1st Night Pt. 1/3

Evelyn walked beside Van in silence long enough for the silence to become its own presence.

The corridor leading away from the dining hall had been made beautiful in the same way the rest of the facility was beautiful: polished floors, warm lighting, expensive quiet, the kind of architectural confidence that assumed it would never need to justify itself to anyone. Somewhere behind them, the others were peeling away toward their assigned wings, bedrooms, or restless private corners. Ahead lay the Master’s suite, the mind probe, and whatever truth might be dug out of the young man the system had placed so neatly at the center of all this.

Van lasted until the second turn in the hall.

“You can just tell me to ask it,” Evelyn said.

He glanced over. “Ask what?”

“The question you’ve been rehearsing for the last thirty seconds.”

His mouth twitched in something too strained to be amusement. “Did you already read my mind?”

“No.”

He looked relieved for exactly one step.

“I get that question from everyone,” she said.

That relief vanished. “Right.”

They walked a little farther.

Then, because he was apparently committed now, he asked, “What’s it like?”

She looked at him. “Telepathy?”

“Yeah.”

For a moment she didn’t answer, and in the pause he seemed to assume she wouldn’t. His shoulders had already begun to settle back into that guarded, practical stiffness she had seen all through dinner.

Then she said, “It can be beautiful.”

That got his attention more than she expected. He turned fully enough that he nearly drifted a step off his line before correcting himself.

“Beautiful?” he repeated.

“Yes.”

He waited, perhaps expecting elaboration. She didn’t give it.

Some things about telepathy were impossible to explain to someone who had never opened a mind from the inside and found not just thoughts or secrets or lies, but the shape of a soul arranged in breathing architecture. She had found tenderness there. Terror. Grace. Rot. She had stood in the memory of a mother singing to a feverish child and wept like a fool afterward in the shower where no one could see her. She had also broken grown men open and watched them learn, in one instant, that there was nowhere left to hide.

Beautiful was not the whole of it. But it was not a lie.

They reached the door to his suite.

Van stopped with one hand on the handle, then hesitated. His shoulders rose and fell once. “I should probably say this now.”

Evelyn folded her arms loosely. “Say what?”

He didn’t look at her. “That I’m sorry.”

“For what?”

He let out a breath through his nose, irritated at himself already. “For all of it.”

She considered him for a second. “I don’t hold you accountable for the system.”

He looked up then.

“Yet,” she added.

His brows lifted.

“That,” she said calmly, “is part of what the probe is for.”

He gave a short, humorless huff. “That’s fair.”

But he still lingered there, awkward in a way that was almost young enough to be jarring. The facility, the title, the pressure sitting on his shoulders — all of it kept trying to make him seem older than he was, more anchored, more dangerous, more central. Moments like this interrupted the effect. They reminded her that, beneath everything else, he was still a young man trying and failing not to embarrass himself in front of a beautiful woman about to enter his mind.

“I didn’t mean just that,” he said.

“No?”

He grimaced faintly. “I mean I wanted to apologize before you…” He made an awkward little gesture near his temple. “Before you go in there.”

Ah.

Evelyn’s mouth shifted despite herself.

“You think I haven’t done this before.”

“That is not what I—”

“I’ve been reading minds for twenty-five years,” she said. “You are not going to shock me.”

Van stared at her.

She let the beat hang just long enough.

“I know you’ve already pictured me naked.”

The poor boy actually went still.

“Most men do,” Evelyn continued. “Some women as well. I’m prepared for it. I’m not ashamed of my body, and I don’t require you to behave as though you sprang fully formed from a monastery.”

Color rose up his neck so fast it was almost impressive. “I didn’t—”

“You did.”

“I mean—”

She was enjoying this now. “You’re human. Try not to injure yourself over it.”

He made a sound that might once have hoped to become a sentence and failed completely.

Then he opened the door.

As he stepped through, still recovering, Evelyn added in the same cool tone, “For that matter, some of the girls have already pictured you naked as well.”

