Chapter 5 – Part 4
The Art That Breathes
Morning came pale through glass the world had already forgiven. In the Apotheion's south lab, warm vapor rolled low along stone benches, sliding through ranks of copper alembics and thick-bellied retorts like organized weather. Every vessel wore a hand-painted sigil and call number, as if an old library had sprouted glassware and kept its cataloging habits out of stubborn love.
Kara washed her hands in a basin of rosemary water until the sting in her bitten cuticles eased. The basins were a Myles tradition the University hadn't torn up by the roots—Drakari Healers had asked for them specifically. A sign above the drains in careful block script read: WASH FOR INTENT, NOT ONLY FOR CLEAN.
Mestre Yal observed from the doorway like a stone that had learned to walk: Drakari, slate-scaled, eyes a river-gold that held its own light. Four human Adepts worked in a crescent. Two Candidates oversaw them with the brittle calm of people certain about their vocabulary if not yet their hearts. No one wasted motion.
"Run begins in three breaths," Yal said, his Trade low and gentle. "On the third breath, you may begin."
Kara moved to Station Seven—her station today—where a retort sat assembled over a ring burner with a tamed blue flame. On her slate: Tincture #41: Gentian | Copper | Angelica (Field Antitoxin, River-class). She touched each ingredient with a fingertip before she lifted it, a Myles ritual of attention. Somewhere under miles of soil her grandmother's hands were asleep; the muscle memory woke anyway.
The Candidate posted to her lane—Sera Dray (gray cords, fast eyes; a mouth that remembered scorn more easily than praise)—skimmed Kara's notes without asking. "You're running gentian cold," Sera said. "Old technique. We keep heat lower and copper ratio higher."
Kara didn't look up. "I don't have the luxury of your copper."
"This is the University," Sera said, a paper-thin smile. "You have what you ask for. Unless you don't know to ask."
Kara measured by drop and pace, not only pipette. "The field won't always care what I know," she said softly.
Mestre Yal's voice, mild and iron both: "Let a method speak before you teach it a different language."
Sera stepped back two inches and smiled the way people do when corrected without bleed.
Kara set her ratios—gentian bitter-root powdered to a talc that smelled like rain on coins; copper shavings thin as fingernails, measured not by weight alone but by the color sunlight found along their edge; angelica sliced with a glass knife so sap wouldn't oxidize into false sweetness. She set the coil, checked the condenser's trickle, opened the stopper. The first breath off a run always told the truth. She leaned in and breathed the air around the apparatus, not the vapor itself.
Her shoulders loosened. "Not burning," she whispered. "Not drowning." Two degrees down on the ring.
At Station Three, Adept Morlen coughed as a purple haze licked from a flask. Sera snapped a vent and slid a neutralizing cloth over the neck. "Heat drift," she said, calm. "You rushed the copper plate."
Morlen flushed. Kara did not look over. Not pity. Not triumph. Just flame and breath and binding.
Angelica binds bad breath, her grandmother's voice said from memory's pantry. But only in river class. In swamp class it lies to you. Know your water before you know your medicine.
Kara's hands worked in the present. A half-pinch of her own dried smokewort; stir with bone spatula; cut the flame to a steady whisper. Condensed tincture dripped into the receiver: pale blue-green, deepening to the true river color her grandmother used to hold up to the kitchen window and say, "That's a saved life."
Yal drifted behind her like weather that had chosen a person's shape. He bent his tall head; the plates along his throat fluttered. Drakari did not smile with mouths; they smiled with pressure, scent, the way gold warmed by a degree. "Not only precise," he said. "Attentive."
Sera's pen scratched anyway. "Output is narrow-band," she murmured into the ledger. "Any deviation in source water and the tincture will drift."
"It will," Kara said without turning. "So you change the input, not bully the recipe. You prime with local water, then decant and run." She felt for a step that wasn't on her slate, turned the ring down another hair, and tapped the receiver once to loosen tension bubbles. The flow steadied.
