Chapter 5 — Thresholds
They walked beneath the guardians of the University: ironwoods that had learned to grow in ruin, their trunks braided around old street lamps, their crowns fused into a green vault that sifted daylight into a chapel's hush. The ranger column set an easy pace—easy for people who had learned to read danger before it lifted its head. Kara matched them, chin up, the small green thread of the charter bracelet still an hour from her wrist but already pulsing inside her like a promise. KrysKo paced just behind her, silent, listening to the way the earth sounded when people expected safety soon. It was a different quiet than the road's: less teeth, more breath.
Up ahead, the path bowed toward a stone arch. A sigil of braided lines had been carved across its lintel and hammered deep with copper: two strands crossing, joining, holding—the same mark stamped in wax upon Kara's papers. Voices traveled along the stone, some bright with youth, some frayed with work. Somewhere a bell chimed twice, then once. A scholar's code for the hour, carried in bronze and memory.
The auburn-haired ranger with the river-delta scar fell in alongside Kara. "Last warning before the line," she said, not unkindly. "University code: no live steel drawn inside the walls; no loaded arms; and no autonomous constructs operating without sponsor supervision."
Her eyes slid to KrysKo for the last clause.
Kara lifted her palm, steady. "Understood. He's with me."
The ranger's mouth quirked. "Then he's with the rules, too."
KrysKo inclined his head. "I will comply."
They came to a waystation of stone and salvaged glass. Beneath the arch stood a Drakari scentwarden, cowl marked in the latticed pattern of his calling. His eyes were half-lidded, his long nostrils barely moving. Beside him, a frame of polished oak held three small cups of gray ash, a bowl of smokeleaf, a rack of narrow reeds that sang when the wind crossed them.
The scentwarden dipped two fingers into the ash, touched them to his tongue, and hummed low. "Step," he said, his Trade deep and clean. Kara moved first. The Drakari inhaled, slow as tide, as if her story were a scent to be read.
"Road-dust," he said. "Rosemary. Copper from a recent cut." His pupils tightened, then widened by a degree. "Myles line. Admitted."
Kara let out air she hadn't meant to keep.
The warden's gaze slid to KrysKo. The air cooled by something older than weather.
[Advisory: Drakari olfactory net engaged.]
[Status: Nonhuman vectors detectable at 89%.]
[Recommendation: Deploy scent veil.]
Kara was already moving, quick-fingered. She drew a jar the color of old honey from her satchel and a wand of bundled herbs bound with copper thread.
"Hold still," she murmured.
He did.
She touched spark to bundle. Smoke unfurled: rosemary, backbay myrtle, a pepper-sweet of crushed smokeleaf. With two fingers she dotted salve to his pulse points—throat, wrists, the hollow beneath the scarf. The smoke curled and clung, then softened.
[New compound detected.]
[Analyzing volatile profile…]
[Result: human-adjacent pheromone mask; botanicals: rosmarinus, myrtle, ash-tallow.]
[Action: Modulate micro-sweat excretion to match mask profile.]
[Result: olfactory signature shift → 93% human.]
"Breathe in," she said.
He let the system take the rhythm. The faint mineral whisper of alloy heart receded beneath a warm human musk of smoke, fat, herb, and road.
The scentwarden's lids lifted a fraction. He inhaled.
"Human," he said. A beat. "Fatigue, dust, iron." A pause as fine as a blade's edge. "And something else I will not name today." His eyes turned to Kara. "Sponsored?"
"Yes. Under Myles charter."
The warden touched the ash, then the arch. "Enter under vow," he said, voice like stone remembering its river. "No hidden steel drawn against scholar or soil."
KrysKo bowed his head. "Under vow."
They stepped beneath the sigil.
Beyond the arch, the University did not rise; it unfolded. Courtyards webbed by herb lines and clotheslines alike. Broken aqueduct learned into gardens. A semicircle of students stood around a Drakari healer as he taught the difference between bruised mint and blackleaf by scent alone. Farther on, a bone-and-bronze automaton creaked under two apprentices' careful hands, heart-stack ticking in an old, stubborn rhythm.
Kara's pace slowed as the place revealed itself: awe on a tight rein. "I've only seen it in drawings," she breathed.
"Stay with your sponsor," called the ranger. "Registration first. Rules talk second. If you're lucky, a meal."
