Roseline kept her office with the specific care of someone for whom the office was the one domain that remained fully within their control.
Every certificate on the wall was perfectly level. Mars had checked this once, with a spirit level he had borrowed from the maintenance room on an idle afternoon at eleven, because he had been curious whether the perfection was real or just appeared to be. It was real. Every frame, every plaque, every framed letter of commendation, level to within a fraction of a degree.
The desk was clear except for a manila folder placed at its exact centre and a cup of tea that had gone cold some time ago, the bag still in it. She had been sitting here thinking rather than working, and had been doing it for long enough that the tea had given up on being a useful temperature. This told Mars that whatever she needed to tell him was something she had been preparing to say for a while and had not yet found the right arrangement of words for.
She looked at him when he came through the door.
The look was the specific look she used on these mornings — the one that took stock of the visible damage and then moved on to a point on the wall just past his left ear. His lip, his shoulder, his hands in that order, catalogued with the practiced efficiency of someone who had been doing this long enough to have developed a system for it.
"Sit down, Mars."
He sat. He kept his eyes on her face, which was the honest thing to do and which also, as a secondary function, occasionally produced a slight discomfort in her that he was not entirely above using as a small, cost-free equaliser.
She opened the folder. Didn't read it. Something to do with her hands.
The office had the morning quiet of rooms that faced north — no direct sun at this hour, just the even diffused light that made everything look considered. On the wall behind Roseline, between two of the level certificates, there was a small framed photograph of Ashveil taken from the ridge, which was the only photo in the room that hadn't been put there for official reasons. He had noticed it years ago and had decided it meant something about Roseline that he hadn't fully worked out yet.
"There has been an adoption inquiry," she said. "Formal. Government-cleared. Full documentation, properly filed and reviewed."
Mars waited.
She was choosing her words with the particular care that meant the sentence coming had been edited in advance and she was now selecting the least problematic version.
"They are asking specifically for you."
He sat with it.
Specifically. The word did more work than it appeared to. An adoption inquiry at Ashveil was not unusual — the building existed, in part, as a pipeline, children who were assessed and identified as having significant abilities and who were then connected with individuals or organisations who had an interest in that. The system was not entirely comfortable to look at directly, but it functioned, and it was what it was.
But not for him. That pipeline had never included him. He was an anomaly, which made him precisely the kind of child that government-adjacent organisations did not request specifically.
Specifically was the word that didn't fit.
"Who?" he asked.
She had been waiting for this.
"A man named Aldric. Retired military. The documentation describes him as government adjacent, which he apparently distinguished from government at some length when the initial inquiry was filed."
"He read my file."
"All of it. All nine assessments, the medical history, and—" a brief pause, just long enough to be intentional, "—the incident documentation."
The incident documentation.
He had a reasonable estimate of how thick that file was, based on the frequency of incidents and the number of years they had been occurring. It was, in all likelihood, thick enough to make a statement of its own — thick enough that the act of reading it entirely communicated something about the level of seriousness with which Aldric had approached this.
"Why me." Not a question exactly. More a request for the actual answer, delivered in the tone that distinguished between wanting to be reassured and wanting information.
Roseline was quiet. Not the quiet of thinking — the quiet of deciding how much of the answer to give.
"He said your particular circumstances were the specific point of interest."
Your particular circumstances.
There was a lot that phrase could cover. What it was covering here, in this office, in this conversation, was "Powerless". The score that broke the framework. The result that had its own category because no existing category fit.
Mars looked at her. At the cold tea and the folder she had opened without reading and the relief that was sitting, carefully managed but present, somewhere beneath her expression. The relief of someone who had been carrying a weight for a long time and could see a way to set it down.
He filed that.
"Do I have a choice?"
"There is a review period. You could submit an objection." She met his eyes briefly. "The government endorsement carries considerable weight in these reviews."
"So the answer is no."
She didn't disagree. She looked, instead, at the folder, and the silence had the particular texture of a silence that was being used to avoid saying the thing that would make the conversation harder.
He stood.
The conversation had given him everything it had to give. The rest would be reassuring language — the kind that was produced for the benefit of the person delivering it rather than the person receiving it, and which he had no use for this morning.
"I'll contact you with any further information," she said, to his back.
He pulled the door shut behind him. Not hard. Not soft. Exactly the amount of force the door required. Slamming it would have required caring what she thought about it, and he had more useful things to care about.
He walked back down the east corridor, past the trophy wall, not looking at it, and started to think.
A retired soldier named Aldric. Government adjacent. He had read the full file — nine assessments, medical records, incident documentation running to what was probably a significant thickness — and had specifically requested the only person in recorded history to score a perfect ten on assessment and had nothing. Not one of the children with impressive abilities. Not one of the rising assessments. The anomaly.
Why.
He walked and let the question open without pushing it. Pushing produced guesses, which were worse than nothing in situations where the guesses were likely to be wrong. The productive approach: catalogue what was known, identify what it implied, hold the gaps without filling them prematurely.
Known: government adjacent meant connected to the official response to the Starburst world, but not part of it directly. The distinction Aldric had apparently made at length when filing the inquiry — Mars held that detail and turned it over. A man who specifically clarified he was not government when filing a government-endorsed adoption inquiry was a man who wanted that distinction on the record. Which implied the distinction mattered to him for reasons, and the reasons were probably not administrative.
Known: he had read the full file. All nine assessments. Not a summary. Not the headline result. The full documentation. This took time and effort and deliberate choice. The kind of choice that communicated seriousness of purpose.
Known: the specific point of interest was Mars's particular circumstances. That phrase could cover many things. In context it was covering one thing: the result that had no framework. The score that said something was there and the assessors who couldn't find anything. The situation that had its own notation in the records — anomaly, no existing category — because no existing category fit.
Unknown: what Aldric intended to do with those circumstances. What he saw in them that other people hadn't.
Unknown: whether what he saw was actually there.
He reached the end of the corridor and took the stairs down.
He had two weeks. He was going to use them to find out what he could, prepare what he could prepare, and identify which of the unknowns required information from Aldric directly and which he could close before the meeting happened.
Two weeks was something to work with.