Van caught himself on the doorframe.

Actually caught himself.

He had nearly tripped over nothing at all.

When he turned back to her, shocked and mortified in equal measure, her expression had already settled into perfect professional neutrality, as though the last half-minute had not happened at all.

“After you,” she said.

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Claire, Cassie, and Fiona made it halfway down the outer steps before anyone spoke.

They had left the dining hall by one of the side exits rather than drift toward the dormitory wing with the others, and now the evening air hit them in a wave of humid green warmth that felt almost unreal after the facility’s polished interiors. The jungle beyond the terraces breathed around the edges of the grounds like something waiting patiently for darkness.

They still had time before curfew.

Not much, but some.

Fiona glanced toward the tree line. “We should find a gate.”

Claire blinked. “A gate?”

“Yes, Claire. A gate. Those things walls tend to have.”

“I know what a gate is.”

“Then keep up.”

Cassie crossed her arms. “If they’ve got guards, we strangle the guards. Get out. Come back with… I don’t know. An army. A strike team. Something.”

Claire looked between them. “You both escalated that really fast.”

Fiona snorted. “You want to ask Verena politely if she’d mind opening the front door?”

“No, I just—” Claire pushed hair back from her face, then stopped because it moved differently now and touching it made her conscious of it all over again. “I like the part where we figure out the edge of the prison. I’m less committed to the strangling and army portions.”

Cassie muttered, “Details.”

Claire looked up toward the sky above the canopy. “Let me check first.”

She rose cautiously, not in a dramatic launch but in a deliberate, controlled lift that kept her ready to drop the instant anything started shooting, scanning, or locking onto her. She had seen enough fortified compounds in training simulations and field footage to know what to look for: walls, towers, sensor masts, drones, turrets, light arrays, hidden emplacements. The obvious apparatus of captivity.

There was nothing.

Below her, Fiona and Cassie were two tense figures in a wash of path-light and tropical shadow. Behind them the facility glowed elegant and impossible, all polished stone and warm windows. Ahead lay jungle, deeper and darker and much more real.

Claire went higher.

Still nothing.

Then higher again.

And found herself staring at white.

Not a glimmer where water might have caught the last light. Not some pale break in the trees. White in the distance in every direction, broad and bright enough to catch the eye even through haze and forest. For one disorienting second her brain tried to file it under clouds, then cliffs, then fog.

Then it landed on something that made no sense at all.

Ice.

She dropped back down faster than she meant to, boots thumping against stone as she landed hard enough to jar her knees.

Cassie looked up immediately. “What?”

Claire pointed toward the jungle. “I can’t be sure.”

“That’s never a reassuring start,” Fiona said.

“I went up to get a look at the boundary.”

“And?”

Claire frowned, trying to fit what she had seen into language that did not sound insane. “The edge of the forest looked… white.”

Cassie blinked. “White how?”

“Like…” Claire hesitated. “Like ice.”

For a second neither of the others said anything.

Then Fiona laughed once, short and unbelieving. “No.”

“I know how that sounds.”

“Like a **** screen maybe?” Cassie said. “Or one of those fake horizon walls? Or illusion crap?”

“Probably,” Claire said quickly, because that was easier. “It has to be something like that.”

“How far?” Fiona asked.

Claire looked back toward the dark line of trees. “A few miles, maybe. Not far if we move.”

Cassie was already nodding. “Then we go look.”

Fiona’s grin showed teeth. “Now that’s what I’m talking about.”

Claire should have felt reassured by their confidence.

Instead she looked once more toward the jungle and thought of white walls in the distance where no white walls should exist.

Then she went with them anyway.

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Katherine, Mara, Lizzy, and Naomi entered the dormitory wing in a tired cluster of soft footsteps and overstretched nerves.

