The dormitory round had started as cover.
Steven had told himself it was reconnaissance — learning the layout, mapping the building, the kind of practical orientation that any sensible person would undertake in an unfamiliar place. This was true. It was also true that his hands had, somewhere between the third corridor and the fourth, begun quietly annexing things into his inventory with the calm efficiency of someone who had discovered a new hobby and was still in the enthusiastic early phase of it.
A book from an unattended windowsill. A pen. A small decorative object whose purpose he couldn't immediately identify. A scarf hanging from a door hook.
The inventory accepted everything without judgment.
He had turned a corner and found the boy — broad, familiar, the same boy from the canteen whose foot had met Steven's with such productive results earlier in the day. He was sitting against the wall of the corridor with a lunch box open on his lap, eating with the focused attention of someone who had found a quiet corner and intended to use it.
Steven had looked at the lunch box.
Then, with the precise, unhurried movement of someone doing something they have decided to do, he reached out and directed the lunch box into his inventory.
It disappeared.
The boy looked down.
Looked at his hands, which were now holding nothing.
Looked at the floor, where the lunch box was not.
Looked at the wall. At the ceiling. At the floor again.
His face went through several expressions in quick succession, each one more complicated than the last, until it arrived at the specific expression of someone who has exhausted the available explanations and is now standing at the edge of something they don't have words for.
His eyes went wet.
Steven watched him for exactly three seconds.
Then he put the lunch box back.
It reappeared in the boy's hands with the same quiet efficiency with which it had left them. The boy stared at it. Turned it over. Opened it, checked its contents, closed it again.
And Steven felt something happen inside him — something that had nothing to do with thinking and everything to do with the body's response to a specific kind of experience. Warmth. Moving faster than usual. A speed that hadn't been there a moment ago.
He stood in the corridor and took stock of it.
*The potion,* he thought. *It's digesting faster.*
He turned the observation over carefully. He had returned the lunch box at the moment the boy needed it most — not just as an object, but as the specific object, at the specific moment, to the specific person for whom its absence had caused the most distress. The storage ability had not simply held the item. It had, in returning it, performed something that was more than storage.
*Provision,* he thought. *It doesn't just hold. It provides. The right thing, to the right person, at the right moment — that's what accelerates the digestion.*
He looked at his inventory.
Several items that now needed to go back to people.
---
He found Draken's tissue papers in his inventory sometime later, which was when he remembered having taken them from the washroom on that particular floor, which was when he registered that Draken had gone to that washroom approximately eight minutes ago and had not come back out.
Steven walked to the washroom door.
Knocked.
"Occupied," came the response, with the strained dignity of someone managing a situation that had become more complicated than anticipated.
"I know," Steven said.
A pause.
"I have your tissue papers," Steven said.
A longer pause.
"Why," said Draken's voice, with the careful enunciation of someone who was choosing to focus on language because the alternative was focusing on the situation.
"I took them earlier. I'm returning them."
"You took my—" Draken stopped. Restarted. "Why did you take them?"
"I was testing my storage ability."
"And why are you returning them?"
"Because you need them."
"Then why did you take them in the first place?"
Steven considered this question.
"I didn't plan far enough ahead," he said honestly.
A very long pause.
"Pass them under the door," Draken said, with the resignation of a person who has decided that understanding can wait and practicality cannot.
Steven passed them under the door.
From inside the washroom came the sound of someone who was going to have several questions later and had decided to file them for the appropriate moment.
Steven walked away.
He returned things to people for the next forty minutes — quietly, without announcement, restoring each item at what seemed to be the moment of its owner's maximum need. A notebook returned to a girl who was frantically searching her bag before a deadline. Boots returned to a boy standing in the corridor in socked feet looking increasingly bewildered. The scarf returned to its hook before its owner arrived to collect it, so that she found it exactly where she expected and never knew it had been anywhere else.
Each return accelerated the warmth in his chest by a degree.
*Provision,* he thought again, cataloguing it. *The ability is called Storage but its function is provision. That's the real nature of it. That's what S9 actually does.*
---
He was at his window when the last of the evening light turned the sky the specific color that exists only in the minutes before full dark — orange and grey and something that wasn't quite either.
He looked at the plants in the courtyard below.
They needed water. He could see it from here — the specific droop of something that was thirsty, the dullness of soil that had been dry for longer than was good for it.
Steven looked at the tap in his washroom.
He looked at the plants.
He opened a portal inside the washroom, positioned it over the tap, and let it run. Water moved into his inventory — held there, contained, the storage accepting liquid with the same equanimity it accepted everything else. Then he opened a second portal at his window, angled downward, and directed the water through.
It fell in a clean arc onto the plants below.
He watched them receive it.
Then he leaned back from the window and looked at his hands — at the two portals he was holding open simultaneously, which was something he had not been able to do this morning, which meant the afternoon's work had produced something measurable.
He closed both portals.
Sat on the edge of his bare mattress — bare because everything was in his inventory, which was a situation he had created and was now living in — and looked at the middle distance with the expression of someone who has just understood something.
*I am,* Steven thought, with the particular satisfaction of a person who has earned a conclusion through evidence rather than assumption —
*Genuinely quite clever.*
He held this thought.
Turned it over.
Examined it from several angles.
Found it, on balance, accurate.
"I didn't know until today," he said aloud, to the empty room, in a voice that was both sincere and aware of itself, "how much of a genius I am."
The room did not respond.
This was, he felt, the correct response.
He lay back on the bare mattress, folded his arms behind his head, and stared at the ceiling in the dark with the quiet contentment of someone who has had a productive day and knows it.
*Tomorrow,* Shivani thought, somewhere behind his eyes.
*Tomorrow, find out what Steven Green did that made this school what it is for him. Find out what the principal actually wants. Figure out the mythical creature blood situation.*
*But tonight —*
She looked at the ceiling.
*Tonight it's enough.*
---
*End of Chapter Fourteen*