Scarlett Vance stood in the Council office after everyone had gone home, and did not work.

This was unprecedented. The Council office was where she worked; it was practically a second self, the room and the role indistinguishable, and she had never once sat in it and found herself unable to open a folder. The folders were open. The folders had been open for forty minutes. She had not read a single line.

She was thinking about a hug.

Not even a long one. Brief, certain, warm - it had lasted perhaps five seconds, and she had spent the subsequent eight hours thinking about almost nothing else, which was frankly appalling, and she had no one to blame but herself for allowing it, except that she hadn't allowed it, exactly, she had simply been standing in a corridor with a stack of things to do and he had walked up and thanked her and then held her and there had been no opportunity to prepare, no procedure for the eventuality of Leo Evans saying I see you, specifically, the whole you, and meaning it, no protocol that covered the feeling of someone's arms around her feeling like the answer to a question she hadn't known she was asking.

She pressed her fingertips to her mouth and stared at the opposite wall.

Because here was the thing she'd been circling for months, the thing she'd labeled and filed and relabeled and refused to look at directly, and tonight, alone in the quiet office with the work going undone, she couldn't file it anymore. She'd fallen in love with Leo Evans. There it was. Not an infatuation, not an anomaly, not a disruption to be managed - love, the real kind, inconvenient and total, the kind that didn't go away when you pointed out to it that it was poorly timed and strategically inadvisable. She loved the way he noticed things. She loved that he cooked because it was how he'd learned to matter and had never stopped, as though care were a language he couldn't turn off. She loved that he'd made her eat lunch, once, with the same matter-of-fact warmth with which you'd make sure a plant was watered. She loved that he had looked at the most guarded, most defended, most relentlessly composed version of herself and said the whole you, not just the President bit - and meant it - as though the parts of her she kept hidden were the parts he was most interested in.

She had spent her whole life certain that to be known was to be found wanting.

He had known her, and wanted her anyway, and the terrifying joy of that was more than any folder could contain.

She couldn't not have him. That was the truth that arrived now, late and simple and final: she could not go back to the world before him, the world where she carried everything alone and nobody noticed and she was fine, because she had seen now, briefly, what the other thing felt like, and the other thing was the warmest, most frightening, most alive she had ever been. Without Leo she would still be the President, still be capable and reliable and in charge of everything, and she would be, she understood now with a clarity that ached, unbearably lonely for the rest of her life. She had looked at what it felt like to be held and known and she could not unknow it.

Scarlett picked up the red pen. Looked at it. Set it down.

"Alright," she said quietly, to the empty office and the undone work and the life she was about to stop hiding from. "Alright. I know."

---

Aria didn't go home after practice. She sat on the bleachers in the empty stadium, because the stadium was where she went when things were too large for normal rooms, and stared at the track.

She'd cried in the locker room. Actual tears, which was not a thing Aria Blake did publicly, and she'd run the shower to cover the sound of it, and come out feeling wrung out and clean and oddly, terrifyingly settled - like something that had been off-kilter inside her for months had finally clicked into place and was sitting still for the first time.

He'd said the bravest kind of being there is when you're afraid and you show up anyway.

He'd said that to her. Aria Blake, who had built her entire life on not being afraid, on running fast enough that the fear couldn't catch her, on winning before anyone could discover whether she was worth anything when she lost. He'd looked at her terrified sprint through the dark and called it brave, and the thing that had broken her open about it was that he hadn't said it to the athlete. He hadn't said well done or brilliant form or impressive pace. He'd said brave, the fear and the showing-up-anyway, which were the parts she hid, which were the human parts, the parts that had nothing to do with the scoreboard.

She sat on the bleachers for a long time, in the empty stadium where she'd broken records and been adored, and thought about what it meant that the only opinion she'd cared about in months wasn't from a scout or a coach or an admiring crowd, but from a quiet ordinary boy who'd said thank you and held her for half a minute in a school corridor.

She thought about what it would mean to lose that. To compete for it and fall short. To watch someone else end up standing next to him at the end of all this.

The thought hit her like a wall at the end of a sprint - sudden and total and impossible to run past. Because she'd told herself, at the start of all this, that wanting Leo was like wanting a win: you identified the target, you put in the work, you got there or you got faster for next time. But sitting in the empty stadium she understood, finally, that it was nothing like a win. You didn't lose a win and carry it with you. You didn't lie awake after a second-place finish imagining the alternative. Winning and losing were arithmetic.

This was not arithmetic. This was the kind of thing that left a mark.

Aria Blake, who had never been afraid of losing in her life, was afraid of this. Specifically, concretely, down-to-her-bones afraid of a world where Leo Evans was in it and not for her.

Which meant, she understood, sitting in the fading light with the empty track below her, that she was in love with him. Not infatuated, not competitive-about-him, not interested in the prize. In love - the kind you felt in the chest when someone said the bravest kind of being there is when you're afraid and you show up anyway, looking at exactly you, seeing exactly you, the scared version, the one nobody was supposed to see.

