Mira’s current survival strategy is simple: aggressive denial.

  She convinces herself that if she avoids Adrian long enough, reality will just reset to default. A part of her wants to cave. She wants to call Clara, to ask about the Celestial Bloom and this sudden, terrifying fairy crisis. But her finger hovers over the screen, paralyzed. Is the line even safe?

  Not that it matters. The truth is, Clara has gone strictly radio silent—vanished, ghosting her completely.

  So Mira is left banking on the only hope she has: that yesterday was just a lucid nightmare. A glitch in the system. The bloom can’t bloom twice... right?

  Morning classes barely finish before Mira makes a beeline for the study room. She's great at memorizing stuff in her head, but everything clicks way faster when she talks it out. She loves to broadcast and dissect her ideas at full volume. She lives for that intellectual friction—basically, she needs a human sounding board to debate until her logic is actually bulletproof.

  She goes directly to the window bays—a coveted row defined by massive, slanted wooden beams and floor-to-ceiling glass looking out onto the green. Every seat along the continuous desk is taken by students already in crunch mode, their faces illuminated by the small, warm mushroom lamps as they aggressively attack their projects. Mira pokes her face around the wooden frame, scanning the line of many backs, and luck is on her side—she spots Elias immediately at his usual station.

  Elias sits alone at the back table, surrounded by a respectable fortress of law textbooks, highlighters, and an almost-empty coffee cup. His brow is furrowed in concentration, eyes moving across a dense page of legal commentary, when the door creaks open.

  “There you are!” she says brightly, already making her way inside with her tablet and a stack of notes pressed to her chest. “I’ve been looking for you.”

  “I need a study partner,” Mira continues.

  “No,” Elias says immediately, without missing a beat.

  Mira blinks. “You didn’t even hear me out!”

  “You don’t need a study partner, Mira,” Elias replies, setting his pen down. “You need an unpaid audience with stamina and a working knowledge of post-colonial theory.”

  She pouts, lips curling into a dramatic frown. “You’re so heartless. Just fifteen minutes.”

  “That’s a lie and you know it.”

  She places her notes dramatically on the table, like she is laying down a challenge. “Elias.”

  “No.”

  “I’ll owe you one.”

  “No.”

  She crosses her arms. “You used to be nicer.”

  “You used to ask me to be your study partner for ‘just a moment.’ It turned into an hour of you passionately debating yourself while I sat there wondering if I’d ever see sunlight again.”

  She groans, flopping into the chair across from him. “You’re so dramatic.”

  “And you’re exhausting.”

  “Ten minutes.”

  “No.”

  “Five.”

  Elias raises a brow. “I have exams, too. You think listening to you analyze international diplomatic discourse isn’t emotionally taxing?”

  “Fine,” she huffs, gathering her things again. “But don’t come begging me to explain geopolitical polarization when the world collapses.”

  Elias snorts. “If the world collapses, I’m blaming your caffeine intake.”

  Mira shoots him a deadpan look. “Please. I’m running on water and chocolate milk. If I added caffeine to this system, the university would have to evacuate the building.”

  Mira finally stands up, balancing her notes and tablet in her arms like a scholar-princess retreating from battle.

  As she turns to leave, the hem of her oversized sweater sways behind her. A whirlwind in disguise, Elias thinks—equal parts fierce and chaotic, with just enough charm to make even her exasperating traits endearing.

  His eyes follow her until the door clicks shut behind her.

  It wasn’t the first time she’d pulled the "study partner" bait-and-switch.

  He leans back, and the image comes back to him—Mira last year, running on nerves before the Vermillion entrance exams. She’d asked for "just a moment," and he, with the tragic optimism of a crush, actually thought it might be a date.

  Instead, it was a one-woman seminar.

  For over an hour, she sat cross-legged on his floor, notes spread out like a conspiracy theorist's map, ranting about the international system like she was personally feuding with it. Her hands moved as fast as her mouth, citing scholars and dissecting cases at Mach speed—fierce, unstoppable, and annoyingly magnetic.

