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"Venting his anger?"
Ethan kept his voice mild. Lily Snow glanced toward the larger side table where Garrison Pike was holding court with two other students, then leaned closer.
"You remember the woman he mentioned earlier? Yvette Caldwell?"
"The proprietress."
"That's her. She's also one of Teacher's students. Strictly speaking, she's a junior of mine, and a senior of you, by ordination. The reason she has this restaurant is a long story, but it's hers, and Teacher visits when his schedule allows."
Ethan's eyebrows climbed. The proprietress, whose calligraphy collection alone suggested a person of extraordinary connections, was a fellow disciple of Hargrove. He filed the fact away and turned his expression into something appropriately surprised for a wide-eyed junior.
"That's incredible. Why isn't she at the dinner tonight?"
Lily's expression flickered. The cheerful warmth faded into something more careful.
"That you'd have to ask Teacher. None of us are really in a position to explain it."
The deflection was clean, but the deflection itself was information. There was a story. Lily knew it. And the story wasn't the sort one shared with a new junior at a public dinner.
Ethan didn't push. He gave her the friendly, slightly disappointed shrug of a young pupil who had been gently warned off a topic, and changed direction.
"Then is there something between Senior Garrison and the proprietress? He seemed angry about her in particular."
That, Lily was willing to discuss.
She glanced again at Garrison, lowered her voice, and gave Ethan the short version.
"Old relationship trouble. Yvette was the most beautiful student in her cohort at Hartwell. The most pursued, by every metric. During orientation week the boys swarmed her so thoroughly she could barely walk to class without an escort."
"Garrison was one of them."
"More than one of them. From what I heard, he was the one who personally talked her into pursuing her graduate work under Teacher. He convinced her it was the right academic move. The right intellectual mentor. And, less explicitly, that being his fellow student would allow them to develop a relationship in parallel."
Lily took a small sip of her tea.
"It didn't work. Yvette's standards are extremely high, and Garrison, accomplished as he was, did not meet them. She turned him down, multiple times, over a period of about two years. He took it badly."
"And ever since then?"
"Ever since then, every time her name comes up at one of these gatherings, he has something cutting to say. He doesn't show his face at her restaurant, except when Teacher requires us all to be in the same room. The rest of us learned, years ago, that engaging with him on this topic is a waste of breath."
She looked at Ethan with a small, regretful smile.
"So when he insulted you earlier, that was him taking out a fifteen-year grudge on the nearest available target. It wasn't actually about you. I'm sorry it caught you in the cross-fire."
Ethan nodded thoughtfully and looked toward Garrison Pike with an expression that, on the surface, registered as something close to sympathy.
Love turning into bitterness, then bitterness into entitlement.
Internally, the sympathy was less generous. Garrison had taken a private grudge from his student years and weaponized it into a habitual public cruelty. Whatever he might have once been, he had let himself become a man who insulted strangers for failing to soothe his ego.
That was a character that could not be fixed by hiring it.
But more importantly, none of that excuses going at my parents and Frank and Linda by implication.
Ethan kept his face composed.
His patience, however, was already settled.
Garrison Pike, on the other side of the room, was working on a parallel grievance.
He had, in fairness to himself, made an honest mistake about the young man at the door. No one in this room would have intuitively guessed that Hargrove had taken on an eighteen-year-old new pupil. The misunderstanding was forgivable.
But the proper response from a younger junior, in the wake of such a misunderstanding, was clear. The new arrival should have crossed the room with a teacup, made a small, modest introduction, apologized for the confusion he had inadvertently caused, and offered Garrison a respectful pour. That was the protocol. That was how social hierarchies in Hargrove's pupil-line had always worked.
Instead, the kid had been chatting comfortably with Lily Snow for the last twenty minutes. He had not approached. He had not apologized. He had not, in any visible way, acknowledged that he had committed a social misstep against the senior pupil in the room.
Garrison felt, in his chest, the slow, hot wind of being disrespected.
This little brat. After embarrassing himself, he's not even bothering to make the proper amends.
He was about to stand up, walk over, and remind the new junior of the correct order of operations, when the door of the private room opened.
Edmund Hargrove walked in.
He had come directly from the lab. His coat was a touch rumpled, his hair was the windblown gray of a man who had not stopped to comb it, and he had the particular distracted alertness of someone whose mind had been on equations until ninety seconds ago.
The room came to attention instantly.
Eight students, in unison, rose from their seats. Even Garrison Pike, who had been mid-rise on his own grievance trip, switched smoothly into a respectful posture, as if his original intent had simply been to greet the teacher.
"Good evening, Dr. Hargrove."
"Welcome, Teacher."
"Thank you for the invitation, Teacher Hargrove."
