Vivian stepped out from behind the reference shelves.

"Oh." Phoebe looked at her, then at Ash. "It was you."

"Were you expecting someone else?" Vivian asked. She had a jacket held with her elbow on one arm. Her hair was tied in a low ponytail. Unlike Phoebe, who at least conformed to the academy’s dress code, Vivian’s outfit looked like she decided which parts were optional. A sleeveless high collared black shirt, a skirt that sat well below academy regulation, with thigh highs and heels to complete the look. "You look better than the last time I saw you horizontal."

"I wasn’t horizontal."

"You were at a forty-five degree angle against a storage wall. Close enough." She turned back to him. "Are you busy tonight?"

"Depends."

"On?"

"On what tonight is."

Vivian smiled. "I want to show you something. Come with me after dinner."

Phoebe put her coffee down on Willis’s vacated table. "What’s the something?"

"A Vein," Vivian said.

Phoebe stared at her. "A Vein? You cannot be serious."

"It’s just the Seventh."

"It’s just the—" Phoebe stopped and looked at Ash. "You’re not going."

"I haven’t said anything."

"You’re thinking about it. I can tell." She turned back to Vivian. "He just finished a Gate fight and spent the past two weeks in the medical ward. And you want to take him to fight a Vein."

"I want to take him to look at a Vein," Vivian said. "The fighting is secondary."

"That’s a very fine distinction."

"Most important distinctions are fine." Vivian sat on the edge of Willis’s vacated table with the ease of someone settling into furniture she’d been invited to sit on. "Sit down. I’ll explain it."

Phoebe remained standing. Vivian looked at Ash.

"The Seven Veins," Vivian said. "Are Shades that took physical form instead of becoming Hollows. They’re not corrupted humans, quite the opposite direction. A Shade that crystallized outward. It stopped being the psychological remnant of a person and became an independent physical entity with mass and autonomy"

"And this one?" Ash said.

"It incorporates. Every entity it kills, it absorbs structural traits from it. The Seventh has been building for years. It looks like what it looks like because of everything it’s killed."

"You’re aware of why there is an entire distinction class dedicated to them," Phoebe added in.

Vivian didn’t look concerned at all. "An S-rank Hollow is below the Seventh Vein in threat classification. The ones above the Seventh are stronger."

"Are they?" Ash asked.

"Don’t get excited" Phoebe snapped.

Vivian ignored that. "The First is continental. Possibly higher. Nobody’s fought it and come back to characterize the ceiling."

Phoebe scoffed..

"The Seventh is city-level," Vivian said. "It’s the lowest of the seven. Weakest. And the most killable, in theory."

"Its only city level" Phoebe said in a mocking tone meant to sound like Vivian.

"And you want to go tonight," Ash said.

"I’ve fought it before." Vivian looked at her hands, then back at him. "Alone. and I survived while I still had options." She said it without embarrassment "I lost. I want to go again with better information."

"And I’m the better information."

"You read Shades in ways I can’t. You can tell me what I’m looking at from ranges I can’t reach. That’s useful." She brought a thumb up to her lip. "Also I heard you fight well when you’re not unconscious on the ground."

"That’s a high bar," Ash said.

"It’s the bar I have data on."

Phoebe crossed her arms. "Why do you hunt them at all? You could hunt things you could actually beat."

Vivian looked at her. "If I only fight things I can beat, I never find out where my ceiling is. The Veins are beyond any logic in this world. The gap between us changes every time I see one. I need to know what the gap is, and the gap only shows itself in the fight." She said this like she was reading from a document she’d written herself. "I’ve fought Evelyn. I’ve fought Lucia. I’ve fought Azure." She picked up her jacket. "None of them gave me that."

"That?" Ash asked.

"Thrill."

Phoebe looked at her for a moment. "You’ve fought Evelyn."

"Twice."

"And?"

Vivian put the jacket on. "She’s good. Come find me at nine, Ash. Wear shoes you can run in."

"Wait—" Phoebe started.

