The grand marble entrance of the Vance estate felt cold, but the atmosphere inside was about to generate heat. Leo burst through the front door, his face alight with a manic, suppressed energy, followed by Kian, who moved with the slow, deliberate pace of a man walking toward mandatory surgery.
They found Alicia folding laundry in the sun-drenched living room, and Arthur Vance in his customary leather armchair, reading a first-edition history text.
"Mom! Grandpa! You will not believe what happened in the cafeteria," Leo announced, practically vibrating as he dropped his bag.
Alicia looked up, instantly worried. "Leo, what is it? Was there a fight? Did someone hurt Kian?"
"No, Mom, the opposite," Leo said, dissolving into a fit of breathless laughter. "Kian got silenced. Publicly. By the new transfer girl."
Kian stopped by the fireplace, crossing his arms and pulling his hoodie tighter, attempting to deploy the universal signal for "do not engage."
"Leo," Kian interjected, his voice cold and flat, "the interaction was a brief, trivial exchange of abstract reasoning. It concluded with a mutual agreement to disengage. It is irrelevant."
"Trivial? Irrelevant?" Leo sputtered, turning to his mother and grandfather, who were watching the exchange with growing fascination. "Mom, this girl—Anya—she sat down right across from him in the corner booth, which is practically Kian's intellectual perimeter! He tried to get rid of her with his usual 'subjective territorialism' routine, and she broke him."
Arthur lowered his book, his eyes glinting. "Broke him, Leo? That is a bold claim. Kian's logical defenses are formidable."
"They were useless!" Leo insisted, pacing the rug. "He told her she was disruptive and she said, 'I deduced this corner possesses the highest concentration of resistance to noise, making it the most logical choice.' Kian had no answer! He was trapped with his own premise!"
Alicia pressed a hand to her mouth, stifling a genuine smile. "Oh, Kian, dear. She sounds… sharp."
"She was worse than sharp, Mom," Leo continued, relishing the memory. "The final blow—and the whole cafeteria went silent, Grandpa, silent—she stood up, right when Kian was mid-sentence, and told him he was utterly incapable of managing a simple two-variable system."
Kian winced, running a hand over his face. That was the phrase that still haunted him. It wasn't just a critique; it was a devastating, flawless analysis of his entire social strategy.
"And then," Leo added, leaning down toward his grandfather, his voice dropping to a conspiratorial whisper, "she walked away, and the entire cafeteria thought Kian had just met his Queen. Even Silas muttered it!"
Arthur Vance sat back, a slow, wide, genuinely impressed smile spreading across his face. He looked at Kian, who was now staring furiously into the empty fireplace.
"Kian," Arthur said, his voice ringing with paternal amusement. "For the first time, you engaged in a duel of pure logic and were defeated by superior wit. This is not a social failure, but an intellectual triumph. You have found a worthy opponent."
"I have found an irritant who requires excessive emotional energy to manage," Kian corrected coldly. "I was bested by an anomaly, not a superior intellect."
"Nonsense," Arthur scoffed. "You were bested because her premise—that you fear emotional engagement—was accurate. But let us move past the abstract and attend to the only relevant piece of data."
Arthur picked up his book, but his eyes remained on Kian. He delivered the final question with the casual simplicity of a master setting a decisive piece.
"So, Kian," Arthur asked, his voice low and entirely serious. "Setting aside the Camus and the complexity of her logic. Tell me the data: Is she, in fact, beautiful?"
The question was so direct, so sudden, and so personal that Kian's prodigious brain short-circuited. He had been so focused on analyzing her logic and intent that he had failed to construct a simple defense for the fact of her appearance. He had spent the last twenty-four hours reliving her devastating argument.
Kian's cool facade evaporated. He looked directly at his grandfather, his eyes wide and completely unguarded.
"Very," Kian replied, his voice a low, involuntary admission. "Very beautiful. Her eyes possess an unusual clarity, and her facial symmetry is near-perfect."
The silence in the living room was immediate and profound.
Leo stopped breathing. Alicia dropped the sheet she was folding. Arthur's face remained impassive, but his eyes twinkled with victorious amusement.
Kian, realizing what he had just said—a genuine, uncalculated, human admission—clamped his mouth shut. His eyes darted to Leo, who was now shaking, trying desperately to suppress an explosive laugh.
"Kian!" Leo squeaked, clapping his hand over his mouth.
"I will be in my room," Kian snarled, his face flooding with color. He stormed out, hating himself for the emotional slip, hating his family for witnessing it, and most of all, hating Anya Petrova for being the single variable capable of disabling his entire internal operating system.