Mira's POV
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The locked-down signal stops moving.
I am still sitting near the open edge of the eating area watching the corridor above when it just - stops. Like whatever was coming toward me changed its mind. Or decided to wait. Both options are somehow worse than if it had just kept coming.
Guide's fear doesn't ease up. It stays at exactly the same level, which tells me that whatever just paused up there has not gone away. It is simply standing still somewhere above us, out of sight, and the fact that I cannot see it but my Resonance can still faintly feel it at the edge of my range is deeply unsettling.
I stand up.
"We should go," I tell Guide.
Guide is already moving.
---
We go through the main cavern and it hits me immediately - everyone is looking.
Not the cautious looking from last night when I first arrived. This is different. This is the whole court, fully awake, in full light, with full attention. Every creature we pass stops what it is doing. Some of them take a full step back. Some of them lean forward. Some of them make sounds to each other that I cannot understand but my Resonance translates the feeling underneath just fine.
She is real. She is still here. The king kept her.
I keep my spine straight.
I look back at every single one that looks at me. Not challenging - I am not stupid enough to think I can challenge anyone in this court and win physically. But I look back because looking away first tells them something about me that I refuse to let be true.
Guide stays close. Closer than before. Like it is making a point.
We pass a cluster of tall mutants near the central tower and the signal from that direction is so cold and sharp it actually makes me slow my steps for half a second. I feel it like walking past an open freezer - a blast of deliberate unfriendliness aimed straight at me. I look toward them without turning my head fully.
One of them is staring at me.
Tall. Still. Wearing something that catches the light the way only meteor rock does. The stare is not curious. Not wary. It is the specific look of someone who has already made a decision about you and is simply waiting for the moment to act on it.
My Resonance reaches toward her automatically.
The contempt that hits me back is so clean and so total that for a second I almost admire it. There is no confusion in this creature. No conflict. She has looked at me and categorized me completely and the category she put me in has one word written on it.
"Beneath me."
This is Liss.
I don't know how I know. I just know. The same way you know a fire is hot before you touch it - something about the way she holds herself, the way every creature near her is angled slightly toward her like planets around a sun.
I look directly at her.
She stares back.
Neither of us moves. The creatures around us go very still. Guide makes a tiny sound beside me that I am fairly sure is the dungeon equivalent of *please don't do this right now.*
Then Liss looks away.
Not fast. Not flustered. Slow and deliberate - the way you look away from something you have decided you will deal with later, on your own terms, in your own time. It is not a loss and she knows it and I know it and somewhere in this dungeon Zyrax probably knows it too.
I keep walking.
-
Guide takes me to a large open area off the main cavern. I hear it before I see it - the sounds of impact, movement, the specific rhythm of bodies testing each other. When I walk in I see eight mutants sparring in pairs. Fast, controlled, powerful in a way that makes every human fight I have ever seen look like children playing.
They all stop the moment I step through.
Eight pairs of eyes on me. No movement. No sound.
I stand in the entrance and I understand something completely in that moment.
This was not an accident.
Guide did not bring me here because this was the next logical stop on some tour. Guide brought me here because it was told to. Someone decided that the court needed to see me here, in this space, among fighters - needed to see how I stand and whether I flinch and what I am made of when eight sets of eyes hit me all at once.
Zyrax announced me to his court this morning. Not with words. With this.
I walk fully into the space.
I find a flat section of ground near the wall and I sit down, cross-legged, and I watch them. Just watch. Calmly. Like I have been invited to observe and I am choosing to accept that invitation with my whole chest.
For five seconds nobody moves.
Then one pair goes back to sparring.
Then another.
Then all of them.
And I watch, and my Resonance works quietly underneath everything, learning - this one fights from anger, this one from discipline, this one from something that feels like joy, this one from something I haven't felt from anyone since I walked through that gate.
Shame.
One of the sparring mutants - shorter than the others, faster, landing hits that the others don't see coming - is fighting from deep shame. Every strike is trying to prove something. Every movement is arguing with a voice in its head that says it doesn't belong here.
I know that feeling so well it makes my chest hurt.
I am still watching the ashamed fighter when Guide goes rigid beside me for the second time this morning.
I look at the entrance.
Liss is standing there.
She is not looking at the fighters. She walked all the way here, past the main cavern, through the corridor, and she is standing at the entrance of this training space looking at exactly one thing.
Me.
The contempt is still there. But there is something underneath it now that wasn't there before. Something that my Resonance catches and will not let go of.
She is not just here to intimidate me.
She is here because I looked back at her in the main cavern and did not look away and that did something she was not expecting. It cracked something open, just slightly, in a place she has had locked up for a very long time.
She takes one step into the training space.
And then she says something.
Not to Guide. Not to the fighters. To me. In the mutant language I cannot speak or understand.
But every fighter in the room stops again.
And the feeling that comes off every single one of them when she finishes speaking is identical.
Dread.
Guide grabs my arm. Its feelings are screaming. And in a voice so low I almost don't hear it, Guide makes a sound - and somehow, impossibly, I understand it. Not the word. The meaning underneath the word.
She just challenged me.
In front of the whole court.
And in this dungeon, I have just learned, a challenge cannot be refused.