Chapter 20: The Weight of Watching
Thornfield dormitory's ground floor held fourteen rooms, and Aiden's neighbors made themselves known before the evening bell rang.
The first was a boy named Poul — broad-shouldered, ruddy-faced, with the thick forearms and calloused knuckles of someone who had done physical labor before cultivating and had never fully converted his body to spiritual energy use. He occupied the room directly across the corridor from Aiden and emerged from it as Aiden returned from the afternoon session, filling the narrow passage with a presence that was less threatening than simply large. His robe was green, properly fitted, and his expression carried the cheerful blankness of a person who defaulted to friendliness the way other people defaulted to suspicion.
"Gold resonance boy," Poul said. Not a question. He leaned against his doorframe, arms crossed, studying the scales with the frank, unguarded interest of someone who had not yet learned the academy's social reflexes. "Word travels fast. Half the corridor knows you lit up during stance two. That true?"
"Some of it," Aiden said.
"Huh." Poul scratched the back of his neck. "I'm Poul. Fourth room on the left. If you need anything — food, water, someone to carry something heavy — I'm here. I'm not good at much, but I'm big." He grinned, the kind of grin that lived in the muscles of his face rather than his eyes, a social tool deployed without calculation. Then he dropped his voice. "Heads up. The boy you trained with — the sandy one — he's been talking. Not to instructors. To his group. They were in the washroom when I was filling my basin. He didn't know I was there."
Aiden stopped moving. "What did he say?"
"That your arms went hot. That he felt something through the contact that made his teeth hurt." Poul's grin faded into something more careful. "He's not spreading it wide. Just his people. But green-robes talk. Blue-robes listen. That's how it works here."
Poul retreated into his room, leaving the corridor empty and the information hanging in the air like smoke.
Aiden stood outside his own door. The "Watching" mark was inside, carved into the stone at eye level, a single character pressed into the wall with the deliberate precision of someone who understood Covenant script and wanted Aiden to know it. He had not told Wren about the mark. He had not told anyone. The mark was a communication — direct, personal, left in the space where Aiden slept — and its meaning was clear enough: we know where you are, we knew you were coming, we were here before you.
He opened the door. The room was unchanged. Small, stone-walled, the narrow bed pushed against the window, the desk beneath the single shelf. The mark on the wall caught the last of the evening light and held it in the grooves of the character, making the stone look wet. Aiden crossed the room, set his jaw, and covered the mark with a spare cloth draped over the shelf's edge. It was a small, useless gesture. He did it anyway.
The evening meal was quieter than midday.
Aiden had expected the refectory to empty as students retreated to their rooms for private practice or study. Instead, the hall retained a steady hum of conversation, the ambient energy of two hundred students decompressing from a day of physical and spiritual exertion. The food was different at dinner — heavier, denser, the kitchen staff serving roasted root vegetables and salted meat alongside the grain porridge that appeared at every meal. The cultivation arrays embedded in the serving tables kept the food warm, and the energy density of the meal was higher than anything a common kitchen could produce. The academy fed its students the way a forge fed its fires: consistently, efficiently, and with full awareness that the output depended on the quality of the input.
Wren was already seated when Aiden arrived. He had secured a table at the hall's edge, near the corridor entrance — a position that offered sightlines in three directions, the strategic choice of a person who had learned to eat with one eye on the exit. His bowl was half-empty, his spoon moving in the mechanical rhythm of someone who ate as a task rather than a pleasure.
"You're late," Wren said. "Duty desk. Did you go?"
"I went. The clerk said gate passes require a sponsor from the faculty. A student request alone isn't enough."
"Which clerk?"
"Thin woman. Grey-green sash. Said she'd been on shift since dawn."
"That's Wen. She's thorough. Which means she processed your request properly, filed it in the correct stack, and it will reach the gate officer in—" Wren counted on his fingers, "—four to six hours. Varden Holt patrols through the dormitory checkpoint at the seventh bell. You've got about an hour." He glanced at the windows, where the sky was deepening toward the blue-grey of early evening. "If she comes through on schedule."
"She knows about the outpost?"
"She knows the patrol was redirected after the outpost went silent. She doesn't know why, and she doesn't like not knowing. That makes her useful to you and dangerous to the person who wants the silence maintained." Wren pushed a second bowl of roasted vegetables toward Aiden. "Eat. You burned through something during training that wasn't just calories. I could feel the heat off your arms from three positions away."