"And if the field tech can't find clean prime?" Sera asked, lemon-sweet.
"Then she boils and chars," Kara said. "If she can't, she dies with her town. The recipe isn't worse because the world is cruel."
Silence, not unkind. Mestre Yal nodded like a bell. "A Myles answer. We keep the old not because it is old, but because it remembers things our new hands have not yet learned."
He wrote in the ledger in a careful Drakari hand: Myles—P+ (Precision), M+ (Rationale). Note: Field-robust judgment.
Kara's throat tugged toward a smile she didn't allow. She finished her decant, labeled with steady script, slid the vial into the tray for assay.
A faint curl of smoke—not hers—found her nose. She glanced to Station Nine. A tiny glass stress-star winked a heartbeat before it went. The retort popped. Hot tincture flared and hissed along the bench. Adept Kiv screamed, jerking back. An amber-red line opened along his forearm where splash had kissed him.
Kara moved before her mind did. She upended her basin, dumped rosemary water across the bench, smothered flame, and dragged Kiv's arm into the flood. "Hold," she said, voice cutting panic like a clean blade. "Copper burn. Not acid. Breathe." Sera landed with a neutralizer pad and—credit where it was due—didn't waste a motion: press and hold.
Yal's shadow washed them. He scanned the ruin with a slow, thorough turn of his head, then plucked a hairline from the wreckage—an almost invisible scratch etched along the retort's throat. It looked like a micro-fault. It felt like intent.
His eyes cooled. "Who prepped glass?"
"Night tech," Sera said. "We always—"
"We will check," Yal said, voice quieter than before. When Drakari voices went quiet like that, a file opened somewhere you never saw.
He turned to Kara. "Adept Myles."
Kara blinked. "Adept?"
"You knew water before you knew ratios," he said, which from a Drakari was the same as a ribbon. "Field session this weekend. Observe a Warden run. You will carry tinctures at the rear and write what you smell." A beat. "And Candidate Dray will show you when 'modern' saves hands. She will not sneer while she does it."
Sera's jaw set. "Yes, Mestre."
Kara bowed the way she had seen healers bow: not low, but sincere from the shoulders. "Yes, Mestre."
When she returned to her bench, she felt six eyes on her back like weather. Two warm. One cold. Three measuring. She kept her hands steady and did not let herself shake until the bell called end of block. Before she left, she logged one vial for Field—River Class and slid it into her satchel with ceremony small and real.
Yal added a black dot beside her name in the ledger—the Drakari mark for remembers useful things.
Outside, under a ribbon of sky, Kara leaned to the stone, whispered a single, fierce breath of laughter, then ran—late now—toward the refectory and KrysKo.
The scent of rosemary followed her down the colonnade like a promise.
Mechanum: Engines Pray to No One
Turbine Bay Three sang in three wrong keys and still wanted to live. Jax Marrow stood at its edge and fell in love carefully.
Three refurbished human turbines straddled Architect girders and Ophilim braces like dogs trained to ride horses. Overhead, conduits tangled so completely the dust looked confused about gravity. Someone had looped a Drakari chime-stone from a cable as a "ward against surge spirits," and it thumped metal every time the bay coughed.
"Hey, sweetheart," Jax told the room. "Let's teach you a language you can survive."
Senior Candidate Corin Hale arrived late with a clipboard and the conviction clipboards make things true. Close-cut hair; sleeve hems crisp enough to shave on; a Mechanum shoulder strap with brass discs he had definitely polished himself. Professor Halden—who had done this work for thirty years and learned to let rooms reveal themselves—leaned a hip to rail and listened.
"This is our audit?" Corin said. "A scavenger with a wrench?"
Jax saluted with the wrench. "Two wrenches," he said cheerfully. "Brought my optimistic one."
Halden's mouth flickered. "Listen to the bay."
