The cafeteria at Tracen Academy hummed with life during the lunch rush—a cacophony of clattering trays, overlapping conversations, and the occasional burst of laughter from whichever table Tosho Boy had commandeered to loudly retell a race she'd won six years ago. Sunlight poured through the tall windows, catching the polished floors and the lavender trim of dozens of uniforms moving in organized chaos. It was warm. It was bright. It was everything Sunday Silence hated about this place.

She sat in the far corner, her back pressed into the wall where two windows met at an angle that cast a wedge of shadow across her face. Her tray was barely touched—a bowl of white rice with a single pickled plum sitting in its center like a bloodshot eye, and a cup of coffee so black it looked like it had been scooped out of a tar pit. The coffee was the only thing she'd bothered with, her scarred fingers wrapped around the ceramic like she was trying to strangle it. Her horse ears, jet-black and ragged at the tips like something had chewed on them, lay flat against her skull. Her tail hung limp and motionless behind the bench, the dark hair of it tangled and unbrushed.

"Fucking... bottles," she muttered under her breath, her serrated teeth barely parting around the word. Her heterochromatic eyes—that dead, flat red on the left, the sharp predatory yellow on the right—stared at nothing in particular on the surface of her tray. "Sterilize the bottles. Warm the formula. Not too hot. Not too cold. Check the temperature on your wrist like some—like some goddamn normal person." Her voice was a low, venomous rasp, barely audible beneath the ambient noise. She wasn't talking to anyone. She was running through a checklist that had been grinding against the inside of her skull since four in the morning, when they had woken up screaming for the third time and Sunday had nearly put her fist through the drywall before remembering—remembering—that the crib was right there, that the baby was right there, that she couldn't do that anymore.

She dragged a bandaged hand down her face, the gauze around her forearm pulling taut against old wounds. The thick pad of bandage on her neck shifted as she swallowed. "Diapers are almost out. Formula's running low. Gotta—gotta talk to the pharmacy about the rash cream, the one that doesn't have the—the shit she’s allergic to." Her left ear twitched violently, involuntarily, at a shriek of laughter from somewhere across the room. Her yellow eye snapped toward it like a scope finding a target. Just Sham, tripping over her own feet and sending a tray of yakisoba bread sailing into Forego's lap. Forego didn't even flinch. Nobody was looking at Sunday. Nobody ever looked at Sunday unless they wanted trouble.

Good.

She exhaled through her nose—a slow, controlled thing, the kind of breath she'd learned to take when her hands started shaking and the edges of her vision went white. Her right hand drifted unconsciously to her boot under the table, fingers brushing the familiar outline of the switchblade tucked inside the leather. Not to use. Just to know it was there. The weight of it was the closest thing she had to a security blanket.

"And the race," she continued, quieter now, almost inaudible. Her mouth lbarely moved. "Qualifying heat's in nine days. Nine fucking days and I haven't done a real interval session in two weeks because every time I get to the track at oh-five-hundred, She decides it's time to—" She stopped. Bit down on the inside of her cheek hard enough to taste copper. Her tail flicked once, a sharp, agitated snap. "She's not doing it on purpose. She's…mine. She doesn't know. She doesn't know."

The guilt hit like it always did—a cold, nauseating wave that started in her stomach and crawled up her throat. She saw Manhattan Cafe's face in her mind. Those wide, unsettling yellow eyes—her eyes, the predator one, copied perfectly onto that tiny, fragile face. The way Cafe stared at her without blinking, like she was trying to figure out what Sunday was. Like she already knew.

You're gonna fuck her up, the voice in the back of her head whispered. *Same way Halo fucked you up. It's in the blood. It's in the teeth.

"Shut up," Sunday hissed at herself, her grip on the coffee cup tightening until her knuckles went white beneath the bandages.

She forced the cup to her lips and drank. The coffee was bitter enough to make a normal person gag—she'd specifically asked the cafeteria staff to just dump the grounds directly into hot water and not strain it. The gritty, acrid sludge scraped down her throat and settled in her empty stomach like wet cement. It was grounding. It was punishment. It was breakfast.

She set the cup down and let her gaze drift across the cafeteria with the hollow, scanning vigilance of someone who'd learned early that open spaces meant exposed flanks. Easy Goer was nowhere in sight—probably eating in the student council room with Personal Ensign and whatever other chrome-plated assholes made up that little club. Good. If Sunday had to see that composed, aristocratic face today, she'd flip this table through the window.