The hallway was quieter than the main facility, more intimate in its design, with carpets underfoot, framed artwork on the walls, warm lamps placed to imply rest rather than spectacle. It might have been comforting anywhere else. Here it only sharpened the absurdity of the day. Everything about the place insisted on hospitality while every rule beneath that hospitality reminded them they were captives.

Lizzy had her hands clasped together in front of her, shoulders slightly rounded, as though trying not to take up more emotional space than necessary.

“I think he might be trustworthy,” she said.

The words came out carefully enough that the uncertainty underneath them was obvious.

Mara looked at her with immediate gentleness. “I think he might be too.”

Katherine, walking a pace ahead, didn’t turn around, but Naomi looked at her anyway.

“What do you think?” Naomi asked.

Katherine took a second before answering. “I don’t get creeped out by him.”

“That sounded almost encouraging,” Mara said.

“It wasn’t intended to be.” Katherine glanced back over one shoulder. “It means exactly what I said. He doesn’t strike me as predatory. That is not the same as trustworthy. I don’t know enough yet.”

Naomi nodded slowly.

That answer, if anything, seemed to settle the group more than a softer one would have.

They reached the point where the hallway branched.

“Well,” Mara said, forcing a little brightness into her voice, “I suppose now we all go pretend this was a completely normal first day.”

Fiona would have had something vicious to say about that. Cassie something rude. Claire something hopeful and unconvincing.

Instead Lizzy gave a small, tired sound that might have become a laugh under better circumstances.

“Try to relax before bed,” Mara told them.

“Before the unknown punitive horrors begin?” Katherine said dryly.

“Exactly.”

They separated there.

Mara and Lizzy disappeared into one room together.

Katherine and Naomi into another.

For a moment, in the hall between, the day loosened its grip just enough for the silence to feel almost human.

Then the doors closed.

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Van’s suite was absurd.

That was Evelyn’s first private thought as he led her farther inside.

Not because it was vulgar. It wasn’t. Whoever had designed the place had taste, or at least a clear idea of luxury meant to look like taste. The rooms were large and elegantly proportioned, furnished in dark woods and plush fabrics, with windows that opened onto moonlit greenery and a living space large enough to host a small political dinner. The bar was stocked, the bath sunken, the bed large enough to deserve its own postal code.

None of that impressed her in any deep way. She had known wealth before. She had stood in penthouses with armed guards at the elevator and in embassies disguised as homes. But there was still something quietly astonishing about the care with which this system decorated its cages.

Van rubbed the back of his neck. “Anyway. That’s…”

“Extravagant?”

“I was going to say too much.”

He huffed once, then gestured toward one of the chairs near the window. “Here?”

“That will do.”

He sat.

Evelyn stepped behind him and rested the fingertips of both hands lightly against his temples.

His body went still with the effort of not going rigid.

“Before we begin,” she said, “I’m going to repeat something important. If you resist, it will be worse.”

He swallowed. “Define worse.”

“Harrowing is the last word used to describe a probe that went wrong.”

“That’s not really comforting.”

She felt the tiny shift of breath as he tried not to laugh and failed. Good. Humor helped. A little.

“And if you react badly,” she added, “I’m not going to report it to anyone.”

He tilted his head a fraction. “React badly, how?”

“Crying is common.”

He made a face she could not fully see from behind but could imagine anyway.

“Relax as much as you can,” she said.

“That’s easy for you to say.”

“Yes.”

He closed his eyes.

Breathed in and then out.

Evelyn lifted her chin slightly and let power roll through her.

The effect moved outward in concentric waves, subtle in the room and enormous inside the mind. Thought met thought. Her awareness slid across the skin of his consciousness and—

Van’s hands shot upward so violently they clamped around her wrists.

Not deliberately, it was a reflex. His body reacting to psychic pain before the man inside it could even form the thought of resisting.

Evelyn’s point of view dropped out from under her. The first sensation was pressure. The second was a storm. Then she was in it. It was not a mind in any ordinary sense. It was an abyss.

