Four in. Hold. Four out.

  Not mine. Hers.

  I wake with Liora Vale's breathing pattern threaded through my skull like a second pulse, and the wrongness of it—the intimacy, the intrusion, the way my lungs want to sync—is enough to make me roll onto my side and press my face into the pillow until the stone-cold dark of the barracks swallows everything except the tremor in my left hand.

  Three rules. I built them before I could shave. Don't show pain. Don't show weakness. Don't let anyone close.

  She broke all three in a corridor six days ago, and I've been bleeding ever since.

  The tremor is worse this morning. Not the sharp, electrical spasm of active Sear. That passed two days ago, drained out of me like poison under the impossible pressure of her hand on my shoulder. But… the residual shudder, the body's memory of what it survived. My fingers twitch against the sheet in an arrhythmic stutter that I clock and contain: left hand only, intermittent, amplitude decreasing. Manageable—not visible at arm's length. Not visible at all, if I keep my fist closed.

  I assess the rest of the damage the way I was trained, clinically, the way you check a harness before flight.

  Headache: persistent, low-grade, centered behind the right eye. Hyper-clarity: the room's details are too sharp, too present. The grain of the stone ceiling. The hairline crack in the mortar above my bunk. The distant sound of the watch-change horn three levels down, each note individually distinguishable. My senses are running hot, overcalibrated, the Well's aftershock leaving everything dialed to a frequency that's almost beautiful and entirely unsustainable.

  And beneath it all, the shame.

  Not of the Sear. I've lived with that for months: the private knowledge that the Aerie's prized weapon is corroding from the inside, that every flight costs more than the last, that the margin between controlled draw and catastrophic feedback is narrowing like a canyon that used to be a valley. The shame is older than the Sear. Deeper.

  She knelt beside me. She put her hand on my shoulder, and instead of recoiling from the wreckage of a senior rider mid-episode she stayed. She matched her breathing to the rhythm she wanted mine to follow. She did something to the feedback loop that no one should be able to do, and the Sear broke like a fever under her palm.

  And what I felt, in the moment before her regulation took hold, before the agony receded and the world solidified and I could think again, was not gratitude.

  It was relief so vast and so complete that it terrified me more than the Sear itself.

  Because relief means need. Need means dependency. Dependency means someone has a hand around the part of you that keeps you standing, and when they close their fist—

  I sit up. The tremor stills. I press both palms flat against my thighs, feel the muscle and bone through regulation-issue sleep clothes, and rebuild the wall.

  Stone by stone. Discipline by discipline. Every brick is a thing I will not feel: the warmth of her shoulder under my forehead, the exact cadence of her voice counting breaths, the way she looked at me afterward, not with pity, not with fear, but with a fierce, pragmatic anger that said you idiot, you've been handling this alone.

  The wall goes up. The link goes flat.

  On the other side, far across the mountain in the first-year barracks, Liora Vale sleeps. I know because the vow tells me, a low, steady hum of unconscious presence, her breathing slower than waking, her emotional resonance muted to the soft grey of dreamless rest. She earned it. Yesterday she dropped Daven Carrick on his back in front of two hundred people, and she did it the way Scyllax fights: not with force but with redirection, turning the ring into a weapon and her opponent's expectations into a trap.

  The memory surfaces before I can stop it. Her standing in the center of the ring. Sand in her hair. Blood on her knuckles from a split she didn't notice. And the blade of pride that drove through the vow-wall like it was paper—Mine.

  I clamp it. Hard. The containment costs me a flare of pain behind the right eye, the headache spiking in protest, and I hold it there, grinding the feeling into powder between the gears of discipline and denial.

  She is not mine. She is a first-year cadet with a shamed name and a dragon that hasn't bonded in four decades and a dead brother whose ghost lives in the classified files I'm about to go looking for. She is my wingmate because my father made her so, and my father makes nothing without a catch attached.

  Edge. Assessment. Threat.

  Iskra's bond-echo hits through the pre-dawn dark like a cold blade laid flat against skin. My dragon is awake in her roost three levels below, her obsidian scales reflecting nothing, her mind a clean geometry of angles and threat vectors. She felt the vow-leak. She felt the mine. And her response is not jealousy. Iskra doesn't do jealousy; jealousy requires emotional imprecision. This is a cold, surgical recalibration of risk.

  The Vale girl changes his responses. She destabilizes his containment. She makes him want.

  Want is a variable Iskra cannot control. Therefore want is a threat.

  I agree with my dragon. That should tell me everything I need to know.

  It doesn't.

  I dress in the dark. Flight leathers, boots, the senior rider's insignia at my collar that opens doors and closes mouths. My hands are steady by the time I buckle the last strap, the tremor buried under muscle memory and willpower and the particular numbness that comes from years of practice at being someone I'm not.

  The corridor outside is empty. Pre-dawn, pre-watch-change, the dead hour when the Aerie belongs to the ghosts carved into its walls. I pass Kal Vale's name on the way to the stairwell.

  I make myself look.

  The letters are clean, precise, regulation-depth. Kal Vale. Cadet. Bonded. Fallen. No cause of death. No story. Just the name and the dates and the smooth stone that says nothing about how he actually died, which is the point, because the truth of how Kal Vale died is locked behind my father's seal in a room I'm not supposed to enter.

