist the urge to fill the silence.
"I know," she said finally. "I knew before you said it."
"I know you knew. I needed to say it anyway."
"Yeah." She looked down at her cold coffee. "Thank you."
That was all.
No anger. No forgiveness-granting speech. No dramatic moment. Just — thank you, and the courtyard being cold, and Claire somewhere to my left not saying a word.
Something shifted in my chest. Not relief. Closer to settling. Like a chair that had been slightly off-balance and had finally found its four feet.
The system was quiet.
That bothered me on a delay.
Later, walking back, I realized the system had been entirely absent during that conversation. No log. No notation. No condition assessment. It had watched me do something genuinely reparative and offered zero response, which meant one of two things: reparative action was beneath its notice, or it was waiting for something.
I stopped trying to figure out which.
What I did instead: I started thinking about what permanent meant for the path forward.
Because the other word I'd been avoiding since last night was Lucian. And what he'd looked like in that chair — not grieving, very deliberately not grieving, filing the collateral damage away like it was equipment inventory.
He had the same system I did, more or less. He was at a later stage. And he didn't treat what happened to Maya as something that required an apology.
That wasn't sustainable. Not for anyone in his orbit. Not for the people who didn't choose to be near him.
The question was no longer how to reverse the Mythic effect.
The question was what to do with a system that had decided permanent was a feature.
I had accepted responsibility. That part was done.
Now I needed to figure out what responsibility actually required me to do next.