The gap in the lattice screen revealed something that didn't belong in the carefully curated world of Halcyon's protective camp. Something raw. Something real.
It was a courtyard, but the word felt inadequate to describe what Elijah's eye had found through that narrow triangle of vision. This wasn't like the other courtyards scattered throughout the facility—those manicured spaces with their ornamental plants and their benches positioned at aesthetically pleasing intervals, designed to photograph well for the foundation's promotional materials. No, this space was something else entirely.
The ground was swept packed earth, its surface compressed by countless hours of footfalls and impacts until it had achieved an almost concrete-like hardness.
It was bordered by raked gravel that had been arranged in precise, geometric patterns—not for beauty, but for function, for traction, for the sound it would make when disturbed.
The space was stark, severe, stripped of any pretense of comfort or decoration. This was a training ground. A dojo under the open sky, where the only concessions to aesthetics were those that served a practical purpose.
In the center of this austere space stood Dr. Nina Isley.
But this was not the Dr. Isley that Elijah knew from his limited interactions with the foundation's staff. This was not the woman of soft sweaters and gentle smiles, of kind words delivered in that melodic alto voice that always seemed calibrated to put children at ease. The transformation was so complete that for a moment, Elijah's brain struggled to reconcile what his eye was seeing with what he knew to be true.
She wore simple, grey training gi pants that sat low on her hips, the fabric worn soft from repeated washing and use. A fitted black tank top covered her torso, the kind designed for athletic performance rather than fashion, clinging to the contours of her body in a way that spoke of functional muscle beneath. Her auburn hair, which he'd only ever seen arranged in a neat, professional bun, had been gathered into a single, severe braid that hung down her back like a rope. It whipped through the air like a pendulum with her movements, a counterweight to the kinetic energy she generated.
And over her eyes, tied securely with a knot at the back of her head, was a sleek black blindfold.
She was not alone in the courtyard.
Four men surrounded her, their positions carefully spaced to form a loose circle with her at its center. They were large—not grotesquely so, but with the kind of size that came from years of dedicated training and proper nutrition. Each one moved with the grounded, deliberate stance of people who knew how to fight, who had spent countless hours drilling the fundamentals until correct posture and weight distribution became as natural as breathing. They wore similar training gear to Dr. Isley, their faces set in expressions of focused concentration.
For a moment that stretched and compressed time in that strange way that moments of anticipation always did, there was only the sound of the wind moving over the gravel and the synchronized breathing of the five figures in the courtyard. Elijah held his own breath without realizing it, his small body pressed against the lattice screen, his eye wide and unblinking.
Then one of the men moved.
It started as a testing jab, fast and direct, the kind of strike meant to gauge an opponent's reflexes and positioning. The fist shot forward toward Dr. Isley's midsection, the man's footwork solid, his form textbook-perfect.
Dr. Isley didn't step back. Didn't raise her hands in a defensive posture. Instead, she flowed.
There was no other word for it. Her body seemed to melt sideways, the physics of solid matter temporarily suspended as she moved through space with a liquid grace that shouldn't have been possible for something made of bone and muscle. The fist passed through empty air where her ribs had been a fraction of a second earlier, the man's momentum carrying him forward into the void she'd left behind.
As he over-extended, his balance compromised by the force he'd put into a strike that had found no target, Dr. Isley's own arm shot out. It wasn't a punch—there was no wind-up, no telegraphing of intent. Just a knife-hand strike delivered with surgical precision to the side of his neck, her hand moving so fast it created a sound like a whip cracking. Thwack. The impact was controlled but devastating, the kind of strike that spoke of years spent learning exactly how much force to apply and exactly where to apply it for maximum effect.
The man staggered, a sharp exhale forced from his lungs by the impact to the nerve cluster in his neck. His hand came up reflexively to the point of contact, his eyes watering despite his obvious training and pain tolerance.
The others converged immediately, the testing phase over. This was a coordinated assault now, multiple attackers working in tandem with the kind of synchronization that only came from extensive practice together. One aimed a low kick at her leading leg, the kind designed to sweep an opponent's base out from under them. Another came in high with a hook punch aimed at her temple, trying to capitalize on the moment when she'd be dealing with the low attack.
Blindfolded, unable to see any of it coming, Dr. Isley became a vortex of motion.
What happened next unfolded with a speed and fluidity that made Elijah's breath catch in his throat, his young mind struggling to process the cascade of movements even as his body responded with visceral excitement.
She dropped her weight with perfect timing, her knees bending as her center of gravity plummeted. The low kick sailed harmlessly over her calf as she spun on the ball of her other foot, her body rotating with the kind of angular momentum that physics teachers would use as a textbook example if they could capture it on film.
