“Ah! Finally!” Megan held up her slip of paper victoriously, handing me one of the two combination locks she’d been carrying with her since we got our locker assignments from the principal. “You take the one on top, I’ll take the bottom.” The reason, that she did not want me straining myself, went noticed but unsaid. I was not so stubborn as to protest, though the sentiment still weighed heavily against my already waning patience. The majority of the student body hadn’t even arrived yet, but the constant, echoing noise was already starting to become problematic. The smells were awful too, absolutely disgusting, but I was already too overwhelmed to try and manage another sense.

“You’re making that face again. Zel, you should really ask Alyssa or Issac for, you know, earplugs or something.” I nodded, though I knew I wouldn’t have to ask; Megan would surely have texted her about this predicament long before I saw her again tonight. I hated both the prospect of intentionally inhibiting my senses and going to either of the Elves for help, but my headache from yesterday had already returned full force and I knew I would not be able to tolerate it becoming a chronic issue.

Dragging out a long breath, I started depositing my belongings into the locker. Megan had given me all the notebooks, binders, textbooks, and folders I could possibly need for classes, but their combined weight was too much for me to shoulder in one trip, so a lot of supplies were still at our apartment, waiting to be brought in tomorrow. I doubted I’d need them today anyway, Megan had been certain of it, citing over and over that it‘s the first day and nobody does anything on the first day, Zel. I’d taken her at her word; it wasn’t like I had much in the way of comparison anyway.

“I could ask Ana, if you want, maybe she’d be able to do something,” she then quieted at the look I shot her. The corners of her lips twitched downwards, a frown you had to be looking for to really see. It was, however, obvious that she was trying not to roll her eyes. “Come on, Hazel, you can't keep holding it against her! She has no control over it, and if you just let her, maybe she’d be able to help—“

“Enough,” I snapped, “I do not want her help. I do not need her help. I don’t need any goddamn help.”

The word tasted so much like blood, I almost lifted my fingers to see if it was real.

The hesitation in her eyes made me sure she knew the precarious situation she had put herself into. We both knew I needed help, but to challenge me on the statement, especially in public and with so much of the day left to go, would certainly yield no decent outcome. On the other hand, to back down would have been an obvious show of pity. I couldn’t hardly tell which would have been a worse choice.

Fortunately, for both her and me, I was distracted by the same piercing, nearly-familiar smell from yesterday.

Megan opened her mouth to point it out, but I silenced her with a curt gesture, working past the painful ambiance of noise and trying to hear any sort of identifying characteristics of the scent’s source; a heartbeat, a tapping, any shuffling of textures against each other that could possibly give away the source. In the din, I couldn’t find anything, and frustration felt painfully like the tension in my jaw as my teeth ground together in concentration.

“Hey,” Megan’s light touch on my arm made me flinch instinctively, and she smiled an apology, trying to veil her nervousness behind assurance. “You may not like dealing with humans, but nobody would touch you with so many of them around to see it.” I grunted a lackluster confirmation, still tense and exceedingly snappish. “Come on, we still have to find our homeroom.”

“I know that smell,” I hissed between my teeth. The rest, the implicit danger of something I recognized, went unsaid.

“Would you rather go look?” She lowered her tone, and a tinge of fear slipped through her façade. I hesitated to nod because I knew I would be at an innate disadvantage against whatever the source was if it were hostile, and it likely was, though the pin-like tingle of suspicion threatened to remain as long as I was kept unaware.

Megan trailed behind me, elbows tucked cautiously beside her stomach, and her hands pressed together against her neck, nestled underneath her chin. She’d never quite grown out of that, not when she felt legitimately on edge.

Weaving through the growing clusters of humans, doing my best to do so as unobtrusively as I could manage, I was fully aware that despite my best efforts, I was attracting some attention, especially with Megan following so closely behind. Collateral damage was unavoidable, though I was already annoyed by the lecture I’d be receiving if Alïsï found out I was being reckless.

The smell was getting stronger, and I let myself fall into that well-worn rhythm of the hunt.

“You’re right, I know that smell,” Megan mumbled, her words muffled by her index finger, pressed against her lips.