  Elias hadn’t said a single useful word.

  He remembers sitting there, totally faking it, nodding along like a bobblehead while his brain slowly melted. He was a law student, for god’s sake—he knew torts, not whatever this nonsense was. Eventually, it hit him: Mira didn’t need his input. She just needed a blast radius.

  That was also the moment he knew he was screwed. Liking Mira wasn’t a crush; it was a liability. She was a hurricane in a hoodie. Brilliant, but absolutely exhausting.

  Unauthorized duplication: this tale has been taken without consent. Report sightings.

  A walking safety hazard.

  ?

  Mira settles into the middle of the room, sliding into the tiered, curved rows of seats that fan out around the stage.

  Stupid Elias. Who needs him anyway? Fine, be like that.

  She forces her attention to the stage. It’s the daily lunch seminar. Conrad Falk, the Senior Environmental & Sustainability Advisor, stands beneath the projection: “When Sacrificing the Environment Becomes a Political Necessity.” She is here specifically for this.

  It’s a brutal topic. She has to see exactly how he handles the balance between ecological duty and development.

  Five minutes in, Conrad already turns the seminar into a battlefield. He provokes the entire room, challenging them to a debate.

  "We cannot eat forests," Conrad declares, pacing the stage. "Europe straightened the Rhine to fuel the industrial revolution. Was that a mistake? No. It built the modern world. We sacrifice the tree to save the economy."

  The intellectual friction thrills Mira—it’s a rush of pure dopamine.

  She stands up, hand high, ready to contribute. She has the perfect counter-argument. But just as she prepares to speak, a very unexpected figure appears and claims the empty seat right next to her.

  In the middle of the room. In the middle of the attention.

  Mira pauses, her hand still raised. All eyes turn instantly to her left.

  It is him. Adrian Vale.

  Her thoughts stumble. Why is he here? And why must he sit right next to her at this exact moment?

  Conrad is looking at her, eyebrows raised, waiting for the challenge.

  She blinks, forcing the distraction aside. She clears her throat, pulling her focus back to the stage.

  "Professor, the Rhine floods faster and harder than ever before," she says, her voice clear in the silence. "They gained farmland for a generation, but they stripped the sponge. Without the floodplain forests to hold the water, they turned a heavy rain into a bullet train. Look at the recent floods in Germany—towns wiped out because the water had nowhere to slow down. I don't think they built an economy; they built a funnel."

  Conrad stops pacing. He waves a hand, smiling indulgently. "You’re conflating weather with geography. We are currently at the peak of Solar Cycle 25. High solar activity drives evaporation and extreme precipitation. The floods are a celestial inevitability, not a forestry issue."

  Mira catches the shift in Conrad’s expression. His eyes snap past her, locking onto the figure at her side, and suddenly the man looks thrilled.

  Adrian raises his hand.

  "The solar maximum accounts for a four percent increase in global precipitation volume," he says, his voice carrying easily to the back of the room. "But the removal of the riparian vegetation in the Rhine valley increased the hydraulic velocity of the river by over three hundred percent."

  He leans forward, engaging Conrad directly.

  "The systematic destruction of those floodplain forests began in 1817. They built the economy on that land for a century, and the bill came due in 1986 with the Sandoz chemical spill in Basel."

  He ticks the consequences off, a cascade of failures.

  "Toxic chemicals entered the river. Wildlife died en masse. Drinking water systems shut down. The loss of the natural forest destroyed the soil memory. That requires a five-hundred-year cycle to recover. The species loss is permanent. The hydrology is irreversibly altered because floodplain forests depend on seasonal flooding and groundwater interaction. It mobilized political will in Switzerland, Germany, France, and the Netherlands to finally admit the truth: sacrificing the ecosystem for the economy was a miscalculation."

  Conrad chuckles, leaning against the podium.

