Ravian paused for a moment before answering her.
"Because I lost consciousness inside the central building after hearing the name of one of the Taboos, then vanished for several days and came back with a completely different body," Ravian said. "If you had been in Sir Karius’s place, what would you have done?"
"I would have listened to you first," Lysandra said with slight hesitation.
"And then?"
Ravian pressed, and both of them knew perfectly well that wasn’t all she would have done.
Lysandra didn’t answer right away.
"Then I would have examined your soul to make certain you hadn’t been exposed to contamination or possession," Lysandra said.
Ravian nodded, but he still wasn’t satisfied.
"Is that all, Lysandra?" Ravian asked, looking deep into her eyes.
Lysandra met his gaze, but hers was nowhere near as steady as his.
"...And worse than that, the fort commander would have stepped in personally, since you might turn out to be a future disaster if their suspicions proved correct," she said at last.
"And that is exactly what I wasn’t prepared to allow," Ravian said.
Lysandra scowled.
"You didn’t trust Sir Karius in the first place," she said.
"This isn’t about trusting him as a person," Ravian corrected her. "Sir Karius isn’t just my teacher; he’s also a commander, and he’s responsible for an entire border city. Even if he believed every word I said, he wouldn’t be able to ignore the possibility that something deeply tied to one of the Taboos had walked into his camp inside his own student’s body."
"...He would have protected you," Lysandra said.
"Maybe." Ravian said it flatly, without the slightest hint of emotion.
The word came out with a calm that bothered Lysandra more than an outright refusal would have.
It seemed he didn’t trust Sir Karius—no, it seemed he barely trusted anyone at all.
"But you didn’t even give him a chance," she said.
"I wasn’t prepared to lay my life on an examination table just to find out whether he’d protect me or not, Lysandra."
Her gaze hardened.
But Ravian didn’t take back a word of it.
He was grateful to Karius, and he knew perfectly well that the man had treated him far better than he was obligated to, but he wasn’t prepared to hand himself over to anyone on the strength of gratitude alone.
Even if that person happened to be his teacher.
Because Karius was the very same man who had once come close to killing him after hearing Ravian rave about his own death inside that old, crumbling house.
So how was he supposed to willingly hand himself over to a man like that, knowing full well he wouldn’t be able to resist if Karius ever made a decision Ravian couldn’t accept?
"That’s why I stayed hidden underground for a while and then started looking for a route out of the region that didn’t pass through the official gates," Ravian continued.
Lysandra’s eyes stilled for a moment in mild surprise.
"The evacuation passage," she said.
It wasn’t a question.
Ravian looked at her, then nodded.
"The evacuation passage," he confirmed.
"So you were the infiltrator who breached the fort," Lysandra said in utter disbelief.
"Yes," Ravian said with lethal simplicity, as though he hadn’t breached one of the most important and secure locations in the entire City of Light—if not the single most secure of them all.
The confession came out so plainly that it left Lysandra staring at him for several seconds.
Perhaps she had expected him to evade the question for a while longer, or at least deny it until she’d laid all the evidence before him, but he did neither.
"And were you the one who beat up that boy who came with the supply cart, that Bimbo or whatever his name was?"
"Yes," Ravian said, scratching the back of his head in feigned remorse.
"And you’re the one who set off the Final Evacuation Alarm across the entire fort?"
Ravian was silent for a moment.
"...What alarm?" he asked, genuinely bewildered for the first time.
Not the slightest change came over Lysandra’s face.
"You triggered the Final Evacuation Alarm in a border fort, which caused a crisis across both the fort and the camp, and then you swam through a secret passage all the way to the capital right under the fort commander’s nose."
Lysandra said it, and with every word, she felt as though she herself were raving.
"When you put it that way, it sounds a little worse than it actually was," Ravian said with a frown.
"It was literally the worst thing you could possibly have done," Lysandra answered with a flat expression.
"...That’s fair." Ravian nodded in acknowledgment.
Lysandra continued staring at him coldly.
"Did you hurt anyone else inside the fort?"
"Not really," Ravian said.
"Did you take anything?" Lysandra asked.
"Not really." Ravian gave her exactly the same answer.
Lysandra’s scowl deepened at the strangeness of his answers, but she continued regardless.
"Did you enter any restricted military areas beyond those on the route you needed to take?"
"I didn’t go into the room behind the golden door, if that’s what you’re asking about," Ravian answered, having gathered from the way she’d phrased the question that she knew the route he had taken in detail, likely based on the fort’s investigation and the timing of the alarm she’d mentioned, which had gone off immediately after he left.
"All I wanted was to get away from the border without being caught, before I understood what had happened to my body," Ravian said, maintaining the performance he had woven from truth and falsehood into a mixture no one could pull apart. "I wasn’t working on anyone’s behalf, and I had no intention of harming the fort or the city."
Lysandra nodded once.
It seemed she believed at least that much.
"And then I reached the capital," Ravian said.
"And then you entered the Ninth District," Lysandra finished for him.
His gaze settled on her.
"It seems all of you figured out more than I expected." Ravian smiled with feigned warmth.
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