Hargrove waved a hand.
"You're all grown professionals at this point. Let's skip the ceremony. Sit down, all of you. Eat something. I'm starving."
He moved toward the round table at the center of the room. Despite his casual instruction, none of his students actually sat down until he did. Hargrove understood the etiquette he was pretending not to enforce, and he settled into the head seat at the round table with the unhurried ease of a man who had earned the right not to perform his own status.
His students filed toward the table.
Garrison Pike moved with the practiced confidence of an established senior pupil. The seat to Hargrove's right, the place of primary honor, had been his at every gathering for the last fifteen years. He had occupied it so many times that it had become muscle memory. He took two steps toward it.
Hargrove, without looking up, raised his voice.
"Kid. You. Come over here. You're sitting with me tonight."
He patted the seat to his right.
The seat that had, for fifteen years, been Garrison Pike's.
Garrison stopped in mid-step.
Every other student in the room paused.
Eight pairs of eyes tracked, simultaneously, from Hargrove to Ethan and back again.
For fifteen years, Hargrove's pupil-line had operated on a simple, observable principle: the teacher treated everyone equally. He did not play favorites. He did not promote one student above another. He had, in his entire teaching career, never publicly elevated one pupil's status over another at a formal gathering.
Until tonight.
The youngest pupil in the room, a teenager nobody had ever seen before, was being seated in the place of honor. Above the senior pupil who had occupied it for fifteen consecutive gatherings.
The room performed a silent, comprehensive recalculation.
Who is this 'Evan Wright' actually?
Ethan, for his part, was trying very hard not to smile.
He stood up from Lily's side table, walked across the room with the casual ease of a younger pupil being summoned, and passed within two feet of Garrison Pike on his way to the seat.
He did not look at Garrison.
He did not need to.
He could feel the senior pupil's eyes burning a path along his shoulder.
He sat down in the seat. Made a small, comfortable show of settling in. Adjusted the chair. Wiggled slightly, as if testing the cushion.
"Dr. Hargrove. The seat you picked for me is really comfortable."
Hargrove, suppressing a laugh, gave him a small sidelong glance that was not entirely free of mischief.
"Eat your soup, kid."
Across the table, Garrison Pike's face had gone the color of an aged red wine. The veins on his forehead were visible from across the table.
Lily, to her credit, did not visibly react. But her hand, moving toward her water glass, had a small, telling tremor of suppressed amusement.
The meal proceeded.
The first quarter-hour was stiff. The students, having spent twenty minutes adjusting to the discovery that their teacher had a hidden young pupil, now had to spend another quarter-hour adjusting to the discovery that this hidden young pupil had been seated in their senior brother's traditional place. The conversation around the round table was professional and mannered, without the easy warmth that Hargrove's gatherings usually featured.
Then the wine started flowing.
Hargrove, despite being ninety-one years old, drank like a man two decades younger and weighing a hundred pounds more. Glass after glass disappeared into the old man's gullet without producing any visible effect. His students, who had observed this phenomenon many times, took turns approaching to offer toasts, and Hargrove accepted every single one with a calm, undisturbed grace that suggested he could continue this pace for another three hours and not miss a step.
Ethan watched in private awe.
He had the super-soldier serum running through his veins. It had multiplied his physical capacity in every measurable way. And he was reasonably sure that, in a head-to-head drinking contest, the ninety-one-year-old man at the head of this table would beat him cleanly.
The man's liver is a national treasure.
While the students made the rounds, Hargrove, sharp-eyed as always, had noticed that Ethan was avoiding any reference to his actual identity. The boy had introduced himself to Lily as "Evan Wright" and the name had spread to the rest of the group in the last hour. None of the senior pupils had connected the name to anything notable, which was reasonable, because the name was an invention.
Hargrove understood the move immediately.
The boy was running an unannounced character evaluation. He wanted to see how each of these students treated a young, unimportant junior pupil before they knew his actual identity.
It was a smart move. Hargrove approved of it.
So as he spoke during the dinner, he did not, at any point, mention Ethan's real name. He did not introduce him formally. He simply referred to him as "the kid" and "your junior brother" and let the other students draw their own conclusions about who he was and where he fit in the hierarchy.
By the time the third bottle of wine had emptied, Ethan had a clear mental picture of every person at the table.
Lily Snow was warm and competent. Genuinely kind. The social glue of the group, exactly as she had presented herself.
Olivia and Theresa, two more senior pupils, were thoughtful and well-spoken. They had treated him with appropriate friendly curiosity since the introduction, neither too distant nor too obsequious.
Marcus and Gregory were sharp and slightly competitive, but their competitive instinct was pointed at academic and professional achievement, not at peers. They were the kind of men who would push themselves harder if a colleague did good work. Useful traits in a startup.
