For advance chapters /patreon.com/HandsomeDuckGod
The conversation between Ethan and Yvette did not get to begin properly.
The head waiter, who had been dispatched downstairs to oversee the eviction of Garrison Pike, returned at a half-jog. The careful institutional calm he had displayed earlier had developed a small, visible crack.
"Ms. Caldwell. You should come down."
Yvette's hand, which had been reaching for a teapot, paused.
"What is he doing?"
"He didn't make it into the cab. He came back inside, shoved past the doorman, and is currently in the front lobby. He's, ah, addressing the dining room."
"Volume?"
"Considerable."
Yvette closed her eyes briefly.
She rose from her chair, adjusted the collar of her qipao, walked out of her office, and headed for the stairs. Ethan followed two paces behind.
The two of them reached the second-floor landing, and they could hear it before they could see it.
Garrison Pike's voice, amplified by alcohol and three flights of architectural acoustics, rolled up the central staircase in waves of slurred profanity.
"YVETTE CALDWELL, YOU WHORE."
A pause for breath.
"I LIKED YOU. I LIKED YOU AS A KINDNESS. I LIKED YOU OUT OF PITY."
Another breath.
"AND YOU TURN AROUND AND OPEN YOUR LEGS FOR A TEENAGER. YOU HAVE NO SHAME. NO SHAME AT ALL."
Yvette stopped on the landing.
Her face stayed composed, but Ethan, watching her closely, saw the small involuntary tremor in the hand that had reached for the banister. The slurs were rolling off the walls of her own restaurant, in front of her own customers, on her own watch. Whatever protections her business standing afforded her, Garrison Pike had just punctured several of them.
She turned to a junior waitress who had followed them up.
"Phone the police."
The waitress nodded and pulled out her phone.
"Wait."
Ethan's hand caught the waitress's wrist gently before she could dial.
He turned to Yvette.
"Senior Sister. The police will take twenty minutes to get here. By then, every customer in the dining room has heard everything he has to say. And by tomorrow morning, every word he's said will be on social media. The damage is to your reputation. The police will not undo it."
He paused.
"Let me handle it."
Yvette studied him.
In her experience, when men volunteered to "handle" situations like this, the resolution involved violence. The violence usually made everything worse. She had spent fifteen years carefully constructing a public reputation, and the prospect of a teenage boy fistfighting her drunk senior pupil in front of her dining room was not, on the face of it, a reputation-saving outcome.
But Hargrove had vouched for this kid with a level of urgency she had not heard from the old man in years. And she could not, in fairness, do worse than the police call.
"No violence," she said quietly. "If you put a single bruise on him in public, it reflects on Teacher. He's still our senior pupil."
"No violence. I promise."
She nodded once. He started for the stairs.
"Junior Brother."
He stopped.
"If you actually solve this," she said, with the composed dryness she'd recovered upstairs, "I'll consider the CEO position at your company."
Ethan grinned at her over his shoulder and went down the stairs.
The first-floor lobby of the restaurant was, by the time Ethan reached it, the unwilling host to one of the more memorable scenes the establishment had ever produced.
Garrison Pike was at the center, swaying, red-faced, slurring through accusations. Around him, in a loose ring, were the seven other senior pupils who had been at the dinner upstairs. They had come down to try to manage him.
Their attempts were not going well.
"Brother Garrison, please. Stop. This isn't going to help anyone."
"Garrison, this reflects on Teacher. Whatever you think happened upstairs, this isn't the way."
"Come back to the room. Sit down. Have water. We'll talk."
Garrison was not listening. He was, in his own internal narrative, the wronged party in a dramatic public confrontation, and the dramatic public confrontation was the entire point.
"GET OUT OF MY WAY. I AM NOT THE ONE WHO IS EMBARRASSING TEACHER. THEY ARE."
He flung an arm vaguely toward the upper floors.
"THE PROPRIETRESS AND HER LITTLE TEENAGE LOVER. THAT IS WHAT IS EMBARRASSING TEACHER. NOT ME."
The dining-room patrons were watching with various combinations of horror and entertainment.
"This is unbelievable," one diner said quietly to his companion. "I never imagined the cold proprietress had this side to her."
"Hah. A strapping young man. Who wouldn't be tempted? If I'd known the position was open, I'd have made my own offer."
"Yeah, I can teach all the same tricks as that little brat."
Several patrons laughed.
The laughter was the kind of casual, unconsidered cruelty that crowds produce when they think they're spectators rather than participants. The men making the jokes were not, in their own minds, attacking Yvette. They were merely making the kind of crude small talk that men make when a woman's name comes up.
But the talk was being made in Yvette's lobby, in front of Yvette's staff, about Yvette herself, and the cumulative effect was the kind of damage to her reputation that took years to recover from.
Ethan reached the foot of the stairs.
The diner who had made the loudest joke was three steps to his left, wiping a small spill of laughter-sloshed wine off his sleeve.
Ethan turned to him and spoke without raising his voice.