"He’s not going to get hurt worse than the Gate fight," Vivian said raising and waving a hand. She glanced at Ash. "Probably."

She left. The library door slammed behind her, falling off the hinges.

Phoebe looked at the empty doorframe. Then at the door on the floor beside it. Ash was already looking at her.

"You’re going," she said, finally closing her mouth.

Ash was now looking at it too, "Yeah, I think I am."

"But you just did an extraction."

"The extraction wasn’t physical."

"The Vein will be." She picked up her coffee. "Come find me before you leave. And after. That’s still the arrangement."

"I will."

She left him with the empty table and the lingering smell of vanilla coffee.

Later that night, Ash went to Phoebe’s dorm room.

"I really hope you’ll reconsider this" Phoebe said.

"I did." Ash said.

"So you’re not going?"

"No I am going, I changed my decision several times since the morning."

"Can you change your decision just one more time, please?" Phoebe looked up at him.

Ash swallowed. "I don’t know what to say."

"You can say no. You don’t even need to say anything. There’s a reason only someone like Vivian is wanting to fight one."

Ash’s breathing caught.

"Just come back with all your limbs attached. That’s all I ask."

"I will."

Ash found Vivian waiting outside the residential block.

She had a pack over one shoulder and a katana at her hip. She had changed into civilian clothes, which wasn’t much different from how she dressed earlier, only wearing high heeled boots with ankle support. She looked at him when he came out and gave a short nod.

"Did you say your prayers before," she said.

"All of them."

"Good." She turned toward the south gate. "Stay close until we’re off campus. After that, follow my lead until I tell you otherwise. If I say run, you run. Not after me. Away from it."

"Understood."

"And if something comes through before we reach the location—"

"I handle it."

"No." She raised an arm and stopped him from moving entirely. "You tell me what it is and I handle it. You’re my information tonight, not front line. You go to the front line when I need you to go to the front line."

They moved through the campus at the pace of students walking back from a late session, nothing urgent in it, nothing that would tell onlookers they were going somewhere they shouldn’t.

"Stay behind me" Vivian ordered.

They approached a monitoring station at the south gate. A single attendant was parked inside, staring at his phone. Vivian gestured Ash to duck down.

"Evening Andy" Vivian said.

"The usual excursion?" Andy asked?

"Just for an hour." She looked down at Ash. "Actually make it two," she said with a smile.

The city opened around them.

Despite the hour, there was night traffic, the eastern district running quieter than the academy’s interior but not fully silent. Delivery vehicles were making their evening rounds, a pair of students from another institution, a restaurant closing down its patio seating two blocks over. Vivian moved through it without checking her pace.

"Is this your first time outside the Academy since you got in?" Vivian asked.

"Yeah, I haven’t had much reason to leave despite wanting to eat better food."

That got Vivian laughing. "I’ll take you out more often then. Once you get a taste of freedom, nothing is ever quite the same" she said, licking her lips.

Ash walked beside her and let his Shade-sense run loose in the open air for the first time outside a controlled environment.

The city’s ambient signals were different from the academy’s. They were older, more varied, less compressed by proximity. A Shade three buildings over with the heavy pressure of something long-suppressed. A lighter signal from above, upper floor, barely present. The general background noise of a city full of people carrying things they’d never been given a way to put down.

And underneath it, faint, growing clearer as they walked east: something that wasn’t a person.

Vivian stopped at the end of an alley running between two warehouse buildings. The industrial district’s edge, where the city’s organized grid started giving way to older construction.

She looked at him. "You can feel it. Can’t you"

"Yeah," Ash said. He looked down to see his knees had started to shake.

"What does it read as?"

The hunger was fully awake beside him, running its read in parallel with his. Orienting. Interested in a way it hadn’t been interested in anything since the courtyard Gate.

"Big," he said. "And... I think it knows we’re here."

Vivian looked at the alley mouth. Then at him. The corner of her mouth moved into a smile.

"Ahh, that’s good," she said. "Let’s go introduce ourselves."