I haven't slept.

  Not really. The hours between Kade's corridor searstrike and dawn passed in a half-conscious drift where every time I closed my eyes, I felt it again: the jagged frequency of his Sear bleeding through the link, the white-hot wrongness of magic eating itself alive, and underneath it all, the thing that kept me staring at the ceiling long after the episode faded.

  How fast I moved.

  I didn't think. I didn't weigh options or calculate risk or run the careful cost-benefit analysis that the academy drills into every rider before they're allowed to touch another person's magic. I felt the link scream, and I followed it, and when I found him—the Aerie's untouchable weapon, the Commandant's perfect son—on his knees in an empty corridor with his mask in shards, I put my hand on his shoulder and did something impossible.

  Something I don't have a name for. Something that felt like reaching into a broken engine and smoothing the gears until they caught again.

  I've been awake for six hours, and the feeling still lives in my palm. A phantom pressure. A residual hum. The echo of Kade Dray's heartbeat syncing to my breathing rhythm, and the way his body shook and stayed rigid while locked in the private hell of a Sear episode he's clearly been hiding for months. But it stilled under my hand.

  Not calm. Still. The way a wound stops bleeding when you apply pressure.

  I don't know what to think.

  "You look like death warmed over." Zara drops onto the bench beside me in the mess hall, her tray loaded with the particular mountain of food that suggests she's either stress-eating or training for an endurance event. "Bad night?"

  "Fine."

  "Liora. You have circles under your eyes that could qualify as tactical camouflage. 'Fine' is a lie and we both know it."

  I take a bite of bread that tastes like sawdust and obligation. The mess hall is loud this morning, the controlled chaos of two hundred cadets fueling themselves for a day that will hurt, and the noise should be enough to drown out the link's low hum. It isn't. Kade is somewhere in the senior wing, awake, his presence a tight point of controlled blankness at the edge of my awareness.

  The wall is back, of course. Thicker than before, if anything, rebuilt overnight with the desperate thoroughness of a man who woke up realizing someone had seen him at his worst and decided the only appropriate response was to become a fortress.

  I should be relieved. I'm not.

  "Dueling evaluations today," Zara says, mercifully interpreting my silence as pre-combat nerves rather than an existential crisis about accidentally stabilizing my wingmate's magical implosion with a power I didn't know I had. "Full cohort. Ring three. Torvin's running the bracket."

  My stomach tightens. "Torvin."

  "Who else? He's been overseeing all first-year combat evals since Lorne's harness." She lowers her voice. "Since the harness."

  The harness. The filed pin. The chemical residue on the stress point that smelled like nothing in the standard maintenance compound library. Kade's voice in the corridor, low and precise: It wasn't an accident.

  And Torvin, arriving on the landing shelf with his clipboard and his prepared response and his hand that paused, just for half a second, when Kade mentioned the residue.

  "Great," I say. "My favorite instructor."

  "He's watching you, you know." Zara's voice drops further. Not playful anymore. "After Bond Day. After the canyon. After the cross-cohort pairing. You're on his radar, and not in the 'promising young talent' way."

  I know. I've felt it: the particular quality of Torvin's attention, heavy and clinical, the gaze of a man who's evaluating not talent but threat. Every time I fly, every time I channel, every time Scyllax does anything that reminds the Aerie he's not a normal dragon, I can feel Torvin's assessment tightening like a noose made of paperwork and policy.

  "Then I'd better not give him a reason to pull me from the ring," I say, and finish my bread.

  The Dueling Ring sits between two mountain peaks like a jaw waiting to close.

  It's an aerial arena, technically, but the first-year evaluations happen on the ground-level platform: a circular stone floor fifty feet across, ringed by Weave-construct barriers that glow faintly blue and hum with a frequency that makes my teeth itch. The barriers serve dual purpose, containing stray magic and preventing overly enthusiastic cadets from launching each other off the mountain.

