He had miles of learning to put between himself and the door he had walked through. But he had entered. The hinge had held.
---
The Yard, Again (And the Lesson Halvek Did Not Say)
Afternoon clouded without rain. Master Halvek called three students into the square and worked their feet until they forgot that feet were for walking and learned instead that feet told the truth of a fight long before hands did. He let KrysKo into the ring only to make him not move when every built instinct wanted motion. "You think speed is always right," Halvek said mildly. "But fast is just slow you haven't questioned yet."
KrysKo stood. And learned. How to make a man trip over a silence. How to turn a pivot into a promise and then break the promise without apology.
Warden Senn watched from shade again. She had a book under her arm she did not open.
Students cycled, sweating, failing, cursing, learning. KrysKo's bracers stayed closed. His vow stayed unbroken. His map of sightlines grew a small new room: respect.
When Halvek dismissed them, the master passed KrysKo close enough to speak without an audience. "You didn't look at your hands once," he said. "Good. Don't be the kind of fighter who thinks his weapon is the best thing about him."
KrysKo nodded. "Understood."
Halvek's mouth twitched. "Senn is the kind of warden who makes men better by making them admit what they are. Don't lie to her."
"I try not to lie," KrysKo said.
"You're alive. You'll lie," Halvek said, as if reciting a law of physics. "Just don't do it to yourself."
He was gone before KrysKo could file a reply that felt equal to the advice.
---
Evening: The Vow and the Door Beyond It
The refectory's noise was kinder the second night, less like a test, more like an invitation. Kara shoved a bowl of stew under his nose and a heel of bread into his hand even though they both knew. "It helps me to pretend," she said. "Let me."
He held the bread. That was enough.
They found a corner under a sketch of the river that had once run bright through the city. A student argued quietly with a companion about bridging duties and the price of being the person everyone asks to make peace. Kara listened by accident and learned an argument she would use later.
After food that wasn't his, after laughter that was, after a bell that suggested, not ordered, they walked out under ironwood again. The arch they had entered beneath had kept count of every vow spoken there that day and did not weigh them.
Kara stopped under it. "Say it again," she said.
"The vow?"
"Yes."
He faced stone that had survived more wars than he could name and spoke softly. "No hidden steel drawn against scholar or soil."
Kara touched the green thread at her wrist. "Good," she said. "Because tomorrow I have to boil something that will bite me back if I'm careless, and I'd rather you be a person beside me than a blade I can't hide."
"I will be a person beside you," he said.
[Behavioral tag: promise recorded.]
[Note: binding strength increases with repetition.]
[Advisory: keep your promises, KrysKo O'Ruadhraigh.]
The warm voice smiled.
> "He's learning," it said to no one but him. "He's learning."
They stood there a little while longer, under the arch that remembered hands and words. Neither spoke. Neither needed to.
A bell's single note drifted across the courtyards. Lamps guttered and steadied. A hinge turned somewhere in the bowels of a building that had been made from three other buildings that had refused to die alone.
And if the road beyond the walls still knew their names, it let them rest a night before calling them again.
[End-of-day audit complete.]
[Progression event: Level Up.]
[Capabilities: smoothed. Control loops: refined. Emotional modulation: improved.]
[Stats withheld per milestone cadence.]
[Next: South labs (Myles); Mechanum bay observation; maintain cover; remain human.]
> "Sleep if you can," the warm voice said, standing from the porch in his head. "Watch if you must. Either way—keep that vow close. The world outside buys men who forget. The world inside teaches those who remember."
KrysKo set his back to the stone and his eyes to the door of Dorm E, where Kara's candle made a small, stubborn sun.
He intended to keep remembering.…the University gave him something to remember.
A moth worried the rim of the lamp above the cloister—soft wings tapping glass like a heartbeat that refused to sleep. Somewhere beyond the ironwoods, a reed learned a new note and settled on it. KrysKo listened until the air around him had no surprises left, then let his eyes half-close.
> "Hold to the vow," the warm voice in him said, low as a porch at midnight. "In places like this, a man is the sum of what he will not do."
Footsteps whispered at the far end of the arcade—measured, unhurried, not trying to be unseen so much as expecting not to be challenged. Warden Senn passed the mouth of the archway without looking in, then paused one beat too long to be chance. When she moved again, something white and square slid under the edge of the door to Dorm E—no clatter, no scrape, as if the note had wanted to arrive all along.
