The review notice sat face up on the desk.

Soren read the classification office slate twice. He hid it under his system sheet. The news could wait.

He fetched Mona her breakfast.

A knock sounded at the Class Z door. That was rare. Visitors did not seek out the bottom dorms on purpose.

Three girls in pressed Class A jackets stood in the hall.

Their gold trim signaled a housing budget the bottom floors would never see.

They held the posture of people who were used to being watched and had stopped minding it.

"Are you Soren Kane?" the tallest one asked. She held a clipboard against her chest.

"That depends on the clipboard," Soren said.

She blinked. The line did not fit whatever she had rehearsed in the elevator. She adjusted her jacket and started again.

"We are from Class A. I am Elena."

"The jackets gave it away."

Elena frowned at her clipboard like the answer might be written there. "We are here to assess the new C rank asset."

"Asset," Soren said. "I’m a student. Right now I’m a student eating eggs."

"We heard about the arrangement." She gave a practiced smile, the kind that came with the jacket.

"You heard wrong," Soren said. "There’s no arrangement."

"It is not a rumor if the Council confirms it."

"So the Council talks to Class A," Soren said. "Good to know."

That landed wrong on her face. She had said too much and they both knew it. He filed it.

Her companions peered past him into the room.

Mona held her fork the wrong way. The tinted lenses hid her eyes. She gripped the handle like a digging tool and watched the strangers without blinking.

The shortest visitor scribbled on a folded paper with a pencil stub. Soren noted she had started writing the moment she crossed the threshold and had not stopped. 𝒇𝙧𝙚𝓮𝔀𝓮𝒃𝙣𝓸𝒗𝒆𝒍.𝙘𝒐𝒎

He didn’t say anything about it.

"We wanted to see if the bottom class really has the most interesting boy in the academy," Elena said. She leaned on the door frame.

Soren knew that refusing them entry would look like he had something behind the door.

Letting them in turned three watchers into three witnesses who saw nothing.

Fawning fans were a better cover story than a formal report about a boy worth surveilling.

So he let the noise in.

The tall girl sat on the bed. The wolf beneath it went still and did not surface.

Maren came back from the showers and stopped in the doorway.

"Who are they?"

"Visitors."

"We don’t get visitors."

"We do today." Soren took the upside-down fork from Mona and traded her a clean one. "Eat."

Maren leaned against the wall. Heat came off her skin as the fox in her read the stranger on the bed and didn’t like it. The tall girl saw the tension and read it as jealousy and decided that was charming.

Soren let her stay wrong.

◆◆◆◆

Joan came in twenty minutes later with a stack of worksheets under her arm.

She looked at the three Class A girls the way she looked at a proof with a hidden error in line four.

"Joan," Soren said.

"What are you writing," Joan asked the girl with the pencil.

The room did a small thing. The tall girl turned on the bed. The short one closed her hand over the stub.

"Just notes for my journal."

"You wrote four lines for ten words spoken," Joan said. Her voice was flat. "That’s a high ratio. Does your journal have the date at the top, like a Council intake form?"

The short girl did not answer.

Soren watched Joan find the report girl in one pass. He had seen noise in the room. Joan saw a person doing a specific job and had named it before she sat down.

◆◆◆◆

"You’re not fans," Joan said. It wasn’t a question.

"We are allowed to be curious about a C rank," the tall girl said.

"Curiosity doesn’t use intake formatting."

Selah spread a thin line of frost across the desk from the side of her hand. It crept toward the folded paper and stopped a finger short.

The short girl stood up.

"We should leave."

"You should," Maren said from the wall, and the room went a degree warmer.

◆◆◆◆

They left. The tall girl dropped the smile at the door.

The silent third one glanced at the desk on her way out, at the corner of the review notice showing under the system sheet, then followed the others into the hall.

Soren stood in the middle of the room with three empty spaces where Class A had been and did the arithmetic.

The Council had sent probes wearing fan faces. Popularity was a perimeter he couldn’t object to without looking like a boy with something to hide. That was the trap and it was a good one.

"How did you know," he said to Joan.

"She’d decided her purpose before she walked in." Joan squared her worksheets against the desk. "People like that aren’t visitors."

The pack did not take it well.

Maren wanted to go after them. Selah had iced the door handle solid. The wolf under the bed waited for a word to move and didn’t get one.

Mona put her fork down.

She pressed her face into Soren’s arm and stayed there. She wanted the room back the way it had been before the knock, the small quiet circle with no strangers sitting on the bed.

Soren looked at the door they had left through, then at the notice on the desk, and saw two moves pointing opposite directions.

The first move was to lean into it. Become popular on purpose, bury the watched signal under a crowd of noise nobody could subpoena. Safe. It cost the pack the one thing they had ever asked for, which was to be left alone with him.

The second was to close the circle. Pull the pack tight, refuse the perimeter, keep the room theirs and let the Council make of that whatever it wanted to make.

That protected the bond and confirmed every suspicion in the file at the same time.

Selah cracked the ice off the handle with her thumb.

"Which one are you," she said.

Soren said nothing.

The wolf waited for his word.