Evening. The mess tent.

  The smell of watered-down stew and bread that had been stale before we were born. The sound of two dozen exhausted men trying to exist in a space designed for fifteen. Steam rising from bowls. The wet-wool stink of bodies that hadn't been properly washed.

  I sat with Senna and Corvin at our usual spot. My body was a map of new damage layered over old. The ribs from Kel's strikes. The shoulder that screamed. The hands that were more bandage than skin.

  But I was here. Functional. Eating.

  Michael used to eat his cereal with the same mechanical determination, spoon in, chew, swallow, spoon in, when he was too tired to taste anything but too hungry to stop. Saturday mornings after sleepovers. He'd sit at the kitchen table with his eyes half-closed and his hand moving on autopilot, and I'd watch from the doorway and think: that's my kid. He doesn't even know I'm here and he's still the best thing I've ever done.

  I hadn't thought about it in weeks. The memory arrived now, sharp and clean, in the middle of a tent full of strangers in a world that shouldn't exist.

  The stew was thin. The bread was dense. I ate both.

  Senna watched me hold the spoon with swollen, bloody fingers. "You okay?"

  "Sore."

  "Kel hit you hard."

  "He hit everyone hard."

  "Everyone else went down." She said it matter-of-factly. The way she said everything, clean and undecorated, stones dropped into still water. "You didn't."

  I didn't respond. Focused on the bread. Each bite required more jaw work than the stew was worth. The bread here was engineered for durability, which meant eating it felt like chewing compressed sawdust.

  Corvin leaned in. Voice dropped. "How did you take those hits? The channeled ones?"

  "I don't know."

  "That's becoming your answer for everything."

  "It's the only one I have."

  He studied me. Those sharp, calculating eyes that were always running numbers behind the grin. The difference was that Corvin wasn't just looking at what I could do. He was looking at what I was worth.

  "You're an appreciating asset," he said finally. "And I don't even know what you are yet."

  "He's a person, Corvin," Senna said. "Not an investment."

  "Everything's an investment. Including people."

  Across the tent, Kel sat alone. Other recruits had left deliberate space on either side, the kind of careful avoidance that looks accidental but requires effort. He ate with one hand and held a book in the other. Fine leather binding. The kind of object that cost more than anything else in this tent and announced its cost with every visible page.

  "He's going to be alone the whole time he's here," Senna said. She didn't sound sad about it, exactly. She'd identified a problem and was deciding whether to solve it.

  Corvin shrugged. "He chose that. The posture. The book. The 'I'm better than all of you' routine. He's building walls."

  "Everyone builds walls."

  "Not everyone builds them out of leather-bound books and contempt."

  I watched Kel turn a page. His face was neutral in the careful way that required constant maintenance, the same mask I'd worn for eleven years. Yeah, doing okay. Can't make it. The face of a man who'd decided that loneliness was safer than vulnerability and was probably right about it.

  I recognized it because I'd invented it. Or thought I had. Turns out isolation looks the same in every world.

  Kel stood. Picked up his bowl. Walked over.

  "May I sit?"

  Formal. Stiff. Still trained to ask permission and still hating it.

  Senna nodded. "Sure."

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  He sat across from me. Set his bowl down. Closed his book with the care of someone handling something they valued. For a moment, silence. Just the sounds of the mess tent, other conversations, the clink of spoons, someone coughing.

  "You fought well today," Kel said. To me. "Better than I expected for someone who—"

  "Can't channel. Yeah." I dipped my bread in the stew. Let it soften. "I just tried not to die."

  "You succeeded. Most don't, against me."

  "Modest," Corvin said.

  Kel didn't smile. "Accurate."

  "So why are you really here, lordling?" Corvin leaned forward, elbows on the table, grin sharpening. "What did you do to get shoved into a Low Quartz cohort when your brand says Mid Jade?"

  The question landed like a slap. Kel's jaw tightened. The mask flickered. I saw the crack, the brief flash of something raw underneath.

  "I existed," he said. "That was enough."

  Senna's voice was flat. "That's shit. Family shouldn't do that."

  "No," Kel said. He looked at her. Surprised, maybe, by the simple directness of it. The way she delivered sympathy without softening it. "They shouldn't."

  "We're all here because someone more powerful decided we were expendable," Corvin said. He wasn't grinning anymore. "You're just expendable in a fancier way."

  Kel considered that. "I suppose that's accurate."

