-'They blend in: unseen, patient. But larvae devour from within. They hollow what they live on until only a brittle husk remains.'
---
The cafeteria was a theatre of small violences—an orchestra tuned to the cheap decibels of adolescent life. Trays clattered like broken percussion, a hundred forks and spoons chittering against plastic bowls. Steam rose in slow, greasy coils from vats of something pretending to be dinner, and the air was thick with the twin perfumes of disinfectant and reheated carbohydrate. It settled in the throat like dust, a taste of neglect and industry.
Lucian arrived as if the room had been arranged for him to step into. He slid into the bench without looking, not with the casualness of someone taking a seat but with the precision of a mark slotted into a machine. The world took him in with the same instant recognition as a clock recognizes noon: everything continued, calibrated to the hour, and his place belonged in the center of the dial. He was already months ahead of the lesson, of their petty hierarchies, of their small reputations stitched together on social media like cheap embroidery. He had rehearsed this morning — the wash, the clothing, the pause at the mirror where he learned the angle of the jaw that read best in light. It was ritual; it was armor.
Kael waited, as he often did, like a slow tide at rest. He picked at a bread roll with a care that looked like dissection, unhurried and oddly tender, the movement both idle and exact. He did not eat. He did not need to. Their nourishment worked on a plane the others did not recognize: information, affirmation, the small combustible jolt of recognition from someone who saw what they truly were.
Lucian watched, and the watching was not casual. Faces unfolded to him as if pulled through a lens: details amplified, faults and fissures in relief. The boy at the far table — left knee twitching, thumb bitten to the quick, the raggedness of family pressure written in the raw skin around his nails. The girl who laughed too high and too loud, tilting her head until the tendons at her throat stood out; the sound was a call sent into empty rooms, for an audience she did not have. The swarm of them, endless and unremarkable, their mannerisms predictable as the ticks of a metronome.
The cafeteria, for Lucian, was a vivarium. He was not a participant so much as an entomologist: precise, cold, looking for the delicate vulnerabilities that separated specimens from phenomena. Kael followed his gaze, not out of empathy but because he liked the show. His eyes were half-lid, amused, like a predator that knows it will break something when it decides to.
"You're cataloguing again," Kael murmured, tearing the roll into thin flakes and scattering them across the tray, a litter of white crumbs.
Lucian's reply was a quiet scalpel. "They're self-revealing. Masks are illusions; their seams show under pressure. Let them sit on a plate and they will feed their own undoing."
Kael gave a soft, dry chuckle. "To me, they're pawns. Not worth study, merely worth moving."
"Tools rot if you don't learn where they splinter," Lucian said, drumming the table once—three sharp ticks. "They disgust me. But their faults glitter like veins of ore. I want to dig until I find what's valuable."
Kael watched a fight over a phone screen—a circle of boys shouting at each other like small, furious animals—and said, "You want to smash them open. I want to see if they squeal the same way when I flick them from the ledge."
Words sunk into the air and sat like the weight of a scalpel being readied. Around them the hum of the room continued, laughter rising and collapsing in the familiar rhythms of adolescence. Their conversation did not belong to the room; it was a private experiment.
Then a voice, a crack in the pattern: "Hey."
It was nasal and tentative and foolishly loud, the tone of someone trying to transform derision into a joke. A shadow fell across their table and both men rose from their measured attention, like twin raptors responding to a rustle in the tall grass.
Ethan Mallory stood there with a tray, smile stretched like a thin membrane. He was one of those boys who believed artifice was currency—hair rubbed into unwilling shapes, tie askew as if to suggest a casual defiance he had not earned. He might have been anyone, which is the point: he was the kind of human who tried on personas like garments, none of them fitting.
"You two are…weird," Ethan said and laughed at his own observation, as if that would inoculate him from the answer he already feared. "Always whispering. What's the deal?"
Lucian's smile was a line of frost. "Observation. Nothing else."
Ethan's expression scrabbled for purchase. "Observation…of what?"
Kael flicked a crumb and a small cockroach scuttled into it, an insect trimmed up for the stage. "Them. You. Everyone. You just volunteered."
Ethan blinked, smile faltering. "Volunteered for what?"
Lucian leaned forward, voice smoothed to exactitude. The words were clinical, a dissection masquerading as banter. "Dissection."
It landed not as metaphor but as promise. Ethan laughed again, but the sound was brittle. He was trying to play off the needle point of awareness he felt—trying to spin a sudden chill into a joke.
