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“Yes.”

Students passed by, glancing, pretending not to stare.

Daven leaned in and kissed him slowly. His hand moved to the back of Ryneth’s neck, fingers curling there, holding him in place just long enough for it to be seen.

Ryneth’s pulse spiked.

Daven pulled back, eyes dark. “Be good,” he said softly. “Sit. Learn. And wait for me to pick you up. Don’t make me come looking for you.”

Then he stepped away without looking back.

Ryneth stood there for a second, heat climbing under his skin, palms tingling, mouth still warm.

He turned and entered the lecture hall. Screens lined the front wall. A projection already glowed with diagrams of support frames and barrier arcs.

He slid into a seat near the middle.

The professor began speaking about storm-break structures, about atmospheric shields designed to redirect pressure rather than resist it outright, about walls that failed because they were built to stand alone instead of distributing force across a network.

Ryneth stared at the diagram.

For a second, the professor’s projection blurred into Cyprian’s charcoal wall. He opened his notebook to take notes, then paused and flipped back to the flower he had drawn. What had Daven called it?

The Solvine Bloom.

And he’d promised to send one to Tavi.

Ryneth’s fingers hovered over the drawing.

Maybe Daven meant it.

The hope came fast and stupid, and Ryneth shoved it down just as quickly. Still, for a second he imagined Tavi holding the strange flower, staring at it the way he used to stare at the stars through the cracked dormitory window.

He swallowed and shook his head.

Daven was cruel and cocky, but whatever Ryneth tried to make of him in his thoughts, his chest still fluttered.

Daven was going to reward him tonight.

Ryneth would be a good boy, take notes, and give Daven a full debrief of class. He would prove that he was meant to be an engineering student.

He wanted it so badly.

Ryneth looked back at the diagram on the board, at the barrier failing because its anchors held too hard instead of giving with the force against it.

The Ward had been built on that same idea. One line. One wall. One promise that if they held their ground, the danger would stay on the far side.

But in Cyprian’s drawing there had been nothing there.

Ryneth kept staring at the projection, his thoughts sliding back to Düren, to the rain that so often came in hard from somewhere beyond sight, to all those nights he had stood watch with a wooden stick in his hands and a knot in his stomach, waiting for the wrong thing to show itself first.

Maybe the threat had never been where they were told to look.

Maybe that was why this class hit so hard. It was not only numbers and structures and pressure paths on a screen. It was the first thing in a long time that made part of his old life line up with the person he might still become.

And for the first time since arriving on Helion, something in him settled. This was not only Daven’s world pressing in around him. This could be his too.

For the first time, hope didn’t feel like a trap.