Part 5. The Mistake

  Lelya was returning from the Academy around nine in the evening. Her head buzzed from lectures, seminars, notes. She walked along the familiar street, past apartment buildings with lit windows, thinking about tomorrow: civil law in the morning at the human university, Alma's history in the afternoon, self-study in the evening.

  Ahead, near a small square, children were playing—the last minutes before parents would call them home.

  Lelya passed by, paying no attention.

  Then she heard the scream.

  A boy of about five ran out of the square straight into the road. The ball rolled ahead of him; he ran after it, not looking. His mother turned around too late.

  The car flew around the corner—fast, headlights blinding.

  Lelya didn't think. Her body worked on its own—the werewolf instinct she still knew almost nothing about. The world slowed. Muscles surged forward. Fifteen meters in a fraction of a second—speed impossible for a human.

  She grabbed the boy, jerked herself backward. The car flew past; the screech of brakes tore through the silence.

  Lelya fell onto the sidewalk, the child in her arms. He started crying. She quickly set him on his feet.

  "Shh. It's all right. You're fine."

  Only then did she look up.

  The mother had frozen three meters away, mouth open. Beside her, two more adults from the square. The driver had jumped out of the car, pale.

  "How did you..." the mother began. Her voice trembled. "You were there, and then here. That's impossible."

  One of the men shook his head.

  "I saw it. She flew like lightning."

  "Adrenaline," Lelya forced out. "I was scared for the child."

  "It doesn't happen that fast." The man didn't look away. "I'm an athlete myself. That wasn't human speed."

  Lelya turned and walked away. Fast, almost running. Behind her came voices:

  "Hey, wait!"

  "Who is she?"

  "Got it on video, look!"

  An hour later, Lelya sat in Roslava's office. Roslava listened in silence.

  "How many witnesses?" she finally asked.

  "At least six. Someone was filming on their phone."

  "Did you talk to them?"

  "Said it was adrenaline. They didn't believe me."

  Roslava nodded slowly.

  "The video is a problem. But solvable. Security is already working on it. The recording will be deleted; the witnesses' memories will be wiped."

  Lelya clenched her fists.

  "All of them? Even the mother? Even the child?"

  "Yes. They won't remember the car or you. For them, it was just a quiet evening."

  "But I saved his life!"

  Roslava looked at her hard.

  "Yes. And for him, that won't exist. Because you're a mage. You don't have the right to instincts. Even the right ones. Even when saving a life. The cost of exposure is higher than one life. It's cruel, but it's the law."

  Pause.

  "For you—a fine and a severe reprimand. Second-level unintentional exposure."

  Lelya lowered her head.

  "I couldn't not save him."

  "I know. That's why this isn't an execution. But you've learned your lesson."

  The next evening, Lelya stood in the shadows across from the boy's building. She watched two people in ordinary clothes enter the lobby—mages from Security. Twenty minutes later, they came out. The light went on in the third-floor window. The boy looked out, waved to someone in the courtyard.

  An ordinary evening. They didn't remember.

  Lelya turned and walked toward the dormitory. In her chest—emptiness. She had saved a life, but for the boy, it didn't exist. She had become a ghost. Non-existent.

  Mislav's words surfaced in memory: 'Someone among you will end up under investigation before semester's end.'

  Statistics. She had become statistics.

  This book's true home is on another platform. Check it out there for the real experience.

  Lelya walked through the evening city, past lit windows, past people who would never know of her existence.

  She was a mage. Immortal. Strong.

  And absolutely alone.

  Three days after the incident, Lelya came to the lecture on mental magic. She sat in the last row — for the first time since starting at the Academy. She didn't want anyone to see her face.

  The lecturer — a thin woman with a gray streak in her dark hair — projected an image: a human brain, glowing blue.

  "Today we'll talk about memory correction. Does anyone know how it works?"

  A student in the front row raised his hand:

  "We erase the unwanted memory?"

  "No." The lecturer shook her head. "We don't erase anything. Memory isn't text you can cut a paragraph from. Memory is connections. Thousands of threads between events, emotions, smells, sounds. Pull one—and the whole web trembles."

  Lelya gripped her pen so hard her knuckles went white.

  "Imagine: a person saw something they shouldn't have." The lecturer touched the projection, and a red dot flared in the brain. "We can't just delete this dot. It's already connected to dozens of others: where they stood, what they felt, what they were thinking a second before. If you tear out the memory as a whole, you leave a hole. The person will feel it — like phantom pain in an amputated limb."

  The projection changed: the red dot faded, but a dark spot spread around it—like a bruise on brain tissue.

  "That's why we don't delete. We overwrite. We create a false memory that fills the place of the real one. The person remembers everything. Just a different version of events."

  "Don't they notice the substitution?" Mirra asked.

