Chương 33: Justice will be served

Just look at the poor girl, shaking just from the sight of that sexual predator. She can't even meet his eyes. Look at him looking around dispassionately - don't let his disabilities fool you. He was top of the class when it came to practical abilities. Even if he didn't directly kill Davan, he as good as sentenced him to death. And as if that wasn't enough, he had the gall to violate my daughter. - From the recordings of the hearing on 9th March, 5947 A. E Moghli walked back from Kara's block slowly.

It was not his usual pace, but his body had decided it was the right one for this evening. He had been running his Soothing skill continuously for the better part of an hour. It was a localised emission rather than a directed application when activated - a low-level field that reduced acute emotional distress in nearby individuals without their awareness of it. Sustaining it for that long had cost him. He was tired the way long skill use left him, a different exhaustion from the physical kind and slower to shake.

He had used the bottle as cover. The drink was from Saturn and added its own warmth, but did nothing else beyond that. His junior had needed something to hold, something that felt like it was doing the work, and the placebo had held - which spoke either to the power of suggestion or to how badly the boy had needed an exit from what he was carrying, and Moghli suspected it was the latter. He still hadn't fully processed everything the last hour had pressed on him. Particularly one astronomical reveal.

Ghilim Habuza's brother. He had held himself together on the rooftop through professional focus and the kind of compartmentalisation that his skill set supported. He had listened and responded and given Kara what the conversation required, and the entire time, underneath all of that, the part of his mind that was not occupied with doing it had been quietly losing its composure about who he was sitting next to. He was starstruck.

There was no more flattering way to put it, and he had no interest in flattering himself. He was a third-year student at a prestigious University who had been selected for the dungeon dive and who prided himself on equanimity, and he had spent the last hour sitting next to Ghilim Habuza's brother while maintaining the expression of a composed senior, and that had been one of the harder things he had done recently. Ghilim had been Monk's friend.

Well, atleast Monk had believed him to be, which was how Moghli had first encountered him. Through Monk's descriptions, then through seeing him directly, then through going out of his way to watch him train because Monk's descriptions had fallen so short. It wouldn't be a stretch for him to say that he had got to where he was today thanks to Ghilim. What he had learned from watching Ghilim could not have come from a class. The quality of his stillness and attention to his surroundings before he moved.

The way he processed a situation before anyone else had finished registering that a situation had occurred. The efficiency of everything he did. In fact towards the end, it felt like Ghilim always waited for him at his secluded training spot, in the building he had just taken Kara to, for Moghli to arrive before starting his practice. But that could've just been wishful thinking on his part. And then the trial. He stopped walking for a moment.

Even now, months later, thinking about it produced something in him that was a crude combination of anger and grief. Ghilim - who had never looked at anyone with anything warmer than neutral acknowledgment, the most wholly indifferent person Moghli had ever encountered - that Ghilim, accused of violation. The accusation was not just wrong. It was an insult to everyone who had ever actually known him.

How Lucianne had constructed this narrative around a man who had never once registered her existence, he would never understand. Moghli had gone around that question so many times he had worn a groove in it, and he still could not find the bottom of his contempt for it. He had sat in the hearing room for one session. One.

He had watched Tomas perform grief, and Lucianne sit with her shoulders turned inward in a way that Moghli had studied carefully and found unconvincing, and the lawyers build their structure around the gaps that Ghilim could not fill, and he had made himself stay in the seat and not say anything because saying something would have helped nobody and hurt everything. Monk had been worse.

Monk, who was constitutionally incapable of keeping his feelings off his face or out of his voice, who had shown up to the hearing room and made it approximately thirty minutes before he needed to be physically removed from the building before he said something that could not be unsaid. Who had, in the days after, seriously considered putting himself in the line of fire - giving testimony that would have moved the target from Ghilim to himself, accomplished nothing practically, and cost him everything.

It had taken four people and a considerable amount of time to talk him down from that, and even then it had not entirely taken, and Moghli had spent weeks monitoring him carefully. They had been helpless. That was what made it unbearable, not just the injustice of it, but the powerlessness of watching someone they respected be dismantled by a process engineered around his limitations, with nothing to use against it. When Ghilim escaped after the first hearing, Moghli had felt relief so strong it embarrassed him.

He wouldn't have been able to watch it continue any longer. Tomas' sudden reversal had come as a surprise. Whatever had happened - and Moghli had heard fragments, nothing confirmed - it had apparently been enough to make Tomas decide that the hunt was no longer worth the cost. Moghli had spent time trying to find out what had happened and had been unable to, which was itself informative. And now the brother had appeared. He had contacted Monk during the hour on the roof, while Kara was working through his emotions.

The response had been so immediate it was as if Monk had been waiting by his interface for this. Moghli had communicated the essential facts. Ghilim's brother. Here. Looking. What came back was a torrent. Monk did not communicate in measured sentences when he was moved, and he was very moved. He wanted to call immediately. He wanted to come in person that night. He wanted, evidently, to do approximately seven things simultaneously, each of them inadvisable for different reasons.

He had been blaming himself since the trial, had carried it as a weight that Moghli had watched him arrange his life around. The news that there was someone actively searching, Ghilim's brother no less, had hit him somewhere that produced volume and exclamation marks and a level of enthusiasm that Moghli had shut down immediately and firmly. If you spot this tale on Amazon, know that it has been stolen. Report the violation. No. Not yet. They would take it slow. They would give Kara what they had.

