Mind Reading: The Click

For fourteen months, the people around you could say anything within reach of a deaf ear. Alice never did. Alice was the one who stayed: through hospitals, therapy, and a processor you never take off. Tonight, at the Mill Quad fountain, she taps the old rhythm on your shoulder, lifts the processor away, and says the cruelest thing she can think of, certain you can't hear a word. Sloane Ashcombe watches from a bench. It's a test, and Alice is passing it. Then the click, and the world comes back. Water. Lamps. Wind in the ivy. And underneath all of it, something that isn't sound: what every person in the courtyard is thinking. Nobody knows you can hear. In five days, the Hawthorn Society's Founders' Dinner decides whether Alice's family gets the one thing they've spent years building toward. What you do with what you can hear, and whether anyone finds out, is up to you.