  The conversation continued. Careful. Halting. Four people testing the weight of a structure that might hold or might not. Kel asked Senna about farming, the rhythms, the seasons, the crops. She answered the way she answered everything: directly, without embellishment. He seemed genuinely interested. Or genuinely good at pretending to be, which in my experience amounted to the same thing if you did it long enough.

  He asked Corvin about the capital. The streets. The markets. Corvin deflected with humor but answered enough to be civil. His eyes never stopped calculating, even while his mouth was being charming.

  Kel didn't ask me anything. But I felt the weight of unasked questions. His gaze would find me, hold for a beat too long, then slide away to Senna or Corvin. He was assembling data. Running the numbers. Looking for the variable that explained how a branded Low Quartz with zero channeling ability had absorbed six Core-enhanced strikes without going down.

  When the meal ended, we walked back to the barracks together. The four of us. Not friends. The word was too soft, too quick for what we were. Something more structural. Load-bearing. The beginning of a thing that might hold weight.

  Senna asked Kel more about his family. He deflected. Asked her about hers instead. She talked about her brother, and Kel's shoulders dropped a fraction. Tension he'd forgotten he was holding.

  Corvin ranged ahead, then circled back. Restless. Always moving. The habits of a man who'd survived by never staying in one spot long enough to be caught.

  Nobody asked me anything. I walked between them and felt the warmth of proximity. Just other people. Bodies moving through the same cold air toward the same destination.

  Michael's drawings always had the family holding hands. Stick figures with oversized fingers, connected. I'd stuck them on the fridge and never thought about why a kid would draw that. Why the hands were always touching.

  I understood now.

  At the barracks entrance, Senna said quietly, "He's not bad. Just lonely."

  I nodded. But I was thinking about Kel's eyes during dinner. The way they'd tracked to me and away. The mental file he was building.

  Lonely people paid attention. They had time for it, all the hours that others spent on connection, redirected into observation. I knew.

  And Kel had already noticed too much.

  I sat on my cot. Unwrapped my feet. The ritual, cloth strips peeled away from healing cuts, cold air stinging against exposed flesh, the assessment of what was better and what was worse.

  The cuts were closing. Faster than they should be. I'd noticed it days ago but hadn't wanted to examine it too closely. The blisters that should have taken a week to heal were sealed in three days. The deep crack in my left heel that had been a genuine infection risk was now just a pink line of new skin.

  I rewrapped them. Careful. Thorough. The way Senna had taught me.

  Across the tent, Kel unpacked his bag onto his cot. The leather book. An ornate knife. Quality spare clothes that looked out of place against the straw mattress. Each item a flag planted in territory that would never accept him.

  He caught me looking. Held my gaze for a moment. Then looked away.

  I thought about what waited tonight. The meeting with Aldric behind the armory. More training. More strikes. More learning about the thing inside me that absorbed and held and wanted more.

  The warmth from Kel's channeled hits was still there. Faint. Spread thin through my body. But present. Hours later, and it hadn't fully faded.

  That was new.

  That was terrifying.

  Because I could feel it, and it felt good, and wanting it to feel good was a door I wasn't sure I should open.

  I finished with my feet. Lay back. Stared at the canvas ceiling and listened to the breathing of twenty-four men and thought about Rachel.

  You're right here and I can't reach you. It's like touching glass.

  She'd said that near the end. Before the lawyers. Before the papers. When she was still trying and I was still standing in the same room as her and not feeling anything about it.

  I'd thought she was wrong. Thought presence meant showing up. Meant being in the room. Meant going through the motions in the right order. Come home, eat dinner, say goodnight, set the alarm, repeat.

  I wasn't wrong about the motions. I was wrong about what she was looking for underneath them.

  Something alive. Something that reached back.

  Something I hadn't had. Maybe ever.

  And now, lying on a straw cot in a world that shouldn't exist, with the leftover warmth of channeled energy still humming in my bones. I could feel something. Not what she'd been looking for. But something. A presence inside me that hadn't been there before, or had been there and hadn't been awake.

  The void was still there. The hollow space where a Core should be. But the warmth was sitting inside it, casting just enough light to show that the room existed. That it had walls. That it was a space, not just an absence.

  I closed my eyes. Tried to sleep.

  Couldn't.

  The warmth whispered, a low, persistent suggestion that there was more of it available, if I wanted it. If I went looking.

  I would. Tonight. Behind the armory, where Aldric would be waiting with a practice sword and the patient, measured violence that was teaching me what I was.

  But for now I lay in the dark and felt the warmth and the terror and the wanting, and tried to decide if they were the same thing.