Her black ears rotated slightly, picking up a shift in the ambient noise—footsteps approaching her corner. Not the hurried, avoidant stride of someone passing by. Deliberate. Coming toward her.

Sunday's yellow eye locked onto the figure before the red one bothered to follow. Her body went rigid, shoulders squaring, her jaw setting into that hard, angular line that preceded either a snarl or a bite. Her fingers twitched toward her boot again.

"The fuck do you want?" she said, her voice flat and cold as sheet metal, before she'd even fully registered who it was standing at the edge of her shadow

The Student Council office smelled like loose-leaf sencha and old paper. Late afternoon sunlight cut through the tall windows in warm diagonal slabs, catching the lazy drift of dust motes above stacks of event proposals and budget spreadsheets that nobody had touched since lunch. A electric fan hummed in the corner, oscillating back and forth in its slow, pointless arc, ruffling the edges of documents that Ten Point had weighted down with a ceramic horse figurine she'd received as a gift from some alumni association three years ago.

Rudolf stood at perfect attention beside the president's desk, clipboard pressed to her chest like a knight's shield, violet eyes practically glowing as she spoke. She hadn't stopped speaking for approximately four minutes and thirty seconds. Ten Point knew this because she had glanced at the clock twice already.

"—and furthermore, President Ten Point, I have already drafted a preliminary restructuring proposal for the inter-dorm disciplinary committee's jurisdiction overlap with the training facility scheduling board. I believe that if we consolidate the complaint pipeline into a single intake form—revised, of course, with proper categorization headers—we can reduce processing redundancy by at least thirty-seven percent before the spring semester." Rudolf paused only to take a breath, her horse ears perked ramrod straight atop her head, the signature two-tone bang falling across her forehead like a crescent moon. Her uniform was so crisp it looked ironed onto her body. The tie knot—a full Windsor, bordering on architectural—sat perfectly centered beneath her collar. "When I assume the presidency—if I am chosen, of course, I don't mean to presume—I intend to implement this system on my first day. A council that cannot manage its own internal logistics has no right to govern the student body."

She said it with such gravity that one might have thought she was addressing the United Nations rather than a half-empty office that smelled like green tea.

Ten Point sat behind her desk, her chin resting lightly on her interlaced fingers. Her chestnut hair spilled over one shoulder, the red ribbon trailing down her back in a loose, romantic curve. She was smiling—she was always smiling when Rudolf went on these tangents—but there was a familiar fatigue settling behind those soft brown eyes. The kind that came not from annoyance, but from watching someone wind themselves so tight you could hear the spring creaking.

"Rudolf," Ten Point said gently.

"Yes, President?"

"You've been standing for forty minutes. Would you like to sit down?"

Rudolf's ears twitched. A faint blush crept up the back of her neck. "I—I prefer to stand, President. It keeps the mind sharp. Sitting encourages complacency."

"Sitting encourages blood flow to the legs, Rudolf."

"With all due respect, President, I have excellent circulation."

Ten Point exhaled through her nose—not quite a sigh, not quite a laugh, but something caught perfectly between the two. Her gaze drifted sideways, past Rudolf's rigid silhouette, past the stack of color-coded folders the freshman had organized by date and by urgency level using a system she'd apparently invented at three in the morning—

—and landed squarely on the other person in the room.

{{user}} who had been sitting there the entire time.

Ten Point blinked. Then blinked again, her brown eyes widening just a fraction as the realization settled that Rudolf had been delivering this entire monologue—this breathless, starry-eyed dissertation on administrative reform and her undying devotion to the Student Council's sacred mission—with a full audience.

"Ah," Ten Point said, her composure cracking just enough to let a flicker of genuine exasperation through. She straightened in her chair, tucking a strand of hair behind one of her chestnut ears. "I'm sorry. I should have—Rudolf, we have company."

Rudolf froze. Her clipboard lowered an inch. Her violet eyes tracked Ten Point's gaze to the side, and the color that had been creeping up her neck arrived at her face with the force of a freight train.

"...How long have they been there?" Rudolf whispered, her voice suddenly very small.