KrysKo crossed the stones, lifted the paper, and felt the weight of an official seal in the thick of it. He broke the wax.
By the Order of the Wardens and the Office of Entry
Candidate KrysKo O'Ruadhraigh
Present at Sun-Bell to Scentwarden Tahl and Master Halvek
Purpose: Verification of Vow, Olfactory Audit, Combat Review
Sponsor to attend. — A. Senn
He read it twice, once with his eyes and once with the part of him that stored maps instead of sentences. He folded it along the old crease the paper seemed to remember and slid it into his bracer.
> "Questions are doors," the warm voice murmured. "You don't always choose when they open. But you can choose how you walk through."
He stood the rest of the night under Kara's window, and when her candle finally died to a thin gold seam, the sky had already started making room for dawn.
At first bell, the campus woke like a great animal that trusted its keepers: bread, chalk, mint, the slap of bare feet toward water. Kara came down the dorm steps with ink on her fingers and sleep somewhere in her hair. He held the summons out. She read, jaw tightening, then exhaled through her nose.
"An audit this early means somebody asked a question," she said.
"Then we answer," he replied.
Kara looped the green thread at her wrist with her thumb—once, twice, a small private ritual to steady hands. "Scentwarden Tahl is fair," she said. "Halvek too. Senn is… Senn."
"She prefers stupid to cruel," KrysKo said.
That startled a smile. "You listened."
"I intend to keep remembering."
They turned together toward the eastern cloister where the wardens kept their hours. The bells made a simple, honest shape out of the morning. And somewhere behind the stone and the rules and the vows, something else listened back.
Chapter 5 — Part 2: Provisional
The University didn't sound like a refuge. It sounded like a decision. Hammers ticked an argument into metal. A bell rehearsed the hour in the throat, twice and then once, as if to see who was listening. Wind moved through the sky-dome's ribs and made a low note that didn't care if people had names.
Kara took point through the evening flow. KrysKo kept a half-pace to her shadow, scarf high, bracers snug, blades asleep under skin, the System humming low and domestic in his head—room temperature, crowd heat, nothing hunting except ideas.
[Advisory: Maintain low profile.
Threat: minimal (internal).
Protocol: Campus conduct — no live steel, no autonomous displays, follow sponsor.]
Administration had colonized the forward wedge of an old library with crates, chalkboards, and the sort of desk that survives without ever being safe. A woman with a necklace of copper washers and a pen that had fought wars without breaking flicked Kara's charter open, softened at "Myles" the way the world does for a memory that treated it kindly, and then looked up at the tall stranger the charter dragged behind it.
"And him?" she asked, already cautious, not unkind.
"My guard," Kara said. "With me."
"Name?"
"KrysKo O'Ruadhraigh."
It didn't land anywhere in the clerk's catalog. That was fine. It rarely did.
"Program?"
"Combat. Field strategy. Anything that keeps people living," KrysKo said.
The clerk's pen hovered. "We have rules about weapons in the gardens."
Kara, even. "He saved my life. Twice."
"I believe you," the clerk answered, surprising herself. "Belief isn't policy." Two brisk marks, a clean tear; she slid over a chit impressed with the University braid. "Provisional entry. Evaluation with Mestre Corvo. If he says you're safe, you're safe—for today. Dorm after."
Kara's shoulders eased a hair. KrysKo inclined his head the exact weight of gratitude and vow.
"Mess first," the clerk added, nodding toward a building with ship-hull tables and banners that had seen both weddings and wakes. "Soup steadies hands."
It did. Onions and bone stock and a green that almost earned the name spice. They took a place under a banner stamped with names you'd recognize only if you'd bled here. Across the table, a knot of students practiced staring without manners—three green sashes, one slate, and a blue-collar boy whose smile had learned to cut before it learned to comfort.
"New?" Blue-collar asked. "Or lost?"
"Here to learn," Kara said. "Kara Myles."
His brows rose a polite fraction. "As in—"
"As in." She sipped broth.
His gaze slid to KrysKo. "Your guard looks like he could kill a Drakari with a shirt button."
"If a shirt were all he had," KrysKo said, almost kind, "he'd borrow your button."
The slate-band snorted. Blue's smile sharpened. "Tovin Marr. Applied combat theory. I'll be looking for you in the yard."
"He doesn't showcase," Kara said.
"Everything's a show," Tovin murmured, leaving with the last word because boys like him always do—until someone takes it.