  Above the ring, observation platforms jut from the rock like shelf fungus, tiered seating for instructors, proctors, and senior riders who've come to watch first-years bleed. The air crackles with residual magic from a thousand past bouts, and the stone floor is scarred with blast marks and gouge lines that tell their own stories.

  Two hundred cadets packed into the stands. The noise is a living thing: speculation, wagering, the electric anticipation of people about to watch violence they don't have to suffer themselves.

  I stand at the staging area with thirty-one other first-years, watching the bracket board update with pairing assignments. Zara is three matches ahead of me, bouncing on her toes with the nervous energy of someone who processes anxiety through motion. Pella stands beside her, pale but determined, her hand resting on the Weave-construct practice blade she's been drilling with for a week.

  The evaluations are structured: single-elimination bouts, scored on technique, magical efficiency, and tactical decision-making. Tethered lances for the aerial component, but ground-level first-years fight with Weave blades and controlled discipline bursts. Flux for mobility. Weave for defense. No Ash, no Vitae, no Glamour. Clean combat. Doctrine-pure.

  My name appears on the board.

  Vale, L. vs Carrick, D.

  The murmur starts immediately.

  Daven Carrick. Legacy name. Third-generation rider, trained since childhood by private tutors his family's fortune could buy. He bonded a sleek grey that mirrors his fighting style: fast, precise, economically brutal. He's been top of the combat rankings since the first week, and his Weave work is the kind of polished, architectural precision that comes from having access to the best instruction money can provide before you ever set foot in an academy.

  He's favored to win the entire bracket.

  "Well," Zara says, staring at the board. "At least it'll be quick."

  "Thanks for the support."

  "I support you living to complain about it afterward. Carrick's got three inches of reach and six years of private training on you."

  "I've got Scyllax."

  "Scyllax isn't allowed in the ring."

  "Scyllax is always in the ring."

  She gives me a look that says she's not sure if that's bravado or delusion. Honestly, I'm not sure either. But I can feel my dragon through the bond, a vast, patient warmth beneath the mountain, watching through my eyes with the ancient interest of a predator who's seen a thousand fights and knows what winning actually looks like.

  Patience. Read. Then strike.

  His bond-echo is unhurried. Certain. The confidence of a creature for whom combat isn't a test but a language, and I am still learning the alphabet.

  The first bouts begin. I watch from the staging area, reading everything: the way the ring's barriers interact with Flux bursts. The barrier redirecting the bursts that hit it. The sand-covered stone floor varies traction near the barriers, where residual Weave energy makes the surface slick. The scoring proctors' positions in blind spots at the eastern arc. Even where the observation platform's shadow cuts the sightline.

  Zara wins her bout in ninety seconds, a clean takedown that uses Fenwick's bond-given speed to overwhelm her opponent's guard before he can set his Weave. Pella loses hers in two minutes, outclassed by a boy with better reach and faster channeling, but she takes a hit and gives one back and walks out of the ring with her chin up.

  "Cadet Vale. Cadet Carrick. Ring three."

  The noise swells.

  I step into the ring.

  The barriers hum around me, a low, persistent frequency that I feel in my breastbone. The sand is gritty under my boots, and the air inside the ring smells dry, with old sweat and the metallic tang of channeled magic. Carrick stands across from me, his Weave blade already formed: a sleek, shimmering construct that extends from his fist like a long knife, perfectly shaped, the edges precise enough to cut light.

  His stance is textbook Veyran doctrine. Weight centered, blade forward, left hand open for Flux work. Everything about him says trained, funded, expected to win.

  I form my own blade. It's rougher than his, the edges less defined, the structure less architectural, and I can feel the Well's draw as I hold it, a steady drain that I'll need to manage carefully if this bout goes long.

  Which it will. Because Carrick is better than me at everything the academy measures: speed, technique, magical efficiency, the polished combat choreography that comes from six years of private tutelage and a family name that opens every door.

