Still dark. The air tasted like char this morning, faint and bitter, the burn zone running downwind for once. It would pass.

  The barracks breathed around Coin. All of them at once, a room full of lungs running at different rhythms, some deep and slow, some shallow.

  Coin liked this part. The hour before the barracks woke, when the bodies were still and the building was quiet and the only sounds were breathing and wood settling and the occasional shift of someone rolling in their bunk. Nobody talking. Nobody asking things. No one standing too close with a scanner and a theory about resonance fields.

  The top bunk was quiet. It stayed quiet these days. Coin had handled that situation early and it had stayed handled, which was the best outcome you could ask for in shared quarters. The bunkmate had learned the rules fast. Faster than Coin expected, honestly. The banging helped. First few nights, every time the top bunk shifted or creaked or produced a limb that drifted over the edge toward Coin's space, Coin hit the frame. Sharp, loud enough to register, not loud enough to wake the room. The bunkmate figured it out by night three. No rolling. No dangling arms. No sitting on Coin's end. No letting Jerrik wander over and set up camp at their bunk for conversation Coin hadn't agreed to.

  That last one had taken reinforcement. The bunkmate had tried to be polite about Jerrik the first time, doing the uncomfortable smile and the half-shrug that said I don't want to be rude to this guy on your behalf. Coin had knocked on the frame until the message landed. Not Coin's problem how the bunkmate handled it. Coin's problem was the result. And the result, after a few days, was a bunkmate who understood the arrangement and kept to it.

  Coin could have swapped. Made noise, been difficult, gotten someone else assigned to the top bunk. But trained was trained. Coin had been in barracks before and dungeons before that. There was a garrison in a country that doesn't exist anymore where Coin spent a full season wedged between a footlocker and a wall, and the soldier who slept above Coin had taken most of a month to stop kicking the footlocker in his sleep. After that, he was the best bunkmate Coin ever had. The lesson was the same everywhere. A neighbor who already knew the rules was worth more than a stranger who'd need the whole process run again from the start. You kept what worked. You didn't throw away investment.

  BUNKMATE STATUS: TRAINED.

  MAINTENANCE: MINIMAL.

  The light hadn't started yet. The shutters were dark. Coin knew the schedule by now. Flat terrain, no mountains. The light came at the same time every morning and Coin could plan around it.

  Coin opened the layout.

  The rings spread out, familiar. The outer ring's working nodes glowed steady, same as always, the ones Coin used bookmarked and bright and the rest sitting in the dark where Coin left them. Coin didn't bother with the dark ones. Never had. They did things Coin didn't need and Coin had better things to focus on.

  The lock first. Coin checked the main bridge, pressed on the pattern. It shifted, rearranged, settled into something new. Still closed. The patterns always changed. The result never did. Coin didn't know why Coin still checked. But Coin pressed anyway, the way you jiggle a door handle on a room you know is locked, because knowing and checking were different things and Coin had never been able to leave a lock alone.

  Fine. Moving on.

  The tilt core sat in its place, dark and dry. The sphere, seamless. The output channels running empty in every direction, the same nothing they'd been producing since the power ran out. The red light was on. It had been on for so long that Coin had stopped registering it as a warning and started registering it as decoration. A little red accent on the tilt core. Festive.

  The red light meant something. Coin knew it meant something. But the light had come on back when the reserves were full and nothing bad had followed, so Coin called it cosmetic and moved on. Then the reserves ran dry and the tilt core went dark and the warning light that had been warning about exactly this sat there blinking the same way it always had, and Coin still looked at it and felt nothing urgent.

  That was probably a character flaw. Coin didn't care about that either.

  The bond readout was next and the bond readout had changed.

  Last time Coin checked, the status fields were empty. BONDED: NONE. STRENGTH: ---. Empty since Coin first found the node.

  The fields weren't empty anymore. There was a candidate. The status light had shifted from idle to ready, a soft glow where the dead display used to be, and underneath it a name.

  Jerrik.

  And below the name, a prompt.

  BOND CANDIDATE: JERRIK.

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  INITIATE?

  No.

  The node returned to its ready state, candidate listed, prompt waiting. It would ask again. Coin already had the answer.

  The tilt core could stay empty. Coin could operate at reduced capacity for the rest of this rotation. Coin could sit on a dead probability engine and roll through the rest of this academy on residual skill and stubbornness alone. Coin could go verdigris. Coin could collect lint in a pocket for the next thousand years. Any of that, all of that, before Jerrik's name lived inside Coin's systems.

  The fact that he was registering at all was the problem. The system ran on exposure, or something close to it, and Jerrik had provided enough of it in a short enough window to get his name on the readout. That was fast. The system never asked permission. It measured contact the way a scale measured weight, and watched the number go up.