Thought, memory, instinct, fracture, sensation, old fear, buried **** — all of it surged together in black water and crashing ****. Her psychic footing vanished at once as the current caught her and pulled her under, a telepathic undertow strong enough to rip shape from the self if she let it. The sea was not metaphorical here. It was the structure of his mind. A real thing, as real as any mindscape could become. Black swells rose overhead, the scent of salt and fear on the screaming wind. Lightning tore through clouds so low and dark they seemed close enough to touch. Wind howled hard enough to strip language out of the air.

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The jungle road looked almost ordinary at first. That was what made it unnerving.

Packed dirt. Deep tire tracks hardened by earlier heat. Dense green pressing in from both sides, leaves broad as shields and wet with evening moisture. The sort of rough access road that might exist behind a nature preserve or private estate. Claire found herself absurdly expecting a maintenance gate or a bored security guard in khaki to emerge around the next bend and tell them they were trespassing.

Fiona walked like she hoped for exactly that. Cassie kept scanning the trees. Claire kept scanning everything.

“You know,” Fiona said, “if we do find guards, I’m calling first pick. I want to work out some aggression.”

Cassie snorted. “You assume you’ll beat me to it.”

“Confidence is healthy.”

“It’s really not, at your dosage.”

Claire tried to smile and almost managed it.

The banter wasn’t fooling anyone. Every crack of a branch or shift of leaves dragged their attention sideways. They had expected the facility to defend itself in ways that made sense. Guards. Cameras. Maybe something magical and invisible. Not this much jungle.

They rounded another bend, and all three of them froze at once when the low growl of an engine rolled through the trees.

“Off,” Fiona hissed.

They slipped into the undergrowth just beyond the roadway, crouching low behind a tangle of root and broad-leafed plants. Claire pressed one hand to the ground to steady herself and realized only then how hard her pulse had been climbing.

The vehicle came into view seconds later. A green SUV, lifted and built for rough terrain, mud spattered along the sides and roof. It looked almost insultingly mundane until Claire saw the driver. Or rather, failed to. There was a person behind the wheel. Male, maybe. Broad-shouldered. Dressed in something neutral.

But his face seemed wrong in the way distant details in a dream were wrong. Not blurred, exactly. Unfinished. As if someone had sketched in the existence of a driver without deciding who he was meant to be. One of Verena’s “functional inhabitants”.

The vehicle passed them and continued toward the facility. No searchlights. No guards leaning out, no sign they had been noticed at all.

Cassie let out the breath she had been holding. “What the hell was that?”

“One of the staff?” Claire whispered.

Fiona’s mouth twisted. “More like one of the props.”

The engine noise faded. Then didn’t.

Claire frowned. The rumble remained, but it changed as the SUV disappeared. It no longer had the layered mechanical rhythm of a vehicle moving over uneven ground. It deepened instead, became wetter somehow, heavier, as though the sound were traveling through flesh rather than steel.

Cassie heard it too. “That doesn’t sound right.”

“No,” Fiona said softly.

Then the rumble stopped. Silence hit so abruptly it felt like impact. Claire’s hair shifted around her head in a sudden live sweep.

Every strand drew the same direction at once. Her stomach dropped.

“Move—”

She spun, looking up even as she began cursing. “Holy, fucking, shit!”

The tyrannosaur stood not thirty feet behind them.

For one blank second Claire’s mind refused the scale of it. Her brain skittered uselessly over details as if assembling them one at a time would somehow make the whole less impossible: the massive skull, the ridged brow, the dark hide the color of old earth, the tiny forelimbs held absurdly close to a chest that still looked big enough to crush a car, the sheer column-thickness of its legs, the teeth.

God, the teeth. Its head lowered slightly. Steam rolled from its nostrils.

Cassie swore.

Fiona breathed, almost reverently, “You have got to be kidding me.”

Then the animal opened its mouth and roared.

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Naomi stood in the middle of the room without knowing what to do with her hands.