  But the academy doesn't measure everything.

  "Begin."

  Carrick comes fast.

  His opening is a diagonal advance, blade high, Flux-assisted footwork that eats the distance between us in two strides. The first strike is a testing cut, aimed at my left shoulder, and it carries the confidence of a fighter who expects his opponent to block and give ground.

  I block. I give ground.

  His second strike follows the first, a reverse cut aimed at my right flank, the blade changing direction mid-swing with a wrist articulation that's technically beautiful. I catch it on my Weave blade and feel the impact shudder up my arm. His constructs are dense, heavier than mine, better anchored to the Well, and blocking him straight-on is a losing proposition.

  So I stop blocking straight-on.

  His third strike comes high, a chopping arc aimed at the top of my skull. Textbook. Devastating. The kind of blow that ends fights when the opponent is retreating.

  I drop.

  Not backward. Down. My knees bend, my weight shifts to my rear foot, and I let his blade pass over my head close enough that the Weave construct ruffles my hair. While he's committed to the overswing, I drive a Flux burst through my front foot and push, not at him, but at the sand beneath his lead foot.

  The sand erupts. Not much: a spray, a disruption, nothing that would look impressive from the stands. But it shifts the surface under his boot by half an inch, and half an inch is enough to turn his textbook recovery into a stagger.

  I'm inside his guard before he resets.

  My blade catches him across the ribs, a glancing hit, scored but not decisive. He twists away, and his counterstrike nearly takes my head off, and we separate to the roar of the crowd.

  Points: one to one.

  "Lucky," Carrick says. His face is flushed, but his stance is already reset, perfect, balanced, his blade humming with renewed intensity.

  "Physics," I correct him.

  His eyes narrow. Good. Angry fighters make predictable choices.

  The second exchange is longer. Carrick adjusts. He's smart enough to recognize the sand trick and widens his stance to compensate. His strikes become more conservative, more methodical, each one probing my guard rather than trying to end the fight. He's reading me, looking for the pattern in my defense, trying to find the rhythm he can exploit.

  I give him one.

  Three blocks, each one slightly slower than the last. A retreat pattern that curves to my left, always to my left, my right shoulder dropping a fraction each time I give ground. It looks like fatigue. It looks like a fighter who's losing steam and falling into a predictable loop.

  It's bait.

  Carrick takes it on the fourth exchange. He sees the right shoulder drop and commits to a powerful thrust aimed at the opening, a finishing blow, fast and precise, channeled with enough Flux to punch through a standard Weave guard.

  But the opening isn't there. My right shoulder comes up, my blade rotates, and instead of blocking the thrust, I redirect it, using the same principle Scyllax taught me in the canyon, turning force from obstacle to engine. Carrick's own momentum carries his blade past my guard and into empty air, and his body follows, and for one crystalline moment he's extended, off-balance, and completely exposed.

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  The ring barrier is three feet behind him.

  I hit him with a Flux burst. Not hard. I don't need hard. I need precise. The burst catches him center-mass and adds exactly enough force to his existing momentum to carry him backward into the barrier. The Weave construct catches him, absorbs the impact, and deposits him on his back in the sand with his blade dissipated and his dignity scattered.

  The ring falls silent.

  Then it doesn't.

  The noise hits me like a wall, cheers, shock, the particular roar of a crowd that just witnessed something it didn't expect. Carrick is on the ground, staring at the ceiling with the expression of a man whose model of reality has just been violently revised. The proctors' tablets flash.

  Winner: Vale, L.

  I lower my blade. My arms are shaking, not from magic, from adrenaline, and my ribs ache where Carrick's first hit landed, a deep bruise forming beneath my flight leathers that's going to hurt worse tomorrow. The Well feels manageable, the draw steady. I didn't overchannel. I didn't need to.

  I used the ring. I used his expectations. I used what Scyllax has been teaching me for a week: the world is full of force, and the best fighters don't create it. They redirect it.