They crossed a cloister where sunlight fell in clean squares and the acoustics made footsteps important. A placard of rules hung at the far wall:
NO LIVE STEEL DRAWN
NO UNAUTHORIZED CONSTRUCTS
NO BLOOD PRICE ON UNIVERSITY STONE
ASK BEFORE YOU TAKE. RETURN MORE THAN YOU BORROW.
Kara's gaze flicked to KrysKo's forearms as if rules might peer through skin.
"I will not deploy the blades here," he said, low. "No one will see them."
"How?" she whispered.
"By not needing them," he said. Then, for her alone: "And by not letting them see me."
He watched the flow of the square—the rangers, the scentwardens, the bronze-knuckled gate. Sightlines, blind corners, mirrored glass angles. He could be a shadow until he chose otherwise.
[Stealth protocol: passive.]
[Forearm armatures: safety interlock engaged.]
[EM signature: damped to background.]
They registered in a hall of chalk and ledger. A clerk with ink-stained knuckles stamped Kara's paper and tied green thread around her wrist. "Welcome, Myles," she said, expression brightening a degree at the name. "Dorm E. Apprentices' commons at second bell. Herb lab orientation at third." Her eyes measured KrysKo without flinching. "Sponsor?"
"He's with me," Kara said.
"Then he's welcome so long as you keep the vow. Guests sign the book. We enforce what we ask you to keep." She slid a heavy ledger forward, pages foxed by years, the columns filled with names and promises. KrysKo signed. His name sat among thousands that believed paper could hold intention steady.
They were given a cell with a window that looked onto cracked tile and stubborn green. Kara set her satchel on the cot, smoothed the sheet as if it might remember being unwrinkled. KrysKo stood by the window and watched students cross a square in lines that were also stories: a boy with three scrolls and a loaf of bread; a Drakari child with a slate beneath one arm and a lizard under the other; an elder with a walking stick carved with names.
"Close the door?" Kara asked softly.
He did. The click sounded louder in a place that kept its silences clean.
She faced him, the green thread a soft mark of belonging. "You said you'd tell me," she said. "When we were alone." A breath. "Who you are."
He undid the scarf.
"Project KrysKo," he said. The room became a listening glass. "Echo Vault. A long time ago—longer than any clock here knows—your people built me to be a sentinel. Human thought stitched to alien scaffolds. Architect lattice for memory. Ophilim capacitors for speed. Something older at the core. They signed a vow to wake me and a vow to aim me."
Kara went still. Not afraid; learning.
"The EMP came," he said. "They thought it would blind the enemy. It blinded everything. The Vault went dark. The last thing I saw was three guards standing in red light. Then nothing for five centuries."
"Five hundred years," she whispered, like saying the number too loud might offend time.
"I woke to ruin," he said. "The system locks much of what I knew. It lets go by degrees, as if testing whether I'm still the thing they meant to make."
"And the blades?"
"Not all of me is for classrooms," he said. "But I won't use them here."
"Why tell me?"
He thought of the line under the arch. The ink in the vow book. The weight of her sponsor's hand when she pressed smoke into his skin.
"Because you asked," he said. "And because your line keeps old words."
"Thank you," she said, and meant it.
Outside, third bell rang. Students scattered in orderly untidiness. A professor drifted past with a stack of bones labeled in chalk.
Kara reached into her satchel and unrolled a narrow length of leather. "Bracers," she said. Simple, dark, with thin backing plates stitched between hides. "Training guards for knife practice. If you wear them, people will think you're cautious. They won't ask why your wrists are… different."
He slid them on. They fit too well.
[Armature disguise: effective.]
[Magnetic signature: masked.]
"You'll smell human," she said, humor ghosting her mouth. "You'll look like you've got nothing up your sleeve. And you'll keep your vow."
"I will."
"Good." She tipped her head toward the window. "Welcome to the University, KrysKo."
He looked out again. A student fumbled her slate. Two others pretended they hadn't seen, then went back and helped anyway. Somewhere, someone tuned a stringed instrument until it found the note the room wanted.
For the first time since steam and red light woke his eyes, he felt something he could almost mistake for relief.
[Campus entry: complete.]
[Subsystem unlocked: Scent Profile Editor (Human Baseline v1).]
[Blades: campus interlock engaged.]
[Quest chain updated: University Paths → Attend orientation; secure lab access; maintain cover.]
The leather creaked like a very small door closing politely.
"Let's learn the rules," he said.
"And then," Kara added, eyes bright, "let's break the ones that keep people dying."
He did not smile easily. He did now, quick and precise as a hinge.