She wiped her face with the back of her hand.

"Well," she said, to the empty stadium. "Okay then."

---

Chloe sat in the library long after closing, with the permission of the librarian who had learned not to fight her on this, and did not open a single book.

She was thinking about a sentence.

I was afraid, but I didn't want to not be there. For you.

She had said that. Out loud. To him. Without the Apparatus to hide behind, without jargon to buffer it - just herself, the human part, standing in the open air of her own feelings for the first time. And the sky hadn't fallen. He'd looked at her with that particular focused gentleness and said thank you, Chloe, and held her carefully, as if he understood exactly how new this was for her, and the world had continued to exist, and she was still here, and it was - she tested the unfamiliar sensation, turning it over carefully - it was okay. It was more than okay. It was the most real she had felt in years.

She had been afraid. She had not let that stop her. And he had seen it and named it and held her for it.

The device on her desk at home had a hundred readings in it, charts and numbers and indexed correlations, and not one of them had told her anything as true as what she understood right now, sitting in the silent library without a single instrument to hand: that she loved him. That the number on the screen that night, the hundred percent, had been right, and that the rightness of it no longer frightened her the way it had, because something had changed in the dark street and in the corridor this morning, something had been measured that couldn't be quantified - the fact that he saw her, the actual her, and came back.

She thought about a future without that. Without the library as the place he came to hide, without the conversations that made her feel like the strange parts of her were features and not flaws. Without someone who noticed she'd looked at the egg. Without someone who had, once, with no particular agenda, looked at a girl folded over her papers on a library floor and said you're really cute and meant only exactly that.

The future without it was simple to imagine, because it was the only future she'd ever had before him: the lab, the data, the brilliant isolation. She'd been content in it, she thought. She'd been surviving in it. She understood now that they were not the same thing.

Chloe reached into her bag and found, by touch, the small worn case of the Apparatus. Thought about it for a moment. Left it where it was.

"Ninety-seven percent could have been exceptional," she informed the empty library, with mathematical precision. "A hundred percent is - statistically speaking - " and her voice went quiet and honest " - everything."

---

Veronica was in the garden.

Not her garden, not a Sterling property - the school garden, the little plot she'd tried to buy and then been given, seedlings that had grown into real plants over the past weeks, green and unglamorous and very much alive, tended by her own not-particularly-talented hands with the patient instruction of a boy who had never once commented on her technique being poor.

She sat on the ground. This was not something Veronica Sterling did. The ground was dirty and her coat was expensive and the groundskeeper's peeling bench was three feet away. She sat on the ground anyway, next to the row she'd planted, and looked at the things she'd made grow.

He'd said: the most Veronica thing, not the most Sterling thing.

She was still turning that over. She'd been turning it over all day, between classes and during them, in the car and out of it, in every unguarded moment - the most Veronica thing. As though there were a Veronica separate from the Sterling, a self that existed underneath the fortune that was specific and worth naming. She had spent so long being the Sterling that she'd stopped being certain there was a Veronica at all. The fortune was the point, the girl was the delivery mechanism, and anyone who seemed interested in the girl was eventually interested in the fortune and she'd stopped expecting different and called that realism.

He was not interested in the fortune. He had said so to her face, in a corridor, in front of witnesses, and turned down everything she'd offered with a gentleness that had been worse and better than contempt. He had wanted to know if there was a person under the money. And there had been - there was, she was finding, more of her than she'd thought, tentative and unpolished and sometimes ungainly, the kind of person who knelt in dirt and crushed seedlings and had to be shown how to transplant a living thing without killing it - and he'd taken the ungainly person and treated her like she was worth the same careful attention he gave everyone else, and she had not known, before him, that that was the thing she'd been starving for her whole glittering life.

She touched one of the small green plants, the ones she'd grown. It was a real thing she'd made. It hadn't cost anything. It was hers in a way nothing else she owned had ever been.

She thought: if I lose him - if someone else ends up with him - I will still have this. The plants I grew. The morning in the garden. The time the boy who couldn't be bought asked me to just show up, and I did.

And then she thought: but I don't want to only have that. I want more. I want the whole thing, the unreasonable impossible thing, the boy who made me grow something for the first time in my life and never once asked for anything back.

Veronica Sterling, who had always known what she wanted and always found a way to get it, sat on the ground in a school garden at dusk and admitted to herself, fully, without armor or transaction or strategy - just the bare fact of it, offered to no one but herself and the plants that had grown under her hands - that she was in love with a boy she couldn't buy, and that it was the realest thing she had ever felt, and that she was not, not even slightly, going to walk away from it.

She stayed in the garden until it was nearly dark.

And across the school, in four different places, four girls carried the same knowledge - new and enormous and differently shaped for each of them but fundamentally the same - the knowledge of what it meant to want something not because it was rare or because someone else wanted it or because it would prove anything to anyone, but simply because the thought of not having it made the world look like a smaller, colder place.

The festival announcement had gone up that afternoon, bright paper posters plastered across every noticeboard in the building.

None of them had missed it.