  Good. Simple.

  Scyllax's echo, warm and ancient and insufferably smug.

  I allow myself a moment. Just one. Standing in the center of the ring with the crowd noise breaking over me and the taste of victory sharp on my tongue and the knowledge, private, fierce, mine, that I earned this. Not with legacy money or private tutors or a name that opens doors, but with observation and nerve and a dragon who taught me to read the physics of the world.

  Then the link spikes.

  It comes without warning, a surge through the wingmate vow so intense it nearly buckles my knees. Not pain. Not anger. Something else. Something that floods through the wall Kade has maintained for five days with the force of a dam breaking, hot and bright and edged with a possessiveness so raw it steals the breath from my lungs.

  Mine.

  Not the word. The feeling. Territorial, fierce, shot through with a pride that has nothing to do with mentorship or senior oversight or any of the clinical categories the academy uses to describe the wingmate relationship. This is deeper. Older. The feeling of a man watching something that belongs to him prove itself magnificent, and being undone by it.

  It lasts maybe two seconds. Then the wall slams back into place, harder than before, reinforced with the particular ferocity of someone who's horrified by what just escaped, and the link goes flat and grey and controlled.

  But two seconds is enough.

  I cover up that I felt it. Maintain my stature. I've had years of practice, and the crowd is loud enough to cover the hitch in my breathing, and my hand is steady on the dissipating Weave blade. No one watching from the stands would see anything except a first-year cadet collecting herself after an upset victory.

  But my pulse is hammering, and my skin is hot, and somewhere in the observation platforms above me, Kade Dray is watching me with grey eyes, a hidden smile and a wall rebuilt so frantically it's practically vibrating.

  I don't look up.

  I need to, actually. That is the honest truth of it. My entire body is making an argument for looking up. It is the argument of a person who just felt someone else's pride move through her like a warm current and wants to see the face that goes with it. Not the mask. The face underneath, the one he wore in the training yard when he followed Scyllax's pattern and forgot to be a weapon for thirty seconds.

  I do not look up.

  I am aware that this is the second time in two days I've had to deliberately choose not to do something my body has already decided it wants. I am aware that the vow did not create this, because the vow only transmits what already exists, and what just came through the link was not manufactured by magic.

  I can feel him: the shape of his attention, the precise quality of his focus, the effort it's costing him to contain whatever just happened. And underneath the wall, despite every fortification he's thrown up, a residual warmth that he can't quite extinguish.

  Edge. Territory. Assessment.

  That's not his echo. That's Iskra's, bleeding through the link the way Scyllax's sometimes bleeds through the bond, a dragon's evaluation of a situation, cool and predatory and entirely separate from human confusion. Iskra is watching me from whatever roost or perch she's occupied, and her assessment has changed.

  Two days ago, I was a complication. Now I'm something else.

  I don't know if that's better or worse.

  "Vale." The scoring proctor's voice cuts through the noise. "Clear the ring. Next bout."

  I walk off. Zara is waiting at the staging area, her face split between disbelief and unholy glee.

  "You absolute... how did you... that Flux redirect was..." She grabs my arms, squeezes, shakes me slightly. "Liora. Liora. You just dropped Daven Carrick on his back in front of two hundred people. His father is on the war council."

  "His father isn't in the ring."

  "His father is going to hear about the ring, and then..." She stops. Studies my face. The glee fades. "What's wrong?"

  "Nothing."

  "You won. You look like you've seen a ghost."

  Not a ghost. Something worse. Something alive and complicated and living behind a wall that just proved it has cracks.

  "Post-fight adrenaline," I say. "I'm fine."

  I can tell Zara doesn't believe me. Zara is too smart to believe me. But she's also too loyal to push, and after a moment she squeezes my arms once more and lets go.

  "You're buying drinks at the mess hall. Winner pays."

