Ashveil in the mornings had a specific quality that Mars had never found a fully satisfying word for.
It wasn't chaos, exactly, though an outside observer might have called it that. It was more like a particular kind of density sixty-odd children between the ages of six and seventeen, collectively in the process of learning what they were, producing an environment that had no equivalent in the world before the Starburst Event because the world before the Starburst Event had not contained anything like it.
The main corridor on the ground floor smelled of toast and of the warm, faintly electric quality that accumulated wherever people with energy-based abilities spent time a smell that had no official name and that everyone who lived in buildings like this one simply called the smell, understood by context. It was pleasant in small concentrations and overwhelming in large ones, and breakfast was the large-concentration time of day.
A textbook drifted past Mars at approximately head height, its owner presumably somewhere behind it, managing the telekinesis with the slightly distracted focus of someone who had learned to do this the way other people learned to ride a bicycle and now did it without thinking. A second-year girl named Priya, with a short dark braid and the expression of someone conducting an internal conversation, had her feet four inches off the ground and was completely unaware of this levitation as involuntary expression, the ability surfacing without conscious direction the way a voice carried further when you were excited. Near the junction of the east corridor, a boy named Tom was growing something on the wall. Lichen, it looked like. A slow green-grey spread of it, creeping outward from a central point, and Tom was watching it with the satisfied attention of a person watching something they have made work.
Mars walked through it at the pace he had developed over years of morning corridors with bruised ribs careful enough to be steady, fast enough to not look like he was being careful. It was a specific calibration. He had gotten good at it.
He made it to the east corridor without anyone deciding to be interesting at him, which was the standard measure of a successful morning transit.
Ryan was waiting outside the stairwell door.
He was leaning against the wall with his arms crossed and the expression he wore when he had already completed his assessment of a situation and was choosing, out of what he probably considered tact, to present it as an open question rather than a concluded fact. He was sixteen, which made him one of the older residents, with the particular quality of stillness that people with enhanced perception developed over time not the stillness of inactivity, but the stillness of someone who was already fully arrived in a room while most people were still in the process of getting there.
His registered ability was Expanded Sensory Processing. The official documentation's careful language for: Rohan could walk into a space and within roughly thirty seconds know more about the people in it than they had communicated to him. Heart rates and breathing patterns and the specific muscular tensions that gathered around the truth when someone was working to keep it to themselves. The micro-expressions that resolved before they reached conscious visibility. The smell of cortisol, which stress produced and which most people couldn't detect and which Rohan had learned to read the way other people read facial expressions.
He had presumably been doing all of this to Mars since before Mars emerged from the stairwell.
Mars did not find this objectionable. Information was information. What you did with it was a separate question.
"You look terrible," Ryan said.
"Good morning," Mars said.
"That's not a disagreement."
"It's a greeting. The two aren't mutually exclusive."
Ryan uncrossed his arms and fell into step beside him with the ease of someone who had decided to accompany you and felt no particular need to make it a negotiation. This was one of the things about Ryan that Mars had arrived at a tentative appreciation for over the past year and a half. He didn't ask. He didn't make a production of the accompanying. He was just there, steady and unremarkable, offering something without framing it as an offer.
"Miss Roseline is looking for you. She had Yuna go down to check the basement about an hour ago."
"Right," Mars said. He had expected something along those lines.
"You should go to the infirmary first."
"I shouldn't."
"Dr. Marsa"
"Will give me the look," Mars said. "She always gives me the look. Ryan, I have received the look eleven times in the past two years. In each of those eleven times, the look has not materially changed my situation, which suggests Dr. Marsa needs for her own reasons rather than something that serves any function for me."
Ryan was quiet for a moment in a way that suggested he found this argument more compelling than he wanted to.
"Your lip is split."
"I'm aware of my lip."
"And the ribs are"
"Also," Mars said, with the specific patience of someone who has decided that the conversation has covered all its available ground, "something I am aware of."
They walked together in silence for a while, through the morning density of the corridor. A cluster of younger children went quiet and watchful as they passed not hostile, just observant. Children tracked anomalies. It was a fundamental feature of childhood, the noticing of things that didn't fit the expected pattern. Mars had been the thing that didn't fit for as long as these children had been at Ashveil, and they watched him the way they watched anything unusual, with the complete lack of self-consciousness of people who had not yet learned to pretend they weren't looking.
"You alright?" Ryan asked.
He asked it every time. Mars had never produced a response to this question that felt fully accurate, because the honest answer and the useful answer and the answer he actually wanted to give were three different answers, and choosing between them in the thirty seconds a corridor conversation afforded required more energy than mornings like this one typically provided.
"Fine," Mars said.
Ryan made a sound that indicated he believed the word fine to mean approximately nothing. He peeled off at the next junction toward the dining hall, leaving Mars to continue down the east corridor alone.
The east corridor was the oldest part of Ashveil flagstone floors, walls repainted so many times the layers had developed their own topography, windows that let in the specific pale quality of light that old glass produced. Along one side ran the trophy wall.
He had looked at it every morning for seven years and he had never looked at it at all. This was not a contradiction. It was a discipline.
The wall contained framed photographs and certificates and plaques for alumni who had gone on to impressive things. Hero Division postings, the government bodies that worked with high-ability individuals in formal roles. Class A assessment results. Special commendations. Young, confident faces behind glass, looking forward into futures they had been told were waiting for them.
Mars did not look at it. Not because it hurt he had moved past the stage where it hurt but because it required nothing from him. The wall had been curated to say "this is what this place produces". He was not what this place produced. He was the asterisk at the bottom of the page, the exception that made the rule feel cleaner by existing outside it.
The wall did not require his attention.
He kept walking.
Miss Rosineline's office was at the end of the corridor. Small brass nameplate slightly green at the edges. Warm light showing beneath the door, which meant she had been in there long enough that the morning light outside hadn't caught up with it yet. He knocked.
"Come in," she said.
He went in.