Vince moved his eyes back to the redhead like I had already ceased to exist, which was fine. I was good at being underestimated. The plain had taught me that being underestimated was a resource if you knew how to spend it.
The weather outside the window was still wrong. Still cloudy in the specific way of clouds that hadn't been there five minutes ago.
"That's Vince," the blue girl said, without looking up from her book. She said it the way people say things they consider self-explanatory.
"That tells me his name," I said. "Not what he is."
"This is School Central," she said. "And that is Vince." She turned a page. "That's all you need to know."
[School Central is a vault, not a school. Wealthy parents hide high-threshold kids here to dodge government extraction. Most students are performing depletion. They're stronger than they pretend—and have been for years.]
I read it twice. Hiding in plain sight, I thought. Expensive camouflage.
The second ping hit immediately.
