Mira Solene did not sleep much. This was not insomnia in the traditional sense — she had no difficulty falling asleep, and she did not lie awake worrying about things. It was simply that the quality of sleep available to someone who could see several seconds into the future was, at best, complicated. Dreams had a way of bleeding into previews. She had learned, over years of careful management, to treat the night as useful thinking time.

  On the fourth night after arrival, she used that time to visit the Infinite Library.

  The library was open at all hours — one of the academy's stated policies, the kind that exists because someone, at some point, believed passionately that knowledge should never be gated by schedule. In practice, after midnight the library was empty except for the occasional insomniac and the library's permanent resident, a small man named Archivist Noss, who sat behind the main desk and read with the focused absorption of someone for whom books were both occupation and oxygen.

  Mira had a specific question. She had been building toward it since Instructor Hale's class, since the word RESONANCE had appeared on the blackboard and she had seen Raka go very still in the way people do when something reaches through the noise of a busy room and touches them directly.

  She found the section she wanted in the academy's historical records: a subsection tucked between standard Guardian histories and decommissioned training manuals, labeled in small, unremarkable text — Anomalous Aether: Historical Incidents.

  She pulled the relevant volume and sat down at the nearest table and began to read.

  An hour later she closed the book, sat very still, and looked at the ceiling.

  What she had found was not what she had expected. Or rather — it was exactly what she had expected, which was somehow worse. Because Mira's ability let her see seconds into the future, not months, and when she had walked into this library tonight she had not known what she would find. But now that she had found it, it felt inevitable in the way that things always feel inevitable when you are looking backward at them.

  There had been seven of them before. Seven students with anomalous abilities, three hundred and twelve years ago, placed in a dormitory that did not have a number yet because the academy had not needed a system for housing its anomalies until those seven arrived. They had been mocked. They had been dismissed. They had graduated without honors and been assigned to border patrol — the least prestigious posting available, far from the academy's political center.

  And then the Void had opened, and the seven had been the only ones close enough, the only ones with the right kind of power, the only ones who could do what needed to be done.

  Three of them had not come back.

  The academy had named the dormitory Seven after that. The number chosen not because seven students would always live there, but as a record. A memorial. A reminder of what anomalous abilities had once meant and might mean again.

  The academy knew. It had always known. The placement of students in Dormitory Seven was not careless — it was careful, in the way that preparations for a contingency are careful. Someone had been watching for these specific power signatures. Someone had been waiting.

  We didn't end up here by accident.

  Mira sat with this for a long moment. Then she took out her notebook and wrote it down — all of it, precise and ordered, because information is only useful if you can retrieve it — and walked back to Dormitory Seven through the empty pre-dawn corridors.

  You might be reading a pirated copy. Look for the official release to support the author.

  She did not wake anyone. The time for that was not yet.

  But she noted it. She noted it very carefully.

  * * *

  The next morning, Raka found the note on his desk.

  It was written in Mira's handwriting, which was small and very precise, the kind of handwriting that means someone thinks faster than they write and has learned to compensate with efficiency. The note said:

  Library. Tonight. Bring the others. All of them, including Kai. — M

  Raka read it twice, then looked up. Mira was already gone, having left for her first class with the efficiency of someone who had scheduled everything in advance. He pocketed the note.

  Getting Kai to agree to anything required a particular approach, which Raka had not yet worked out. He knocked on the curtain of Kai's alcove at breakfast time and said, simply: 'Library tonight. Mira found something.' Then he walked away without waiting for an answer, because he had the instinct — unverified but strong — that Kai was more likely to show up if given no opportunity to decline.

  The others agreed without difficulty. Lenne with enthusiasm. Damar with a single nod that meant he had already made a similar plan and was willing to consolidate. Tobas with a quiet 'alright' that carried more resolve than it sounded. Sena with the slight tilt of her head that meant she had already known this was coming, in the way that Sena always seemed to already know things, not through any specific ability but through a quality of attention that missed very little.

  * * *

  They assembled in the library at the hour when the rest of the academy was finishing dinner. Archivist Noss looked at seven students settling around a back table with the resignation of a man who had seen stranger things, which he probably had, and returned to his book.

  Mira put the historical volume on the table and opened it to the relevant section. She did not summarize. She let them read it.

  The silence while they did was of different qualities from person to person. Lenne's was tight, like a spring winding. Damar's was the silence of calculation. Tobas read slowly, twice, and when he looked up his expression had the particular quality of someone who has just understood something they'd rather not have understood. Sena was the only one who didn't seem surprised. She read it with the steadiness of someone receiving confirmation.

  Kai had appeared at the table without Raka noticing his arrival. He was reading now, one finger tracing a line of text. His expression was unreadable.

  'Three hundred and twelve years,' Raka said, when everyone had finished. 'The last time abilities like ours appeared.'

  'The same abilities,' Mira said. 'Not similar. The same. The records are specific. Resonance. Temporal Pause. Future Glimpse. Void Communication. Existence Erasure.'

  'What about Lenne?' Tobas asked. 'And you?'

  'Kinetic amplification and precognition both appear in the records,' Mira said. 'Different labels, same mechanics.'

  Lenne had been very quiet, which was unusual enough to be notable. She was staring at the page with an expression that had moved through several stages and arrived somewhere complicated.

  'They named the dorm after us,' she said. 'After the ones who came before.'

  'After the ones who died,' Tobas said quietly.

  'After all seven,' Sena said. 'The ones who came back too. They didn't just remember the dead.'

  Raka looked at the page. The names were there, written in the register of three centuries ago: seven students, their abilities, their assignments, their fates. Three names with a mark beside them that the archivist's notation key identified as fallen in the line of duty. Four names with the notation returned to service.

  Seven names. Seven abilities. Arranged in the same dormitory, three centuries apart, because someone had known — or feared — that they would be needed again.

  'Someone at this academy is watching for us,' Damar said. It was not a question.

  'Yes,' Mira said.

  'The question is whether they're watching to protect us or to use us,' Damar said.

  The table was quiet again. Outside the library's high windows, the academy's lights had come on against the darkening sky.

  'We don't tell anyone what we found,' Raka said. 'Not yet. We find out more first.'

  'Agreed,' Damar said.

  'Agreed,' said Mira. Then Lenne. Then Tobas. Then Sena, with a small nod.

  They all looked at Kai.

  Kai looked at the open book, at the names of seven students who were three hundred years dead, and then at the six people sitting around the table with him. His expression did not change. But he put his finger on the page — on the name at the top of the original Seven's list — and then lifted it and closed the book.

  That was agreement enough.