We left the coffee shop at four-twelve, which meant we were already late for the equipment check I’d lied about and dangerously close to missing Misato’s training window.

Naomi walked beside me with her fingers laced through mine, her complicated vanilla drink half-finished and balanced in her free hand, and the California afternoon painted everything in that stupid golden light that made her brown skin look like it belonged in a Renaissance painting.

Her pink and black striped hair caught the breeze coming off the ocean, and I had the completely inappropriate thought that I could get used to this. Afternoons that didn’t involve federal crimes or monster teeth or the constant background hum of my death timer counting down like a bomb nobody else could hear.

The shuttle back to campus took twelve minutes. Naomi rested her head against my shoulder during the ride, and I let her, because Friday we were walking into a C-rank gate with creatures that wanted to eat us and teammates who wanted to watch, and right now the weight of her skull against my collarbone felt like the most valuable thing I owned.

We hit Building C at four twenty-eight and took the elevator to the fifth floor, Naomi still holding her drink and me checking the group chat to see if Belle had figured out our administrative detour was complete horseshit. She had. Three messages from Belle, escalating from suspicious to accusatory to a single emoji of a knife. Jordan had contributed a sleeping face. Aurora sent a photo of herself doing a peace sign with the caption "while you two lovebirds are out playing hooky I secured us priority simulation slots for tomorrow morning you’re welcome."

The hallway on five smelled wrong.

I stopped walking two steps out of the elevator, and Naomi bumped into my back, her drink sloshing against the lid. She started to say something about watching where I was going, but the words died when she saw my face.

Copper. The hallway smelled like copper and something chemical underneath, the antiseptic tang of wound sealant that hadn’t been applied properly. My C-rank senses, sharpened by weeks of Silver essence and Vale’s training that bordered on torture, picked up what a normal student would have missed entirely

. A smear on the carpet near 5E. Not large. Not dramatic. Just a thin line of brownish red that someone had tried to wipe away and failed, because cleaning blood out of institutional carpet requires club soda and time, and whoever made this mess had neither.

The trail led from the hallway to my apartment door.

"Jace, is that..."

"Stay behind me."

I keyed the door and pushed it open. The living room looked normal. Hikaru’s shoes sat in their usual formation by the entrance, aligned with the kind of compulsive neatness that spoke to years of discipline beaten into muscle memory. The kitchen counter held a single washed mug and a folded dish towel, because Hikaru treated every surface like it might be inspected by a superior officer at any moment.

But the blood trail continued across the tile floor, faint drops that someone had tried to walk through without leaving prints and failed, leading past the kitchen and into the hallway toward Hikaru’s room. The door stood open about four inches. Not enough to see inside, but enough to confirm that whoever went in there hadn’t bothered closing it behind them, which meant they’d been in too much of a hurry or too much pain to care about operational security.

And Hikaru always cared about operational security.

My brain did something awful then. It cross-referenced what I was seeing against a scene from the novel I’d read in my previous life, a scene that happened in Chapter forty-seven of "Hunter Academy: America’s Elite," where the original protagonist Javier Mendoza came home to find his roommate Hikaru Tanaka unconscious on the bathroom floor with cracked ribs and a dislocated shoulder from a training accident that went wrong.

That scene was supposed to be the catalyst for everything. Javier discovering Hikaru’s secret. Javier earning Hikaru’s trust. Javier and Misato developing genuine respect for each other because Javier handled the situation with the kind of earnest, bumbling heroism that made readers want to root for him.

That scene was supposed to happen after winter evaluations. Months from now.

Not today.

Not on my watch.

The timeline was wrong. The events were compressing, accelerating, folding in on themselves like a gate about to destabilize.

Was this because of me? Had my interference with the story’s natural progression pushed events forward, creating pressure points that forced the narrative to find new paths to the same destinations?

Or was the old man from my dream library pulling strings from whatever cosmic perch he occupied, rearranging the chess pieces because the game was more entertaining this way?

I didn’t have time to figure it out.

"Hikaru," I called, pushing the door open all the way. No response. The room looked the same as always, military neat with a perfectly made bed and nothing personal on any surface, but the bathroom door at the far end stood wide open and the light was on and the copper smell was stronger here, much stronger, thick enough that even Naomi covered her nose behind me.

I crossed the room in four steps and looked into the bathroom.

Hikaru was on the floor.

Not sitting. Not leaning. Crumpled against the base of the shower stall with one leg bent at an angle that suggested either extreme flexibility or a joint that had given up cooperating, the other leg extended straight out across the white tile.

Black hair hung loose around a face the color of old paper, plastered to skin by a mixture of sweat and shower water that had apparently been running at some point before being shut off or shutting off on its own.

The tactical training suit, the standard black composite every student wore for combat sessions, had been partially removed. The top half hung around Hikaru’s waist, and beneath it the compression bandages that Hikaru wore every single day to maintain the illusion of a flat male chest were soaked through with something that was absolutely not water.

"Oh shit..."