All of it, laid out clearly, without agenda. And then they would step back and let him decide what to do with it, because the one thing Moghli was sure of was that Kara did not need to be steered. He needed information and room, and they would provide both. And when the truth finally came out - when whatever Kara found cracked the case open and the full shape of it became visible - they would unleash their wrath. He had been patient for a long time. He was not going to be patient forever.

Kara came back to find Glasses sitting at the edge of his bed, wearing the look of a man left alone with a responsibility he had not agreed to and was not sure he was handling right. Waggy was crying. Persistently. He was too small for loud, but the focused commitment of something with an unclear problem and every intention of communicating it came through regardless.

Glasses was approximately two feet from the shell, looking at Waggy like a man who had been on the verge of action and frozen at the last second by the thought of doing it wrong. The feeding bottles were right there. Set out neatly, within reach. Untouched. Kara almost laughed.

He crossed the room, picked up Waggy, who responded to being picked up by crying even louder for approximately four seconds before locating the bottle Kara brought within range and latching on, priorities that had been clear all along now finally being met.

"You didn't have to just watch him," Kara said. Glasses looked relieved and slightly defensive in equal measure.

"I didn't want to feed him incorrectly."

"You'd have figured it out. He's not complicated about food." He looked down at Waggy, who was pushing both small paws against his hand in the direction of the bottle.

"Go on, you can touch him. He won't bite, you know. He literally doesn't have teeth yet." Glasses looked at him wryly. He moved in slowly, hand out, ready to pull it back at the first sign Waggy objected. He extended one hand, touched the tip of Waggy's fur, withdrew immediately, checked that Waggy had not reacted, and tried again. This time he ran his hand slowly down the cub's back. He stopped.

"The spots," he said.

"Air coming through them, yes."

"Is that the Elemental Pores skill?"

"That's my best guess. Beyond that I have no idea what it does. We'll probably have to wait until he's older." Glasses ran his hand over the spots again, wearing the look he saved for problems he meant to come back to.

"The wheels are turning," Kara observed.

"They're always turning." Waggy finished the bottle, pushed against the now-empty vessel in case there was more, found there was not, and fell asleep mid-investigation. He was very small and very warm and Kara had to reign in the temptation to squeeze the little bugger. The evening settled around them. Kara was aware of everything that had happened on the roof - Moghli's account, the shape of what had probably happened, the question he had asked that he was still not entirely at peace with asking.

For now there was Waggy, and Glasses' careful hands learning to move with more confidence over the small body, and the easy silence of two people comfortable enough together that it did not need filling. He would think about the rest tomorrow. The second semester started the next morning with the restless energy of something picking back up after a pause.

His Lifesciences class was smaller than the first semester - about twenty students, a mix of familiar faces and a few he did not recognise from his previous schedule. He was looking for Vixen as he arrived outside the classroom, found she was not yet visible, and realized he had been standing just outside the door longer than was strictly necessary when a tap on his shoulder nearly relocated his heart.

"Hey-ho." Vixen, at a volume calibrated for outside and deployed inside the corridor.

"What are you doing skulking out here creepily? Someone catch your eye?"

"I was trying to determine the best seating arrangement in case you were already inside and I needed to sit far from you," Kara replied.

"Should've known you'd be late."

"Some of us make an effort to look presentable."

"It's a Lifesciences lecture."

"And?"

"Please," Professor Peaches said from behind them, in the tone of someone who had heard this exchange in a dozen forms and found it charming precisely because it was so familiar.

"Whenever you're ready." They fumbled through apologies and found the nearest empty bench, Professor Peaches following them in with the small smile of a woman who had timed it perfectly. The lecture covered the semester's scope. Theory on animal biology at a level of detail that went well beyond the first semester, and practicals Kara found real promise in. They would be assisting the research laboratory with experiments. They would be responsible for caring for animals across their life cycles.

Domestic partners would be brought in for study, and captured injured wild animals would be brought in for observation, education and care. Kara listened with half his attention on the content and half on the question he had been turning over since Waggy woke him up at six in the morning. He knew what he wanted to do. He was not entirely sure it was the right call. After class, as they filed out and the corridor's traffic thinned around them, Vixen turned before he had decided to say anything.

"Something on your mind?" He looked at her.

"Was it that obvious?"

"EQ focus. You weren't exactly subtle." He was going to have to work on that. He glanced at the students still moving past them.

"Not here. Could we meet somewhere quieter this evening?" Vixen's smile turned teasing just as Kara realised what he had said.

"Ooh, exciting. My charm got to you already?" A couple of the students passing by slowed their paces. Kara grimaced, shooting her a glare.

"Alright, alright, you don't need to give me that death glare. Maybe pull down your eyebrows a little further. Yeah, that's it, now you look you could scare off a stray cat. Ugh, fine. Behind A-block, at the nursery. Seven?" He would get her back some day, he vowed. Just giving her the win today since he had other priorities. Yep, that was definitely why he was letting her go for now. He confirmed, noted the location on his map, and they went their separate ways.

He did not know yet exactly what he was going to show her. He knew that he needed help, and that she was the best source of it available to him, and that help required a degree of trust, and that trust required a decision. He had made harder decisions. He would figure out the right amount to give her tonight. The nursery at seven. He looked it up on the campus map and found it, a small marked area behind A-block that he had walked past twice without registering. Of course Vixen knew it existed. He had a few hours.

He went to find his Arts classroom.