  "A five-hundred-year recovery cycle," he repeats, shaking his head. "That is a beautiful timeline for a geologist. But it is useless for a Prime Minister."

  He scans the room, engaging the students.

  "My argument is not about what is ecologically sound. It is about what is politically necessary. You are talking about soil memory; I am talking about voter memory. If you do not straighten the river to ship the grain, the people starve this winter. The government falls this week. You cannot legislate for a five-hundred-year future if you do not survive the present. The destruction was not a mistake; it was a ransom payment."

  The seminar continues with a sharp back-and-forth of counter-arguments. Mira holds her own, but she still doesn't understand why Adrian is sitting here or why he chose to stand on the same team as her. As soon as the bell rings, Mira gathers her stuff, walking straight toward Conrad to continue the aftermath of the debate. She needs those final answers from him in person. The second she pushes back from her desk, he’s up too. She heads toward the stage to corner Conrad, but she can feel Adrian right at her heels, a constant, looming presence that makes the back of her neck prickle with heat.

  But if Mira thinks the seminar stage is the finish line, she is dead wrong. Adrian seems to have decided to follow her everywhere around the campus until she finally caves and talks to him. She speeds up her pace, her boots clicking sharply against the pavement, but he’s just there—a silent, celebrated ghost trailing her every turn.

  Finally, she hits her breaking point. Mira stops dead in her tracks and spins around, looking up at him. She sighs dramatically, her chest heaving as she prepares to let him have it. But before she can get a single word out, Adrian speaks, and the words almost make her faint.

  "Your laptop is still in my room," he says, his voice flat and professional as if he’s reading a data sheet. "Don’t you want to get it? Also your other stuff."

  Mira squeezes her eyes shut so hard she sees stars. Urggg. Does this guy have any filter? Does he know what he’s doing? Before he can say anything else that might completely ruin her reputation, she lunges forward and grabs his wrist. She yanks him toward a side exit path, dragging him behind a heavy door and into the shadows of a deserted corridor. She is totally losing her cool now.

  "Of course I know that!" she hisses, her face flushing a deep, panicked red as she looks up at him. "Do you need to tell the entire campus that I stayed at your room last night?"

  "So can we talk now? I mean, in my room?" Adrian asks.

  Mira exhales, her head dropping back for a second because this guy is actually hopeless. She whispers sharply, keeping her voice low and dangerous. “Do you have any idea how insane this looks?!”

  “If you had answered my messages or agreed to talk in private, I wouldn’t have needed to come here.”

  “You—”

  Mira lets out an exasperated noise, her fingers curling into tight fists as her patience reaches its absolute limit. “You are driving me crazy.”

  "I am not driving you anywhere," Adrian says, sounding confused by her choice of words. "I am just asking for my conversation. And you are the one who pulled me into a dark corner, Mira."

  The narrow exit path feels smaller by the second, and the heat from his body is making it impossible to think straight. She realizes she is still clutching his wrist, her fingers dug into his skin, but he hasn't even tried to pull away. Mira slowly lets go of him, completely out of words. She stares at him for a long beat, her chest tight with exhaustion.

  "Ok. Fine, I'll go," she finally says, her voice sounding flat. "Just... can you stop following me around?"

  Adrian looks directly into her eyes, his expression becoming intensely serious in a way that surprises her all over again. "No. Your condition is critical and I can't just leave you alone now. If you have no class, can we just get back to the dorm?"

  Mira is speechless. She lets the silence stretch between them for several seconds, searching his face to make sure he isn't joking, but there isn't a single trace of humor in his gaze. He actually thinks she’s a walking emergency.

  She gives in with a heavy sigh. "I need to pass by the Honors Program Office to submit my volunteer registration form and the health check for the upcoming Conference. And you," she points a warning finger at his chest, "stay outside. Do not follow me into the office."

  Adrian nods once, and the tension in his jaw seems to ease. He stands there, waiting for her to lead the way, already clocked into a new role as her personal guardian.