Page 30 of The Amber Sunburst

“Can I help you?” Alexander asks.

“You just got here and you’re already making a fool of yourself. Not sure if I want your help.”

Alexander smiles, a scathing, mean thing. “Oh, buddy. If you have an inferiority complex, you could just say so.”

No one seems to like Horse-face very much because snickers erupt around the room. The only people who don’t laugh are the two lackeys sitting on either side of him and another boy in the back who looks too stern to be entertained by shenanigans like this.

Kallias doesn’t laugh either, too busy pretending to be apathetic toward the world, but Alexander can see in the way the corners of his mouth tilt that he’s amused.

Then an older woman struts into the room and silences the chatter with a powerful clap. She rises to her podium, scratching numbers on the board without a glance at her class.

“Today we’re looking at vector calculus and convergence,” she explains at top speed. Then, not looking away from the board, she says, “Before we begin, I know we have a new recruit here today. Stand up for us, will you?”

He stands.

“Name?”

“Alexander.”

“Welcome, Alexander. Sit. If you need help, ask a classmate after the lesson.”

“Sounds go⁠—”

“Let’s dive right in.”

When they open their textbooks, Alexander bites back a smile. Maybe this is obnoxious, but surely he’s already proven himself to be arrogant, so who cares. Alexander is great at math. He doesn’t even really have to try; something about him is wired to just get it.

His brother hated him for it. He thought it made his successes less impressive—he studied for hours while Alexander didn’t even open the book.

Part of him thinks that he was meant to be the treasurer and not the King of the Holy American Empire. But instead, he’s neither, and his entire country thinks he’s dead. Which is just great.

He needs to stop thinking about home; it does him no good.

The teacher lectures, assigns practice problems, and reviews the answers in a predictable, near-meditative cycle. Until she breaks the pattern.

“Kallias,” she says, after ten minutes of work time for a particularly sticky problem.

“Here we go,” Eudoxos groans quietly next to him.

“Ma’am,” Kallias drawls, not disrespectful, but definitely not overly kind. His voice is low and intense and⁠—

Well, it fits his body.

“The problem on the board that we’ve been doing for the last several minutes. Do you have an answer?”

Alexander looks to Kallias’ desk two rows up from his own, and he very clearly has not been working on math, but has, in fact, been reading a book of his own choice. Not the one he was reading at breakfast, though. Did he finish that whole thing in the three hours between then and now?

Kallias doesn’t seem nervous at all despite being caught red-handed. He just bites his bottom lip and pushes his glasses into his hair. He squints for a moment, reading the problem, then says with complete confidence, “Well, since the limit of one over n plus three over n squared plus two over n cubed divided by twenty-seven plus fifty-four over n plus thirty-three over n squared plus six over n cubed equals zero, the series converges absolutely.”

The teacher sighs like this is a regular occurrence. “Correct,” she acknowledges begrudgingly.

Kallias nods, smug, before letting his glasses fall to his nose and going right back to his book.

She shakes her head and resumes her lesson.

Alexander doesn’t follow her lecture, though—he stares at Kallias instead. Even he had trouble with that problem, and he had ten minutes. It took Kallias five seconds and no paper. He did all the work in his head.

Eventually Kallias catches him looking and his brows rise slightly. When Alexander doesn’t do anything, he lifts one brow higher up.