  "That's not how—"

  "Winner pays. It's tradition. Everyone is saying it."

  Despite everything: the aching ribs, the hammering pulse, the phantom warmth in the link that I refuse to acknowledge… I almost leak a smile.

  Almost.

  The link settles back to its usual hum on the walk to the infirmary, Kade's wall solid and grey and aggressively uninformative. But there is a quality to it now that wasn't there yesterday, a texture beneath the surface, like pressure against glass. He is containing something. He has been containing something since the moment the scoring proctor called my name as winner, and whatever it is, it is warm enough that I can feel the heat of it through inches of reinforced emotional wall.

  I don't know what to do with that. I just keep walking.

  The infirmary smells of antiseptic herbs and exhaustion.

  It's quieter than the ring, a different kind of intensity, the held-breath hush of a place where the consequences of the Aerie's ambitions are measured in bruises and broken bones and the particular, devastating silence of riders who've pushed too far. The beds are narrow, the stone walls whitewashed to something approaching cleanliness, and the light comes from Weave-construct lanterns that cast everything in a flat, clinical glow.

  I'm here for my ribs. The proctor who examined me after the bout palpated the bruise, declared it "non-critical but worth monitoring," and sent me to the infirmary with the same casual indifference the Aerie applies to all non-fatal damage.

  The healer who greets me is not what I expected.

  Linnea is small (shorter than me, which is saying something) with close-cropped hair the color of winter wheat and hands that move with the focused precision of someone who's spent years learning exactly how much pressure a human body can bear. She wears the Vitae healer's insignia on her collar, a small green spiral that catches the light, and her expression as she examines my ribs is the particular combination of competence and quiet fury that I'm beginning to recognize as the hallmark of people who see the Aerie's true cost and aren't allowed to say so.

  "Bruised, not cracked," she says, her fingers pressing gently along the line of my lowest rib. A faint warmth follows her touch, Vitae magic, applied with the careful restraint of someone who knows the price. "You'll be sore for three days. Avoid direct impacts. Which, given that you're in dueling evaluations, is approximately useless advice."

  "Understood."

  She pulls a salve from the cabinet, standard issue, smelling of camphor and something green, and applies it with brisk, efficient strokes. Her hands are steady. Her face is not. There's a tension around her eyes that has nothing to do with my bruised ribs.

  "You're Vale," she says. Not a question. "Scyllax's rider."

  "Yes."

  "Kal's sister."

  The name hits differently in this room. In the corridors and the mess hall, Kal is a cautionary tale, Searstruck, reckless, the boy who burned too bright. Here, in the place where riders come when the burning gets too real, his name carries different weight.

  "You knew him?" I ask.

  "I treated him." Linnea's hands pause on the salve. "Twice. For early-stage Sear symptoms that he didn't want reported." She meets my eyes. "The third time, it was too late."

  "He was bonded for two years," Linnea says. Her voice is careful. Measured. The voice of someone choosing exactly how much to give. "He had a Wingmate partner. A good one, by what I saw of them together. The kind of pairing where both riders fly better for the bond." She pauses. Goes back to the salve. "I thought about that partner a lot after. About what that kind of severance does to a person. The Well damage it leaves." Another pause, and this one has weight. "I still think about it sometimes."

  She doesn't say his name. She doesn't have to. I am already doing the arithmetic, slowly, with the particular cold focus of someone who has just realized that a door they thought was closed is standing open.

  The silence that follows is the kind that fills rooms where the truth is too heavy for the architecture.

  "I'm sorry," she says. "That's not what you came here to hear. But I've learned that context matters, especially now."

  "Especially now?"

  Linnea glances at the infirmary door. It's closed. We're alone, the other beds empty, the afternoon light cutting thin lines through the window slits. She lowers her voice.

  "How much do you know about what's been happening this month?"

  "The harness failure. Lorne."