Aiden sat. He ate. The food settled into his stomach with the heavy satisfaction of fuel, and the dragon blood fed on it — not literally, but the internal furnace that burned behind his ribs drew energy from the meal with a speed that would have alarmed him if he had not been too tired for alarm. The headache from suppression had faded to a low, constant pressure, the baseline discomfort of holding the bloodline in a closed fist for nine hours.
"The Hendricks situation," Aiden said. "You said he'd talk."
"He did. To his people. Green-robes. Four of them, all second-term, all conventional cultivation, all from families with timber or mining interests in the western marches. They're not dangerous — they're not connected enough to be dangerous. But they're the kind of students who write incident reports when they think something unusual happened during training." Wren's voice carried the flat, affectless tone of someone delivering information without editorial. "They won't call it a bloodline surge. They'll call it 'abnormal resonance during partner exercise.' That's the language the academy uses. It gets filed. Instructors review it. If the review finds a pattern—"
"Caldera already knows. She was right behind us when it happened."
Wren's spoon paused. "How close?"
"Close enough to feel it herself. She didn't stop. She didn't comment. But she felt it."
The information sat between them like a stone in a stream. Wren resumed eating. His face cycled through two expressions — calculation, then something harder, the set of a jaw that had learned to process bad news without flinching.
"Then the report doesn't matter," he said. "If Caldera felt it, she already has more detail than a Hendricks incident report would provide. She'll act on her own assessment, not on second-hand gossip from a green-robe." He looked at Aiden. "You need to ask yourself what she'll do with that information. If she's what you think she is — and you've given me enough context to suspect you're right — then she's reading your signature to report it. Not to help you. Not to assess your training. To send your profile to whoever she's working for."
The dragon blood stirred. Aiden pressed it down. The flame-cupping technique was muscle now, reflexive, but the effort of holding it through the day had left deep grooves of fatigue in his nervous system. Every suppression cycle cost a little more. Every hour a little harder.
"I need to see Maren," he said. "Not through a message relay. In person. She can teach me proper suppression techniques — the ones that actually work under stress, not just during breathing exercises."
"Varden Holt," Wren said. "If she comes through on schedule. If she's willing. If the duty desk hasn't already flagged your gate-pass request as unusual." He ticked each condition off on a finger. "Three ifs. Not terrible odds, but not comfortable ones either."
Aiden ate. The refectory hummed. At the far end of the hall, the table where Elara Veyne had sat at midday was empty — the Phoenix bloodline heir apparently did not eat dinner in the green-robe refectory, or did so only when her schedule allowed. The absence left a social vacuum that other students filled instinctively, spreading into the space she had occupied with the unconscious relief of people released from a field of pressure.
Through the hall's windows, the courtyard was dark now. The fountain's spiritual nodes switched to a lower output, its arcs diminishing to a steady trickle that caught the lamplight and threw thin, wavering reflections across the stone. Students moved through the courtyard in small clusters, their robes catching the light — green, blue, the occasional flash of silver on the far walkway that marked a senior student descending from the upper levels.
One of those silver-robes crossed the courtyard with a purposeful stride that Aiden's senses tracked without permission. The figure moved through the lamplight, through the fountain's spray, through the ambient hum of the evening campus — and paused.
Caldera.
She stood at the courtyard's edge, her small frame barely visible against the stone wall behind her. She was not dressed for training — no black instructor's robes, but the plain dark clothing of someone off-duty. Her hair, iron-grey and close-cut, was indistinguishable from the shadows around her face. She was looking at the dormitory. Not at the windows. At the entrance. At the corridor where students entered and exited, their faces catching the light as they passed through the doorway and into the covered walkway.
She was not looking for anyone in particular. She was watching. The way a hawk watches a field — not targeting any specific mouse, but scanning for movement, for patterns, for the anomaly that would trigger a strike. The Master-rank cultivator's attention was distributed across the entire dormitory entrance with a precision that Aiden's dragon senses could read as clearly as a drawn bow.
Then she turned and walked away, disappearing into the upper campus with a stride that did not hurry and did not linger.
Aiden set down his spoon.
"Wren," he said. "Did you see—"
"Caldera. In the courtyard. Watching the dormitory." Wren's face was unreadable. "Yes. I saw her. She does that every evening. I thought it was routine — instructor checking on student housing. Now I'm less sure."
