Tuesday started with a decision Ferb had apparently made sometime between Sunday night and Tuesday morning.
He had decided to investigate.
This was, in itself, not unusual. Ferb investigated things the way some people breathed — continuously, automatically, without apparent awareness that it might not always be welcome. He investigated Sky's choice of breakfast foods. He investigated the gap between the library's official opening hours and the hours the librarian actually arrived. He had once produced a fifteen-minute analysis of the campus maintenance schedule based entirely on the sound patterns of the groundskeeping equipment.
What was slightly unusual was that this time, Ferb had decided to investigate a person.
Specifically, Isabella Lopez.
Specifically, Isabella Lopez's connection to Marx Cartez.
Specifically, what in the world was going on between Isabella Lopez and Marx Cartez, because Ferb had eyes and a functioning brain and the Socials post and whatever he'd seen in the hallways over the past week, and the picture those things formed together was interesting in a way he could not leave alone.
I didn't know any of this at the time, of course.
I only found out later, in the way I found out most things Ferb did — through reconstruction.
By his own account — which I received third-hand through Sky, who had apparently witnessed the majority of it from a coincidental position — Ferb began his investigation at 10:15 on Tuesday morning.
He had identified Bella's Tuesday schedule from the class listings board outside the main office. He had positioned himself near the east building entrance at 10:12, pretending to review notes. He had waited for her to exit her morning lab session.
She appeared at 10:16.
Ferb fell into step at what he judged to be a safe surveillance distance.
Bella had a particular way of walking. Not fast, not slow. Economical, like someone who had calculated the exact amount of energy required to get from point A to point B and applied precisely that. Her bag was over one shoulder. She was looking at her phone.
Ferb adjusted his distance to twenty metres.
Bella's pace didn't change.
What Bella was actually doing — which Ferb did not know, because Ferb was looking at the back of her head — was checking the reflection in her phone screen.
Not her reflection. The corridor behind her.
She had noticed him at the east building door. She had noted the glasses, the ginger hair, the studied casualness of someone trying to look like they weren't following her. She had registered him as recognisable — the boy from Ethics class, the one Sky called Ferb, the one who sat two rows back and wrote notes that were more detailed than anyone else's.
She had decided to let him continue.
For now.
Ferb followed her across the east corridor.
She turned left at the junction near the science block. He turned left.
She slowed near the student café. He slowed.
She stopped to read a notice board about an upcoming engineering workshop. He stopped twenty metres back and became very interested in his own notebook.
According to Sky, who had at this point joined the scene as an unwitting observer from the café doorway, Ferb's notebook investigation looked like a man reading the same sentence fourteen times while trying to watch something in his peripheral vision. Sky had initially not realised what he was watching. Then he'd seen the direction of Ferb's peripheral attention. Then he'd seen Bella, at the notice board, and the particular quality of her stillness.
Sky had not moved from the café doorway.
He later described this decision as the best call I have ever made.
Bella finished reading the notice board — or appeared to finish reading it. She picked up her bag. She rounded the corner at the end of the corridor.
Ferb followed.
He turned the corner.
Bella was not there.
The corridor stretched ahead of him — long, straight, with three doors on each side and a fire exit at the far end that was very clearly not open. No alcoves. No obvious hiding places. No sound of footsteps.
Bella had simply ceased to be present.
Ferb stopped walking.
He stood in the empty corridor and looked at the space where Bella had been approximately three seconds earlier, and his brain performed a rapid inventory of the available explanations, and the inventory came back largely empty.
He took two more steps forward.
He stopped again.
"Why are you following me?"
The voice came from directly behind him.
Ferb's response, as described by Sky, was something that defied easy categorisation. His shoulders went up. His notebook went sideways. He made a sound that was not a word. He turned around with the jerky, overcorrected movement of someone whose body had decided to act before his brain had finished processing the situation.
Bella was standing three feet behind him.
She had not been there before. She was there now. She was looking at him with an expression of complete neutrality, the way someone looks at a mildly interesting weather pattern.
Ferb adjusted his glasses.
"I'm just curious," he said.
"About what?"
"About—" He paused. Recalibrated. "In general. I'm a curious person."
Bella studied him for a moment.
Ferb, to his credit, held the look. He did not bolt. He did not fabricate something elaborate. He just stood there, with the particular dignity of a person who had been caught doing something they couldn't plausibly deny and had decided honesty was the only remaining strategy.
"You're just nosy," Bella said.
She said it the way she said most things — not unkindly, not with emphasis, just plainly, the way you'd state a fact about the weather. Then she picked up her bag, which she had apparently set down at some point during the proceedings, and walked past him down the corridor.
She didn't look back.
Ferb stood in the empty hallway for a long moment.
He was, by Sky's account, offended.
Not hurt. Not embarrassed. Offended. In the specific way of a person who has just been correctly identified.
Sky told me about it at lunch, leaning across the table with the focused energy of someone delivering a news bulletin they were very proud of.
"She just — appeared," he said. "Like. From nowhere."
"She used an exit he didn't see."
"There wasn't an exit."
"There was. He just didn't see it."
"Marx. I was there. I was watching the corridor. There was no exit."
"Sky."
"She materialised. Behind him. Out of the air."
"She found the service access," I said. "There's usually one near the science block junction. Maintenance door. Looks like part of the wall."