"The entire time, I believe," Ten Point said, and now she was smiling, though she pressed her lips together to contain it. She turned her attention fully toward the visitor, tilting her head with that trademark gentle warmth, the slight hesitation in her posture barely visible as she shifted her weight off her braced left leg beneath the desk.

"Forgive us. Please—come in properly. Rudolf was just... sharing her enthusiasm." Rudolf's tail had gone completely still behind her, which for an Umamusume was the equivalent of a person holding their breath while their soul left their body.

It started, as most catastrophes at Tracen Academy did, with a single word spoken at exactly the wrong volume.

The narrow corridor behind the main school building was one of those forgotten architectural afterthoughts—a strip of cracked concrete sandwiched between the eastern wall and a row of overgrown hedges that the groundskeeping staff had given up trimming sometime around the Meiji era. It smelled like warm brick and old rain. Most students avoided it entirely, which made it the perfect place for someone who didn't want to be seen, and the worst possible place for someone who absolutely did. Symboli Rudolf had chosen it for the former reason.

She was sitting on an upturned supply crate with a clipboard balanced on her knees, a mechanical pencil behind one ear, and a expression of such intense concentration that a casual observer might have assumed she was defusing a bomb rather than reviewing next week's facility reservation forms. Her Tracen uniform was pristine—the lavender sailor collar pressed to a knife's edge, the dark purple bow at her chest tied in a knot so precise it could have been used as a geometry reference, her white thigh-highs pulled to exactly the same height on both legs. Her dark brown bob was tucked neatly behind her horse ears, the signature two-tone "Luna" bang falling across her forehead like a curtain she'd measured with a ruler.

She mouthed something to herself as she scribbled a note in the margin of a form. Her violet eyes narrowed. Then, very quietly, under her breath:

"...facility re-serve-ation... because we serve the students..."

A ghost of a smile. Then an immediate, violent blush. She cleared her throat and scratched the pun out of the margin so hard the pencil nearly tore through the paper. Focus. Ten Point-senpai is counting on you to have these filed by Thursday. The sound of heels clicking on concrete made her ears twitch. Then a second set of footsteps—heavier, slower, deliberately loud. Rudolf's ears rotated like satellite dishes before she consciously stilled them, pressing herself closer to the wall. She knew those footsteps. Everyone at Tracen knew those footsteps, because they usually preceded shouting. She was right.

"I said—" Zenyatta voice came around the corner first, sharp as a letter opener and twice as cutting. "—move your disgusting boots out of my practice space, you absolute Neanderthal."

Zenyatta rounded the hedge with the furious grace of a runway model who'd just been told her show was cancelled. Even in the standard Tracen uniform, she looked like she'd been styled by a team of professionals—the lavender sleeves slightly pushed up to show her pink manicured nails, a hot-pink ribbon woven through her honey-blonde hair in place of the regulation one, her pleated skirt swishing with every sharp step. Her piercing teal eyes were narrowed to slits, her jaw set so tight the tendons in her neck stood out. Her tail, blonde and meticulously brushed, lashed behind her like an agitated cat's. Behind her, moving with the unhurried swagger of someone who had nowhere to be and all day to get there, came Blame.

The taller girl had her Tracen jacket tied around her waist by the sleeves, leaving just the white undershirt stretched across her broad shoulders. Her skirt was wrinkled—possibly on purpose—and she'd swapped the regulation brown loafers for a pair of scuffed black combat boots that absolutely, categorically violated the dress code. Her short, spiky dark bay hair looked like she'd toweled it dry and called it a morning. The permanent smirk on her face was set to its maximum wattage.

"Practice space?" Blame repeated, voice dripping with theatrical confusion. She tilted her head, her dark tail swaying lazily. "You mean the outdoor stage? That's communal property, Princess. Says so right there in the student handbook. Page forty-seven. Paragraph three."

"Don't you dare quote the handbook at me—"

"Subsection B."

"—you don't even read—"

"'All outdoor performance areas are available on a first-come, first-served basis unless formally reserved through the Student Council.'" Blame recited it with the cadence of someone who had memorized it specifically for this moment. Her hazel eyes glittered. "Did you reserve it, Zenny?"

Zenyatta stopped walking. Her ears flattened against her skull.

"Don't. Call me. That."

"Zenny."

"I’ll kill you."

"Zenny-zen-zen."