Katherine, for all her self-possession, had gone very still after closing the door, as if the act of entering private space had finally given her somewhere to set the full weight of her thoughts down. Naomi could almost see the woman thinking, lines and contingencies and hidden exits moving behind her eyes in silence.

Naomi needed something less silent than that.

She had spent the entire day being looked at, assessed, transformed, instructed, threatened, and arranged, and somehow the moment that finally made her feel most exposed was standing in a well-appointed bedroom with another woman and not knowing whether talking would be an imposition.

Katherine looked up first.

“You look like you’re about to either ask a question or climb the walls,” she said.

Naomi laughed once, thinly. “Maybe both.”

“That bad?”

Naomi shifted her weight. “Would it be terrible if I unloaded a little?”

Katherine’s expression changed by a degree so small most people might have missed it.

“Not at all,” she said.

That alone nearly made Naomi want to cry, which was humiliating enough to prevent it.

Instead she asked, “What did it look like?”

Katherine leaned one shoulder against the dresser. “Your transformation?”

Naomi nodded. “I could feel it, obviously. But I couldn’t…” She searched for the phrasing. “I don’t know. I couldn’t see what everyone else saw. It felt strange. Not painful exactly. More…” She grimaced faintly. “Close. Intimate, almost. Which somehow made it worse.”

Katherine considered that.

“Dark,” she said at last. “Clinging. Beautiful, in an unsettling way.”

Naomi’s eyes flicked up.

“And dangerous,” Katherine added. “Very dangerous.”

Naomi let out a slow breath. “That tracks.”

Katherine folded her arms. “You’ve dealt with dangerous power before.”

Naomi laughed without humor. “My power stopped feeling fully mine when I was a teenager.”

She had not meant to say it that bluntly.

Or perhaps she had.

Either way, once the sentence was in the room she could not take it back.

Katherine didn’t interrupt.

Naomi looked down at the floor. “People talk about powers like they’re gifts. Or identities. Or proof you’re meant for something. Mine’s always felt…” She searched again. “Hungry. Like I’m holding onto an animal by the throat and pretending that counts as partnership.”

Katherine was quiet long enough that Naomi finally looked at her again.

The older woman’s face had gone thoughtful, not in a cold way but in the way of someone stepping carefully through unfamiliar emotional terrain.

“No one gets to tell you how to feel about your own power,” Katherine said.

Naomi blinked.

“I’m serious,” Katherine said. “Not the public. Not a team. Not a mentor. Not me. If it frightens you, it frightens you. If you resent it, you resent it. If you need time to decide whether it still belongs in your life at all, that is your right.”

Naomi swallowed.

It should not have mattered so much, hearing something so simple said aloud.

But it did.

“Thanks,” she said.

Katherine inclined her head once, like a woman accepting gratitude she had not quite expected to earn.

Naomi hesitated, then asked, “Are you really going to look for that dossier tonight?”

Katherine’s mouth flattened slightly. “Yes.”

“Even though it’s obviously bait?”

“Especially because it’s obviously bait.” She sighed. “If Verena wanted me merely punished, she had easier avenues available. If she wants me moving, then movement itself matters. And if they’re dangling information, then it’s the only opening we’ve seen so far that even resembles leverage.”

“That is a very Katherine way to look at it.”

Katherine gave her a dry glance. “I will take that as a compliment.”

Naomi almost smiled.

Almost.

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Evelyn drove power through herself like a blade and **** stillness into the chaos.

Not peace. Never that. But enough order to survive.

The sea resolved by degrees.

Broken islands emerged around her, scattered across the dark water beneath a sky of rolling thunder. Memory-islands. Fragments of life made solid by significance and repetition. Rain struck them in hard silver sheets. The wind buffeted her even as she lifted from the nearest stretch of wet black sand and rose into the air.

Flight was natural in mindscapes. Motion obeyed intention more readily than mass.

Even so, Van’s storm fought her.