"If I were you, I would not say one more word. Not about her. Not in this room. Not in this restaurant."
The diner, who had been having a fine time, turned around to deliver a sharp comeback.
The sharp comeback died in his throat.
The young man in front of him was not a college kid. The young man in front of him was, on closer inspection, calm in a way that calm men are not usually calm. The eyes were perfectly still. The voice was perfectly level. The face was relaxed.
But there was, underneath the relaxation, something that the diner's animal brain registered before his social brain could override it.
Ethan Mercer, in addition to being a teenage scientist with a custom haircut, was also a person who had personally walked through a burning intelligence headquarters in the Aurelian Republic and walked back out. He had been in two confrontations with armed assassins. He had killed people. He had absorbed the moral weight of having killed people, and absorbing that weight had changed his presence in a way that polite society did not have a vocabulary for.
The diner, looking into Ethan's face, found himself unable to remember what his comeback had been.
He nodded, very slowly. He took a small step backward. He turned and walked back to his table without saying anything else.
Several of the other diners, who had been about to chime in with their own witticisms, suddenly became very interested in their food.
A small bubble of silence opened in the lobby around Ethan.
He walked through it.
The crowd, without anyone consciously deciding to, parted in front of him.
He walked directly to Garrison Pike, in the center of the cleared circle, and placed his right hand on Garrison's shoulder.
"Senior Brother. You're drunk. Let's take this conversation back to the private room."
The grip was light. To any observer, it looked like the polite, brotherly gesture of a junior pupil escorting an inebriated senior back to private quarters.
Garrison, still mid-rant, started to swat the hand away.
"Get OFF me, you piece of..."
The pressure on his shoulder shifted.
Not visibly. Ethan's expression did not change. His posture did not change. The hand on Garrison's shoulder did not move.
But something happened underneath it.
Garrison made a small, choked sound. The threat he had been about to deliver dissolved into a sharp, gasping wheeze. His knees, briefly, almost gave out.
The pain was immediate. Compressive. As if the entire weight of a small building had localized itself onto a single nerve cluster between his shoulder and his collarbone. Garrison's body tried to twist away, and discovered that the hand on his shoulder was not negotiable.
Garrison's head jerked up. His eyes locked, instinctively, on Ethan's.
What he saw in the new junior pupil's face was not the polite teenager who had been playing along with the dinner all evening.
It was something else.
Something quiet, and old, and patient.
The pupils of Ethan's eyes were the pupils of a person who had killed, and who was, in this specific moment, choosing not to kill.
Garrison Pike, drunk as he was, understood the choice.
His mouth closed.
His muscles, which had been straining to break free, went still.
Ethan, sensing the surrender, eased the pressure on Garrison's shoulder back to a polite, brotherly grip.
"Let's go upstairs, Senior Brother."
He guided Garrison toward the stairs. Garrison, walking on legs that had abruptly remembered how to cooperate, went with him.
The other senior pupils watched the exchange with open astonishment.
They had been arguing with Garrison for ten minutes. They had been getting nowhere. The new junior pupil had walked over, said one sentence, touched his shoulder, and the violent drunk in the center of their dining room had quietly and obediently turned around to go upstairs.
What kind of grip was that?
What had he said?
Lily, watching from the periphery, glanced at Ethan and then quickly looked away. She had felt, briefly, something cold in her own chest when Ethan had crossed the room. The kid she'd been chatting with for the last hour and a half was, evidently, not entirely the kid she'd been chatting with.
She filed the observation away, deeply and carefully, for later.
Back in the private room, Yvette was already seated at the round table, calm and composed, a fresh cup of tea in front of her.
When Ethan entered with Garrison in tow, she did not look up.
The other senior pupils filed in behind them. The atmosphere in the room had shifted considerably from the convivial dinner of an hour earlier. Nobody was eating. Nobody was drinking. Everybody was watching.
Garrison, whose forced sobriety had been only partial, locked eyes with Yvette and immediately staggered forward.
"Yvette. Yueyao. Please. I'm sorry. I lost my temper. I lost my composure. But you have to understand. I genuinely care about you. I always have. I just want you to give me a real chance."
Yvette did not respond.
She did not even shift her gaze.
The cold, comprehensive silence she returned was the same silence she had directed at him fifteen years earlier, when she had first turned him down. It was the silence of a woman who had made her decision a long time ago and was not going to revisit it.
Garrison's plea curdled, in the space of about three seconds, into something else.
The fear that had quieted him in the lobby was, now, leaving him. The wine was still in his bloodstream. The humiliation of the public scene was still fresh. And looking at Yvette, looking at her composure, looking at the obvious ease she had with the new junior pupil who had managed to walk her down the stairs without incident, Garrison's wounded pride flared back up.
He turned on Ethan with new heat.
"What's so impressive about this kid?"
He pointed at Ethan, his voice loud again.
"Look at him! What's he ever done? Who is he? He's eighteen. He has no money. He has no career. He has nothing!"