The high hook punch, she met not with a block—not with opposition that would pit her strength against her attacker's—but with a rising forearm deflection that intercepted the strike at just the right angle to redirect its energy skyward. The punch flew up and away, harmless, and the deflection left the attacker's torso completely exposed, all his defenses focused on the arm that was now uselessly extended above his head.
In the same spinning motion—because it was all one motion, one continuous flow of kinetic energy being generated and redirected—her other leg snapped out in a blistering side kick. Her hip rotated to generate power, her supporting leg providing the base, her entire body aligned behind the strike as it connected with the second man's solar plexus. THUMP. The sound was deeper than the previous impacts, the kind of noise that made Elijah's own stomach clench in sympathetic pain.
The man folded like a puppet with its strings cut, all the air forced from his lungs in a single explosive exhalation. He hit the packed earth with a heavy thud, his hands clutching his midsection, his mouth working to draw in breath that his shocked diaphragm wouldn't accept.
The first man, the one who'd received the knife-hand strike, had recovered enough to charge back in. Dr. Isley somehow sensed his approach—perhaps from the vibrations in the ground, perhaps from the displacement of air, perhaps from some other sense that came from years of training blindfolded. As he reached to grapple her, to use his size advantage to pin her in place, she did something that defied Elijah's understanding of how bodies were supposed to move.
She leaped—not away from the attack, not backward to create distance, but up and toward the charging man. Her knees tucked to her chest in mid-air, and both her feet planted squarely on his chest in a powerful push-kick that used his own considerable momentum against him. The impact reversed his charge, sending him flying backward as if he'd been launched from a catapult. He landed in a cloud of dust several feet away, the gravel crunching beneath his body as he slid to a stop.
The remaining two attackers, seeing three of their number neutralized in the span of heartbeats, attacked simultaneously from opposite sides. A synchronized pincer movement, the kind of tactic that should have been impossible to defend against when you couldn't see it coming. One came from her left, the other from her right, their timing perfected through countless hours of practice.
Dr. Isley dropped into a low squat, a move so sudden and so complete that it seemed to defy gravity itself. One moment she was standing at full height, the next she had collapsed her frame to a fraction of its vertical space. Two fists passed harmlessly over her head, the attackers' strikes meeting only air where her skull had been, their momentum carrying them forward into each other's space.
From the squat, she exploded upward like a coiled spring releasing all its stored energy at once. Her body uncoiled with violent grace, her elbows driving out in opposite directions with the precision of piston rods. They caught both men in the ribs with twin impacts that produced sickening cracks—not the sound of bones breaking, necessarily, but the sound of force meeting the rigid structure of the ribcage, of impacts that would leave spectacular bruises and make breathing painful for days.
The men grunted in unison, stumbling apart, their hands clutching their sides, their faces twisted in expressions of pain that they were trying very hard to keep professional.
It was over in less than fifteen seconds.
The entire sequence, from the first testing jab to the final double elbow strike, had taken less time than it took to breathe in and out twice. Elijah's eye was still wide, still unblinking, his brain working furiously to process what it had just witnessed. The men on the ground groaned as they pushed themselves up, brushing dirt and dust from their training gis with movements that were slow and careful. But there was no anger in those movements, no resentment or shame. Only a weary, professional respect that spoke of people who knew exactly how outclassed they were and had made peace with that fact.
Dr. Isley reached up with both hands and pulled the blindfold off, her fingers working the knot at the back of her head with practiced ease. Her face was sheened with a light sweat that caught the sunlight, making her skin seem to glow. Her green eyes were bright, alert, and utterly calm—not the eyes of someone who'd just fought off four attackers, but the eyes of someone who'd completed a routine training exercise, something no more strenuous than a morning jog.
She wasn't even breathing heavily.
She offered a hand to the nearest man, pulling him to his feet with a small, almost imperceptible nod of acknowledgment. He returned the nod, respect in his eyes, before he and the others began to file out of the courtyard through an exit on the far side that Elijah couldn't see clearly from his vantage point.
Outside the lattice screen, little Elijah's entire world had narrowed to that square of packed earth. The tears on his cheeks were forgotten, dried to nothing more than salty residue. The shame that had been crushing his chest, that leaden weight that had felt like it might suffocate him, was burned away by a sudden, incinerating heat that started in his gut and spread outward until his whole body felt like it was on fire.
His small hands were clenched into white-knuckled fists at his sides, his nails biting into his palms hard enough to leave crescent-shaped marks in the soft flesh. His breathing had gone shallow and rapid, not from fear but from something else—something that felt like hope mixed with hunger mixed with desperate, aching want.
He wasn't seeing a fight. Not really. He was seeing a language. A language of movement, of certainty, of power. A way to translate the leaden fury in his gut—that rage and humiliation that had nowhere to go, no acceptable outlet—into action. Into something concrete and real. A way to not be weak anymore.