Jax walked the floor. He didn't look at turbines first. He smelled pipes, peered into condenser sumps, tapped gauges and listened for the truer note that came back—like telling whether a glass is cracked without taking it off the shelf. At the primary manifold he kneaded a gasket with his thumb. It yielded like something tired too long. "We're talking, you and me," he told it.
Corin sighed the sigh of a man who knows the exam and resents improvisation's existence. "We have specs. We run them. The Ophilim branches were mated to human ports with blessed adaptors. Any failures are wear or impurity, not design."
Jax crouched and squinted at an adaptor. His grin died. "Blessed, huh?" He pointed at the flared ring. "Whoever cut this mated it right and then carved a glyph clockwise."
Halden's brows rose. "And?"
"Ophilim flow wards go counterclockwise," Jax said. "Clockwise is a bleed." He ran a fingernail along the etch and felt a burr. "You've been bleeding pressure by design."
"Conspiracy," Corin muttered.
"Sabotage or ignorance," Jax said. "Either ruins Thursdays. Listen to the drift: every time the manifold stutters, your ward line sings because it's getting a surge and a bleed. You're cavitating pumps."
Professor Halden knelt (which told the bay everything it needed to know about his pride), pressed his own thumb to the ring, and palmed a wrench without looking at it. "Huh."
"Even if he's right—and I'm not conceding that—removing a ward violates safety protocols," Corin said.
"Then don't remove it," Jax said. He rolled his sleeves back, burn-scars mapping a life of almosts. "Lay a counter-glyph to null the bleed, repack the gasket with proper dielectric, and seat a real adaptor instead of a prayer."
He opened a cloth roll: honest tools; a bone-handled scribe; a spool of resin he'd extruded over a stolen candle in a dorm window. Clean the ring. Scribe the mirror etch that kisses the first glyph without affirming it. Warm the resin. Press it thin, layer by layer, the way his mother once pressed pie crust before a rooftop fire took pies and roofs both.
"Hold this," he told Corin, handing him the adaptor body. Corin held it—muscle memory obeying a mechanic even while hating the man inside him.
"Seat," Jax said.
They seated. The adaptor went home with a good sound.
"Cycle," Halden said.
The bay coughed twice, cleared its throat… and sang. Three wrong keys fell into one. The chime-stone found nothing to thump and seemed offended. Gauges steadied. The condenser stopped sounding consumptive. Cooler air moved along catwalks. Jax closed his eyes and took one deep breath like a priest hearing a choir finally find the pitch.
Halden laughed once—a bark like rust cracking off a hinge. "Hale," he said to Corin, "write twenty lines of apology to this room. And five of thanks to this one." A chin-jerk at Jax. "Audit the warding log. If someone carved three more clockwise, I want names before supper. If there are five, bring me the council."
Corin swallowed fury he hadn't practiced swallowing. "Yes, Professor."
Halden clapped Jax's back hard enough to shift a rib. "Good eye, Marrow."
"Good room," Jax said, rubbing the ache, grinning. "She wanted to live."
As the turbines settled into happier voice, a hair-thin line under the catwalk winked in the light. Not a crack—too clean. A seam, metallic ceramic. Architect. Hidden in the original pours.
Jax crouched, touched it. Cold climbed his finger like a thought that didn't belong to him.
"Problem?" Halden asked.
"Not today," Jax lied. He would not spook a good room with a bad suspicion. Not yet.
He pocketed worry like a coin he'd flip later in the dark.
The Refectory: How Knives Learn Manners
At noon the Grand Refectory brimmed. The ceiling still carried faded stars from when the room was a planetarium; thin gold leaf overlaid new constellations—The Sower. The Wall. The Bridge—virtues you could hold with two hands. Long tables on iron wheels could be cleared in a breath if a triage day arrived. The Merit Board updated in chalk and brass: Kara's name in P climbed a notch; Mechanum Turbine Bay 3 earned Jax a neat +P and smaller +M for documentation; KrysKo's morning left no public mark, but a quiet strip of paper had been pinned to Cohort Nine's slot by Bel Verran: CAPACITY — KEEP IT.
