The basement level of the eastern building had a different atmosphere than the rest of the academy.
Upstairs everything was stone and iron and Victorian permanence, architecture that had decided it would outlast whatever happened above it. Down here the ceiling was lower, the walls closer, the lighting functional rather than aesthetic. It smelled of metal and exertion and the cold of underground spaces that never fully warmed regardless of the season. The corridor leading to the training rooms ran straight and without decoration, doors on either side marked with numbers and nothing else. No names. No colors. Nothing that would suggest the people who used these rooms were anything other than interchangeable.
Solandre checked his schedule and found the right door.
Someone was already standing in front of it.
He recognized her before she turned around. One hand on her hip, the other holding a folder with the casual authority of someone who had never once doubted that whatever she was holding belonged in her hands. Lyza Zelleni. Eighteen years old. Blonde hair that fell past her shoulders with the kind of effortless precision that suggested it had simply decided to behave and had not been consulted on the matter. Pale blue eyes that caught the corridor lighting and held it without effort. She was, by any objective measure, extraordinarily beautiful, the kind of elegant that old money produced when it had enough generations to refine itself into something that looked natural, straight posture and clean features and the composure of someone who had been taught since birth that composure was non-negotiable.
Solandre saw a large brute in an expensive uniform.
She turned.
Her expression lasted approximately one second before it changed entirely.
Lyza : "You absolute—"
She crossed the distance between them in three steps and hit him on the top of the head with the folder, hard enough to be entirely unambiguous about her feelings on the matter.
Lyza : "Do you have any idea how long it has been? Not a single message. Not one. I had to find out you were even alive through a third party like some kind of—"
She hit him again.
Solandre : "I'm going to need you to stop doing that."
Lyza : "I will stop when I decide to stop."
She grabbed him by the collar of his uniform and pulled, which accomplished nothing given the difference in their heights but communicated intent clearly enough. He reached up and attempted to detach her hand from his collar. She tightened her grip. He abandoned the attempt.
There has never been a productive strategy for this. I have tried every available option. The only solution is to wait.
He waited.
She released him after a moment, smoothed the front of his collar with the brisk efficiency of someone who had just wrinkled it themselves and was correcting their own work, and stepped back. With anyone else she would have been calm and composed through the entire exchange, her voice even, her expression controlled, her posture exactly what it always was in public. With him she had never bothered. He had always found this mildly exhausting and, though he would not have said so aloud, the closest thing to honest that most people ever managed.
Lyza : "You look terrible."
Solandre : "You look exactly the same."
Lyza : "That's a compliment whether you meant it as one or not."
He looked at the door behind her.
Solandre : "I have a course in this room."
Lyza : "Cancelled."
Solandre : "How do you know?"
She straightened slightly and held up the folder with the expression of someone delivering information they had been waiting to deliver for longer than was strictly comfortable.
Lyza : "Because I'm the instructor."
He looked at her. Then at the folder. Then at her again.
Of course she is.
He was not shocked. Shocked would have required the situation to be unreasonable, and in a world where sixty three percent of humanity no longer existed and sixteen year olds were being trained for front line combat, appointing an eighteen year old genius as an instructor was not unreasonable. It was arithmetic. Lyza Zelleni had been doing things no one her age should have been capable of since she was twelve. Near perfect command of close combat, firearms, blade work, anything that could be held in a hand and used to end something. He had seen it himself, years ago, in the period before everything that came after years ago. The manpower shortage was real. You used what you had. The fact that what you had happened to be an eighteen year old from a prominent Italian family who moved through a training room like she had been born inside one was beside the point.
Solandre : "Makes sense."
Lyza : "That's all you have to say?"
Solandre : "What else would you like?"
She opened her mouth, closed it, and made the particular expression she made when she had decided that pursuing a point was beneath her dignity but wanted him to know she had not abandoned it. He had seen that expression more times than he could count. It had not changed.
He picked up his bag and adjusted the strap.
Solandre : "If the course is cancelled I'll—"
Lyza : "Wait."
He stopped.
She was looking at him with an expression he recognized less easily than the others. Not the performative irritation that she deployed the way other people deployed greetings. Not the comfortable aggression of someone who had known him long enough to dispense with pretense entirely. Something underneath that, quieter and less rehearsed, the kind of expression that arrived when the performance had run out of material and what was left was simply what was there.
Lyza : "Can we talk?"
The corridor was empty around them, lit and silent. The low ceiling pressed the space into something more intimate than either of them had arranged for, the kind of accidental proximity that came from two people standing in a corridor that had not been designed with conversations like this one in mind.
He looked at her for a moment.
He thought about the schedule in his bag. About the cafeteria and the book he had not finished and the particular quality of early afternoon silence in the dormitory building when most students were still in class. About the fact that Lyza Zelleni did not ask for things. She stated them, she took them, she arranged for them to happen through a combination of competence and the particular force of will that had apparently been issued to her at birth along with the blonde hair and the composure. The word wait from her mouth was not a request. It was a declaration that the conversation was continuing regardless of his participation.
He did not answer immediately.
But he did not walk away either.