They sat with that. The refectory noise pressed in around them, the ordinary sounds of a community settling into evening — chairs scraping, voices rising and falling, the clatter of bowls being stacked. The normalcy of it was almost offensive. Somewhere in this building, two students had disappeared. An instructor was compromised. And the woman who had just stood in the courtyard, watching the dormitory with the patient attention of a predator, had felt Aiden's bloodline surge through a partner's forearms and chosen to do nothing about it publicly.
Not nothing. Aiden understood that now. Caldera's inaction during training was not indifference. It was strategy. A public response would reveal her own awareness of bloodline signatures — awareness that a conventional cultivation instructor should not possess. She had let the surge pass unremarked, filed it in whatever internal catalog she maintained, and continued her sweep of the room. The incident was recorded. The information was secured. And Aiden, by reacting, had given her exactly what she needed: confirmation that his bloodline was unstable during conventional exercises, difficult to suppress, and vulnerable to detection through direct contact.
Every student she paired him with after this would be another data point. Every training session another opportunity to read his signature at close range.
Aiden was a specimen being measured.
The seventh bell rang. Deep, resonant, the calibration tone that marked the transition from evening activity to the quieter hours of the dormitory cycle. Students in the refectory rose, collected their bowls, and filed toward the exits. The noise level dropped in stages — first the loud conversations, then the scattered voices, then the murmur of individuals talking to themselves or to the person beside them. Within minutes, the hall was half-empty, the remaining students scattered across tables in clusters of two or three, their conversations private, their postures relaxed in the particular way of people who had decided the day's work was done.
Aiden and Wren walked to the dormitory checkpoint.
The checkpoint was a desk staffed by a fourth-year student — a blue-robe with a scar across his chin and the bored, competent expression of someone who had drawn the evening duty shift for the third consecutive week. He processed students in and out of the residential block with minimal interaction, checking names against a roster and marking gate passes with a stamp that glowed faintly with cultivation energy.
Varden Holt was not at the checkpoint.
"She patrols through here," Wren said. "Usually between seventh and eighth bell. Sometimes later." He studied the blue-robe on duty. "Ask the clerk about expedited gate passes. Mention the healer at the gate — Maren Voss. The clerk can relay a message to Holt's patrol unit."
The blue-robe looked up as they approached. His eyes moved from Wren to Aiden, lingering on the scales that Aiden had not bothered to hide — they were visible on his forearms, catching the lamplight, impossible to miss. The blue-robe's expression did not change. He had processed a gold-resonance Dragonblood through intake yesterday and had presumably heard the training-session gossip by now. Nothing about Aiden was going to surprise this particular clerk.
"Gate pass request," Aiden said. "I filed it this afternoon. Healer at the gate complex — Maren Voss. I need to see her in person. It's urgent."
The clerk consulted a ledger. His finger traced down a column, paused, tapped. "Dragonford, Aiden. Gate-pass request filed at four bell. Status: pending faculty sponsor. Reason given: medical consultation with external healer." He looked up. "Pending means it hasn't been approved. I can't expedite it. You need a faculty signature."
"I need to speak with Varden Holt. She brought me in yesterday. She knows the situation."
"Holt's not on campus tonight. Eastern Road patrol was redirected to the northern perimeter after—" He stopped. Recalibrated. "She's not available. You can leave a message. I'll route it through the patrol relay."
Aiden looked at Wren. Wren's expression was neutral, but his eyes held a flat signal: not here. Not in front of the clerk.
"Leave a message," Aiden said. He dictated a brief note — Maren's name, the request for an in-person meeting, the urgency without the specifics. The clerk transcribed it with mechanical precision, stamped the paper with a relay sigil, and dropped it into a wooden box behind the desk.
"The relay runs every two hours," the clerk said. "If Holt's unit picks it up, she'll respond through the same channel. Could be tonight. Could be tomorrow. Depends on where she's patrolling."
They left the checkpoint. Wren waited until they were in the corridor, away from the desk and the clerk's hearing range, before speaking.
"She won't get the message tonight," Wren said. "The relay runs, but the patrol units on the northern perimeter don't check relay boxes until morning. They're operating under the redirected patrol pattern — longer routes, wider coverage, fewer stops. Whoever redirected them wanted the eastern approaches less watched."
"Who has the authority to redirect a patrol?"