  "Lorne is the latest. He's not the first." She moves to a workstation near the window, where patient charts are stacked in neat piles, and pulls three from the middle of the stack. "These are from the past two weeks. Three riders, first-years, admitted for severe Sear symptoms. Not the mild tremor-and-headache kind. The real kind. Bond-echo nightmares. Time-skips. Magical backlash severe enough to leave residual damage to the Well's connection."

  She fans the charts on the table. I don't touch them. Patient records are restricted, and Linnea is already taking a risk showing me the covers.

  "Three severe cases in two weeks," she says. "The academy average for the entire year is four. And all three occurred within twenty-four hours of a training exercise that pushed the riders to maximum channeling output."

  Outside the infirmary window, a training flight passes — the low percussion of wingbeats, the rush of displaced air against stone, and then silence. I watch the shadow cross the light slit and disappear, and I think about how ordinary it looks from the outside. Two riders in formation, running a standard drill, just bodies on dragons doing what the Aerie trained them to do.

  The hairs on my arms rise. Not from cold.

  "You're saying the exercises are causing the Sear."

  "I'm saying the exercises are designed to push riders to their limits, and somehow, this month, those limits are being hit more frequently and more severely than any statistical model would predict." Her jaw tightens. "One case is bad luck. Two is a pattern. Three is—"

  "Intent."

  Linnea's eyes meet mine. In them, I see the same grim recognition I felt in the corridor with Kade, the moment when suspicion crystallizes into something harder.

  "The training configurations have changed," she says. "Subtle changes. Flight paths that funnel riders through more turbulent air, drill timings that coincide with peak Well-depletion hours, formation densities that require higher channeling output to maintain safe intervals. Each change is small enough to justify on paper. Together, they create conditions that are almost engineered to force overchanneling."

  Someone designed the scenario to force my hand. Kade's voice in the corridor, flat and precise.

  It wasn't just his hand. It was everyone's.

  "Have you reported this?" I ask.

  "To whom?" The bitterness in her voice is quick and controlled, the kind that comes from hitting the same wall repeatedly. "The training configurations are approved by the senior instructors. The Sear cases are documented as individual incidents: rider error, insufficient discipline, failure to regulate. Each one gets its own report, its own explanation, and none of those reports are cross-referenced because they're filed through different administrative channels."

  Different channels. Compartmentalized.

  "Who designs the training configurations?" I ask, though I already know.

  "Instructor Torvin's office. Approved by the Commandant's training council." Linnea pauses. "Torvin has been... very involved this term. More than usual. He's redesigned the entire first-year curriculum around what he calls 'accelerated operational readiness.' The council approved it unanimously."

  Torvin. Again. Always Torvin, standing at the center of every thread, his clipboard and his flat eyes and his hand that paused on the pen.

  "There's something else," Linnea says. She hesitates, and the hesitation tells me that what's coming is the part she's most afraid to say. "The three riders who suffered severe Sear, I ran their channeling diagnostics myself. Standard procedure. And in all three cases, the Well's feedback signature was... wrong."

  "Wrong how?"

  "Amplified. The backlash they experienced was disproportionate to the amount of magic they actually channeled. As if something was boosting the feedback loop. Making the Sear hit harder than it should for the level of draw."

  The room feels colder. The antiseptic smell sharpens.

  "That shouldn't be possible," I say. "The Well is internal. You can't externally amplify—"

  "I know." Linnea's voice is barely above a whisper. "I know what doctrine says. I'm telling you what the diagnostics show. Something is making riders Sear harder and faster than their channeling output warrants. And it's happening to first-years in Torvin's redesigned training program."

  I think of Kade. On his knees in the corridor. The Sear eating through his defenses with a ferocity that didn't match what I'd seen him channel during the rescue. At the time I understood it as severity, as a rider who'd been hiding the damage too long and finally hit his limit. Amplified feedback. Disproportionate to the draw. The same signature Linnea documented in three first-years this month. The same signature she documented in Kal's records two years ago, before Torvin's office reclassified it as inconclusive.

