The ranking board added Ren Lockwood's name at dawn.
A name on a board could be reward, target, or obituary. Ren Lockwood had become all three.
Not under servants.
Not under logistics.
Not under the invisible category where Astral Zenith placed every person who cleaned blood from training floors and carried tea to children who thought inheritance counted as personality.
A new line had been burned beneath Team Seven's provisional registry in pale silver script.
SUPPORT WITNESS: REN LOCKWOOD.
The Great Hall went quiet in the wrong way.
Not silent. Silence had weight. This was calculation pretending to be restraint.
Forks paused over plates. Gold-tier heirs leaned closer to one another without moving their chairs. Obsidian students stared as if someone had carved a door into a wall they had spent their lives accepting as stone.
Ren stood beside my table with a tray in both hands and all the color gone from his face.
His humming had stopped.