He didn't want to be like the bullies. That thought crystallized with absolute clarity in his young mind. He didn't want to be like Marcus with his casual cruelty, or Lara with her sharp elbows and sharper words. He wanted to be like her. To move through the world as she did: not as something fragile that could be pushed around, not as prey that had to constantly calculate the safest path, but as an unassailable fact. A force that couldn't be ignored or dismissed or shoved onto the grass while others looked on with bored indifference.
The desire was so visceral, so all-consuming, that it drove every other thought from his mind. It filled the space where shame and fear had been living, replacing those familiar demons with something new and fierce and bright.
He was so absorbed in the revelation, in the sudden understanding of what was possible, that he didn't hear the soft footsteps behind him on the gravel. Didn't sense the approach of another person until it was far too late to run.
A hand settled on his shoulder with firm, inescapable pressure. It was not a gentle touch, not the kind of contact an adult might use to get a child's attention for something benign. This was a grip that spoke of training and purpose, fingers positioned precisely to maintain control with minimal effort.
Elijah flinched violently, a small gasp escaping him as his body jerked in involuntary response. His heart, which had been racing with excitement, now hammered with a different emotion entirely. He turned his head, craning his neck to see who had caught him.
The man holding him was tall and lean, his frame suggesting wiry strength rather than bulk. He was dressed in immaculate black trousers and a white shirt under a dark waistcoat—attire that looked like a butler's uniform, but somehow it read as something far less domestic, far more dangerous. His hair was an unnatural shade of bluish-black, the kind of color that didn't occur in nature, tied back in a severe, sleek ponytail that emphasized the angular planes of his face. That face was impassive, carved from stone, his eyes the color of flint or steel—cold, hard, revealing nothing of whatever thoughts might be occurring behind them.
He didn't smile. Didn't frown. Didn't show any emotion whatsoever.
"This area is restricted," the man said.
His voice was quiet, utterly devoid of inflection or affect. It wasn't a threat, wasn't a warning, wasn't even particularly stern. It was simply a statement of absolute fact, delivered in the same tone someone might use to observe that the sky was blue or that water was wet. The man wasn't angry that Elijah was here. He was merely correcting an error in the proper order of things.
"Let go!" Elijah protested, his voice coming out higher and more desperate than he'd intended. He squirmed in the iron grip, his small body twisting, but he might as well have been trying to escape from a steel trap. The man's fingers didn't budge even a fraction of an inch.
He was being steered away from the lattice screen, back toward the bland safety of the main lawns, away from that courtyard where power lived and breathed. The vision he'd just witnessed was being ripped from him, torn away before he'd had time to properly absorb it, and the loss felt physical, like something vital being extracted from his chest.
Desperation choked him, made his throat tight and his eyes burn with fresh tears that he absolutely refused to let fall.
"I wasn't doing anything! Let me go!"
"Ibrahim."
Dr. Isley's voice cut through the struggle like a blade through silk—clean, sharp, impossible to ignore.
She stood at the opening in the lattice screen, framed by the vines and the afternoon light. The four men were already gone, vanished as silently as they'd appeared, as if they'd never existed at all. She had thrown a light jacket over her tank top, a concession to modesty or perhaps just to temperature, though she didn't seem bothered by the cooling air. Her expression was one of mild curiosity, her head tilted slightly to one side as she studied the tableau before her.
"Release him," she said. Not a request. A command, quiet but absolute.
The grip vanished instantly, the fingers opening and withdrawing with the speed of someone who'd been trained to obey without hesitation or question. The man—Ibrahim, apparently—stepped back, his hands clasping behind his back in a posture of military readiness. His flinty gaze fixed on a point in the middle distance, no longer acknowledging Elijah's existence.
Elijah stood there, rubbing his shoulder where those iron fingers had gripped him, his face a tumult of warring emotions that he had no idea how to process or organize. Residual anger from the bullying, still fresh and raw. The searing want that had been ignited by watching Dr. Isley fight, burning in his chest like a coal. The shock of being caught doing something forbidden. The humiliation of being manhandled, of being reminded once again of how small and powerless he was.
He felt small again. Smaller than ever. He'd been caught gawking like some stupid kid, and now he was going to be pitied by the very person he wanted to emulate. The thought made him want to curl up and disappear.
Dr. Isley walked toward him with measured steps, her movements now returned to something closer to normal human locomotion, though there was still a grace to them that spoke of perfect body awareness. She didn't kneel down to his level the way adults usually did when they wanted to talk to children, that condescending crouch that always made him feel even smaller. She simply stood before him, her head tilted in that expression of mild curiosity, and looked at him.
Really looked at him.
She saw the dried tear-tracks on his cheeks. She saw the way his hands were still clenched into fists, knuckles white, nails digging into palms. She saw the furious, helpless light in his eyes—that desperate combination of anger and longing and shame that had nowhere to go.