It shoved at her from all directions. Wind struck like hands. Lightning crawled along the edges of her perception. Twice she had to veer hard to avoid being thrown bodily into memory she had not chosen to enter.

She reached the first island and landed.

A kitchen.

Small, sunlit, warm. The memory itself slightly thin at the edges, not yet fully formed with the density later years would hold. A woman’s laugh from another room. A child — Van, maybe six — standing on tiptoe to reach something forbidden on a counter. The feeling of safety ran through the place like clear water.

Evelyn withdrew.

The next island: a yard. Dirt on knees. Summer heat. A father’s hand on a boy’s shoulder. The boy looking upward, squinting into light.

The next: fever, blankets, a cool hand on a forehead, half-heard lullaby.

The memories sharpened as he aged.

By nine they were more detailed, more stable. By ten the emotional architecture was clearer. By eleven she could begin to trace the internal weather patterns that would become the man in the chair behind her hands.

And then, around twelve, everything changed.

The transition was not graceful.

It was a break in the world.

One island showed him sitting alone in woods dense enough to swallow light, knees tucked up, breath held behind them as though breathing too loudly might kill him. Another had him in an alley, younger than he should have been to know how to search a trash bag without making noise. Another showed him asleep under something broken and half-metal, face smudged, body curled with the instinctive tightness of someone who had learned that sleep was never fully safe.

Gone were the mother, the father, the stable home.

Gone was the feeling of belonging anywhere.

The loneliness in these memories was so complete it was almost a pressure system of its own.

And in the backgrounds—

Evelyn slowed.

On the far edge of the alley-memory, just beyond the spill of weak yellow light, something moved between shadow and shape.

On the forest-island, between the trees, a silhouette hunched low and wrong.

Too long in the limbs. Too narrow in the waist. Shoulders built for a body that should have walked on four legs, but did not. A snout angled forward from a head that was almost, but not quite, human, lined with too many teeth.

The thing never fully entered the memories.

It stalked them.

Present.

Persistent.

Watching.

A cold certainty tightened in Evelyn’s chest.

This was no incidental symbolic fear.

Something had hunted him.

And somewhere deeper in the storm, it was still there.

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The tyrannosaur lunged.

Claire was already moving. She threw up both hands, and a glimmering quarter-dome of overlapping **** planes murmured into being over the three of them.

The titan’s jaws crashed into the tiny constructs. The planes bowed inward like a fishing net trying to hold a shark. The tyrant roared, frustrated and furious.

“Run!” Claire snapped, jaw tight with strain.

Fiona did not run. Of course she didn’t.

She planted herself beside Claire and drew in a deep breath. For one terrible instant she held there, like a trembling boulder at the lip of a ravine.

Then her power reversed.

She bent forward and screamed.

The shrieking blast erupted in a focused cone straight into the dinosaur’s snapping jaws. Claire’s **** planes, caught between the scream and the beast’s raw strength, shredded first. The cone tore through underbrush and churned earth into the air. When it hit the tyrannosaur, the blow landed like a hammer.

The monster reeled back. Skin flayed away from its face. Teeth shattered and fell like bits of masonry. Small trees near its head ripped loose from the ground.

But it was still there.

It shook its enormous head once, twice, and fixed its eyes right back on the girls.

Cassie let out something halfway between a curse and a laugh. “Okay. Bad plan.”

Claire staggered as feedback ripped through her, blood already threading from one nostril. Beside her, Fiona dragged in huge, ragged lungfuls of air, her voice blown raw by the effort.

Then the T-rex roared again and surged forward.

This time they all ran.

Claire and Fiona leaned into each other for balance as they sprinted. Cassie twisted as she ran, both hands already lit with sizzling spheres of angry plasma. She hurled them one after another over her shoulder. Her aim was dead on. White-orange fire burst across the tyrannosaur’s hide.

The animal plowed straight through the explosions and brush alike.

If the burning plasma bothered it, it gave no sign.