  "Usually no. The brain fills in the details itself, smooths the seams. But sometimes…" The lecturer paused. "Sometimes a trace remains."

  Lelya leaned forward, though she didn't want to.

  "What kind of trace?"

  The lecturer turned to her.

  "It varies. Anxiety without cause. The feeling of having forgotten something important. Sometimes—dreams. The brain tries to restore what was lost and creates images the person can't explain. They wake up in a cold sweat because they dreamed of something that couldn't be. They don't understand where the dream came from. They blame stress, fatigue."

  The silence in the auditorium became dense, palpable.

  "In most cases, it passes within a few weeks. The brain adapts, the false memory takes root, the anxiety fades." The lecturer turned off the projection. "But not always. Some people have high mental sensitivity. For them, correction is a trauma that never fully heals."

  After the lecture, Lelya caught up with the instructor in the corridor.

  "Excuse me. May I ask a question?"

  The lecturer stopped, surveying her with an attentive gaze.

  "You're that student from last week's incident."

  It wasn't a question. Lelya nodded.

  "What happened to them? To those people. Can you find out?"

  A long pause. The lecturer looked at her without judgment, but without warmth either—the professional, detached gaze of a surgeon.

  "The boy's mother." Her voice was stable, as if reading a report. "The correction went normally. But she visited a therapist two days after the procedure. Complained of insomnia and a feeling—I quote—'that I've lost something very important but can't remember what.'"

  Lelya felt something clenches in her chest.

  "Will it pass?"

  "Probably. In eighty percent of cases, it does." The lecturer tilted her head slightly. "You saved her son. She'll never know it. And every night she'll wake up feeling that something's wrong. That's the price."

  Lelya clenched her teeth. The words stuck in her throat, because it wouldn't have changed anything.

  "I'm not giving you this knowledge so you'll torture yourself." The lecturer's voice softened slightly. "Guilt is a poor teacher. But you need to understand the consequences. Every exposure isn't just 'erased and forgotten.' It's an intervention in someone else's psyche. Sometimes necessary. Always—with a price."

  She turned and walked down the corridor. Then, without looking back, added:

  "Check on her again in a month. If the symptoms persist—let me know. There are methods for gentle refinement."

  Her footsteps faded around the corner.

  That evening, Lelya sat in her room at home, at her mother's. She didn't know why she'd come. After the lecture, her feet had simply carried her to the metro, and from there to the familiar entrance with peeling paint on the railings.

  Her mother asked nothing. She put on the kettle, sliced apples into thin wedges like she used to when Lelya was little. Lelya sat at the kitchen table, warming her hands on the cup, saying nothing.

  "You've lost weight," her mother said, sitting across from her. "Do they feed you at that academy of yours?"

  "They do. Just a lot of studying."

  Her mother looked at her with that particular gaze Lelya remembered from childhood—when she'd come home from school after a fight or a bad grade and lied that everything was fine. Her mother never pushed. She just waited.

  "Mom," Lelya raised her eyes. "Have you ever done something right... and it still turned out badly?"

  Her mother was silent. She sipped her tea, set down the cup.

  "When your father got sick," she said slowly, "I sold grandmother's ring. The one with the sapphire. To pay for treatment."

  Lelya blinked. She hadn't known this story.

  "The treatment didn't help. He died six months later anyway. And the ring was gone forever." Her mother traced her finger along the rim of the cup. "I thought about it for a long time afterward: was it for nothing? Maybe I should have kept it? The only keepsake from grandmother. And I gave it away—for nothing."

  "But you wanted to save him."

  "I did." Her mother looked up. "And I did everything I could. And still lost both—my husband and the ring. That doesn't change the fact that I tried. But it doesn't make it easier either."

  Lelya was silent. Outside the window, rain rustled—fine, autumnal, the kind that can go on for hours.

  "I don't know what happened to you," her mother said quietly. "You don't tell me. I understand—if you don't want to, you don't have to." She covered Lelya's hand with her own. "But you're my daughter. And if you did something because you thought it was right—then it was right. Even if it didn't turn out the way you wanted."

  Lelya felt a stinging in her eyes. She didn't cry. She only squeezed her mother's hand—harder than she'd meant to.

  "Thank you."

  "For what?"

  "For not asking."

  Her mother smiled—sadly, knowingly.

  "I'm your mother. My job is to be here. Even when you're silent."

  They sat like that for a long time, until the tea grew cold. Outside the window, the city glimmered through the veil of rain. Her mother didn't know what her daughter had become. Didn't know about mages, about Alma, about erased memories and the prices innocent people pay.

  But she was here. And that was enough.

  And somewhere on the third floor of a building two blocks from the Academy, that same woman woke again in the middle of the night. She had dreamed of someone's hands—strong, warm—and a flash of light. She sat up in bed, pressed her palm to her chest, trying to calm her heart.

  She felt like she had forgotten something.

  Something very important.