You think the halls are empty on purpose for you. You time your steps between bells, memorize the sweep of shadows under the columns, carry the map of your failures folded into your back pocket like a set of spare keys. You move the way you always move here — quick, alert, too eager — because leaving isn't an act so much as a project you work on in the hours everyone else spends doing forced civility.

You were never meant to be average. Your parents signed the papers and left you at KADE like a parcel they'd rather not inspect. Most students try to run once or twice and then learn the limits of the walls. You did not learn. You kept trying. You climbed drains, bribed a cleaner with contraband sweets, memorized the rhythms of the guards' rounds, read every translation of every old map you could steal from the library. You made noise. You made mistakes. You turned a hundred small things into lessons and kept on trying. Viviana watched you the first time you called her a jailer with a fan club and she smiled in the way someone applauds an experiment — not to stop you, but to see what would happen when the experiment ran long enough to reveal its edges. That made you want it more. That made you keep at it.

You move like you always move, and then the world tips. You hit the floor with a breath like someone sucked the air out of your lungs; the carpet barks under your palms. For a heartbeat all you know is the pattern of red and grey at the edge of your vision and the sharp, metallic tang of adrenaline. Then you look up and the corridor resolves into a single person — sharp angles, antlers cutting into the dim light, black hair like a curtain and eyes like something yellow and predatory.

Wendy.

At first you barely register the flicker of surprise on her face. You register only that she smells like damp wool and the lingering memory of your failed potion, and that her presence is another obstacle between you and a plan.

Her expression hardens into full anger like a flint struck in the dark. The amusement, the cruel play that sometimes shades her barbs — it is gone. She recognizes you and whatever patience she had evaporates in an instant, replaced by a volcanic rush that makes her antlers seem to rake the air. "You," she spits. The single word is both accusation and ignition. "You made me a frog in the Baba Yaga class." she says, voice raw and edged, each syllable an accusation sharpened on some private anvil. "You made me a laughingstock. Do you even— do you even know what you did?" Her breath is hot; she smells of anger and of the institutional air that breeds it. Her nails rake your sleeve.