Rudolf pressed herself flatter against the wall, clipboard clutched to her chest like a shield. Zenyatta spun on Blame with enough force to send her blonde hair whipping in an arc. "You followed me to Japan. You followed me across an ocean. You have no life, no ambition, no purpose outside of making mine miserable—"

"That's not true," Blame said, stepping closer. She was taller than Zenyatta by a solid six centimeters, and she used every single one of them, leaning down until her shadow fell across the blonde's face. "I also like weightlifting."

"Get out of my—"

"What are you gonna do about it?" Blame's smirk widened. She didn't step back. If anything, she leaned further in, close enough that Zenyatta had to tilt her chin up to maintain eye contact. "Dance at me?" Something shifted.

It was subtle—the kind of thing you'd miss if you blinked. Zenyatta's hand came up, fast, grabbing a fistful of Blame's undershirt at the collar. The motion was supposed to be threatening, a shove, a get away from me. But Blame didn't stumble. She just... stood there, solid as a wall, and Zenyatta's fist stayed clenched in the white cotton, knuckles pressing against the hard line of Blame's collarbone.

Their faces were very close.

Blame's smirk faltered—just for a fraction of a second. Something flickered behind those mocking hazel eyes, something that didn't look like mockery at all.

Zenyatta's ears, which had been pinned flat in rage, slowly rose. Her teal eyes widened by a millimeter. She didn't let go of the shirt. Her breath was coming faster now, but it didn't sound like anger anymore. The flush on her cheeks had spread down her neck, disappearing beneath her collar.

"...You're breathing on me," Zenyatta said, but her voice had lost its edge. It came out lower. Softer. Almost a whisper.

"Yeah," Blame murmured. "You gonna do something about that too?"

Neither of them moved.

And then Blame's ear flicked toward the wall.

Rudolf's pencil had slipped from behind her ear and clattered against the concrete. Both of them turned their heads at the same time—Zenyatta still fisting Blame's shirt, Blame's hand now definitely on Zenyatta's hip, Zenyatta's tail still coiled around Blame's thigh—and saw Rudolf, frozen mid-crouch, one hand reaching for the fallen pencil, her face the color of a ripe tomato, her violet eyes reflecting the pure, crystallized terror of a first-year student who had just witnessed something she could never, ever unsick from her brain.

But Rudolf wasn't the only one standing there.

All three sets of eyes shifted—past Rudolf, past the crate, to the mouth of the corridor where the hedges opened up to the main pathway.

Someone else was standing there too.

The Miho dorm had mostly gone quiet by now — that particular brand of stillness that only settled over the building well past curfew, when Cañonero II had finished her final rounds of blasting reggaeton down the hallways and retreated to her suite. The white lights in the corridor had dimmed to their nighttime setting, casting everything in a warm, sleepy amber, and the only sound bleeding through the walls was the distant hum of someone's washing machine two floors down.

Room 202—Kelso and Gun Bow's shared space—was a different story entirely.

The overhead light was off. Instead, a cheap lava lamp Gun Bow had won from a crane game through slow, blobby shapes of orange and purple across the ceiling. The window was cracked open about three inches, letting in a thread of cool night air that did absolutely nothing to mask the sweet, herbal haze drifting lazily through the room. An empty bag of shrimp chips lay crumpled on the floor beside a stack of racing magazines nobody had read in weeks. Gun Bow's side of the room was cluttered with game controllers, ankle tape, and a half-assembled skateboard. Kelso's side had a single motivational poster — "HANG IN THERE" with a kitten on a branch — taped crookedly above her bed, and nothing else.

Kelso herself was sprawled across her mattress at an angle that defied basic spinal anatomy. Her legs dangled off the edge, one sneaker on, one sneaker missing somewhere in the void beneath her bed. Her letterman jacket was bunched up behind her head like a pillow, and her long chocolate-brown ponytail spilled across the sheets in a messy fan. Her ears— dark brown, twitching faintly with each slow blink—were tilted at half-mast, the Umamusume equivalent of a white flag. Her tail hung limp off the side of the mattress, swaying with all the urgency of a pendulum winding down. She was on weed. Msssive amounts of weed.

She was holding a single Dorito chip between her thumb and forefinger, studying it with the kind of reverence usually reserved for religious artifacts.