The bell rang again. Somewhere inside him, a door moved on its pins.
---
The Trial of Blades Without Blades
The University was not a single building so much as a stitched quilt of endurance. Where walls had fallen, gardens grew in their bones. Where towers had cracked, Drakari stone learned human angles. Wind ran its fingers along Architect glass and made soft music no one had designed.
Kara peeled away at third bell toward the south labs, a map of excitement and terror under her green thread. KrysKo watched her go until the crowd took the straight line of her out of sight. Then he turned at a warden's gesture and followed.
They passed beneath banners dyed in herb and soot. A stone plaque over a low door read: Office of Entry.
Inside, books and ledgers lined the walls. The desk was old oak, scarred by ink and years. Behind it sat a scribe with narrow spectacles and a white beard braided into a rope that rested like another line on his chest. His sash was green, but there was a fighter's posture in him—a man who had trained his back to stay a certain way even when seated.
The scribe set down his pen only after he finished the line he was writing. "Name," he said without looking up.
"KrysKo."
"No family?"
A fractional pause. "None."
The scribe dipped his quill. "Purpose of study?"
The word caught differently in KrysKo's processors than in his ears. Study. He let the slow part of his mind answer first.
[Query: purpose of entry.]
[Operational suggestion: hone skills under legitimate framework; reduce suspicion via institutional alignment.]
He chose truth's edge. "Combat. Strategy. Tactics. The saving kind."
The scribe's quill paused. His eyes lifted. Measuring, not mocking. "You seek to be tested."
"Yes."
The scribe tore a slip from the ledger, sanded the ink, stamped a small bronze seal into the corner. "Master Halvek will see you. If he judges you worth the stone we stand on, you'll have access to the halls you mean to haunt." He gestured. Two wardens unfolded from the shadow with the economy of trained hands. "The yard."
They brought him to a square of stone open to the air. No theater seats. No pomp. Just beams darkened by sweat and years, racks of blunted weapons, chalk lines gone soft beneath countless feet. Students practiced at the edges in small clumps—laughter underlaid by the sound of wood on wood.
At the center stood a man.
Master Halvek was not large so much as arranged for force. Shoulders like a yoke; forearms knotted with old work. Iron-gray hair tied close. His bo staff rested against one shoulder, polished to a deep, unreflective glow. His eyes, when they found KrysKo, were not cruel. They were curious the way a blade is curious about a whetstone.
"Candidate," a warden said. "Combat study. Tested at your will."
Halvek's gaze traveled from boots to brow. "You carry no weapon."
"My body is my weapon," KrysKo said.
A breath moved one corner of the master's mouth. "Then we'll see if your body sings louder than mine." He stepped into the chalk square. "Bo staff. Root of Okinawa. Simple. Infinite when patient."
KrysKo slid into ginga. Feet soft. Hips a pendulum. The rhythm climbed into him like a familiar river.
Halvek's brows tipped by a degree. "Capoeira. Few here know its song."
"Then listen," KrysKo said.
A student rang a bell.
Halvek moved first—a fast, straight thrust to the chest, no telegraph.
KrysKo let the ginga carry him left, weight off the line, and the staff hissed by. His heel snapped toward Halvek's ribcage, precise as a spoken name.
Crack. Staff met shin. Pain stung. KrysKo let it map the limb and folded with it, spinning out, landing light.
"Good," Halvek murmured. He swept low, the staff a level line meant to take both ankles.
KrysKo inverted, palms to stone, legs with the memory of dance. His feet scissored to trap the staff; Halvek turned the pole within his hands and freed it with a half-beat jerk born of practice older than most books.
KrysKo landed already moving, rasteira cutting at the master's lead ankle.
Halvek planted the staff, pole-vaulted over the sweep, turned mid-air, and brought the end down toward KrysKo's shoulder like a judge's gavel.
KrysKo rolled; stone cracked where wood struck.
They reset without talk. Dust rose. Students edged closer, the circle of breath around the yard changing shape as attention condensed.
[Scan active.]
[Style detected: Bo Staff Mastery.]
[Efficiency: 82%.]
[Weakness: micro-overextension during vault recovery; right knee favors old injury—lat drop a hair slower.]
[Strength: superior centerline control; ambidexterity.]
KrysKo feinted left, spun right, heel arcing toward Halvek's temple. The staff intercepted. The impact shivered from calf to hip. KrysKo turned the shiver into motion: meia lua, his leg tracing a crescent that sought jaw then shoulder then hand.
