CHAPTER 205: 205: THE FIRST SEMESTER XXVIII

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He opened his eyes. The jungle was still the jungle. Teachers still measured, students still whispered, and the ironwood still made a shape on the ground like a black sail. Only one thing had changed, and it had changed everything: the world leaned.

Pebbles twitched toward his boot. A fallen leaf that should have drifted left took a sudden interest in his right knee. Even the sleeve of his coat tugged inward with the faintest greed. It was gentle —gossipy, not grabby— but it was there.

Fizz saw the leaf make its wrong decision and gave a soft, delighted gasp. "Oh. Oh, that is new."

"It is," John said. He kept his voice ordinary. He was not going to make a sermon out of a breath.

Ray limped over with the gait of someone who refused to admit he was tired. He stopped, blinked, and watched a bead of water roll off a blade of grass, hesitate, then run in a tiny curve to touch John’s boot. "Is the ground... fond of you now," he asked, baffled rather than afraid.

Rhea approached from the other side like a soldier approaching a shrine: respectful, skeptical, unamused by theatrics. She halted a safe arm’s length out of noble habit and looked him up and down with the eyes of a fighter cataloging assets. Her red ribbon lifted as if to sniff the air and then tilted a finger closer than the wind should have asked it to. She steadied it with one gloved hand. "You changed," she said simply. "You feel different."

John nodded. "Circle three." He did not add the rest. He did not say gravity. He did not say empathy. He did not say the word attraction out loud in a forest full of young people.

Fizz, on the other hand, lived to ruin everyone’s composure. "He is now the center of a very small tasteful universe," he confided to the branch, to the proctors, to the future. "Do not panic, but your shoelaces may begin to worship him."

Ray looked down at his boots. He had no laces. He looked relieved anyway.

One of the late arriving teachers glanced over, saw four figures not bleeding, and returned to counting scorch marks. Another student —a boy whose fan of knives had clearly been more fan than knives— stared at John like a pilgrim deciding whether a candle was worth buying. The jungle breeze moved. It moved toward John.

Rhea set her jaw and took one measured step backward. "Demonstrate," she said. "Small. Then we plan."

John raised his right hand, palm outward. He imagined the pull as a lens rather than a void — curving, not erasing. He made it a cup rather than a black hole. The new skill answered like it had been waiting for the compliment. The air thickened in a soft ring around him. A scatter of pebbles trembled, hopped, and rolled inward until they clicked together at his boot.

Ray’s scarf —an unnecessarily fashionable strip he had pretended he did not own— tilted in, then tugged at his own throat. He yanked it loose, cheeks pink. "It is definitely... something."

Fizz floated with a scholar’s solemnity that he abandoned after three seconds. "Name it something dramatic. Gravity Embrace. Magnificent Pull. All mighty pull."

"No," John said at once.

Rhea’s ribbon leaned toward him a finger and then another. She noticed herself lean before the cloth did and made a small sound of irritation at her own body. "You are pulling more than stone," she said, low. "It is not a charm. It is instinct. Like the way a fire takes air out of a room and all the doors complain about it later."

John throttled the field to a narrower band. The pressure eased. The leaves on the ironwood stopped acting like shy students. The ribbon fell back into obedience. He exhaled, slow and grateful. "I can control it," he said.

"Good," Rhea said. "Do it always."

Proctors finished their mutters. A warden with a ledger declared, with the solemnity of accountants and gods, that Team Lord Fizz’s tally would be audited in the camp by sunset. A dozen students drifted nearer to the accident because their feet made little decisions without their permission now. Fizz noticed the drift and did not scream with laughter, which meant he was growing as a person.

John kept the field tucked tight to his chest like a secret.

"Explain to me," Fizz whispered, hair standing with excitement as if his fur had read the advisory before John could hide it. "What do you feel, and do not be clever. Be useful."

John kept his words calm and general, the way a careful man talks about the weather. "Weight in. Not heavy. Firm. Like the world agreed to stand closer when I ask. If I push, it pushes. If I cup, it pours. If I forget the shape, it decides on its own."

Ray listened with the face of someone trying not to be impressed and failing. Rhea listened with the face of someone who was impressed and refused to reward him for existing.

"Try an object," Rhea ordered. "Not a person. Not a scarf. Certainly not me."

John pointed his open palm at a split branch, half buried in the churned loam. He set the pull small, the way you put one finger into water before you agree to a swim. Wood shivered. Dirt loosened. The branch rose from its grave, turned once, and slid through the air into his hand as if gravity itself had given it a polite escort.

Fizz clapped without shame. "Yes. Good. You have become a janitor for the laws of motion."

Ray let out a low whistle. "Could you pull a blade from someone’s hand."

"Yes," John said. "If I make the field tight and ask nicely. If they hold on, I will bring them too."

Rhea nodded. "Use that. Pull ankles. Pull wrists. Do not pull hearts unless you mean to." She paused, eyes narrowing as she studied the faint shimmer around him that others would never notice until they felt it. "And keep that other effect leashed."

"I will," John said.

He did not say the name of the other effect. He did not say empathy because the word felt like stealing a choice from a mouth. He did not say attraction because he could already feel the way the air wanted to mistake him for a sweeter version of himself and he did not intend to encourage that sort of confusion. He set his jaw and kept the pull as close and small as a ring.

Students from another team craned their necks. One girl with a braid so tight it had opinions squinted at him and then looked away very quickly, cheeks heated by a sun that did not exist. A boy whose armor was mostly confidence took two steps toward John and then remembered he had somewhere else to be and left with dignity in a hurry. The proctors felt nothing because their lives were made of rules, and rules are heavier than most magic.

"Move," Rhea said, practical again. "We have to get to the proctor post, turn in cores, collect the smug looks we are owed, and sleep for many hours."

Ray tucked his scarf into his coat like it had done something wrong. Fizz drifted backward, threw a last glance at the ironwood (which, to be fair, had begun visibly leaning), and stage whispered, "Do not flirt with the tree. It is beneath you. Also above you. That is how trees are."

Fizz said with a low voice, "You can only pick up less hot girls. I will be the hottest one when I am done with my plans."

They made the short walk to the temporary camp where tents had been arranged with military spite and barrels of water steamed in the sun. The head proctor, a bear of a man whose smile was rumored to be an elective available only to seniors, stood at a trestle table with a ledger the size of a paving stone. He looked them over, counted bodies, counted cores, checked the seal on each core pouch, and grunted in a way that might have been praised in a different language.

"Survived," he said. "Good."

"Flourished," Fizz corrected, then pretended to be a lantern when the man’s eyebrows suggested he could be used for kindling.

Cores logged. Names marked. A chalk tally was added under Lord Fizz’s team tag and the chalk broke, which Fizz took as a blessing from the gods of petty symbolism.

While Ray fetched water and Rhea sharpened patience along with steel, Fizz floated to John and hovered nose to nose. His eyes were bright and his voice, for once, dropped the joke like a coat. "How much of that can you turn off."

"Enough," John said.

"Turn off more," Fizz said gently. "Until you can walk through a hall without giving an entire class an excuse to fall in love with a wall. Not because I am jealous. Because you are already in trouble, dear man, and you do not need to be gravity flavored on top."