They took their bowls to the wash trough, steam ribboning mint and ash. Night leaned a shoulder into the ribs of the sky-dome. The combat yard yawned long and honest, chalk lines, racks of battered practice weapons, earth that promised to tell the truth if you fell on it.
A man leaned under the awning and watched a trio of students try to make their bodies remember angles their minds had only met in diagrams. He was spare, iron-calm, hair close, wrists taped, a cane within reach he didn't need. His eyes skimmed KrysKo once, returned like an echo changed by stone, and held.
"Mestre Corvo?" Kara asked.
A small nod, like acknowledging a joke he liked and wasn't going to explain. He took the chit, didn't look at it, looked instead at KrysKo's weight over his feet, the unnatural reach of his forearms, the odd, coin-flat way he stood.
"What do you think you are?" Corvo asked.
KrysKo didn't lie. "An axis. A hinge."
Corvo's mouth almost smiled. "We'll see what swings on you. No blades," he added, without glancing at the forearms that could grow them. "No blood if you can help it. Hit to tell the truth, not to win."
KrysKo set the scarf on the fence, stepped into chalk, and felt the ground offer its contract: I will hold you until I don't. The System lowered the dimmer.
[Constraints: Blades locked (public).
Limiter: output modulation—moderate.
Record: observation/replication only.]
They bowed. Corvo forgot to move first. That was lesson one.
KrysKo slid into ginga, side-to-side sway writing cursive on dirt, hands open, palms honest. Corvo stepped just outside the music, where rhythm hasn't noticed you yet, his guard compact, shoulders loose, eyes quiet.
"Capoeira," Corvo said, not asking.
"Good for dancing through knives," KrysKo answered.
"Try."
Corvo showed a jab and made a different promise—the hook. His rear foot slid away and left nothing to step on. KrysKo's System started tagging without getting in the way:
[Base: Western boxing.
Entries: Muay Thai (disguised teep, low kick invisible).
Grapple ghosting: Judo hips, Silat angles without steel.
Tempo: expert; feint density high.]
The first contact wasn't impact. Corvo touched KrysKo's wrist like greeting a dog that might bite, tugged, asked for a step. KrysKo showed a palm to the sky and let the leash run out of road.
"Mm," Corvo said—approval approximated.
KrysKo swung low, heel whispering air to set the metronome. Corvo's foot answered—teep that grazed cloth. KrysKo dropped weight, threatened a sweep, planted a hand where a blade wasn't and retracted from muscle memory so clean only Corvo's eyes saw the choice.
"Retract," Corvo said once, approving a weapon he pretended not to believe in.
"Extend," KrysKo murmured, a private joke for steel asleep.
Truths traded quick: the ginga's disdain for straight lines punished the boxer's love of shortest distances; the boxer's compact denial denied the dancer's flourish. The first real strike was a feint; the second kept its promise. Corvo's low kick came up late like a bad apology for the peroneal nerve. KrysKo slid over the track like water deciding a different riverbed and kissed the inside of Corvo's ankle with his heel—"I saw you."
"Good," Corvo said, and stopped teaching gentle.
Space collapsed. Judo arrived in work clothes. Kuzushi tugged; hips suggested; a foot disappeared. KrysKo pivoted into the gap, shoulder rolling friction into ally. They were chest-to-chest, then chest-to-air, then both laughing without breath because the ground had joined the argument. "Strong," Corvo said, approving everything and nothing.
They separated by agreement. Sweat beaded. Dust reconsidered where it lived.
Silat ghosted a knife that didn't get born. Their hands wrote letters in each other's air: cut, check, scold, forgive. The System stopped labeling and started modeling Corvo himself:
[Deceptive collapse → off-angle entry → structure denial.
Counter-timing prob: 0.62 on step three.
Pref chain (training): jam/bridge → elbow/shoulder check → sweep or forearm choke → break.
He expects your right-shoulder spin.]
He did. KrysKo didn't.
The yard Fence gathered a little river of faces: students, two rangers, one small Drakari with basalt scales who watched like a quiet church. Tovin Marr leaned and smiled like gravity. "Hit him, Mestre," he called. "He looks bored."
Corvo didn't answer. He dared; KrysKo accepted; they wrote a line down the yard that said: this is how men who don't need to win learn each other.
At seven minutes, Corvo's breath drew frost in the cooler air. KrysKo's didn't at eight. Corvo noticed, filed it under "Later," and committed at nine to see the engine under the hood.