Sky stared at me for three full seconds. "How do you know that."
"I notice things."
"Like ceiling exits and invisible maintenance doors."
"Among other things."
He sat back. Shook his head slowly. "I'm surrounded by people who operate on a completely different level and I'm just here with my fourteen debate questions and my colour-coded notes."
"Your colour-coded notes are very good."
"They are," he agreed. "But they don't help me disappear into walls."
He ate for a moment, still visibly processing.
"Ferb looked genuinely offended," he said. "Not scared. Offended. She told him he was nosy and he looked like she'd made a personal remark about his character."
"She did make a personal remark about his character."
"An accurate one."
"That's what made it personal."
Sky pointed at me. "That," he said. "Right there. That's the level I'm talking about."
The evening came in cool and clear, the kind of Tuesday that had decided to be decent despite no particular obligation to be.
I made coffee this time — I'd given up on the tea experiment being consistently successful — and took it out to the balcony while the city settled into its nighttime arrangement.
I heard her door before I saw her.
Bella appeared at the partition, mug in hand, hair loose, in the oversized shirt that was becoming as familiar as the railing itself. She leaned on her side and looked out.
"Your ginger friend followed me today," she said, without preamble.
"Ferb," I said.
"Across three corridors."
I already knew this, from Sky's lunch briefing, but I kept that information where it was. "How long did it take you to notice?"
"East building door," she said.
"That's where you came out."
"That's where I noticed him. He was already waiting." She took a sip of her drink. "He's patient. Genuinely patient. Most people get bored or self-conscious within the first corridor."
"That's because most people aren't Ferb."
"What is Ferb?"
I thought about how to describe him. "He's the kind of person who once spent three weeks documenting the campus maintenance schedule based entirely on equipment sounds. Not because anyone asked. Not because it was useful. Just because he wanted to know."
Bella considered this. "How close did he get to accurate?"
"Within four minutes on every shift."
A pause.
"Impressive," she said, and she sounded like she meant it.
"He also nearly died when you appeared behind him," I said.
"He recovered quickly."
"Sky said he looked offended."
"He was offended." She turned the mug in her hands. "I told him he was nosy. He didn't like it."
"It's accurate."
"That's why he didn't like it." She glanced at me sideways. "He followed me like a wounded duck."
I tried very hard not to react.
"He was visible," she continued, with the measured tone of a professional filing a report. "He stopped when I stopped. He changed direction when I changed direction. At one point he pretended to read a notice board about an engineering workshop." She paused. "He was still there when I came back the same way twelve minutes later."
"He read the notice board for twelve minutes?"
"He was watching my reflection in the window next to it." A beat. "The reflection showed him watching the window. Not the most effective method."
"Ferb has never done surveillance before."
"That was obvious."
"You let him keep going anyway."
She looked at the city. "He's not a threat. He's curious. Those are different things." She was quiet for a moment. "Also it was genuinely interesting to see how long he'd maintain it."
"How long did he?"
"Until I made him stop."
"Which was?"
"When I'd seen enough." She set her mug on the railing. "I let the ones who aren't dangerous play out their hand. You learn more from watching someone investigate you than from stopping them."
I looked at her. "What did you learn from Ferb?"
She thought about it.
"That he's sharper than he looks," she said. "And that he already suspects something. Not what — just that there's a what to suspect." She picked up her mug. "He'll keep pulling at it."
"I can talk to him."
"Not directly." She shook her head. "He'll know someone told him to stop and it'll make him more determined. Ferb is the kind of person who gets worse when he's redirected." She glanced at me. "Give him something else to be curious about."
"Like what?"
"I don't know." She looked back at the city. "You're the one who knows him. You figure it out."
We stood in the quiet for a while.
Below us, someone was walking home with shopping bags, the plastic handles catching the streetlight. A couple sat on the bench at the corner, leaning toward each other in that particular way of people who had decided to be warm despite the cold. The city made its sounds. Ordinary sounds. Engine noise and distant voices and the ambient hum of a place that didn't know or care about drone factions or encrypted data or the particular weight of a Thursday that was two days away.
"He called you an ice witch," I said.
Bella turned her head.
"Not to your face," I said. "The general they. The school version of you."
"I know what they call me."
"Does it bother you?"
She thought about it. Actually thought, the way she did with questions she was taking seriously.
"No," she said. "People name things they don't understand. It's how they manage uncertainty." She paused. "I'd rather be called something I didn't earn than something I did."
I turned that over. Didn't say anything.
"Ferb called me terrifying," she added. "To the person next to him, when he thought I couldn't hear. He said it like it was a compliment."
"Was that better?"
The almost-smile again. The one that lived behind her eyes and only occasionally made it to her face.
"Much," she said.
The night settled around us. The city kept going. We stayed on the balcony until the cold made staying impractical, talking about small things — whether the campus café's afternoon menu was deliberately worse than the morning one, what Alden's navy coat concealed if anything, whether Dr. Mirela had always been a teacher or had arrived at it from somewhere else entirely.
When she went inside, the partition clicked shut softly.
I finished my coffee standing there alone, watching the city's lights reflected in the windows of the building opposite.
Thursday was two days away.
Right now it was Tuesday.
And Tuesday had been, by every reasonable measure, a good day.