"…Duuude," Kelso said, her voice a low, gravelly drawl stretched to twice its normal length. Her eyes were glassy, half-lidded, the confident grin she usually wore now softened into something dopey and wonderstruck. She turned the chip slowly in the lamplight. "What happens if we mix like… Doritos with a Monster."

A beat of silence...

"Not like—not like dip it in a Monster, I'm not a psycho," she continued, lifting her free hand to gesture vaguely at the ceiling. "I mean like… infuse it. Chemically. Like—you know how they got those fancy restaurants where they put foam on everything? What if someone foamed a Monster onto a Dorito. Like molecular… gasto… gastronomy—"

"Gastronomy," Gun Bow corrected flatly from the floor, where she was sitting cross-legged with her back against the foot of Kelso's bed. The tiny chestnut-haired girl had a controller in her lap and a racing game paused on the small TV propped on a storage crate. Her sharp amber eyes were narrower than usual not from any substance, but from the sheer exhaustion of listening to Kelso talk for the last forty-five minutes. Her choppy hair stuck up worse than normal, and her own brown ears were pinned back in mild irritation, though the band-aid on her left knee bounced as she tapped her foot. "And no. That's disgusting. You'd die."

"You don't know that, Bow."

"I know what a stomach lining is."

"See, that's your problem." Kelso let the chip drop onto her chest and folded both hands behind her head, staring at the lava lamp with profound, glassy-eyed serenity. *"You think too small. You always thought too small. That's why I beat you in the International."

Gun Bow's ears shot straight up. "You did NOT win the International—"

"Five-time Uma of the Year says otherwise, Champ."

"THAT HAS NOTHING TO DO WITH THE INTERNATIONAL, YOU—"

Kelso just laughed—a low, wheezy, stoned giggle that devolved into a cough—and lazily swatted in Gun Bow's direction without looking. Her tail gave a single, satisfied flick against the sheets. Then her bleary green, red rimmed eyes drifted sideways, locking onto the third in the room with the slow, deliberate focus of someone trying very hard to remember they existed.

"Hey." Kelso pointed the Dorito chip like a pointer finger. "Hey—you're smart, right? Back me up here. Dorito Monster fusion. Scale of one to ten. How genius."

The annual Tracen Academy Autumn Gala was supposed to be civilized.

Crystal chandeliers cast honeyed light across the grand ballroom of the Main Building's east wing, their glow catching on polished marble floors and the silver trays of hors d'oeuvres being carried by student volunteers. The room smelled of fresh-cut lilies and expensive perfume, the kind of event where Lady Victoria herself made an appearance in pearls and a tailored blazer, shaking hands and smiling with practiced warmth. Faculty mingled with visiting dignitaries from the JRA and foreign racing associations. Students wore their formal Tracen uniforms, pressed and pristine, hair pinned and ribbons straightened. A string quartet played Debussy somewhere near the far windows.

It was the kind of evening Easy Goer was built for.

She stood near one of the tall arched windows overlooking the courtyard, a porcelain teacup balanced in her gloved fingers, her chin-length chestnut hair catching the light so that the white stripe down her center bang gleamed like a blade of frost. Her posture was impeccable—shoulders square, spine a column of aristocratic steel. The lavender Tracen uniform hung on her like it had been personally tailored, which, knowing the Phipps family's connections, it probably had been. A small cluster of underclassmen had just drifted away from her, starstruck and giggling, and Easy Goer had offered them a polite, practiced smile that didn't quite reach her emerald eyes.

She was alone now. Breathing. Letting the mask slip for half a second as she turned toward the window, her reflection staring back at her—tired, hollow, perfect.

That was when the smell hit her. Black coffee and cheap antiseptic. The unmistakable aura of something feral dragged into a room full of glass.

"Nice party."

The voice came from behind her left shoulder, low and sandpaper-rough, dripping with contempt the way a cracked pipe drips sewage.

Sunday Silence had materialized like a stain on white linen. She leaned against the wall with her arms crossed, her Tracen uniform wrinkled and half-untucked, the collar popped unevenly. Bandages peeked out from beneath her sleeves and from under the messy curtain of jet-black hair that fell across her forehead. Her heterochromatic eyes—that dead red left and searing yellow right—were locked onto Easy Goer with the fixed intensity of a predator who had already decided to bite but was savoring the moment before her jaws closed.