"Instructor-level or above. Which means Caldera, or whoever Caldera answers to." Wren's voice dropped. "Think about it. The outpost goes silent. Patrols get redirected. Two students disappear. And then a gold-resonance Dragonblood arrives at the gate with a Covenant agent in tow. If you were the compromised agent, what would you do?"
Aiden walked. The corridor was empty now — students in their rooms, the evening quiet settling into the stone like sediment in water. The cultivation arrays that heated the dormitory hummed at a lower frequency, their output reduced for the night cycle. The light from the wall-mounted lamps was warm, steady, casting long shadows that moved when the ventilation shifted the air.
"I would watch," Aiden said. "I would watch and wait and read every signature that passed through my training room. And if the new arrival was unstable enough to flare during a standard exercise, I would know exactly what he was before he knew what I was."
"That's what she's doing."
"That's what she's doing."
They reached the corridor junction where Wren's room sat — two doors down from Aiden's, separated by Poul's broad frame and a storage alcove that smelled of stone dust and old cleaning solvents. Wren stopped. Turned. His face, in the lamplight, held an expression Aiden had not seen on it before — not the easy grin, not the sharp-tongued informant, but something rawer, the face of a boy who had survived Ironhaven's streets by reading danger and running from it, and who was now choosing not to run.
"I can't help you with the bloodline stuff," Wren said. "I don't know anything about it. But I know this place. I know who talks, who listens, who owes favors, and who collects debts. If Caldera is what you think she is, and if she's building profiles on bloodline students, then you're not the only one at risk. The blue-robe who disappeared — the one from a bloodline family — she was in Caldera's training group. Third-term. Silver resonance. Gone within two weeks of the outpost going dark."
Aiden processed that. "How do you know which training group she was in?"
"Because I pay attention to things that don't concern me. It's my primary talent." The grin flickered, brief and thin. "Get some sleep. Or don't — if you're going to try suppression techniques in your room tonight, I'd rather you didn't set the building on fire. Ground floor, fourth room from the left. I'll hear it if something goes wrong."
Wren disappeared into his room. The door closed. The corridor was empty.
Aiden stood in the lamplight. The scales on his forearms pulsed — slow, golden, a heartbeat that did not match his own. The dragon blood was restless. Not agitated. Attentive. The way a hunting dog strains at its leash when it hears something its master cannot. The bloodline was reading the dormitory the way it had read the combat hall, the refectory, the courtyard — mapping the spiritual signatures of every student, every faculty member, every cultivation array and energy node within its range. The information accumulated whether Aiden wanted it or not, a constant flood of data that his conscious mind could only process in fragments.
He entered his room. Closed the door. Sat on the bed.
The "Watching" mark stared at him from beneath the cloth he had draped over it. He could feel it — not with his eyes but with the Mark in his palm, which recognized Covenant script the way a compass recognizes north. The character pressed into the stone was old. Not freshly carved — the edges of the grooves had collected dust, the stone had settled, the mark had been there for weeks. Months, possibly. Before Aiden arrived. Before the outpost went silent. Whoever had placed it had known this room would eventually hold a Dragonblood descendant, and had marked it in advance.
Or — and the thought landed with the cold weight of a blade against skin — the mark had been there for years, left by an earlier Covenant agent stationed at the academy, and the compromised operative had simply allowed it to remain. A signal, buried in plain sight, that the Covenant's own infrastructure was compromised from within.
Aiden pulled the cloth away and looked at the mark. The character was precise, the grooves clean, the stone around it undamaged. Someone with Covenant training had carved it — not with a tool but with a focused pulse of spiritual energy, the script burned into the stone the way the Mark had been burned into Aiden's palm. The technique was intimate. Personal. It required proximity, intention, and the willingness to leave a trace of your own energy in the work.
He pressed his palm against the wall beside the mark. The dragon blood reached out, sampling the residual energy in the stone. Faint. Cold. The spiritual signature was degraded — too old to read clearly, too faded to identify. But the type of energy was legible: conventional cultivation, Adept-rank, with a resonance pattern that matched the Covenant's documented signature structure. This was not the work of the compromised agent. This was someone else. Someone who had stood in this room, years ago, and left a message for whoever came next.
Aiden pulled his hand away. The information was useful but incomplete. The mark confirmed the Covenant had operated inside the academy. The degraded signature confirmed it was not Caldera's work. And the fact that the mark remained — uncovered, uncommented, ignored by whoever maintained the dormitory — confirmed that the compromised agent either did not know about it or did not care.
