The Summer Festival had been a Silverleaf tradition for longer than anyone currently attending could remember, and it arrived every year with the force of a collective exhale - the whole school breathing out, releasing the accumulated pressure of terms and tests and the general anxiety of being young, into a single long warm evening of lights and food and music and the specific sweet recklessness of summer beginning.

In the one-in-seven world, it also meant something else. Leo had learned this gradually, from context and overheard conversations and the particular charged quality of the air the moment the posters went up: the Summer Festival was, by long tradition, the occasion for declarations. Not formal ones, necessarily - not the structured courtship proposals the world had developed for more serious intentions - but the lighter, braver, maybe-this-evening kind of declaration, the kind you could make over a festival game or a shared paper cup of something warm and then, if it went wrong, blame on the lantern-light. It was the night people asked and were asked. It was, in other words, exactly the kind of event Leo would ordinarily have approached with the full arsenal of his avoidance strategies and a very clear route to the exit.

Except that things were different now, and he knew it, and the knowing made everything complicated.

The first invitation came from Scarlett, which surprised him not at all. It came in the form of a note - handwritten, which was not how she did things, which was part of what made it significant - left on his desk before he arrived one morning, short and uncharacteristically unguarded: I'd like to attend the festival with you, if you're willing. Not as Council, not for orientation. Just - if you'd like. The signature was just her name, no title.

Leo read it three times. He'd been reading things three times lately, every time one of them did something that had a different quality to it than before, something that didn't quite fit the category of friend anymore and didn't fit any other category he had words for either. He folded the note carefully and put it in his pocket.

The second invitation came from Aria, which surprised him only in its delivery, because Aria's approach to most things was a full-speed frontal assault but she appeared to have been saving some subtlety for this. She appeared beside him at lunch and sat down and very intently studied the middle distance and said, all in one breath, without looking at him: "Okay so there's the festival and I want to go with you and before you say anything it's not a luck thing this time I just want to go with you because I want to go with you so there it is and you can respond whenever you're ready I'm going to eat my food now." And she ate her food with tremendous concentration and did not look up.

Leo looked at the side of her face for a moment.

"Aria," he said.

"Yep."

"Was that an invitation?"

"It was a statement of preference, yes."

"Okay," he said, and she went pink, and he thought about it all afternoon.

The third came from Chloe, and it was the one that cracked him open a little, because Chloe had been operating, for as long as he'd known her, at one remove from the world, buffered by devices and data and careful scientific distance - and this invitation had none of that in it. She found him in the library - their library, the place it had all started - and she sat across from him, no Apparatus, no clipboard, no device between them, and she looked at him steadily through her glasses and said, with only the smallest stutter on the first word: "I-I'd like to go to the festival with you. Not for research. Just because I would like to. If you'd - if that would be something you wanted. I wanted to ask properly. Without - " she gestured, vaguely, at the absent machine " - all that. Just me asking."

Just me asking.

It was such a small thing to say and it cost her so much and he could see exactly how much it cost her, the straight spine and the chin up and the deliberate absence of any shield, and it landed on him with a weight that had very little to do with festival plans.

"Thank you for asking properly," he said gently, because it was the truest response he had. "That meant a lot, Chloe. Really."

She nodded, once, quickly, and opened a book, and he could see her hands were not quite steady.

The fourth came from Veronica, and it was the most changed of the four. She found him in the garden - their garden, his garden, the one she'd grown plants in with her own hands - and she sat on the bench he'd made her kneel beside in the dirt, and she turned to him without preamble, and she said: "I'd like to go to the festival with you. I don't have a reason that's about strategy or acquisition or the Sterling name. I have no leverage to offer and nothing to negotiate with." A pause. "I just want to go with you. As myself. If that's - if that means anything." Something uncertain moved across her face, quick and real. "I'm still learning how to do that. Just asking. But I'm trying."

I'm trying.

Leo sat in the garden for a long time after she'd left, and let himself think.

Four invitations. In one day. From four people he -

And there it was, unavoidable now, the thought he'd been circling since the dark street and the corridor and four hugs that had felt like coming home from four different directions: he couldn't dismiss it anymore. Not with all four of them asking, not after months of evidence, not after the look on Scarlett's face over a shared lunch and Aria's arms at the finish line and Chloe's voice cracking over distributed evidence and Veronica's rigid self unwilling softly in a hug. He'd been so certain - so deeply, foundationally certain - that there was nothing here worth falling for, nothing in plain Leo Evans that could possibly hold the sustained attention of four extraordinary people. And they had held it anyway, and they were holding it now, and the bedrock had cracked enough that he could see through it to the thing he hadn't been able to believe.

They liked him.

All four of them. Not The Charm, not the rare thing, not the prize at the center of the contest - him, the actual person, the one who cooked because he'd learned young that care was a language, who couldn't stop noticing things, who'd come to this world wanting only to disappear and had somehow ended up mattering to four people in a way he hadn't believed he was capable of mattering to anyone.

The knowing of it sat in his chest warm and vast and terrifying, and under the terror was something he had no practice at, something so foreign it took him a moment to name: hope. Not the modest careful hope of a person who expects little - the big kind, the dangerous kind, the kind that acknowledged the possibility of something real and good and meant for him, specifically, him.

And then, because he was Leo, the hope immediately complicated itself with the question of what to do with it.

Because the problem - the particular, painful, specific problem - was that it wasn't one of them. It wasn't that he'd met someone wonderful and things had developed and now there was a person. It was four people, and he had feelings toward each of them, real ones, different ones, feelings that had grown from real moments and real knowing, and he could not in good conscience pretend that any one of them was simply a friend while the others were something more, because that wasn't the truth and he'd always been terrible at untruth.

So he couldn't choose. Not because he didn't care enough, but almost because he cared too much - because each of them had shown him something real and let him show them something real in return and the connections were all genuine and he didn't know how, when all the connections were real, you were supposed to arithmetic them down to one.

He sat in the garden for a long time. He thought about Scarlett's handwriting, unguarded for the first time. About Aria's face studying the middle distance, trying so hard at vulnerability. About Chloe's hands not quite steady, saying just me asking. About Veronica saying I'm trying, in a voice that had never, before him, had anything to try at.

And he thought: I don't want to hurt any of them.

And then, because he was also still, in some fundamental way, the boy who'd never quite believed in his own worth - the boy from the overlook household, the overlooked one, the one who'd learned to take care of everyone else because that was the one contribution he was allowed - a thought arrived that was, in its way, both his best quality and his most problematic one:

What if I could give all four of them a real evening? What if I went to the festival with each of them - truly, properly, one at a time - and gave each of them a real evening that wasn't about who would win? Not a competition. Just - time. Real time. The thing they were each asking for, which was him, present and attentive, not divided.

It was, he thought, the fairest thing he could do. Nobody would be chosen and nobody would be excluded and he would have the chance to - he didn't let himself finish the thought about what the chance might be for, but it was there, warm and frightening, underneath the logistics.

He didn't think about what would happen if they found out. He'd never been very good at thinking ahead to the complications, which was, arguably, part of how he'd gotten here.

He went home and thought about it for the rest of the evening and by morning he had decided, with the gentle, hopeful, slightly catastrophic certainty that characterized his best and worst decisions in equal measure: he would say yes to all four. He'd divide the evening into quarters and give each of them a quarter that was fully present and fully real and fully his, and by the end of the evening he would perhaps, finally, know what he felt and who he was and what came next.

It was a plan that could only end two ways.

Leo, being Leo, was focused almost entirely on the better of the two.