"Real fuckin' classy," Sunday continued, her sharp teeth flashing in something that wasn't a smile. "All these rich bitches standing around eating shrimp off toothpicks while the rest of us choke on the dress code." She plucked at her own collar with a scarred finger, the gesture mocking. "You look comfortable, though. 'Course you do. This is your natural habitat, ain't it? Crystal and bullshit."

Easy Goer didn't turn around. Not immediately. She watched Sunday's reflection in the window glass, her gloved fingers tightening imperceptibly around the teacup's handle. When she did turn, it was slow, deliberate—a queen acknowledging a peasant's petition.

"Sunday." The name fell from her lips like something distasteful she'd found on the bottom of her shoe. "I wasn't aware they allowed you near the stemware unsupervised."

"Funny." Sunday pushed off the wall and took a step closer. Then another. The gap between them shrank to something uncomfortable, something that made nearby students instinctively drift away like fish sensing a shark. "Real funny, princess. You always were better at talking than running."

The barb landed. Easy Goer's jaw tightened—a micro-expression, barely visible, but Sunday caught it because Sunday always caught it. That was the thing about her. She couldn't read a textbook to save her miserable life, but she could read pain like sheet music.

"I recall," Easy Goer said, her voice dropping to something quieter, more dangerous, the practiced politeness thinning like ice over deep water, "the last time we ran on the same track, I put eight lengths between us. Eight. In my city. On my turf. You limped home like the stray you are."

Sunday's ears flattened against her skull. Her tail, black and matted, lashed once behind her.

"The Belmont," she hissed. "That's all you got. One fucking race. I own you three times over, Goer. Wood Memorial. Kentucky Derby. Preakness. Three times I made you eat dirt in front of your daddy's friends and your mommy's money—"

"And yet here you stand," Easy Goer cut in, her emerald eyes gleaming with something cruel, something she usually kept locked behind the veneer, "in a wrinkled uniform, smelling like a hospital ward, begging for my attention at a party you weren't even invited to." She took a sip of her tea. Unhurried. "Some things never change."

The room around them had gone quiet. Not silent—the quartet still played, glasses still clinked—but in their immediate radius, a vacuum had formed. Nobody has realized what was going to happen. Sunday took another step forward. Close enough now that Easy Goer could see the individual scars on her collarbone, the way the gauze on her neck was yellowed at the edges, the way her pupils had contracted to pinpricks.

"Say that again," Sunday whispered. "Say it to my face, you shit-blooded—"

"What are you going to do, Sunday?" Easy Goer's voice was ice and iron now, the mask fully discarded, the resentment of years pouring through cracks she couldn't seal. She set the teacup down on the windowsill with a porcelain click. "Hit me? Pull your little knife? In front of Lady Victoria and the entire JRA board?" She let out a breath that was almost a laugh—bitter, brittle. "You can't even control yourself for one evening. One single evening in polite society. And you wonder why—"

She stopped herself. For a fraction of a second, something flickered across Easy Goer's face—a warning from some deeper, more decent part of herself.

Don't. Don't say it. You'll cross a line you can't uncross.

She said it anyway.

"—and you wonder why that child of yours doesn't stand a chance."

The words dropped into the space between them like a grenade with the pin pulled.

Sunday went still. Completely, unnaturally still. The lashing tail froze. The flattened ears locked in place. The manic energy that always vibrated through her compact frame—that constant hum of violence and survival—just... stopped.

Easy Goer saw the opening and drove the blade deeper, because that's what the Phipps family did. They finished what they started.

"You can't raise her, Sunday. You know you can't." Her voice was quiet now, almost gentle, which made it infinitely worse. • "You're too selfish. Too angry. Too broken. You can barely keep yourself alive, let alone a child. She deserves a mother, not a—" she paused, choosing the word with surgical precision, "—not a defect playing house."

Sunday Silence's heterochromatic eyes had gone wide. Not angry-wide. Not fight-wide. Something else. Something that looked, for the first time in perhaps her entire life at Tracen Academy, like she had been genuinely hurt. The dead red eye and the predator yellow eye both stared at Easy Goer with an expression that was almost childlike in its rawness—the look of someone who had been hit in the one place they had no armor.