Lucian's invitation was casual, deliberately simple. "Why sit alone when you might as well sit with us?" He gestured to the empty seat opposite, the movement unthreatening in its economy. "Try it."
Ethan, puffed up by a vanity that mistook danger for acceptance, miscalculated. He sat.
As the tray clicked into place the air around them seemed to graze a different frequency. Lucian felt it, a thin electrical arc beneath the fluorescent hum, and his mouth shaped into something like interest. Kael, sensing the opportunity for sport, leaned forward.
"So," Kael said, bright now, "what do you think of her?" He nodded at Charlotte across the room—the girl whose laugh ripped too loud. The group she orbited moved like moths around a faulty lamp.
Ethan blinked. "Who? Charlotte? She's…alright. Why?"
Lucian's voice, patient as scalpel-edge. "Not her name. Not the performance. What do you think of her?"
Ethan's answer came thin, careful: "…She's loud."
Lucian's declarative cadence closed like a trap. "Too loud. Compensating. Father keeps wine bottles as ornaments; mother is absence. She raises her voice to hide smallness. If you lean in, you can smell the panic."
Kael's pupils tightened to black coins. "Your move, Ethan. Pick someone."
The boy's bravado soured into indecision. He picked the easy target—Sam, a boy whose swagger was on the surface only—"cocky"—and then, at Kael's slight, tried again, fumbling toward something braver, weaker: "Maybe he's insecure. The bragging is covering…" His words trailed under the pressure of the two watching him.
Lucian's gaze sharpened. "Better. You've nicked the skin. But you shake with the knife."
Ethan flushed, the color not courage but exposure. "This is—this is weird. You're—this is creepy."
"Creepy?" Lucian leaned in, the warmth of his breath an unpleasant closeness. "You walked here. You sat down." His voice was low enough that Ethan had to lean in to catch it. "You chose to be part of what you now condemn. Don't pretend you didn't."
Kael watched Ethan's hands, saw the faint tremor in the fingers. "You sweat. You like the gash and you hate that you like it. Best kind of pawn."
"I'm not a—"
"Of course you are," Lucian cut him off, a whisper as clean as a wire. "All of you are. Some know it, some don't. The real question is how long you survive the game."
Silence slotted into place. Ethan's Adam's apple bobbed. For a moment his eyes turned inward, and then he stood, muttered the perfunctory line about "catching up later," and almost tripped on his own pride as he left.
Lucian and Kael did not glance to watch him go. They did not need to. The exit was an act; they had observed the result. The experiment had been administered. The outcome—withdrawal—was predictable and satisfactory.
Lucian dragged a finger through the pattern Kael had made of crumbs, arranging and dismantling a crude figure, a head, limbs; with a flick he scattered it into nothing. "They always show their breaks," he murmured. "Each fissure is an invitation. And they beg to be crushed."
Kael followed the motion of the cockroach at the tray's edge until it stopped beneath his nail. He tapped it; it froze, supple and small and suddenly forgetful of motion.
"Show me it squeal," he said, voice soft as a wager.
Lucian's smile was clean and exact. "I'll show you how it screams."
---
They ate in a silence that held no tenderness. The food sat like platters of compromise; neither of them chewed with hunger. Conversation thinned into observation: a way to keep their minds moving while the room around them kept its noisy respiration. The sound of trays, the soft scrape of napkins, the perfume of over-boiled food—these were the background textures of adolescent life they had rejected.
After a while, Kael's expression softened inwards, and he pushed a piece of bread across the table as if testing balance. Lucian watched him, pupils narrowed, not in suspicion now but in measured curiosity.
"What are you thinking?" Lucian asked, straight and clinical.
Kael's jaw moved. For a moment there was the sense of a muscle flexing; he considered whether to shape the truth. His voice was low, as if the hour demanded it. "Old school," he said. "Before here."
"And?"
"You ever been swarmed by a roomful of small things that don't want to bite but whose presence is worse than teeth?" Kael's look drifted, not at any one student, but at the concept. "I was bored of them. They bored me so much I let them take aim."
Lucian did not smile. He listened.
"I let them push me," Kael continued. "Not out of fear. Strategy. There were reasons to be pushed out. One can manufacture weakness as deftly as one can manufacture strength. I… engineered the transfer."
Lucian's fingers, on the table, stilled. The words sat like a mild chemical reaction; his interest increased, subtle and unmistakable. "Explain," he said.
