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Brawls don’t happen often in here.

The food is bad, the suppressants are worse, and most of us are too foggy by midday to summon the conviction.

But this one, apparently, has been deemed justifiable by popular vote, because another body turned up before the lunch bell—the third in a week, if anyone’s counting, and I am always counting—and once again the finger of suspicion has swung around the room like a compass needle and settled, with dreary inevitability, on me.

Which is genuinely rich, considering I was sitting here minding my own business, eating the extra pudding cup I lifted off the dessert cart for being charming at the right orderly, savoring the small grey miracle of butterscotch in a place that rations joy by the teaspoon.

Now there is an Omega, the approximate dimensions of a vending machine, doing everything in her considerable power to put me on the floor.

The cafeteria is its own weather system at the best of times—a low-ceilinged box where the scent of a hundred suppressed designations curdles together with steam-table gravy and industrial lemon cleaner into something you could chew.

Citrus and gunmetal from the corner table. Bruised peony, thinner now, from wherever the east-wing girls cluster since Wren stopped sitting with them.

And threaded through all of it, climbing as the adrenaline lifts it off my skin, the bright sugared bloom of me—strawberries and warm cake going sharp at the edges the way my scent always sharpens when my blood comes up.

Distress is supposed to sour an Omega.

Mine just turns into dessert with teeth, and the congregation around us breathes it in and bays a little louder for the sweetness of the show.

Somewhere under their cheering I can still taste butterscotch on my tongue, the ghost of the stolen pudding I’d been three spoonfuls into when the word fight cracked across the room and the vending machine launched herself at me with murder in her swollen, weeping eyes.

Such poor timing.

I do hate to leave a dessert unfinished. It feels like a small abandonment, and I’ve abandoned quite enough.

I avoid her.

For theatrics, mostly.

A ring of patients has bloomed around us with the speed only bloodlust can summon—my fellow inmates, my devoted little congregation, cheering the chaos with the bright ugly joy of people who get so few spectacles that they’ll take a violent one gladly.

The guards haven’t arrived in any meaningful number yet.

They will, eventually, in a clumsy thunder of boots and whistles, and I can promise that by the time the reinforcementssort themselves out, I’ll be either pulverized into modern art or bruised past recognition.

If I want to be. Which is the only question that matters, and it’s entirely mine to answer.

Should I, for the plot?

Things are always more interesting when you commit to the bit. A little blood sells the innocent victim far better than a suspicious lack of it.

I tuck the thought away to consider and slide left, letting her next swing whistle past my ear close enough to stir my hair.

It’s a real calculation, not a flippant one, the sort I run a dozen times a day in this place. The performance has rules.

An innocent patient gets overwhelmed; she doesn’t glide through a brawl untouched like a thing that’s done this before in rooms far worse than this one. Bruises are an alibi I can wear on my skin. A split lip is a character witness.

The trouble with looking too capable is that capability invites questions, and questions are the one currency I refuse to spend, because the moment Blackthorn stops believing I’m a lunatic is the moment Blackthorn starts taking me seriously—and a serious Vex is a Vex they’d actually try to contain.

Far better to be underestimated.

Underestimation is a door left unlocked.

She telegraphs everything—grief makes a body loud—and dodging her is less a fight than a dance I already know the choreography to. I weave and pivot and let my feet do the math while the rest of me drifts off to the more interesting puzzle.

This is the part no one in this room would believe if I let them see it plainly:how easy it is.

How slow she looks to me, how legible, every wind-up announced a full beat before the blow arrives, every lunge a sentence I’ve already finished reading. I could end this in three moves.