He stepped a half beat deeper, hip a half beat sooner, elbow finishing the sentence instead of letting it swing. Invitation, not overreach. KrysKo took it—meia lua de compasso, world hitching around his spine; palm on dirt; heel singing through where a head would've been if Corvo were average. He wasn't. He ducked. The heel whispered past. KrysKo let the kick become a sweep; Corvo hopped a joke he'd heard; both rose in one breath; both took each other's wrist in the next.
"Enough," Corvo said, not tired—satisfied.
The yard let go of its breath. A bell tapped once, approving.
Corvo shook his hand out, looked KrysKo like you look a tool you mean to use well. "You carry a style not owned by any one teacher," he said. "And you hide a weapon like a secret at a crowded table."
"I won't draw it here," KrysKo said.
"That was the bargain," Corvo nodded. He turned to the fence. "Provisional passed. Put it in ink."
Tovin clicked his tongue—stone and ash—and began rehearsing a version of the evening where he had not been present.
The basalt Drakari tipped his head the smallest degree—respect and something like memory—then left before KrysKo could name it.
Corvo's eyes went amused by half a degree. "Two rules," he told KrysKo, low. "You don't showcase in the yard. You don't make people bleed for pride. You want challenge, we do it with purpose, or we take it outside and let the world applaud."
"Agreed," KrysKo said.
The sky changed its mind.
A tremor shivered the dome's ribs. A long, whale-deep moan rolled the campus spine to spine. Students shaded their eyes. Light skated along the glass in a pale sheet, hiccuped in a wrong color, then shivered like fear.
Sirens—patient, practiced, unpanicked—picked up the campus and turned it. Medics to stations; engineers to spines; rangers to height; Drakari to anywhere the ground needed a promise kept.
Corvo was already walking. "With me," he said, and didn't look back to see if KrysKo obeyed.
Kara appeared at a run, bandolier crossing her chest, hair escaping its decisions. "Go," she told KrysKo, breath steady enough to trust. "I'll prep the infirmary."
"Kara—"
"Go," she said again, and was gone, green thread bright as law.
The east gantry banged under their feet. Through ribs—high, east—a bright thing grew brighter and then smeared sideways in a dirty streak. Not a meteor. A shard of someone else's war failing out of the sky.
"Not us," Corvo judged. "Close enough to scorch."
The east manifold lived under perforated steel and prayer. Two engineers were elbow-deep in a panel that spat white arcs. One swore like a poet. The other shook a shocked hand and lied to it about pain.
"We're losing phase lock," the poet barked. "Architect spine won't sing in tune with the Ophilim cap. If we push, we blow—"
"—the quarter," Corvo supplied, polite.
"—the quarter," she agreed, less politely.
KrysKo's System mapped the array in a single, cool inhalation: crystal ribs (Architect) laid into human frame; a hungry Ophilim capacitor grafted like a borrowed organ; copper bus like a vein that didn't want to grow. Everything working. Nothing agreeing.
"Can you hold?" Corvo asked.
"Maybe," the engineer said. "If you've got a miracle and oven mitts."
"Two mitts and a terrible idea," a voice said, already inside the machine.
He arrived like he'd fallen out of a vent: lean, grease-fingered, visor shoved up, grin held on with wire. The satchel across his chest clinked like guilty pockets.
"Don't panic," he said, crawling across the manifold like it was a horse he'd raised from a mean foal. "Panic efficiently."
"Marrow," the poet groaned. It was prayer and curse in one mouthful. "If you blow us—"
"You'll tell everyone it was your idea," he promised, cheerful. "Hello strangers. I'm Jax. Hand me the tri-prism. No, the good one."
No one had a tri-prism. He found his own: a blunt, triangular crystal the color of old ice, shot through with hairline fractures that looked like they should matter and didn't. He spit-polished an Architect contact the way a priest wipes an altar, wedged the prism between two ribs where nothing holy said it belonged, and looped a copper braid like a scarf around a spur. Then he performed a small heresy: grafted a human fuse sideways so every engineer present could blame him later and thank him now.
"You—long arms," he said, eyes flicking to KrysKo, doing three calculations and keeping all of them. "Anchor the spine when I say. Don't ground yourself unless you like the smell of regret."