Kael's hands were small and deliberate as he talked. He told the story without dramatic flourish: the right amount of silence at the right time, the push in the corridor that drew a laugh, a slur used in public, the photograph sent to the right group chat. No violence of the kind that ripped flesh; instead he described erosion: a drip that hollowed rock. "I provoked them but controlled it," he said. "I let their predictable cruelty do the work of making the school want me gone. Only one local place would take me—this one. It had prestige. Resources. Quiet labs. I arranged it so that the only exit from their attention was to leave, to come here. My parting would be the ticket."
Lucian's expression did not unclench. He catalogued, the way one collects specimens. "You schemed to be victimized?"
Kael's mouth lifted in something that was not quite amusement. "Victimized is not the right word. The social theatre allowed me a lever. A stage where the crowd wrote the script and I only needed to prompt one cue. They set the conditions; I only supplied the catalyst. It was… effective." He tapped his tray. "The important thing is: the transfer succeeded. I got here."
Lucian's eyes, pale and surgical, watched Kael. The color someone else might expect—shame, regret—was absent. In its place was economy: problem recognized, solution enacted, outcome favorable.
"And you adopted the terminology?" Lucian asked—no judgement, only the shape of a hypothesis. "Insects, pests, larvae?"
Kael's shoulders rose in a small, private shrug. "You said it first. It fit. The metaphor helped me structure thought. Calling them pests clarified the strategy. When a thing is a pest, you don't ask for justice; you apply eradication."
Lucian permitted himself, for the first time in a near silence that held no warmth, a thin smile. It was not pleasure like friendship, but it was approval—selective, discerned. "An incisive mind," he said. "Calculating. Useful."
Kael's eyes shifted and for a sliver of time something like relief flickered. "It also helped me survive," he said. "If I was to be bruised, it was best the bruises were functional. This… was a measure."
Lucian took this in as if it were data. "So you let them bruise you to write yourself out."
"You might call it performance." Kael's gaze slid to Lucian, almost testing the reaction. "I call it procedure."
The tray between them was a table of experiments; a crust of bread, a smear of sauce. Kael's voice dropped quieter, admitting the line that might explain why he stayed in the orbit of someone so dangerous. "There was another factor—coincidence, and then not. You were here. Seeing me. Not looking away. That made it worth it."
Lucian's face registered a change that was minimal and all the more profound for its delicacy: a measuring line at the corner of his mouth, an almost imperceptible tilt of the head. He was not moved in that human way of softening; he was intrigued. Intrigue in Lucian was a form of currency.
"You engineered an exit, and part of the reward was being seen by me," Lucian said. He spoke as if documenting a successful variable in an experiment. "Strategic suffering for strategic gain. Efficient."
Kael's reply was a small, private laugh that tasted like iron. "I suppose I am theatrical. But I prefer to call it intentional."
Lucian considered this. He did not applaud; he rarely did anything as messy as emotion. Instead he offered a compliment that was proportionate to his admiration: precise and spare. "You are competent. Useful competence is rare in those your age."
Kael's smile widened—not because of warmth but because of recognition. The compliment carried weight; it was evidence that Lucian had evaluated and approved. That mattered in an economy where approval was approval of capacity, not of kindness.
They sat in the half-light of the cafeteria, their conversations flowing one onto another, an exchange of hypotheses disguised as chat. Around them the swarm continued—inevitable, loud, unknowing. To everyone else, it was just another lunch period. To Lucian and Kael it was data, texture, and now the scaffold of a relationship based not on affection but on mutual utility.
When the bells finally rang and the crowd thinned, Lucian rose with the same deliberate grace as always. He slid his tray aside, left the crumbs arranged as if nothing had been disturbed. As he stood, something of his expression changed—tiny, calibrated, interior. Not softness. Not affection. But the removal of a mask, the recalibration of an algorithm. He had seen something new: not merely a tool to be used and discarded but an ally whose methods mirrored his own.
Kael rose too. They moved outward together and then, almost without ceremony, split into separate currents: Kael to illustrate before the break had come to an end, and Lucian to arrive to their next class first, before anyone else could.
Lucian's face, as he left, held that new measurement like a specimen slid under glass: neat, labeled, and catalogued.
The last half an hour of lunch folded into itself, and beneath the banal din of school life an alliance had been inserted—cold, forensic, and irrevocable. It had no warmth, and thus it congealed quickly, the way oil congeals on water.
It was exact.
It was dangerous
It would, in time, be effective.