The carriage was well-maintained — cushioned seats, clean windows, the kind of quiet interior that suggested its owner had strong opinions about comfort. Steven settled into the seat across from the woman and tried to look like someone who knew what they were doing.
He did not, currently, know what he was doing.
"I should introduce myself," the woman said, as the driver — broad-shouldered, black-haired, carrying the comfortable solidity of someone who had been doing this job for a long time — guided the horses into the morning traffic. Her voice had the same measured quality as before, unhurried, each word placed with light precision. "My name is Sofia. I am a new instructor at your university."
Steven looked at her properly for the first time.
White hair — not aged, not faded, but genuinely, deliberately white, worn with the confidence of someone who had long since stopped explaining it. Dark skin. And her eyes, when they caught the light through the carriage window, had the unsettling quality of cut stone — not cold exactly, but precise, multifaceted, the kind of eyes that didn't miss much.
*Feysec Private University,* she had told the driver, in a tone that was not unkind but left no room for interpretation.
The moment Steven had heard the name, something had clicked open in the body's memory — Green's memory — supplied automatically, the way a well-read book falls open to a familiar page.
Feysec Private University. Enrollment exclusive to the children of noble families. Curriculum divided into two phases — the first year dedicated to education about the Beyonder world, its structure, its dangers, its pathways. The second year reserved for the actual transformation: the careful, supervised process of making students into something more than ordinary.
Four pathways available through the university's network. Four sanctioned routes upward.
Steven had been a student there. Was, apparently, still a student there.
He studied Sofia's face and found nothing in Green's memories that recognized it. No classroom, no corridor, no administrative meeting. She was new, as she'd said — and new meant unknown, which meant he had no baseline for her, no sense of what she noticed or how much she already knew.
"It's good to meet you," he said. Which was true in a general sense and told her nothing specific.
Sofia's expression shifted — just slightly, the corners of her mouth moving in what a more generous observer might call a smile. It had the quality of sunlight on marble: present, faint, and not especially warm.
"Mr. Green," she said, "your holiday period concluded yesterday. The fourteenth is the final day of break. You were expected at the university this morning."
Steven raised one eyebrow. "The holidays end on the fifteenth. I have today."
"The schedule was updated," she said, without apology. "Students are being asked to return early. There is a matter the faculty wishes to address before the new term begins formally."
She folded her hands in her lap and looked at him with those diamond eyes.
"Specifically — students in their second year are being asked to confirm their pathway selection. For those who have not yet been transformed, the university will be facilitating that process in the coming weeks. For those who have already undergone transformation privately—" a slight pause, almost imperceptible— "the university simply needs the relevant information on record."
Steven absorbed this.
He already knew the shape of it from Green's memory — the way wealthy families frequently got ahead of the university's timeline, transforming their children before the formal second-year process, sometimes before the end of first year entirely. It wasn't unusual. The university accommodated it. The records were updated, the pathway logged, and development continued under adjusted faculty supervision.
A simple, administrative process.
He looked out the carriage window at the passing city and thought, very carefully, about his problem.
The Unknown Pathway was not one of the twenty-two. It existed outside the established architecture of the Beyonder world entirely — not a variant, not an obscure branch, not something that had simply fallen out of common knowledge. It was genuinely, structurally *other*. A pathway with a name that was not a name. A sequence that led somewhere the existing maps didn't show.
If he told the university — if a name even existed beyond the symbol on the card — he would be handing them something they had no category for. Something that would, at minimum, generate significant questions. At worst, something that would generate significantly more than questions.
A girl transmigrated into a dead student's body, carrying an unknown pathway, walking into a noble's academy and announcing she was operating on a sequence that existed outside every known system —
*Yeah,* he thought. *No.*
But the alternative was lying to a faculty member on his first day back, with no preparation, no cover story, and approximately zero understanding of what the university already knew about Steven Green's situation.
He turned back from the window.
Sofia was still watching him — patient, precise, not pressing. Simply waiting, in the way of someone accustomed to waiting and long past broadcasting the effort.
*She's good,* the part of him that was still Shivani noted quietly. *Very good.*
"I've already been transformed," Steven said. Which was true.
"I see." She tilted her head, fractionally. "And your pathway?"
Steven held her gaze.
Several options arranged themselves like cards on a table. Tell her the truth — the X, the Unknown, the sequence pressed into dead hands by dying parents. Deflect. Lie outright and name one of the university's four pathways and hope the discrepancy didn't surface before he had time to think. Or —
Say he needed to confirm the details before sharing. Which was technically not untrue, since he wasn't entirely sure the pathway had a shareable name at all beyond a mathematical symbol on a handmade card.
Through the window, the university gates were already visible at the end of the road — iron, tall, set into a stone wall doing its quiet best to look like architecture rather than a perimeter.
*Information is currency and debt simultaneously,* he thought. *What you share becomes leverage. What you withhold becomes suspicion. What do you actually want this woman to know?*
He let a beat of silence pass — long enough to seem considered, not long enough to seem evasive — and then said, with the carefully measured ease of someone not particularly concerned:
"I'd prefer to discuss the specifics with the full faculty rather than piecemeal. Is that something that can be arranged?"
Sofia looked at him for a moment.
Then the marble-sunlight expression returned.
"Of course," she said smoothly. "That can be arranged."
She looked away, back toward the approaching gates, and Steven exhaled very slowly through his nose.
*Round one,* he thought. *Inconclusive.*
The carriage passed through the gates.
---
*End of Chapter Four*