Daniel and Annika were quieter, more reserved. They listened more than they spoke, but the listening was attentive. The questions they asked Ethan, in the brief moments they engaged him directly, were thoughtful and probing without being intrusive.
And Garrison Pike was a tyrant.
Not just in the dramatic sense of the senior pupil who insulted strangers. The smaller, daily-life sense. He talked over Annika twice. He made a snide remark at Daniel's expense. He laughed too loudly at his own jokes. He referred to two of the younger pupils, in their hearing, as "the junior pair" rather than by their names.
The other seven, by and large, had reasonable characters. Hargrove had vetted them well. Any of them would be a defensible hire, and several of them would be genuine assets.
Garrison Pike, however, would never set foot inside New Future Technology Energy Co., Ltd.
Not as long as Ethan Mercer was alive.
Plates cleared. Hargrove tapped his glass with a chopstick.
"Right. Down to business."
The students fell silent.
"You've all been wondering why I called this gathering early in the year. Most of you know my schedule. I don't typically organize these dinners until the autumn. So if I've pulled you off your projects and routes in the middle of the working season, it's for a reason."
He gestured toward Ethan.
"This is for the kid."
Eight pairs of eyes turned toward Ethan with renewed attention.
"Your young junior brother is starting an energy company. Initial capitalization is in the ten-figure range. State support has already been secured. The technical foundation is, in my professional opinion, the most significant scientific breakthrough in the energy sector in the last fifty years."
He paused.
"He needs senior staff. Research division leadership, operations, commercial strategy, infrastructure deployment. I've gathered all of you here so he can interview those of you who are interested in joining the company at senior levels."
The reaction was instant.
"An energy company?"
"Privately owned?"
"That's, that's not allowed under Republic law."
"How much capital? Did he say ten figures?"
"That's not even possible. The state would never authorize a private..."
"Teacher, with respect, even if it's a real proposal, the regulatory burden of starting an energy company in this country is..."
"What's his technical foundation? What does the kid have that the established firms don't?"
The questions overlapped. The skepticism was open, professional, and reasonable. Every student at the table had spent their career in the energy sector or adjacent industries. They knew, viscerally, how impossible the proposal sounded.
After the initial wave of disbelief came a second, quieter wave of reluctance.
The students at this table were not unsuccessful. Each of them, by Hartwell standards, had reached the upper tier of the energy industry through a decade or more of hard work. Garrison Pike, the most successful among them by any metric, was the chief operating officer of a major foreign energy conglomerate, drawing a compensation package that several of his juniors envied.
Even the less senior pupils, like Lily, were holding senior research positions at established firms.
To leave those positions, to walk away from established careers, in order to join an unproven startup founded by a teenager they had just met?
It was, several of them thought silently, an absurd proposition.
Lily, to her credit, kept a kind expression on her face and tried not to let her dismay show. But the dismay was there. She had been pulled out of her routine for what she had thought was an academic gathering, and instead she was being asked to consider career suicide.
The other students were less able to mask their reactions. Garrison's face, in particular, had transitioned through several discrete emotions: surprise, contempt, and finally a slow, satisfied amusement at the realization that this entire dinner had been organized for the benefit of the new junior pupil.
So that's what this is. The old man is using us to bail out his pet project.
Hargrove watched the reactions with a calm, weathered patience.
He had expected this.
The students did not have the access to information that he had. They did not know about the deep-water reactor in the Southern Sea. They did not know about the ten-reactor plan being discussed at the highest levels of the Energy Ministry. They did not know about the Stark Element. They did not know that the teenager in the seat beside him was the most consequential physicist of his generation and was about to redefine the global energy landscape.
To their eyes, this looked like an old teacher trying to recruit them into a doomed startup founded by a favored pupil.
But Hargrove knew differently.
He knew, with the clarity of a man who had spent fifty years reading the political and scientific tea leaves of the Republic, that New Future Technology Energy Co., Ltd. was going to be one of the most valuable companies in the world within the decade. The startup phase would be brutal, demanding, and slightly chaotic. But the founding employees, the people who joined in this earliest window, would be the ones who shaped the company's culture, took on its first major projects, and accumulated equity and influence as the firm grew.
The students at this table did not yet understand that they were being offered ground-floor entry into a future Fortune Ten firm.
They thought they were being asked to take a foolish risk.
They were being offered a generational opportunity.
The gap between perception and reality was enormous, and Hargrove was about to spend the next phase of the dinner trying to bridge it.
He took a long sip of his wine, set the glass down, and looked at his students with the particular gentle exasperation of a teacher about to deliver an uncomfortable lesson.
"All right. Hear me out."