They met at their window table. Kara carried her tray with both hands because the tingling edge of adrenaline hadn't entirely vacated her fingers. Jax arrived flushed and smug, hair wild with static that had fallen in love with him.
"I made a thing," Kara said, almost shy, like a child presenting a rock that might be a jewel. She unwrapped cloth: a vial with true river color.
Jax whistled, sincere. "That's not dead," he said reverently. "That's useful."
KrysKo picked up the vial in two fingers as if it had already saved lives that did not yet know it. "Your work moved the world," he said, "and the world allowed it."
"You could just say it's good," Kara said, laughing despite herself.
"It is good," KrysKo said, obedient and warm.
"Mechanum?" she asked Jax.
Jax flung an arm across the bench, telling the story like a man who knew a good story and did not own it. He spared Corin's pride only by not naming him. Kara's eyes went round at the clockwise glyph. KrysKo's stayed level, but a soft hum touched his inner hearing:
[Note: Mechanum Bay 3 — glyph anomaly. Probability: legacy mis-etch (44%), sabotage (36%), unknown agency (20%). Advisory: Observe.]
"Unknown agency," Jax muttered when KrysKo shared the thought in quiet shorthand. "I hate those guys."
Before comfort could set its elbows on their table, a shadow fell—real, not metaphor. Tovin Marr set his tray down with the precise clatter that sounds like coincidence and not threat. Two of his cohort mirrored him a beat later, backup singers with well-rehearsed ears.
"Kara Myles," Tovin said, the name a compliment edged like a tool. "I heard Yal gave you field observation. Congratulations."
Kara straightened a fraction, ready for bristle. "Thank you."
Tovin's eyes flicked to the vial. "River-class," he said, engaged despite himself. "Color's true."
"It is," Kara said, trying not to palm it like a child hiding a sweet.
"And robust?" he asked. "Will it hold when water shifts?"
"I'll change the input," Kara said, voice steady, "not bully the recipe."
Tovin nodded, as if testing exactly for that answer. "Good." He ruined it gently. "But the field doesn't care how much your grandmother loved you."
Jax's chair scraped. "Turbines don't care who your father knows," he drawled, for once not smiling.
Tovin's smile acquired teeth. He turned to KrysKo. "Bel Verran liked a word you said. Capacity. Pretty word. Save what makes more saves. Efficient." His gaze slid toward Kara. "People have made that argument with corpses in their slides."
"Argument is not excuse," KrysKo said, calm. "It's a tool. Useful. Dangerous. Like a knife."
"Do you duel?" Tovin asked lightly, culture wrapped around challenge like silk around wire. The room did not hush—Universities train themselves against humiliation—but it listened.
"No," Kara said at once—at Tovin and at KrysKo.
KrysKo held Tovin's gaze. "On campus," he said, humor like a hairline, "I am a student."
"A clever answer," Tovin said.
"A true one."
Dain, Tovin's broad-shouldered chorus, shifted his weight in exactly the way that earns sanctions. A hand like an ended war settled on the table. Warden Aria Senn—hair in a crown braid; scars in tidy lines; Cohort Nine's oversight—smiled the way weather smiles when it intends rain.
"Are we making friends?" she asked pleasantly.
"Yes, Warden," Tovin said, instantly civilized.
"Are we keeping the University's time for study and not theater?" she asked, voice light and not light.
"Yes, Warden," three voices chimed.
"Good," Senn said. "Because if you want theater, I can seat you in a sanctioned ring with six spectators and a ledger that remembers whether you like to win more than you like to learn." She tapped twice—a rhythm every child of the campus knows (eat / breathe / behave)—and pressure thinned like heat off road after rain.
Tovin lifted his tray, nodded to Kara (respect that dared to be real), and to KrysKo (a promise his mouth didn't make). "Field will likely pair us soon," he said. "Try not to save the idea of me instead of my blood."
"I will save capacity," KrysKo said.
Tovin's laugh escaped before he could keep it. He moved off with his chorus.