A soft giggle escaped her, but it wasn't mocking. The sound held genuine, amused recognition, as if she was looking at something familiar, something she understood completely. She reached out, not to touch him or ruffle his hair or any of the other patronizing gestures adults usually employed, but to offer her hand with the palm up in the space between them. An invitation. An offering.
The gesture was strangely familiar, though it took Elijah a moment to place it. It was a mirror of something that had happened before, in a different context, when she'd tried to comfort him in some other encounter he could barely remember through the fog in his head.
"You don't have to be shy with me, Elijah," she said, her voice returning to that familiar, melodic alto, but now it was laced with a new quality—a conspiratorial warmth, as if they were sharing a secret. "Tell me. What's wrong?"
The dam broke.
All the words he'd been holding back, all the humiliation and rage and desperate unhappiness that had been building for weeks or months or maybe his entire life—it all came tumbling out in a rush, mixed with a fresh wave of hot, angry tears that he furiously tried to blink back because crying was for weak kids, for useless kids, for kids like dummy face who just took it and never fought back.
"They… they pick on me. Elvis , Lara… all of them. I'm small. I can't… I can't do anything. I'm just… defenseless."
He spat that last word, hating the taste of it on his tongue, hating the truth of it, hating himself for being the kind of person that word described.
Dr. Isley listened without interrupting, her smile gentle and patient, her green eyes fixed on his face with complete attention. When he finally ran out of words, his chest heaving with the effort of getting them all out, she didn't offer empty platitudes. Didn't promise to talk to the other children or to implement stricter supervision or any of the other meaningless solutions adults usually proposed. Instead, her smile deepened, and she reached out with one hand.
Her thumb was warm against his cheek as she gently wiped away a fresh tear, the touch startlingly intimate, almost inappropriate in its tenderness.
"You know," she said, her voice dropping to a near-whisper that made him lean in slightly to catch the words, "you are very, very cute when you're upset."
Elijah felt a sudden, confusing heat flood his face. It started at his cheeks and spread outward, a blush so intense it felt like his skin might catch fire. He looked down at his shoes, the anger momentarily scrambled by embarrassment, his brain unable to process being called cute in the middle of pouring out his deepest frustrations.
Her hand retreated, and her tone shifted again, becoming practical and direct, the voice of someone proposing a business arrangement rather than comforting a child.
"But if you're tired of being cute and upset… if you want to be something else…"
She paused, letting the concept hang in the air between them, letting him fill in the blanks with his own desperate imagination.
"I can help you. I can teach you how to be a better, capable little boy. A boy who can defend himself. Who doesn't feel small."
She leaned in slightly, closing the distance between them by just a few inches, her green eyes locking onto his with an intensity that made his breath catch.
"So. What do you say, Elijah? Are you up for it?"
He looked up, meeting those green eyes directly for the first time. They held him, not with pity or condescension or any of the other things he'd learned to expect from adults, but with a fierce, challenging invitation. This was a choice being offered. A real choice, maybe the first one he'd been given since arriving at this place.
A path out of the helplessness. A way to become something other than dummy face.
The last of his hesitation evaporated, burned away by the memory of her flowing, devastating movements in the courtyard. By the image of her standing calm and unruffled while four trained men lay groaning on the packed earth around her.
His expression shifted, the confusion and embarrassment draining away to be replaced by something harder, more determined. The soft, uncertain lines of his face set into something that looked almost adult, almost dangerous. He ground his teeth together, jaw muscles clenching—a habit that would stay with him for life, a physical manifestation of will being exerted.
He gave a single, sharp nod.
When his voice came, it was small but clear, stripped of tears, filled with a newfound resolve that surprised even him with its intensity.
"I'm up for it."
Dr. Isley's smile then was brilliant, warm, utterly approving. The kind of smile that made you feel like you'd just accomplished something remarkable. She placed her hand on his head, her fingers ruffling his hair in a gesture that felt like a benediction, like a priest conferring some sacred responsibility.
"Good boy," she said softly.
She turned then, preparing to lead him toward the restricted courtyard, toward whatever training awaited him there. For a brief moment, as she moved, her profile was visible to Ibrahim, who still stood at attention with his hands clasped behind his back, his expression unchanged.
And in that fleeting moment, as her gaze swept over the training ground where she would now mold him, the warm, encouraging light in her green eyes flickered and changed. It was replaced by something else entirely—a sharp, calculating gleam, a scheming satisfaction that had nothing to do with helping a bullied child and everything to do with the successful priming of a valuable, complex instrument.
The look lasted less than a second before she glanced back at Elijah, and the warmth was seamlessly back in place, as genuine-looking as it had ever been.
The hook was set.