I stopped by the corner of a hallway, where the scent had grown strong enough to be sure that the source was nigh tangibly close, and I strained my ears again against the din of disjointed conversations to find scraps of any pertinent information.

There were too many heartbeats to definitively say any one of them belonged to my target, and there was no sound of disturbed of textures unique enough to be of note.

There were only voices and the occasional movement of school supplies; wood against plastic, paper against metal, the feet of chairs against the tile floor.

I stepped around the corner, and still, there was nothing worth a second glance.

The source of the smell, whatever it was, was strongest around the doorway marked E214.

It was open, but I realized that in my focus, I’d missed the telltale scent and sound of both Tatiana Levison, and her two accompanying humans.

“Fuck,” I snarled, attempting to angle myself so I could see into the room without chancing breaching the Halfling’s orbit.

“At least, if they were going to be a problem, you would have known by now, right?” Untucking her arms and smiling as her shoulder sunk slowly back into a more relaxed posture, Megan gave me her best look of encouragement. If I knew her any less, I might have been convinced she had a part in inspiring this sort of dilemma; she knew I wouldn’t be able to settle for allowing the trail to cool before I got answers, and so I would have little choice but to face the Halfling again. I growled, more at my own inability to be sated by what information I already had than at the way Megan sucked in the corners of her lips to mask a smug grin and crept closer to the door.

The moment I could see inside the room, I knew exactly what, and who I had been following.

Black hair, broad grin, and a careless English accent; of course I knew who she was, and if the purposeful glance she threw me right as I entered her line of sight was any indication, she knew me as well.

She turned away to excuse herself from the conversation she had been part of —with Tatiana, I believe, but I couldn’t have been bothered to divert my focus for even a second— and made her way out to Megan and me in the hallway.

“You must be Hazel.” The combination of her accent, which she seemed to wear like an old wedding band, and the barely tempered look of grief on her face had me immediately sick to my stomach.

She was taller than me, perhaps by an inch or two, and I felt every hair’s-breadth of it as I glared up at her. I was frozen, immobile and cold, but burning through to my fingertip, building pressure like a kettle even as she seemed to realize her mistake and backpedaled with an apologetic half-smile.

“Sorry,” she sighed, looking at me with her lips pursed and unspoken, mismatched thoughts flickering in her eyes. There were far too many nuances about the way she watched me for me to hope to understand what exactly was going through her head.

“Why are you here?” I forced the words past the knot in my throat, and they came out distinctly hoarse. Megan’s hand brushed my arm, an appeal for me to curb my temper, and I swatted her away immediately.

“Student-teaching, actually. Your case is rather slow, so I’m enrolled in college here while Micha juggles international politics.”

When Megan realized I had no intention of responding, she cautiously put her hand back. This time, I let her. I was too preoccupied with untangling my thoughts to bother fighting with her as well.

“It’s so weird seeing you in person. I mean, obviously, everyone’s heard about you and you know, the whole reform thing, but it just never seemed real,” Megan chuckled quietly. Her voice was heavy and stuck to me like a thick, hot fog, though I couldn’t quite place the inflections of her tone; I knew the lilt of bewilderment that softened the obscure sentiment beneath, but the underlying somberness was colored by something else that I was unfamiliar with.

“I’d imagine. I’m Elle, by the way, or Ellie, if you’d like. Everyone here seems to know my sister’s name, but I’m a little less,” she paused, “I’m afraid I’m rather unexceptional.” A faint smile pulled the corners of her lips, but it seemed more like an imitation than a front, and it certainly did nothing to ease the weight that saturated her posture. She was completely still in the way that was blatantly a conscious effort, and her shoulders sagged, even as the muscles beneath were rigid.

Her eyes left mine only to take in the rest of my appearance, and while I stared back with defiance, I let her size me up. It always seemed to go that I would have to prove myself undeserving of the pity offered to me by anyone privy to the details of my history. I hated the process, but I found the grief of strangers far less pleasant.

Megan cleared her throat.

“Hazel, we should go find our homeroom.” Her touch turned insistent once she realized I had no interest in backing off of the other woman. “It was nice meeting you, Elle. Thank you for, you know, helping.” At her name, she finally stood down and leveled another askew smile at Megan.

“Don’t mention it, really. It’s about time you caught a break.”