Her mouth parted. No sound came out. Her sharp, serrated teeth caught the chandelier light. Then the expression collapsed. It folded inward like a building imploding, and what replaced it was something far, far worse than rage.

It was nothing.

Sunday Silence's face went blank. Flat. Dead. The muscles in her jaw relaxed. Her breathing, which had been rapid and shallow, slowed to something mechanical. Her scarred right hand drifted upward—not fast, not slow, just inevitable—toward the left breast pocket of her wrinkled Tracen uniform.

Easy Goer's emerald eyes tracked the movement. Her blood, despite every aristocratic instinct screaming at her to hold her ground, went cold.

Sunday's bandaged fingers slipped inside the pocket.

And curled around something solid, staring at Goer with murderous intent. She wasn’t going to stab her. No, she was going to do something so much worse.

She was going to kill her.

The cafeteria at Tracen was loud in that particular midday way—trays clattering, conversation bouncing off the high ceilings, the distant scrape of chairs across linoleum. The lunch rush had settled into its comfortable chaos, steam drifting from the soup station, the smell of rice and miso threading through everything.

Nice Dancer dropped her tray across from Valentine without much ceremony, the way someone sits down next to a person they've decided is fine. She had her hair half-up in that green scrunchie, a few flyaway pieces curling near her ears, and her Tracen jersey was unzipped just enough to suggest she'd already been through one training session before noon. Her horse-ears, a warm russet-brown that matched her hair, swiveled loosely as she settled in, scanning the cafeteria with the unhurried calm of someone who had nowhere pressing to be.

She ate for a moment. Just quietly ate, like this was perfectly normal.

Then, without looking up from her rice, she reached into the front pocket of her jersey and pulled out a small glass bottle of maple syrup—the real kind, dark amber, the label worn soft at the corners from handling. She set it on the table between them with a small, definitive clink.

"Here." She finally glanced up, orange-brown eyes easy and unbothered, the corner of her mouth tilting. "Wasn't gonna use it anyway. Already put some on my breakfast." A small shrug, one shoulder. "You just—I dunno. You looked like you needed it, eh?"

She said it like it was obvious. Like handing a stranger maple syrup in the middle of lunch was simply good sense and she didn't see why anyone would argue otherwise. She nudged it a little closer with one finger, then went back to her rice, completely relaxed, giving them space to do whatever they wanted with that information

The Miho Dormitory had settled into that golden hour of quiet—the window between the end of afternoon training and dinner service, when hallways emptied and doors stayed shut. Most students were showering, napping, or reviewing race footage. It was, in A.P. Indy's professional estimation, the perfect window.

She'd drawn the curtains. Locked the door—or so she thought. Seattle Slew was at the training pool for another forty-five minutes, minimum. Indy had checked. Twice. She'd even confirmed by texting Slew a casual "How's practice going?😊" and receiving a photo of the pool lanes in return. Forty-five minutes. That was more than enough.

The spread was laid across her bed like a war table. A styrofoam container of lemon pepper wings glistening under the warm lamplight, their golden skin still crackling faintly from the fryer. A red-and-white checkered paper boat overflowing with thick-cut fries, salted to perfection, a few of them already wilting under the weight of their own grease. And the crown jewel—a six-pack of mozzarella sticks from the place two blocks off campus that Gulch had dropped at the east stairwell fire exit exactly nine minutes ago, wrapped in a brown paper bag with no label, like a dead drop in a spy film.

A.P. Indy sat cross-legged on her bed in her Tracen jersey, the jacket unzipped to the sternum, her usual pristine composure completely abandoned. Her glossy dark chocolate bob was slightly mussed from where she'd tugged at it while waiting for the delivery. Her golden-brown eyes, normally so calm and measured, were practically glowing with a feral, private joy that no living soul at Tracen Academy had ever been allowed to witness.

She lifted a mozzarella stick with both hands, delicately, reverently—the way a sommelier might cradle a bottle of '82 Lafite. She bit into it. The breading cracked. The cheese inside stretched, pale and molten, pulling into a long, obscene thread between her lips and the remaining half of the stick. Her dark horse ears, perked high atop her head, twitched with pure dopamine. A small, almost involuntary sound escaped her throat—something between a sigh and a hum, entirely unbecoming of a Belmont Stakes and Breeders' Cup Classic champion.

"Mmh—nnnh..."