"I don't like him," Jax announced. "Which means we'll be under the same tarp by week's end."
"He wasn't wrong," Kara said, staring at her stew.
"About what?"
"Love," she murmured. "It ruins measures. And saves lives." She pushed the bowl away. "I need to write the smells down before I lose them."
"I'll walk you," KrysKo said.
"Please."
Jax waved with two fingers. "I'm going to go not stare at something I shouldn't tell Halden about yet." He winked—it didn't reach all the way. "Back by bells."
"Don't get expelled," Kara said automatically.
"Bend, don't break," Jax chirped, disappearing into tide.
Bell Green: A Shadow With No Weight
Evening made a thin gold edge along the bell's lip. The green was quiet in the way of places that hold a campus's pulse between beats. Kara turned her face to the wind and closed her eyes the way people do who want the day to pass through and leave the good parts behind.
KrysKo hadn't meant to stop; the pause happened to him. He scanned lines: tower stone; arch shadow; walkway angles; the small script of insects relearning bravery in a city that once killed them with light.
The system's warm voice chose a volume that would not wake a child:
[Environmental baseline: normal. Thermal: nominal. Sound: nominal. Anomaly: negative presence detected (recent).]
Negative presence—a space that had been occupied by something that didn't displace air like living things but tugged at the world anyway, like the whirl that remains when a hand leaves a bowl of water.
Between the towers, in the careful triangle of shadow, something had been. Now it wasn't. The hairs along his arms performed biology they hadn't been taught.
He did not look back.
"I'm going to do it," Kara said, continuing a conversation she'd been having with herself all day. "Be Myles and University both. Make something that saves a river even if the river doesn't like me."
"Yes," KrysKo said.
She opened her eyes and gave him a smile that wasn't lack of armor so much as a deliberate choice to set it down. "Walk me to South Dorm?"
"Yes."
At her stair she touched his forearm—careful, respectful of the long, unsettling grace under his skin. "Thank you," she said.
"For what?"
"For being the kind of quiet that doesn't feel like leaving."
He had to nod because words hadn't learned this yet.
She went up. He stood until the door gave itself back to the wall. Behind him, the bell made a small sound not rung by hand. Metal settling. Or a breath.
Lecture: Who Owns a Story?
The hall had been a theater once. Velvet gone, ribs of the room still knew how to carry a voice. The University had stenciled its challenge above the proscenium in uncompromising black:
WHO OWNS A STORY?
Kara slid mid-row, notes balanced on her knees, rosemary tucked behind her ear like a ribbon from a win. Jax sprawled beside her, grease-hands, pencil perched like it paid rent. KrysKo took the aisle; posture composed, scarf set, scent lozenge humming a just-human signature.
[Advisory: observe, refrain.]
Professor Anika Treval entered without ceremony—hair shot with iron; eyes with quiet authority. Behind her, assistants lit lanterns to throw into relief a great wall map: Earth fractured into three domains.
"History," Treval began, "is not a list of dates. It's what people decide those dates mean."
Pens scratched. A ripple of chuckles.
"After the Silence: Protectorates in the Americas and Australasia; Ophilim in Europe and Africa; Architects in Asia and the northern crown. Drakari chose roots over borders—sovereign belowground, honoring our gates."
She tapped tunnels inked like veins.
"And now—Elira Veyne."
Air shifted. Some straightened. Others rolled eyes. It was a name that made rooms remember themselves.
"Elira was an astronomer from river towns," Treval said. "When fevers came, she abandoned her observatory, turned star charts into ground maps, and led a caravan through contested land with help of Karesh-of-Mid-Deep, a Drakari emissary. Together they bore a child recorded only as First Crossing."
She laid her pointer aside. "The Veyne Accords followed: protections for hybrids—inheritance, education, place-right. Both sides admitted fault. Humans wrote down fear. Drakari wrote down pride. Rare honesty in law."
Tovin Marr's hand rose—voice measured when Treval called. "But Professor, weren't the Accords ignored for years? Hybrids were targets."
