Tuesday dawned under a gray sky. Lucy woke feeling half-rested, as if the threads had followed him into his dreams. On his way to school he mentally rehearsed math formulas; they had a short exam, and while he wasn't the best student, he didn't want his grades to slip.
The classroom buzzed with nerves. Students hurried through last-minute notes, whispering problems and solutions. Lucy tried to focus, but the threads crowded his vision.
Among his classmates, colors flickered as if the exam were a battlefield:
Gray threads of anxiety.
Yellow ones of deep focus.
A few red with sheer frustration.
For a moment, he wondered if he could "cheat" not from a paper, but from a thread—reading the confidence of those who seemed sure of their answers. The idea was absurd, but tempting.
He shook his head. No. If he wanted to be worthy of the Eyes, he had to rely on his own effort.
When the test ended, he sighed with relief. He hadn't done badly—or so he thought. As he put down his pencil, he caught Emily's gaze from across the room. She didn't smile, but she didn't look away either. Just a brief moment, but enough to spark warmth in his chest.
The dark blue thread around her looked a little less tense than before, as if the storm cloud had eased slightly.
At recess, his friends dragged him to the gym. The coach had improvised a basketball game to release exam stress. Lucy joined reluctantly; he'd never been good at sports, but didn't want to sit alone.
Once the game began, the threads turned the court into a spectacle. Every pass, every attempt to score, came with invisible tensions:
Red threads of rivalry between players.
Green ones of camaraderie within teams.
Bright yellow in the most competitive.
Lucy noticed Eric again—the same classmate who had collapsed during running days ago. His gray thread was fading like ash, ready to snap. Before it happened, Lucy shouted:
"Eric, switch with me!"
Eric blinked, surprised, but agreed. As soon as he sat, his breathing came in ragged gasps. The coach hurried to get him water. No one understood how Lucy had predicted it, but he knew: the threads had spoken.
Later in computer class, the teacher asked them to build a simple database. Lucy followed along, but in his mind compared it to what he saw daily: threads intertwined like records, colors organized like categories.
Without realizing, he scribbled examples in the margin:
Blue = sadness → medium intensity
Gray = fatigue → high intensity
Green = bond → variable stability
A clumsy attempt to classify what he saw. When Emily leaned over to ask about the assignment, he quickly closed the page.
"You always hide things, huh?" she said with a half-smile.
"Just doodles," he muttered.
She didn't push, but as she returned to her seat, the blue thread around her flickered faintly pink.
That night, Lucy wrote in his notebook:
Threads behave like data. If I learn to organize them, I may understand them better.
My body is still weak. Without training, I won't be able to act when judgment calls.
Emily… every time she smiles, the blue lightens a little.
And for the first time, he thought that maybe school, with all its routines and distractions, was also part of his training as a judge.