Either possibility was dangerous.
He sat on the bed. The night was deepening. Through the window, the Thornwall cliff face was a dark mass against the stars, its silhouette sharp enough to cut. The fountain in the courtyard had fallen silent — the spiritual nodes cycled to their lowest output, the water reduced to a thin, steady trickle that barely disturbed the basin's surface. The academy slept. Or appeared to.
Aiden began the suppression exercise.
Maren's instructions played in his memory, the words precise and unhurried, the voice of a woman who had taught this technique a hundred times to bloodline descendants who needed it desperately. Pull the heat inward. Anchor it to the Mark. Imagine the resonance as a flame you're cupping — contain the light, contain the sound, contain everything that leaks.
He cupped the flame. The bloodline resisted. It always resisted — not violently, not with the explosive rejection of the partner exercise, but with a slow, insistent push outward, the constant pressure of energy that wanted to radiate, to broadcast, to announce. The dragon blood did not understand concealment. It understood presence. Every instinct in the bloodline's ancient architecture was built for dominance, for visibility, for the assertion of territory through the sheer force of spiritual signature.
Concealment was antithetical to what the bloodline was.
Aiden held. The headache bloomed behind his right eye — the same eye that had ached all day, the side of his body where the Mark sat closest to the surface. The scales on his forearms dimmed, their glow fading from amber to dull gold to something barely visible in the lamplight. The dragon blood's output dropped. The broadcast signal weakened. The headache sharpened.
Five minutes. Ten. The suppression held, but the effort was grinding, attritional, the spiritual equivalent of holding a boulder above his head with arms that were already trembling. Every minute cost more than the last. Every breath cycle required a fresh act of will to keep the flame cupped, to keep the bloodline's energy folded inward, to keep the signal below the threshold that the academy's arrays would detect.
Fifteen minutes. The Mark in his palm pulsed — a slow, deep throb, the bloodline testing the containment the way water tests a dam. The pulse traveled up his arm, through his shoulder, into the base of his skull. His vision blurred. The lamplight in the room distorted, stretching, elongating, the flame in the wall-mounted lamp doubling and redoubling as his pupils reacted to the bloodline's surge.
He released the suppression. Not gradually — the dam broke. The bloodline's energy poured outward in a wave that Aiden felt as heat across his skin, a flush of gold that washed from his forearms through his chest and into his face. The scales blazed. The Mark burned. For three heartbeats, the room was bright — gold light painting the walls, the ceiling, the "Watching" mark on the stone, each groove filled with radiance.
Then it faded. The bloodline settled. The scales dimmed. The room returned to lamplight.
Aiden sat on the bed, breathing hard, sweat running down his temples, his forearms throbbing with the aftermath of the suppression-and-release cycle. The headache had not diminished. It had consolidated, concentrating into a tight, hot band around his skull that pulsed in time with the Mark.
The exercise had shown him something. The suppression technique Maren had taught him was designed for short-term concealment — minutes, not hours. For the full day that academy life demanded, he needed a different approach. Something that worked with the bloodline rather than against it. Something that redirected the output rather than simply clamping it shut.
Kael would have had suggestions. Kael, who had taught Aiden conventional cultivation basics in Ironhaven, who understood the mechanics of energy management with the casual expertise of a man who had spent years studying the intersection of different power systems. But Kael was not here. Kael was nowhere Aiden could reach him. The man had vanished from Aiden's life the way smoke vanishes from a room when the window opens — one moment present, the next absent, and no trail to follow.
He lay back. The ceiling was close, the stone rough with age, the cultivation arrays embedded in its surface casting a faint, uneven glow that Aiden's senses parsed as a network of energy channels — not unlike the Mark, but older, institutional, part of the building rather than the body. The academy was alive with cultivation. Every wall, every floor, every breath of air was calibrated. Living inside it was like living inside a machine — a vast, slow-turning engine that processed spiritual energy the way a heart processed blood.
And somewhere inside the machine, someone was watching him.
The evening bell had long since faded. The corridor outside was silent — no footsteps, no voices, the dormitory cycle wound down to its quietest point. Aiden lay in the dark, his senses stretched outward, reading the building the way the bloodline read everything: as a field of signatures, a map of energy, a landscape of proximity and distance.