"True," Treval said evenly. "Power is always measured in the gap between the words we write and the lives forced to survive them."
Jax murmured, "Put that on the wall." Kara elbowed him, smiling.
"Veyne's importance," Treval continued, "is not sainthood but precedent. A human and a Drakari kept a promise when it cost them. Law is a kind of machine—it runs because we make it run."
A girl asked, "Professor, if someone calls hybrid blood 'bargain-marked,' how do we answer?"
"With questions," Treval said. "Whose bargain? Who paid? Who benefits? If the answer is the living, we thank the dead and walk on. If it is no one, we burn the story and write better."
The rear door opened.
A late student slipped in: tall; strength coiled under a black coat. Scaled patterns flickered obsidian across neck and jaw when light caught them. He took the aisle seat with fluid restraint.
Most had read his name on Field boards; few had seen him indoors.
"Ranger Veyne," someone whispered, too loud to be a secret.
Treval pressed on. "The Accords required any hybrid entering this University to live under its law first—not human, not Drakari, but ours. That is the bargain."
A mutter rolled from the back: "Or a myth. Easier to polish the story than live it."
"And easier," another voice, sharper, "to stop worshiping people who bedded monsters and call it peace."
The insult hung. Kara stiffened. Jax's jaw clicked.
A precise tsk—teeth kissing—cut the air. The late student stood. He didn't look at the offender. He didn't need to.
Up close, he was both river and city: calm current under a set jaw, humor like a knife held flat. When he spoke, Trade came careful, vowels learned in two worlds.
"Yes," he said. "I have something to add."
He let silence settle.
"My name is Ronan Veyne."
The room inhaled. A Warden-Apprentice straightened like a compass finding north.
"You can debate myth or law," Ronan said. "But when you call my kin monsters, you call me monster. If that comforts you, I can bare teeth. Or—you can learn to say neighbor without choking on it."
The offender shrank. Tovin's expression shifted—calculation, surprise, the beginning of respect—before he reclaimed neutrality.
Professor Treval inclined her head. "Thank you. The University accepts names—and corrections."
She chalked beneath the arch's question:
—Those who pay for it.
"Class dismissed."
Chairs scraped; whispers braided his name into contraband. Ronan sat a moment, the act of standing having cost him, then rose. As he reached the aisle he glanced at KrysKo. Two nods passed—recognition without surrender. The ranger who had ridden the eastern field. The hinge that had begun to turn.
"I want to meet him," Kara whispered, voice bright and nervous both.
"You will," KrysKo said. It wasn't promise. It was a map.
Epilogue — The Fourth Axis
Night gathered itself around the University as if the walls were a hearth. Lanterns breathed along colonnades. Drakari rang the perimeter chimes, a note you felt in your ribs more than your ears. On the Merit Board, Cohort Nine gained two quiet marks: Adept Myles (+P), Adept Marrow (+P, +M). Beneath them, a provisional tack held Novice O'Ruadhraigh without points and with a Warden's handwritten addendum: "Keep the rules. Keep your shadow." — Senn
Kara walked south under the sky-domes, river-vial wrapped in cloth inside her satchel, the residue of rosemary and copper on her skin. Yal had told her to bring her nose to the field this weekend and write what water said; she intended to come home with pages that smelled like answers.
Jax lingered on a catwalk above Turbine Bay Three, eyes on a seam only he had noticed, listening to a room breathe right. He thumbed a ceramic pin stamped with the University's braided circle and thought about counter-glyphs and the kind of ignorance that cuts clockwise on a counterclockwise ward. He told himself he'd tell Halden tomorrow. He told himself that three times.
KrysKo sat by a North Dorm window no candle warmed and mapped not exits, but returns—the paths you take back to people who check whether your hands came home full. The system kept its voice soft.
[Day Summary — Novice KrysKo O'Ruadhraigh / Cohort Nine]
— Social: Kara (trust +), Jax (trust +), Tovin Marr (rivalry: possible; de-escalated by Warden Senn), Ronan Veyne (acknowledged).
