Chapter 13: Professor Aldgate Breaks from the Script

The private sessions had been Aldgate's idea, or at least that was how it appeared on the scheduling notice — *supplementary perception development, voluntary, Tuesdays 4–5pm, Classroom 7* — written in her careful, evenly spaced hand, slid under the doors of six students whose names Elliot had noted and cross-referenced against Sable's data before he'd even decided whether to attend. Four of the six had Grasp manifestations that were notably strong. One, a second-year named Breem, had come up in Drift's peripheral awareness twice in the past month in a way Drift hadn't wanted to discuss. The sixth was Elliot.

He went.

The first three sessions had been exactly what the notice described — quiet, methodical, Aldgate walking them through sustained attention exercises that felt less like the school's standard curriculum and more like its careful ancestor. She taught them to hold a single perceptual channel open for twenty minutes without redirecting. She taught them the difference between what the Grasp found and what the mind, impatient, decided the Grasp had found. She was precise in the way that people are precise when they are correcting for something — for some older, looser habit that the precision is meant to replace.