Garrison straightened to his full height. His face flushed with the indignity of having to point this out.
"I am the CEO of Maha Energy. I run the largest private-sector energy firm in the global Fortune 500. My personal compensation last year was higher than the lifetime earnings of every other man in this room combined. I can give you anything. Property anywhere in the world. Influence at the cabinet level in three governments. Anything. You've turned that down for fifteen years in favor of, what, this? This kid? What can this nobody possibly offer you?"
Around the table, the other senior pupils had gone visibly still.
The mention of Maha Energy had introduced a new variable to the room.
Maha was not a name to be invoked casually. It was the largest privately-held energy conglomerate in the world. Its operations spanned six continents. Its political influence in the Aurelian Republic, the Meridian Commonwealth, and several smaller petro-states was such that geopolitical analysts routinely listed it as a non-state actor in their diplomatic frameworks. The firm had been known, on occasion, to put pressure on national energy markets sufficient to trigger fuel shortages in entire countries.
And the CEO of that firm, who could allegedly pick up the phone and call an Aurelian senator or two on a casual Saturday, was currently shouting at a teenager in a Valorian restaurant.
If Garrison Pike decided to hold a grudge, a teenager, even a famous one, would not survive the resulting commercial pressure.
Several of the senior pupils began, very subtly, to put physical distance between themselves and Ethan. Whatever loyalty they had been forming during the dinner was, when weighed against Garrison's professional standing, not loyalty enough to position themselves on the wrong side of a Maha quarrel.
Yvette, too, was watching Ethan with a new kind of attention. Not concern, exactly. Curiosity, more accurately. She wanted to see how he would handle it.
Ethan, for his part, was at the limit of his patience.
He had spent the dinner being insulted, dismissed, and eventually publicly slandered. He had handled it all with restraint because Hargrove was at the table and because he had been gathering character information.
Hargrove was no longer at the table.
The character information had been gathered.
And his patience, never a deep reservoir, had been exhausted.
He scratched his ear lightly with one finger and addressed Garrison Pike in the specific casual tone of a teenager dismissing a teacher he had decided he no longer respected.
"Maha Energy is impressive."
He let the word hang for a half-beat.
"As it happens, I am also founding an energy company. If CEO Pike has any spare time, he's welcome to come by for advice. We're hiring."
The casual condescension landed.
Garrison stared at him for a long moment.
Then, to the astonishment of every senior pupil in the room, Garrison turned to Yvette and laughed.
"Yueyao. Look at this. This is what you chose. This is the boy you chose. He thinks his little startup is in the same conversation as Maha Energy. He thinks I'd advise him. This is a child playing at being an adult."
He turned back to Ethan.
"Boy. Listen to me. Maha will buy your entire industry before you finish your incorporation paperwork. Your company is a joke. Your career is a joke. The only reason I'm being civil right now is out of respect for Teacher's pupil-line and Yueyao's establishment. Do not push your luck."
Ethan, who had at this point made his decision about how the rest of the evening was going to go, did not push his luck.
He did something different.
"Sir. I think you misunderstood me."
His voice was perfectly mild.
"I wasn't asking for advice. I was telling you that my company is going to take you down. The next several years of Maha Energy's market position, the equipment manufacturing partnerships, the supply contracts in the Eastern Sea region, and the political relationships that have been keeping your firm afloat: all of it ends with my firm. You're going to spend the rest of your career watching New Future Technology Energy systematically dismantle the empire you've built."
He smiled politely.
"That was a declaration. Not an invitation."
The room went absolutely silent.
The seven senior pupils stared at Ethan with expressions that ranged from disbelief to genuine alarm.
A newly-incorporated startup. Run by a teenager. Declaring corporate war on Maha Energy.
It was not, even slightly, an ant trying to topple a chariot. It was an ant trying to topple a continental tectonic plate.
The plate would not even notice the ant. The ant would simply be flattened in the routine movements of the plate's daily operations.
Garrison Pike, after a moment of stunned silence, threw his head back and laughed loudly.
The laughter was the laughter of a man who had been handed an unexpectedly generous gift. He had come to this dinner expecting to deal with personal grievances, and instead had been handed a teenager who had publicly committed business suicide in front of seven witnesses.
The kid had just declared war on Maha.
By the end of the year, the kid would not have a company.
By the end of two years, the kid would not have a career.
Garrison's evening, which had been progressively deteriorating since the moment Hargrove gave away his seat, had just righted itself.
Across the room, Yvette Caldwell looked at Ethan with a genuinely curious expression.
She did not know, yet, what kind of card her new junior pupil was holding. But she had spent enough time at the highest levels of her industry to recognize that the kid had not, in fact, just committed business suicide.
The kid had a play.
She did not know what it was.
But Hargrove had vouched for this boy, and Hargrove did not vouch for fools, and the way the boy had walked Garrison up the stairs without effort had told her things about him that she had not yet processed.
She picked up her teacup, took a slow, deliberate sip, and decided to wait and see.