  Coin closed the layout and let the barracks come back.

  Coin's attention moved to the other end of the barracks. The bunks along the far wall where the duelist slept.

  Julian.

  The bed was positioned at the end of the row, near the wall, with sightlines to the door and the windows. Coin had noticed that on the first night. A choice like that said something about the person making it. Back to the wall. Eyes on the exits. You didn't do that by accident.

  Estravian. Coin had seen it before the blade confirmed it. How he moved through rooms, how he listened to people with his whole face while his eyes tracked something else entirely, the steady rotation from group to group that everyone read as social and was actually mapping. Coin had seen that method before. Not often. The Estravian court tradition produced a specific kind of operator and Julian was a polished example.

  He'd built a gravity in the barracks that most people didn't notice because they were inside it. They went where he'd been. They talked about what he'd talked about. The mess hall seating settled around his orbit without anyone deciding it should.

  He hadn't come near Coin. And Coin hadn't gone to him. Both of them knew where the other one was at all times and neither had made a move. That was fine. Coin knew what that was.

  JULIAN: NOTED.

  APPROACH STRATEGY: NONE.

  The barracks was starting to shift. Not waking up yet but moving toward it, bodies stirring before any of them opened their eyes. Bunks creaking. Breathing patterns changing. Someone on the far side rolled over and the frame groaned and the person next to them muttered something and went still again.

  Coin had time. The wake-up call was coming but it wasn't here yet and the minutes between the first stirring and the actual rising were Coin's to use.

  The class was forming around Coin and Coin didn't care about most of them. That was the truth of it, plain and stupid and sitting right there. Coin had come to the academy to build bonds. Coin had learned that bonds were the key to refueling the tilt core. Coin had arrived with a framework and a strategy and the people were fine. They were adequate. They trained and ate and slept and talked about things that mattered to them and none of it stuck to Coin because Coin was watching them like pieces on a board. Functional. Positioned. Relevant to the objective or irrelevant to it.

  Halvek was different. Coin respected him. That didn't happen often. The man didn't perform authority. He had it because he knew more than everyone in the room and had the scars to prove why. The other instructors rotated through and some of them were fine and some of them weren't and Coin could tell the difference but didn't care enough to rank them.

  Coin was here voluntarily. That mattered. Coin was trying. Genuinely trying, which for Coin meant completely and with the full expectation of success and the growing suspicion that the thing Coin was trying wasn't working.

  Bonds. Coin needed bonds. The system measured something that Coin was producing at a rate of almost zero despite being surrounded by candidates at all hours of the day. The framework was correct. The execution was perfect. The results were nothing.

  That led somewhere Coin didn't want to follow right now, so Coin went somewhere else.

  The advanced track. The guild ran one. Coin had picked that up from context and overheard conversations and how certain instructors talked about certain trainees when they thought the conversation was private. There was a layer above the standard training and nobody explained how you got onto it. The academy had been running for longer than most of the current governments had been in power, and whatever system they used to sort trainees into tracks had probably been overhauled more than once.

  Coin didn't know how it worked. Coin was old enough to know that not knowing how an institution worked was normal, because institutions changed their methods every generation and Coin had watched it happen so many times that the specifics blurred together. This guild had been a different thing when Coin was last paying attention to guilds. The structure was different. The rankings were different. The whole approach to dungeon management had shifted in ways that Coin recognized in broad strokes but not in detail.

  So the advanced track was a mystery and Coin was guessing. Maybe it was performance-based and the instructors were keeping score behind the scenes. Maybe it was invitation-only and someone behind a desk made the call based on reports. Maybe there was a test nobody had mentioned yet. Maybe it was the scanner thing and anyone who turned the display purple got moved up automatically.

  Coin doubted that last one but enjoyed thinking about it.

  The light in the shutters was changing. The gray rectangle had gone pale at the edges, the first suggestion of sky behind it.

  The smoke was still in the air. Coin could taste it, fainter now, the overnight film starting to thin as the building breathed through its seams. Outside, the burn zone would be winding down for the morning, the disposal crews finishing their shift, the pits cooling. By midday the smoke would be gone and the plains would smell like grass and dust and dry heat baked into flat land.

  Coin sat on the bunk and waited for the day to start. The bond prompt sat in the back of Coin's awareness, dismissed but not gone, the system holding Jerrik's name in its patient ready state, waiting for Coin to change Coin's mind.

  Coin was not going to change Coin's mind.

  The wake-up call came. The barracks lurched to life around Coin, all at once. Bodies swung out of bunks. Feet hit the floor.

  The day was starting. Coin had things to do and people to not bond with and a dead tilt core to ignore and an Estravian duelist to pretend didn't exist.