— Campus Protocols: Compliant (no unsanctioned violence; concealed weapon lock: PASS).
— Threats: Mechanum glyph anomaly (watch-list); Bell Green negative-presence echo (unclassified).
— Capacity: Increasing. Maintain.
— Advisory: Rest optional. Map review recommended. Constellation overlay: The Bridge.
In another dorm, Ronan Veyne unfastened a coat that had mud on it older than some of the students and set it careful across a chair. He looked at his hands—a human's and not; a Drakari's and not—and flexed both kinds of strength until they agreed to be one body again. In the corridor outside, two novices whispered his name, half prayer, half dare. He smiled without heat.
On the bell green, a negative space remembered being filled. It did not name itself. It did not need to. Elsewhere, a hinge turned one more degree and made no sound at all.
The University exhaled as the last bell counted down something that mattered. Above the cloister, the constellations the students had gilded—The Sower. The Wall. The Bridge—held their thin light and did the oldest work in the world: made stories look up.
Inside, three axes slept badly and well, in a building that intended to stand a very long time.
The University dreamed.
It dreamed in soft mechanics: turbines breathing, greenhouses exhaling damp air, the slow tick of heat through copper pipes. Bells measured that dream into hours, but the stone beneath them kept its own time—older, steadier, patient with whatever the young built on its back.
In the north dorm, KrysKo woke first, though waking was only a word the world used for when his systems lifted from silence. The dark was still gray with almost-morning. Jax snored like someone arguing with a machine in his sleep. The scent-lozenge at KrysKo's throat had cooled; its last note was linen and faint mint. He touched it, felt the hum of the Scent Profile Editor adjust to his pulse, and whispered a line to the air:
> "Capacity begins at dawn."
The warm system-voice answered, drowsy but proud.
> You remembered. That is all most species ever do at sunrise.
He rose, tied his scarf, and checked his field kit: no steel drawn, blades folded, mask steady, heart unreadable.
Across campus, in the Apotheion quarters, Kara woke to the smell of rosemary and something else—iron from new glassware, the ghost of yesterday's burn. She sat up, hair a halo of static, and looked at the vial she had set on her desk. The tincture had settled clear, true river color. It caught the light and gave it back with interest.
She wrote a note to herself on the label's edge: Remember the smell before fear. Then she dressed, laced her boots, and ran thumb and forefinger across the calluses that marked a Myles. Field day.
Down in Mechanum, Jax had never really slept. He had been listening to the bay talk through the floorboards all night. When the turbines sighed in harmony, he smiled into the pillow. When the sigh stuttered, he got up, shirt half-buttoned, and scribbled a design on a scrap of course paper: counter-glyph array—reverse bleed, modular. Then he shoved the note into his pocket, muttered, "Breakfast later," and went hunting for coffee that hadn't learned despair.
The first bell rang soft as breath. Students moved through colonnades like migrating ideas—robes, armor, ink-stained fingers. Bells tolled again: one, three, one. Field rotation.
At the east yard, carts were already waiting: seed, pipe, and the kind of silence that meant expectation. The fog was lifting in long gray ribbons over the grass.
Warden Aria Senn checked her ledger once, closed it, and nodded to a figure striding out of that fog—dark coat, river-scaled jaw catching the early light.
"Veyne," she greeted.
"Warden." Ronan's voice was the same low scrape KrysKo remembered from the lecture, worn smooth by distance. "Your Cohort Nine's ready?"
Senn's mouth almost smiled. "They think so. Make them right."
Ronan's gaze moved past her to the three waiting figures: Kara tightening the strap on her satchel, Jax juggling a coil of rope and a grin, KrysKo standing as still as if stillness were a uniform. Recognition flickered between the last two—acknowledgment, not surprise.
"Morning," Ronan said.
"Morning," Kara replied. Her breath fogged and vanished. "Where are we bound?"