CHAPTER 5: THE FUNDAMENTALS

  The second week started the same way the first had ended, with Kolt's rod and a two-mile run through mud that had given up any pretense of being ground.

  My feet were better. The infection had retreated to a dull heat instead of the wet-rot stink that had kept me awake on night three. Senna's salt water and Corvin's stolen wound paste had done their work. I could put weight on my heels without my vision going gray. Could walk without the limp broadcasting weak link to every man in the cohort.

  The run nearly killed me anyway.

  I made it a full mile before my legs started bargaining. A mile and a quarter before the bargaining turned to threats. My lungs burned. My calves cramped. The too-tight boots dug into my feet with every step, and I developed a hobbling gait that was half jog, half controlled fall.

  But I kept moving.

  Around me, other recruits ran in loose packs. The fast ones up front, already done. The middle clump grinding along, miserable but functional. And the stragglers; me, a kid with a bad ankle, and a heavyset man who wheezed like a broken bellows.

  I passed the wheezer at the mile-and-a-half mark. Didn't feel good about it. Didn't feel bad either. Survival wasn't about feeling. It was about mathematics. Who could keep moving longer.

  Kolt ran with her bad leg and her rod, not even breathing hard, and I hated her for it with a pure clean hatred that almost felt like energy.

  I finished walking. Last again. The kid with the bad ankle had found a second wind. But the gap between me and the pack was narrower than yesterday. Measurably narrower. I'd been measuring gaps my whole life.

  Kolt was waiting at the assembly point. She watched me stagger in with that one good eye, the other milk-white, reflecting nothing.

  "You didn't fall down today," she said.

  "No, Sergeant."

  "Don't let it go to your head." She turned away. But there was something in the set of her shoulders. Maybe the absence of active disgust.

  I'd take it.

  The channeling class was new.

  Kolt marched us to an open training area past the weapons yard past and the drill field where another cohort was running testudo formations with weighted shields. Wooden posts driven into packed dirt, practice dummies in rows, a wide circle scratched in the ground.

  A different instructor waited there. Low Ruby brand on his forearm. Older, maybe forty-five. Scarred knuckles. The bored expression of a man who'd taught this class a thousand times and had stopped expecting to be impressed somewhere around the five hundredth.

  "Sit," he said. We sat. Thirty-odd recruits in the dirt, cross-legged, shivering in the cold.

  "You all have Cores." He placed his hand flat against his own chest. "You were born with them. You were branded at birth because of them. Everything you are, your strength, your potential, your place in the Empire, comes from that crystal inside your chest."

  He drew his hand away. His palm glowed. Faint blue-green light, steady and controlled, like a candle behind glass. The light intensified as he held it, then faded when he closed his fist.

  "That's channeling. Drawing power from your Core and directing it." He opened his hand again. The glow returned. "Your turn. Hand on your chest. Close your eyes. Reach for the warmth."

  Around me, recruits complied. Hands on chests. Eyes closed. Faces screwed up in concentration.

  I placed my hand over the brand. The skin was still tender, raised scar tissue under rough fabric. Beneath it, my heartbeat. Beneath that, nothing.

  I knew there would be nothing. Had known since the Assessor's terror-stricken face. Since Senna's quiet word. Hollow. People born without Cores. People the Inquisition had hunted to extinction three hundred years ago.

  I reached anyway. Closed my eyes. Searched for warmth, for a crystal, for anything at all where everyone else apparently had a piece of themselves.

  The void stared back.

  "Good," the instructor said. He was moving between recruits. "I can see flickers. Some of you are finding it. Push harder."

  I pushed. Reached deeper. Found the same nothing I'd found the first time, and the time before that, and every time I'd pressed my hand against my chest since the Assessor had branded me with a lie.

  Around me, palms began to glow. Weak, unsteady, barely visible in the morning light. But present. A recruit two rows up produced a flicker that lasted three full seconds. Another managed a brief pulse. The instructor nodded. Adjusted a hand position. Moved on.

  He reached me. "Show me."

  I held up my palm. Nothing. Just skin. Just blood in the cracks where blisters had split.

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  He waited. Three seconds. Five.

  "Try again. Reach deeper."

  I reached. My jaw clenched. My chest burned where the brand sat. Nothing happened. Nothing would ever happen.

  "Hmm." He moved on. Not concerned. I was Low Quartz, the bottom of the ladder, and some Low Quartz took longer. "Keep practicing."

  I kept my hand on my chest. Kept reaching into the void. Kept finding nothing.

  The recruit beside me, a kid, maybe nineteen, glanced over. His palm held a faint, sputtering glow. He looked at my empty hand, then away. The look was brief, but I caught it. Pity, maybe. Or just noting who was below them.

  Here, I wasn't even adequate.

  The class continued. More recruits found their flickers. The instructor demonstrated channeling into the muscles, the glow spreading from palm into forearm, the subtle tensing of enhanced flesh. Most couldn't replicate it yet, but they had the starting point.

  I had a void.

  When the class ended, I stood with empty hands and a brand that was a lie and the certain knowledge that this would only get worse.

  Weapons training was afternoon, and it was the only thing keeping me sane.

  The Low Jade instructor, I'd learned his name was Havel, handed me a practice sword and nodded. "Let's see what you remember."

  I remembered everything. That was the problem. Or the gift, depending on how you looked at it.