Halvek ducked, staff rising to meet the arc. Wood grazed KrysKo's ribs. If it had been steel, he would be bleeding at a rate the system did not like.
"Adaptable," Halvek said, breathing steady. "But rhythm is still rhythm."
KrysKo's feet changed time. The ginga stuttered, broke, reformed on an off-beat that did not announce itself.
Halvek's staff hesitated a fraction, enough. KrysKo stepped inside the line and hammered a kick into the staff with enough force to shunt the master a half-step back.
The students gasped as if pulled on a thread.
Halvek planted, weight finding gravel and control like a hawk returning to wrist. His smile sharpened. "Better."
They moved again. No flourishes now—utility and timing. Halvek's staff collapsed space in a straight line; KrysKo made that line curve. A lunge, a pivot, a heel. A block, a slide, a thrust. The yard became language.
[Combat analysis: 44% replication of Bo sequences achieved.]
[Adaption curve: rising.]
[Advisory: mimicry risks pattern lock; introduce irregularities.]
KrysKo began to echo Halvek—not perfectly, but enough to be recognized by any trained eye as learning in real time. When Halvek's strike cut diagonally, KrysKo's shoulder twitched in the same angle even as his leg did something else. When Halvek pivoted, KrysKo stole the pivot and fed it forward.
"You copy," Halvek said, staff a line of light and shadow. "Copy is not creation."
"Creation comes next," KrysKo answered, sliding under a thrust he could not have avoided if he had been a fraction later. He twisted out of human geometry, the unnatural length of his forearms changing leverage in ways the eye could not anticipate.
The staff caught his calf—barely. Halvek grunted, the first sound that admitted effort.
They circled, drawing a chalkless figure eight. KrysKo's breathing did not hitch. Halvek's did not either, but sweat mapped his temples in neat lines. The staff swept; KrysKo slid; heel bit wood; wood answered like old bone.
At the edge of the yard, a warden with a crown braid—Aria Senn—had drifted into shade. She watched without moving, eyes the color of a storm that had already chosen landfall. KrysKo clocked her presence and filed it under authority.
Halvek altered pattern: false high, true low, butt-end jab to thigh, pivot to throat, withdrawal before contact. KrysKo's chest felt the threat and turned. The yard kept silence grimly satisfied.
[New pattern branch observed.]
[Counter suggestion: advance past centerline; remove weapon.]
He could. The math sang the line to him: slip inside, pin the staff with the bracer's hidden bite, let a blade kiss daylight—and the vow would scream.
He didn't. He let the idea pass. In its place, he tapped his heel and let ginga carry the refusal like it was always part of the step.
"Hold," Halvek said, not because the fight had ended but because he wanted to see something else. He swapped ends on the staff so casually students who had never been hit hard didn't notice the test in it. "Again."
They collided, and for a handful of seconds the world narrowed to timing, wood, and choice. KrysKo's shin took a solid crack; he returned it with a heel to the staff that made Halvek's fingers sing. Halvek's vault came an inch too slow from the favoured knee; KrysKo's rasteira grazed the ankle and would have taken him if Halvek hadn't bent gravity into a different bargain.
The bell struck once—an apprentice with good ears sensing the moment a ring should end.
Halvek raised a hand. "Stop."
KrysKo froze mid-motion, leg half-raised, staff an inch from his ribs. He let the moment stretch, then lowered smoothly.
The yard breathed again.
Halvek stood straight and let the staff come to rest against his shoulder. "Very good," he said, not stingy. "You fight without fear. You fight without hurry. Your rhythm is yours, and you can break it when it begins to own you." His gaze sharpened. "You will study here."
KrysKo inclined his head. Respect without surrender.
"Remember," Halvek said, voice pitched to carry to the edge of the square, "power copies. Wisdom creates. If you only imitate, you'll always be the second mouth telling someone else's story. If you make, the world will remember the song as its own."
At the edge, Aria Senn's chin tucked, a note made for later. Her eyes flicked once to KrysKo, then to the bracers at his wrists. Her mouth did something that could be mistaken for a smile by a man who didn't know how edges hide.
The scribe from the entry office appeared as if conjured by paper. "Admission granted," he called, waving the stamped slip. "Candidate, present for ledger."
Kara had slipped into the back of the crowd somewhere during the fight. She hadn't cheered, hadn't gasped—she had watched like a field medic who knows the cost of stupid bravery. When the wardens led KrysKo toward the desk, she moved with him as if they had always walked side by side here.