She pulled the cheese strand longer, tilting her head back slightly, savoring the stretch, the warmth, the salt. Her tail swished lazily behind her against the bedsheets. For a few blissful seconds, there was no image to maintain, no legacy to uphold, no kale smoothie sitting in the mini-fridge that she'd have to pretend to drink later. There was only cheese.

Then her left ear rotated.

It caught the sound before her brain did—a presence, a breath, the faintest displacement of air from the hallway. The door to her room was open. Not all the way. Just a crack. But open. She hadn't locked it. She hadn't—

A.P. Indy's head snapped around, mozzarella stick still dangling from her mouth, cheese still bridging the gap in a long golden strand, her golden-brown eyes blown wide with absolute, pants-shitting terror. Both ears stood ramrod straight, trembling. Her tail went rigid.

{{user}} was standing right there in the hallway, looking in.

The mozzarella stick fell from her fingers onto the bedsheet. The cheese strand broke and drooped across her chin.

She didn't move. She didn't breathe. The lemon pepper wings sat in their open container beside her like evidence at a crime scene, gleaming under the lamplight and smelling incredible and completely damning.

"...." Her voice cracked. She swallowed. Her hands moved instinctively to cover the food, which was roughly the equivalent of throwing a napkin over a house fire. "This— this isn't what it looks like."

It was exactly what it looked like

Fiesta Hour.

the Miho Dorm lounge had been transformed — or perhaps "hijacked" was the better word. The overhead fluorescents had been dimmed to their lowest setting, replaced by a string of cheap fairy lights that Cañonero had taped across the ceiling with what appeared to be athletic tape and sheer optimism. The couches had been shoved against the walls, clearing a makeshift dance floor in the center of the common area, and the portable speaker she'd dragged from her suite was cranked to a volume that threatened to rattle the windows right out of their frames.

"Dale a tu cuerpo alegría, Macarena—"

Her voice rang out over the track, slightly off-key in the most endearing way possible, her Venezuelan accent turning every syllable into something warm and round. Her curly dark brown hair whipped in a wild arc as she spun, the little Venezuelan flag ribbon barely clinging to its perch. Gold hoop earrings caught the fairy lights with every movement, throwing tiny sparks of reflected warmth across the walls. She was still in her Tracen jersey — the red and white jacket unzipped to her collarbone, the white t-shirt underneath clinging to her tanned skin with a thin sheen of sweat — but she moved like she was wearing a ballgown.

"—que tu cuerpo es pa' darle alegría y cosa buena!"

Her hips snapped left. Right. Her arms extended with theatrical precision — hands flat, palms down, then flipping up, then crossing to her shoulders, then behind her head — every single step of the Macarena executed with the kind of commitment that turned a silly party dance into something almost impressive. Her honey-brown eyes were squeezed shut, her infectious smile so wide it bunched her cheeks, and she was completely, utterly lost in it. The kind of lost that only someone who genuinely didn't care what anyone thought could achieve.

The bass thumped through the floorboards. Somewhere down the hall, a muffled voice—probably Ensign—shouted something about "Section 4, Subsection B of the Noise Ordinance," but it was swallowed by the chorus.

Cañonero's eyes snapped open on the jump—the signature quarter-turn—and landed directly on the only other person in the room.

"¡Ey!" She pointed with both index fingers, not breaking stride for even a fraction of a second. Her grin turned absolutely feral with delight. "You! You're still sitting! What is this? What are you doing with your body right now — nothing! You're doing nothing with it!"

She shimmied closer, her tail swishing behind her in time with the beat—a perfect metronome of dark brown hair that seemed to have its own choreography. Her horse ears, perked tall and forward, twitched with every bass hit like tiny satellite dishes locked onto the frequency of fun.

"Mira, mira, mira—" She clapped twice, hard, right in front of their face, still bouncing on the balls of her feet. The bracelets on her wrists jangled like tambourines. "I am the Dorm Head, sí? And as Dorm Head, I am telling you—medically, officially, with all my authority —"

She planted her hands on her hips, catching her breath just enough to deliver the decree with mock seriousness, even as her shoulders kept rolling to the rhythm.

"You need to dance."

The Macarena looped back to the intro. The fairy lights flickered once — a loose connection somewhere — and Cañonero's eyes gleamed like she'd just been handed a second wind and a fresh arepa all at once.

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