The call cut.
The holoscreen went dark, leaving only Sera's reflection staring back. Her frown was etched sharply against the glow of the courtyard sun.
But on the other side of that line, her brother was already moving in a room far removed from the crowded academy halls.
The Director's office was vast, not in the way of luxury but in the way of scale. Walls of polished steel rose high, curving around the chamber, embedded with thin strips of holo-panels that pulsed in slow rhythm, like a heartbeat that belonged to the building itself.
The surface of the walls carried a sheen so fine they reflected light in fragments, breaking the glow into shards that danced faintly across the floor.
The chamber was deliberately impersonal—every edge sharp, every surface hard, as though designed to remind anyone who stepped inside that power here was structural, not human.