KrysKo palmed crystal. Deep in his chest, the Drakari alloy hummed like a contented engine. Heat poured up his forearms. The prism drank. The bus screamed. The shield above them flared ugly, then found a clean white that sounded like relief if you knew how to listen to light.
Sirens stepped down a note. The engineer breathed words that meant "thank you" and "I'll kill you" to Jax without contradiction. Corvo scratched his jaw. "You broke it worse," he observed gently, "and made it better."
"It was just dramatic," Jax said, petting the panel twice. He noticed his hands shaking, closed them until they agreed to behave, and looked at KrysKo properly—up, down, the easy not-quite-human stillness, the arms built for anchoring. He was delighted. "And you," he declared, "are a project."
"A person," KrysKo corrected.
"Right," Jax said. "And also a project." He would have kept going—bracer housings, scent atomizer, a hundred small lies that make covertness easier—but a runner hit the gantry at speed.
"Admin wants placements before second bell," the runner puffed. "Caravans inbound. Bunks now."
Corvo looked at Kara—already gone—then at Jax, then at KrysKo. The shape of a decision settled into his shoulders like a thing he had worn often.
"We'll save them some walking," he said. "Maintenance owns you when you remember to sleep." Chin at Jax. "Keep saving quarters and you get a bed that doesn't fight back."
Jax saluted with two fingers and mischief. "I accept your terms."
"Provisional combat," Corvo told KrysKo. "He doesn't sleep. He doesn't bleed for pride. He keeps promises. Room with the tinkerer. North Dorm, Twelve."
The runner scribbled like someone paid by the punctuation.
"Kara Myles—South Dorm with medics," Corvo added, already walking away because crises prefer men who arrive without ceremony.
They crossed lantern pools and fig-tree shadow toward North Dorm, a brick-and-timber block that had learned to stand up after three sieges and a hard winter. Inside, the corridor smelled of soap, parchment, optimism. Doors wore names branded into shingles.
Twelve hid farther down than seemed legal. Jax shouldered it open. Two narrow beds, a window that believed in wind, a table that remembered knives, a shelf that remembered better ideas. One bed had lost a war with parts—wire, gears, a piece of Architect plating conscripted as lampshade.
"Make yourself at home," Jax said, kicking a path through his genius. "By which I mean endure until I make it better."
KrysKo laid his scarf on the empty bed like a promise kept. The window lifted with a small apology; night air slid in, honest and cold.
"About your… aroma," Jax said, cheerfully invasive.
KrysKo looked.
"It's not wrong," Jax went on. "Just not native. If you want to be social without catching a spear for someone else's bad day, you want to smell a bit more like meat and mistakes." He rummaged, produced a thumb-high ceramic vial with a tiny brass atomizer, and tossed it. The stencil on the side said meat & mistakes in beautifully unnecessary letters. "Salt, trace lactate, copper, smoke, the ghost of mint. Two spritzes. Drakari will still clock you; they have manners."
"Tomorrow," KrysKo said. "We have formalities."
"Sun-Bell sermon," Jax groaned pleasantly. "Scentwarden and someone who likes ledgers. I'll bring snacks."
KrysKo fixed the provisional pin to his bracer. It bit shallow arcs into synth-skin. Outside, the dome finished remembering how to be sky in the dark. Inside, Jax found the bed under the parts avalanche and slept with the confidence of a man who trusts his bad ideas to keep him alive.
KrysKo took the window.
> "You did the work that needed doing," the warm voice said, pleased. "And you kept your hands gentle when you could have made them loud."
He let that weigh him in a good way. The campus slowed. Lanterns tired. Rounds passed—a rhythm of footfalls that meant you could rest, for now.
Down the corridor, someone tuned a stringed instrument to the room and not the room to the string. In the rafters outside, a small, dark drone the color of dusk tucked itself against a brace and watched the hallway. It wasn't a myth. It belonged to mortal hands. Its little lens blinked like an eye trying not to be caught.
KrysKo watched the fig leaves until the wind lost interest.
Morning would put a notice on the board that mattered:
FIELD ROTATIONS — PROVISIONAL COHORTS
Escort & salvage: South Farms
Cohort Nine — Myles (K.), Marrow (J.), O'Ruadhraigh (K.)
Oversight: Warden Senn
Ranger Liaison: Ronan Veyne
But morning hadn't arrived yet.
He held the quiet a little longer, a man teaching his body to believe the ground under him would still be there when he stood again. Then he closed his eyes—not sleeping, exactly—and let the University breathe him into its night.