"Good?" she breathed.
"Admitted," he said.
Her smile came quick and unguarded, then hid. "I have orientation," she said. "Mestre Yal. If I faint, catch me."
"I will," he said, and surprised himself with the certainty in it.
[Quest complete: University Combat Trial.]
[Reward: Entry Granted.]
[XP awarded.]
[Progression event queued.]
The warm voice that lived in him like an old book that had learned to speak cleared its throat softly.
> "You listened before you struck, KrysKo," it said, as if they were sitting on a porch somewhere with a river going about its business. "That is a lesson men forget when they paint their hands for war. You didn't break your promise to the stone. That is another lesson. Keep them both."
The cold system tucked the praise into a column called behavioral tags and color-coded it in a way the warm voice didn't trust.
Kara caught his sleeve as they passed beneath a fig bough that had taught itself to climb brick. "Don't disappear," she said.
"I will be where your shadow falls," he said, and only later did he realize it sounded like a vow.
---
Rules, Rooms, and First Lessons
They gave him a guest token with a carved notch, a list of places where he could walk unsupervised, and a list of places where he would not set foot without a sponsor unless he wanted to learn how the University enforced its rules with polite ferocity. Dorm E took Kara in with the quiet gladness they saved for Myles. A girl with ink-black fingers waved Kara toward a water basin and made space at a shelf with a practiced hip bump.
KrysKo found a bench in the cloister and watched the light move along the stone as bells marked the University's heartbeats. He smelled rosemary and sweat, limewash and paper, Drakari heat and human bread. He listened to how a safe place made different noises than the road and let his shoulders drop by a degree no one but him would ever measure.
A boy in gray cords sat at the far end of the bench and tried not to stare. He failed with dignity. "You fought Master Halvek," he said finally, unable to keep the wonder from his voice.
"I trained with him," KrysKo said, which was not a lie.
The boy nodded like a pilgrim who had touched a relic. "I'm Morlen. I'm going to fail twice and then pass. That's how I do things." He squinted at KrysKo's bracers. "Knife guards?"
"Habit," KrysKo said. He turned his wrists a fraction to show unthreatening leather.
A bell rang. The boy startled. "Third! I'm late." He ran, feet thumping joyfully on rules that let him.
Kara appeared, a little pale, a little bright, the way people look when their brain has been force-fed the future at a pace the past disapproved of. "Mestre Yal says I have hands," she said, as if reporting a diagnosis she wasn't sure she deserved. "He also says hands are liars unless they smell like intent."
"Good hands," KrysKo said.
"You didn't see them." She bumped him with an elbow soft as a breath. "Come on. If we sprint, we can steal soup before the fourth bell."
The refectory was a tide pool at evening—eddies of conversation, currents of laughter, territories marked by trays and elbows. The Merit Board updated in chalk and brass while they ate, numbers climbing or refusing. Ask Before You Take. Return More Than You Borrow repeated above the service window not as a threat but a recipe.
Kara ate like a person who remembered hunger. KrysKo sat with a bowl he would not use and studied the way steam moved in a room that had earned its heat.
A shadow fell—a real one, not metaphor—and a woman set her tray down opposite them with the right amount of clatter to make coincidence plausible if anyone wanted to pretend. Crown braid. Warden's sash. Eyes like weather.
"Aria Senn," Kara said under her breath, half-awe, half do not poke.
Warden Senn did not smile. She set her spoon down and regarded KrysKo as if she were reading a law he had been foolish enough to write on his face. "You did not break the vow," she said. "That will matter later." She looked to Kara. "Your sponsor, you keep him calm."
Kara's chin lifted. "He keeps himself calm."
"Good answer," Senn said, without a fleck of irony. "Here are the other answers you're going to need: if you think the University is safe because it is the University, you will do something stupid. If you think the University isn't worth protecting because it is imperfect, you will do something cruel." Her gaze returned to KrysKo. "We prefer stupid to cruel. Stupid can be educated."
Kara swallowed. "Understood."
Senn rose, tray in one hand. "Keep the vow. Keep your hands honest. Keep your feet silent when they need to be." To KrysKo, she added, almost lazily, "And don't copy Halvek's tricks. He hates that."
She vanished between tables like a knife returning to a sheath it didn't respect.
Kara let out a breath. "Is everyone here terrifying?"
"Some," KrysKo said. "Some are simply competent."
She grinned. "I like this place."
He did not disagree.