  Kade knows about the sabotage. He identified the filed pin and the chemical residue in the time it took me to land and walk across a shelf. He knows what Torvin is capable of.

  What I don't know yet is whether he knows what Torvin did to his own partner.

  He's a senior rider, gifted, trained, with years of experience managing his draw. The episode should have been manageable. Severe, but manageable.

  It wasn't. It was catastrophic. As if something was pushing the feedback beyond what his body could contain.

  "Liora." Linnea steps closer. Her voice has dropped to almost nothing, and her eyes are wide and serious and frightened in a way that medical professionals aren't supposed to be. "When you came in, when I touched you for the exam, I felt something. Your magic. It's... different."

  My blood goes cold.

  "Different how?"

  "Steady. Unusually steady. Most riders after a combat bout have residual turbulence in their Well: micro-fluctuations, feedback ripples. Normal. Expected. You don't have any." She studies me with an intensity that makes me want to step back. "It's as if your magic self-corrects. Smooths itself out. I've only ever read about that kind of resonance in..."

  "I'm tired," I say. Too fast. "Post-fight fatigue. It'll normalize."

  Linnea holds my gaze for a long moment. She knows I'm deflecting. She's too professional to push, or too afraid of what she'll find.

  "Keep notes," she says finally. "Dates. Training exercises. Any irregularities you notice, equipment, configurations, anything that feels off. Write them down. Keep them somewhere safe."

  "Why?"

  "Because the official records are being managed." She straightens the patient charts, aligning them with the careful precision of someone putting their armor back on. "And because three riders in my infirmary is three too many, and if the pattern continues, it won't be bruised ribs I'm treating."

  She holds the door open for me. The corridor beyond is dim, the torchlight flickering.

  "Liora." One more time. Her voice is small and hard and certain. "Your brother's channeling diagnostics were wrong, too. The same way. Amplified feedback, disproportionate to his draw. I documented it in my report."

  The floor tilts. My vision narrows to the point of light in her eyes.

  "What happened to the report?"

  "It was reviewed by Instructor Torvin's office," she says. Then, quieter: "And then it was reclassified as inconclusive."

  The door closes behind me.

  The corridor stretches in both directions: dark stone, torchlight, the carved oath marks of a hundred dead riders. Kal's name is somewhere in these walls. His death is somewhere in these files, buried under reclassifications and managed narratives, and the woman who documented the evidence was overruled by the same man who's now redesigning the training program that's sending first-years to the infirmary with amplified Sear.

  Through the link, Kade's wall pulses. He's close, somewhere in this level, the hum of his presence sharper than usual. I don't know if he felt my conversation with Linnea through the vow's emotional bleed. I don't know how much leaked.

  I don't know if I want him to know.

  What I know is this: Lorne's harness was sabotaged. Three first-years have been hospitalized with amplified Sear. The training configurations are engineered to push riders past their limits. And my brother's medical records were buried by a man who's now running the program that's breaking his students.

  I press my back against the corridor wall and breathe.

  Four in. Hold. Four out.

  Storm. Gathering. Pressure.

  Scyllax's echo rises from the deep roosts like heat from the earth's core, not a warning but a promise. A storm doesn't ask permission. It builds until the pressure is unsustainable, and then it breaks, and everything it touches is changed.

  I push off the wall. Start walking.

  Halfway down the corridor, I pass the notice board outside the training office. A new posting, the ink still wet:

  By order of the Training Council: Effective immediately, all first-year riders are required to undergo supplementary channeling assessments. Assessments will be administered by Instructor Torvin's office. Scheduling to follow.

  Special note: Cadet Liora Vale must report to Assessment Room 3, 0600 tomorrow. Individual evaluation per Commandant's directive.

  I read it twice.

  Individual evaluation. Torvin's office. The Commandant's directive.