He could feel Poul through the wall — the big boy's signature was steady, slow, the deep-sleep pattern of someone whose body recovered through rest rather than cultivation. Two rooms down, Wren was awake — his signature was faint, unremarkable, the baseline of a non-cultivator who existed in the spiritual field the way a stone exists in a river. Passive. Present. Undisturbed.
The corridor held five other signatures, all sleeping. The stairway held one — a patrol sentry, stationed at the dormitory's vertical axis, monitoring traffic between floors. Standard security. Predictable.
And outside.
Through the stone wall, across the courtyard, at the edge of his sensory range — a signature that hovered at the threshold of detection. Not the deep, layered complexity of Caldera's Master-rank resonance. Something smaller. Simpler. A conventional cultivator, Adept-rank, standing still in the darkness of the courtyard with the patient stillness of someone who was not there by accident.
Aiden sat up.
The signature did not move. It did not approach or retreat. It simply existed at the boundary of his perception, a point of warmth in the cold night air, stationary, watching. The dragon blood classified it automatically: male, young-to-middle-aged, no bloodline resonance, cultivation energy clean and undisturbed. An ordinary cultivator. Standing in the courtyard at midnight.
Watching the dormitory.
Aiden looked at the window. The courtyard was visible from his bed — the fountain, the flagstone, the dark shapes of the surrounding buildings. But the watcher's position was outside his sightline, angled behind the courtyard's eastern wall where the dormitory's windows could not reach.
The signature held. Did not move. Did not approach.
Aiden's hand found the wooden dragon in his pocket — the carved figure his mother had given him, the last possession that had survived Greybarrow's destruction. The wood was warm. It was always warm. The dragon blood recognized the carving as belonging to its lineage and marked it with the same territorial affection it marked everything else in Aiden's possession: mine, mine, mine.
The watcher outside did not move. The night deepened. The fountain trickled. The cultivation arrays hummed their low, patient hum.
Aiden lay back. He did not sleep. The dragon blood held the courtyard signature in its awareness, tracking the watcher the way a sentry tracks a sound in the dark — not with fear, but with the cold, focused attention of something that had been built to guard territory and had found an intruder at the boundary.
The watcher stayed until the first grey light of dawn touched the Thornwall cliff face. Then the signature withdrew, receding into the building's ambient energy the way a footprint fills with water — present, then gone, then invisible.
Aiden watched it leave. He did not know who it was. He did not know what they had seen or reported. He knew only that someone had stood outside his room for six hours, watching, and that the academy's security apparatus had either not detected the surveillance or had permitted it.
He sat on the edge of the bed as the morning light strengthened. The scales on his forearms were dull gold, muted by the bloodline's nighttime rest cycle. The Mark in his palm was warm but quiet. The headache had settled into a permanent resident — not sharp, not fading, just there, the cost of existence in a body that was two things at once.
He stood. Crossed to the door. Put his hand on the latch.
Something was on the floor.
A single sheet of paper, folded once, placed beneath the door sometime during the night — after the watcher had arrived or before, Aiden could not tell. The paper was academy-standard, the kind used for correspondence notes and assignment submissions, unremarkable in every visible dimension.
He picked it up. Unfolded it.
The page held a drawing.
Rendered in charcoal, precise and detailed, the drawing depicted a hand — a right hand, palm up, with a Mark burned into the center. The Mark was not a generic symbol. It was not an approximation or an interpretation. It was exact — the same configuration of lines, the same spiral pattern, the same branching marks that radiated from the center like cracks in stone. The artist had captured the Mark with the accuracy of someone who had seen it. Close enough to touch.
Beneath the drawing, three words.
We know you.
Aiden stared at the page. The charcoal lines were crisp, the paper uncreased, the handwriting controlled and deliberate. This was not a threat scrawled in haste. This was a message composed with care — a communication from someone who had the ability to render Aiden's Mark in exact detail, the access to slide a paper under his locked door, and the confidence to state, plainly, that concealment had already failed.
The dragon blood read the Mark in the drawing and responded with a surge of recognition — mine, mine, mine — that Aiden choked down with a fist clenched around the paper.
He closed the door. Locked it. Pressed his back against the stone and listened to the morning corridor fill with the sound of students waking — footsteps, voices, the clatter of the day beginning.
Someone inside Thornwall Academy had drawn his Mark from memory.
Someone who was watching.