---
The Long Evening and a Door in His Head
Night lent the courtyards a different grammar. Students walked with books hugged to chests instead of staffs to palms. Lamps threw honey light and made statues look like they were only pretending to be still. A Drakari child taught a human child how to hum through a reed so the reed would hum back. The reed learned.
Kara peeled off toward Dorm E with the small wave of a person who means come back without saying it. "First bell," she said. "I have to prove I know the difference between eight kinds of bitter and which ones lie. If I cry in front of Yal, tell everyone the smoke got in my eyes."
"I will," KrysKo said.
He walked the cloisters in the way a man measures the shape of a room he is going to live in. He counted steps between arches, the height of gates, the time between bells. He filed which corners collected quiet, which windows reflected too faithfully, which doors knew how to keep a secret. By the time the lamps were low and the last laughter had decanted to murmurs, he had mapped three exits, five returns, eight lies he could tell to keep the ninth truth intact.
He sat on a low wall in a garden of broken glass made gentle by moss. The shards had been arrayed into thin rivers that caught the moon and made it pretend to be water. He listened.
The cold system came forward like a clean ledger.
[End-of-day audit initiated.]
[Campus protocol: maintained.]
[Deception footprint: minimal.]
[Risk flags: Warden observation (Senn): ACTIVE. Scentwarden tolerance: CONDITIONAL.]
[Training gains: Capoeira adaptation ↑; Bo staff counter-library: 52% scaffold stored.]
[Blades: locked. Safety: PASS.]
[Next actions: shadow Kara's lab block; seek Mechanum observation to expand structural heuristics; maintain cover.]
The warm voice arrived after, like a chair pulled up at a hearth.
> "It's a good thing," it said, rich and slow, "to be in a place that wants to teach you how to be better than your fear. But I'll tell you something the stone won't: places are people. Keep an eye on the people. Keep a hand on your promise. You made one today; you'll make more."
"I know," KrysKo said, not out loud.
> "And that girl," the voice went on, softer now, as if not to wake the statues, "she sees the world and still chooses it. That's not common. Don't borrow more of her light than you can pay back."
He let the words sit. He did not argue. The night didn't need argument; it needed listening.
Somewhere, a bell rang the late hour, a single note. The University turned in its sleep.
Near the glass river, an insect tried a new song and found an old one easier.
KrysKo rose and went to find his shadow under Dorm E's windowframe.
---
Morning: Edges of Belonging
Morning here smelled like bread and wet stone, chalk dust and mint. The ironwoods sifted light into squares, and students onlineed themselves with coffee and the scold of late friends. Kara met him under the fig tree with a slate and ink on her fingers that hadn't gotten there by accident.
"Today: rules talk," she said, wrinkling her nose. "Then scent orientation. Then maybe Yal lets me light something on purpose."
"You will not faint," KrysKo said.
"I might."
"If you do," he said, "no one will know except me and the floor."
She laughed, the sound clean as the morning.
The rules talk happened in a theater that had once been a chapel, heavy beams wearing chalk like new lace. A woman with hair shot with iron talked about blood price and sanctuary and what it meant to owe a place more than you could pay in coin. KrysKo listened because law was a kind of machine, and he wanted to know where this one was oiled and where it groaned.
After, Kara was claimed by a cohort with herbs tucked behind their ears. KrysKo drifted toward the yard. Master Halvek raised a hand without looking up from the apprentice he was correcting and called, "You copy quick. Today, learn slow." Then he made KrysKo stand beside a new boy and say nothing for an hour while the boy learned the lazy way to hurt his own shoulder. KrysKo said nothing and learned three things Halvek hadn't said out loud.
At noon, he found the wall by the glass garden again and sat in the patch of sun that had chosen him. The bracers warmed. The leather stretched to remember him. The system rolled its shoulders.
[Informal evaluation: integration trending stable.]
[Observation: Kara Myles proximity correlates with smoother control loops under stress.]
[Advisory: this is not weakness.]
The warm voice chuckled, a low river sound.
> "You're scared of feeling things, KrysKo," it said, kindly. "But fear's just the body asking for a lesson. Learn the lesson. Don't let the fear drive."
He let the words settle like warm bread in a hungry chest.
A bell. A laugh. The palm-to-chalk smack of a scholar's triumph. Metal being taught manners in a Mechanum bay two courtyards over.
Inside the rules of this place, something like safety lived. Not soft. Not naive. Earned.
KrysKo stood.