“Road!” Claire shouted.

“I am aware of roads!” Fiona shot back.

Their footing finally came back under them. The three of them burst through the foliage onto the dirt track in a spray of leaves and loose soil, and the dinosaur crashed after them with enough **** to shake the ground.

Claire heard Cassie behind her, breathing hard. Fiona was somehow laughing now, which in another situation might have been contagious and in this one was frankly alarming.

“Why,” Cassie gasped, “are there dinosaurs?”

“Because apparently Hell had a paleontology budget!”

Claire risked one glance back.

The animal was faster than it had any right to be. Every stride devoured distance. Its tail whipped behind it like a felled tree refusing to accept ****. Its jaws opened once, wide enough for Claire to see the wet pink of its mouth around all those impossible teeth, and her whole body tried to become flight in blind refusal.

“Tree line!” Cassie shouted.

“What tree line?” Fiona yelled back. “We are in a tree line!”

“No, keep it near the edge!” Cassie barked. “Drive it toward the side!”

Claire and Fiona looked at each other and turned in tandem.

Fiona loosed another scream, this one tighter and far less powerful. At the same moment, Claire slammed a wedge of telekinetic planes against one side of the monster’s face like a blinder on a horse.

Fiona’s scream struck its exposed side.

The tyrannosaur veered.

Cassie was cackling now, half mad with fear and momentum. She hunched over as she fed power into a plasma sphere the size of a manhole cover, the thing whining hotter and brighter in her hands. Then she spun and hurled it in a screaming arc.

The shot hit the base of a tree beside the road.

The detonation cracked the trunk apart. The tree split, toppled, and on its way down smashed across the tyrannosaur’s head.

For one miraculous second the beast lost momentum, its massive body overcommitting just enough to buy them distance.

The girls ran harder.

Claire kicked off the ground and rose just beneath the canopy crowding over the road. She looked back once.

The sight nearly stole her breath all over again.

“It’s back!” she shouted down. “What the hell is it going to take to stop this thing?”

They were nowhere near the boundary.

And already the jungle wanted to eat them.

Below and behind, the tyrannosaur roared again, no longer right on top of them but nowhere near far enough back.

“Move!” Claire screamed.

They did.

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Naomi stood under the shower longer than she meant to.

The water here came hot and clean and at just the pressure where it felt indulgent rather than punishing. That alone was enough to make her angry in some difficult-to-name way. Even the showers in this place were built to make submission feel luxurious.

She tipped her head back and let the water strike her face.

Then frowned.

Something felt… off.

Not bad. Not wrong exactly. Just different.

Her power was always with her.

Not visible, not active every second, but present. A low constant pressure under the skin. A hum of appetite. The subtle awareness of what it would mean to touch someone too directly, too carelessly, to let the wrong part of herself lean too close to the wrong person.

She had lived with that tension so long it had become part of the texture of being awake.

But standing there now, with steam gathering in the room and water moving down bare skin, that constant hungry pressure seemed farther away than usual.

Not gone.

Just quieter.

Naomi opened her eyes.

She turned a little, as though the shift might be directional.

No. It wasn’t that.

Had she relaxed her guard without noticing? Was this what happened when she was too tired to keep the same tight inward grip on herself? Or was it the opposite — had the day wrung so much out of her that even the power was dulling with fatigue?

Her mouth tightened.

She hated not knowing.

The thought came and went before she could fully examine it: maybe the transformation had changed something.

But she rejected that almost immediately. It was too easy an answer for a feeling she could not yet name, and nothing in the ceremony had suggested her power would suddenly become more manageable in a shower of all places.

So she let the water keep running and told herself not to be stupid.

Still, when she finally shut it off, she did so reluctantly.

And the moment cool air touched more of her skin at once, the power’s hungry edge seemed to retreat again.

Naomi stood motionless in the steam, towel forgotten in her hand.

Then, very carefully, she told herself it meant nothing at all.