The ritual took less than three minutes.
Steven followed the instructions that had arrived through the channel with the careful attention of someone who understood that precision in these matters was not optional, and when it was done, the blast flamy card was simply gone — transferred through whatever mechanism the Fool had established, clean and complete, leaving no residue in the room except the faint awareness of its absence.
He sat with that absence for a moment.
Then he stood up, straightened his jacket, and went to find the principal.
---
Johan's office was on the ground floor of the main administrative building — a location that Steven interpreted, correctly he suspected, as a deliberate choice. Not tucked away in an upper floor where visitors had to seek it out. Right at the entrance level, visible, accessible, the office of a man who wanted to be found.
The door was open.
Steven knocked on the frame anyway, because walking into an open door unannounced was a different kind of statement than knocking, and he had not yet decided what kind of statement he wanted to make.
Johan looked up from his desk.
Something moved through his expression — quick, almost imperceptible, the reaction of a man who had been expecting a thing and was now calibrating the difference between what he'd expected and what had arrived. His eyes moved over Steven with the brief, practiced sweep of someone accustomed to reading people, and Steven watched him do it without expression.
"Steven," he said, warmly. "Come in."
Steven came in.
He looked at the room — bookshelves, a large desk, two chairs arranged across from it with the particular symmetry of furniture that had been positioned with intention. A window behind Johan that put the principal in silhouette and the visitor in light. An old choice, that. An instructive one.
He chose the sofa against the side wall instead of the chairs.
He sat — one leg crossed over the other, one arm resting along the sofa's back, open and entirely relaxed — and looked at Johan with the patient attention of someone who was prepared to wait as long as necessary.
Johan looked at him.
The silence stretched. Ten seconds. Twenty. Thirty.
Steven counted them and said nothing, because the person who spoke first in a silence like this one was the person who found the silence uncomfortable, and he was, in fact, quite comfortable.
Forty seconds.
"Well," Steven said pleasantly, "if there's nothing specific, I should probably get back. Long day."
"Wait," Johan said. The warmth in his voice had taken on a slightly different quality — still present, but with something underneath it now, like a floor that had developed a subtle give. "Please."
Steven waited.
Johan folded his hands on his desk. "I'll be direct," he said.
"I appreciate that," Steven said.
"I sensed something on you," Johan said. "When you arrived. A particular — resonance. Something significant." He paused. "It seems to be gone now."
"Does it," Steven said.
"I'd like to know what it was. And where it's gone."
Steven looked at him. At the round, guileless face and the eyes that were not guileless at all. At the warmth that was a layer over something else, something that had its own agenda and its own patience.
"That sounds like it might be valuable information," Steven said.
Johan's mouth curved. "It might. Which is why I'd like to propose an exchange. You tell me about this object — what it was, where it is now — and in return, I can offer you something. Protection, perhaps. Resources. There are things a student in your position might find useful."
*In your position.* Steven noted the phrase. The deliberate vagueness of it. The implication that Johan knew something about his position that Steven might want addressed.
He let a moment pass.
Then he put his feet up on the low table in front of the sofa, crossed them at the ankle, and said:
"The item you sensed is no longer in my possession. I transferred it to someone else."
"To whom?"
"That," Steven said, "is also information. And information like that doesn't come free."
Johan studied him. "What would you want?"
Steven considered the question with the appearance of genuine thought, and then said, with the perfectly calibrated delivery of someone who wanted to end a conversation without appearing to end it:
"Your cooperation. Your honesty. And, while we're listing things — an end to whatever has been circulating about me in this university since before I walked through the gate."
Johan blinked.
"The rumors," Steven said, pleasantly. "The ones that were on my door when I arrived. Those."
A pause.
"I'm not certain I have influence over—"
"You're the principal of this institution," Steven said. "You have influence over everything that happens within it. That's what principal means."
The silence this time had a different texture. Johan looked at him with the expression of a man recalculating something he had expected to be simple.
"We can discuss the rumors," he said, carefully.
"We can discuss everything," Steven agreed. "Later. When we both have more time and I've had some sleep." He unfolded himself from the sofa in one motion and stood. "Thank you for seeing me, sir."
He was at the door when Johan spoke again.
"Steven." The warmth was entirely gone now. What remained was quieter, and more honest. "Be careful. An object like the one you were carrying attracts attention from directions you may not be prepared for."
Steven paused in the doorway.
"I know," he said, without turning around. "That's why I got rid of it."
He left.
---
He heard the principal's voice before he reached the end of the corridor.
Not words — just volume, the specific register of a man who had not raised his voice in some time suddenly raising it, carrying through stone walls and closed doors with the ease of something that had built up pressure over the course of a conversation and found its release approximately thirty seconds after Steven had walked out.
Steven did not look back.
He walked out into the courtyard and felt, in the cool evening air, the specific lightness of someone who has exited a situation intact and is now adding up what they learned from it.
*He knew about the card. He doesn't know where it went. He has an interest in it that goes beyond administrative concern — that's personal, or factional, or both. He knows something about my reputation that he was prepared to use as leverage, which means he either created it or allowed it, which means it serves him somehow.*
*And he's high sequence. High enough to sense the card from across a university.*
*Which means I am dealing with someone considerably more dangerous than a school administrator.*
He crossed the courtyard.
Above him, a window on the second floor of the dormitory building caught his attention — not because of anything dramatic, but because of the figure standing at it. A student, watching him cross the courtyard below. He couldn't make out the face clearly in the lamplight, but he registered the stillness of the observation. The deliberateness of it.
He filed it.
Then he went back to his room, closed the door on the words written across it, lay down on his dusty sheets, and stared at the ceiling in the dark.
*Monday,* he thought. *Three o'clock.*
*Between now and then — figure out what Johan wants. Figure out what he knows. Figure out who wrote on this door and why, and whether it connects to anything larger.*
*And do not, under any circumstances, reveal that you are not Steven Green.*
He closed his eyes.
Outside, the university settled into its nighttime quiet — gas lamps burning low, corridors emptying, the accumulated noise of a hundred students gradually tapering into the particular silence of a place that would begin again in the morning.
Shivani lay in the dark inside a dead boy's life and thought about all the things she still didn't know.
There were quite a lot of them.
She found, despite herself, that she didn't entirely mind.
---
*End of Chapter Eight*