  Every strike pattern Havel had demonstrated lived in my head. The weight transfer, the hip rotation, the follow-through. The guard positions. The recovery. I could see the mechanics the way I used to see the difference between a forty-pound box and a sixty-pound box before my hands ever touched it.

  Havel paired me for sparring. Same recruit as yesterday, the confident twenty-year-old who'd beaten me bloody in our first exchange. He came in with the same diagonal strike he always opened with.

  I blocked it.

  Not the clumsy, barely-there contact from before. I read the setup, the shoulder dip, the weight shift to his lead foot, the way his elbow tracked outward a fraction before the swing committed. And my sword was there before his arrived. Wood cracked against wood. The impact jarred up through my wrists.

  He recovered. Tried a low strike. I saw that coming too, his lead knee bent deeper, center of gravity dropping, eyes flicking to my thigh. Blocked again. Off-center, sloppy, but contact.

  His eyes narrowed. He came in harder. Three-strike combination, high, low, high. I blocked the first, missed the second, the practice sword cracked against my ribs and I gasped, bruises screaming, but caught the third.

  Two out of three. Yesterday it had been one out of five.

  "Better," Havel said, passing behind us. "Watch your guard on the left. You're dropping it after the first block."

  Added it to the library. My left side dropped because I was compensating for the rib bruises. Favoring the injury, protecting it unconsciously. I needed to stop doing that. Bad habits calcified if you didn't catch them early.

  The sparring continued. I took more hits than I blocked. My shoulder ached. My hands bled where the calluses hadn't finished forming. But each exchange was cleaner than the last. Each pattern sharpened. I could feel the neural pathways burning in, the raw foundation of competence being laid down one repetition at a time.

  The recruit across from me noticed. I could see it in the way his approach changed. Less casual, more careful. He'd started the day expecting an easy target. He was finishing it having to actually try.

  Not respect. But the step before it.

  I returned the practice sword to the rack. My hands left red-brown prints on the wood. I wiped them on my trousers and turned to leave.

  And noticed, at the edge of the weapons yard, a figure I hadn't seen before.

  Tall. Lean. Leather armor worn soft with use. Short dark hair going gray at the temples. He stood with his arms crossed, watching the sparring with the patient attention of someone who'd seen ten thousand fights and was still interested in the mechanics.

  His eyes found mine. Held for a beat. Then moved on, scanning the rest of the yard.

  I walked away. The back of my neck prickled.

  I didn't know who he was. But his gaze had the weight of an inspector, clipboard in hand, face unreadable, deciding who to keep and who to cut.

  That night, after Senna had cleaned my feet and wrapped them in fresh strips torn from a tunic Corvin had acquired through means he declined to specify, Corvin sat me down behind the barracks.

  "The instructors teach you how to fight," he said. "I'm going to teach you how to not die. Different things."

  "What's the difference?"

  "Fighting is standing your ground, facing your enemy, following the rules." He grinned. That sharp, quick grin that never quite reached his eyes. "Not dying is everything else."

  He pointed to his own body. Throat. Groin. Back of the knee. Kidneys. "These are the places no one teaches you to hit. Because hitting them isn't honorable." He said the word like it tasted bad. "But honor doesn't matter when you're on the ground and someone's standing over you with a sword."

  I thought about the three recruits who'd beaten me behind the latrines on day one. The kicks to my ribs. The boot in my back. Honor hadn't been a factor.

  "I'm listening."

  "Good. Because first, I'm going to teach you how to fall." He pushed me. Gently. Just enough to overbalance me.

  I caught myself. Awkward. Stiff.

  "Wrong. You're fighting gravity. Don't fight gravity. She always wins." He demonstrated. Let himself tip backward, then rolled. Shoulder, back, hip, up into a crouch. Smooth. The movement of someone who'd been knocked down a lot and had made peace with the ground.

  "You learned this how?" I asked.

  "Running from city guards." No shame. "The ones who couldn't fall right got caught. I never got caught."

  I tried. Went down hard. My ribs lodged a formal protest. But I'd tucked my chin, protected my head.

  "Again."

  Five times. Ten. Each fall hurt less. The pattern clicked into place. My body was good at learning sequences. Whatever else I was missing, I had that.

  Corvin noticed. "You pick things up fast, old man." He helped me to my feet. "Faster than Low Quartz should."

  The observation hung in the air. I waited for the follow-up question. It didn't come. Corvin had already moved on, demonstrating a move that turned a fall into a leg sweep. But his eyes were sharp. Adding the information to whatever mental ledger he used to calculate the odds.

  I lay on my cot that night and stared at the canvas ceiling and thought about Michael.

  He'd be drawing. He was always drawing. Houses with big suns and stick figures with oversized hands. I wondered did he still draw stick figures? If he did was I still in them? If the stick-figure dad still stood next to the stick-figure family or if he'd been quietly erased, edited out the way you erase a pencil mark, where it just faded a little more each time.

  I'd taught him nothing. That was the truth of it. Eleven years at a factory and I had no skills worth passing on, no wisdom, no legacy except child support payments and a ten-minute phone call once a week.

  And now a thief and a farm girl were teaching me how to survive a world that shouldn't exist. The irony was so thick I could have choked on it.

  I closed my eyes. Sleep came in fragments, interrupted by the ache in my ribs and the deeper ache in the hollow space behind my branding.

  Tomorrow there'd be another channeling class. Another chance to reach inside myself and find the void.

  And at the edge of the training yard, I suspected, that gray-eyed officer would be watching again.

  I wasn't sure which prospect frightened me more.