  I enter it anyway.

  The Restricted Archive occupies a sub-level carved from the mountain's heart, below the main library and above the deep roosts. The air is dry, cold, tasting of mineral dust and the faintly metallic tang of preservation wards. Weave-construct sigils line the doorframe, a lattice of interlocking permissions that respond to rank, clearance, and the specific magical signature of authorized personnel.

  My signature opens the outer door. Senior rider. Top-ranked cadet. Commandant's son.

  The inner door requires more.

  I press my palm to the ward-plate and feed it a thread of controlled magic, enough to activate the keying protocol without drawing attention from the archive's monitoring system. The sigils pulse once, twice, and the lock disengages with a sound like a breath being held.

  Inside: rows of sealed cabinets, each one tagged with classification markers ranging from ROUTINE to RESTRICTED: COMMAND AUTHORITY REQUIRED. The lighting is dim, Weave-constructs set to minimum, preservation-grade, and the silence has weight to it, the particular heaviness of rooms where secrets are stored instead of spoken.

  I know what I'm looking for. The evidence of what happened to Lorne's harness. The training configurations that engineered the conditions for it. And the file I was never supposed to find: Incident Report 47-V, Cadet Kal Vale.

  I start with the equipment logs. Batch 7-R through 9-R covers the last six months of harness maintenance, the window that includes Lorne's "failure." The cabinet is marked RESTRICTED but keyed to senior instructor and above, which my rank technically satisfies. The drawer opens.

  The logs are meticulous. Maintenance dates, inspector signatures, materials used, pin replacement schedules. I flip to Lorne's harness, Serial 7R-0422, and find the entry.

  Inspected: 14th day, third month. Inspector: Cadet Maintenance Corps, supervised by Instructor Torvin's office. Result: Passed. All components within tolerance.

  Within tolerance. The pin that I pulled from the wreckage had a locking detent filed to nothing and a stress point treated with a chemical compound that doesn't appear in the standard maintenance ledger. Within tolerance is a lie, and the lie is signed by Torvin's supervision chain.

  I note the date, the serial number, and the supervising authority. Then I move to the training configuration approvals.

  These are harder. The cabinet is keyed to a higher clearance, RESTRICTED / COMMAND REVIEW, and my palm on the ward-plate triggers a longer pause, a deeper interrogation of my magical signature. For three seconds I think it will reject me. Then the sigils flash amber: conditional access, logged and timestamped, and the drawer releases.

  Inside: training configuration files, neatly organized by term. I pull Term 14, the current term, Torvin's "accelerated operational readiness" redesign, and compare it to Terms 12 and 13.

  The changes are surgical. Flight-path routing through higher-turbulence corridors. Formation densities increased by twelve percent, just enough to require greater channeling output for safe interval maintenance. Drill timings shifted to coincide with the post-midday Well-depletion window, when riders' reserves are lowest and feedback sensitivity is highest.

  Each change is individually defensible. A slightly harder route. A slightly tighter formation. A slightly less forgiving schedule. Marginal adjustments, backed by training doctrine citations and approved unanimously by the council.

  Together, they create a system designed to push riders past the edge.

  I photograph the comparison in my memory, Kade Dray, trained observer, the boy whose father taught him to memorize everything because information is the only currency that doesn't depreciate, and move to the file I actually came for.

  Incident Report 47-V: Cadet Kal Vale.

  The cabinet is different. The classification marker doesn't say RESTRICTED. It says SEALED: COMMANDANT AUTHORITY. ACCESS DENIED WITHOUT DIRECT WRITTEN ORDER.

  My palm on the ward-plate produces nothing. No amber flash, no conditional access. The sigils don't interrogate my signature; they reject it. Completely. The lock doesn't disengage. The drawer doesn't move. The wards simply say no, with the finality of a door that was never meant to open for me.

  My father's seal. His personal ward-key, applied to a cadet's incident report.

  I stand in the cold light and let the implications settle.

  A training accident doesn't require Commandant-level classification. A cadet's death, however tragic, however embarrassing to the Vale name and the academy's reputation, is a matter for the training council and the medical staff and the standard review process. You seal files when the contents would damage something more important than a family's honor.

  You seal files when the truth would crack the foundation.

  I check the access log, a thin ledger mounted beside the cabinet, tracking every interaction with the ward-plate. Protocol requires it. Even sealed files leave fingerprints.

  The most recent entry stops me cold.

  Access attempted: 6th day, current month. Authority: Instructor Torvin, I. Result: Granted.

  Access attempted: 8th day, current month. Authority: Instructor Torvin, I. Result: Granted.

  Two accesses in the last seventy-two hours. Torvin. Not the Commandant, Torvin. Which means Torvin has a ward-key to a file sealed by Commandant authority, or the Commandant gave him temporary access, and either option means the same thing:

  They're managing the file. Right now. Actively.

  Whatever Kal Vale's death actually was, it's not history. It's a living operation.

  I scan the adjacent drawers, anything adjacent in the filing system, anything that might have been misfiled or cross-referenced. In the medical diagnostic cabinet, keyed lower, accessible to senior medical and instructor staff, I find the edge of what I'm looking for.

  Well Feedback Analysis: Vale, K. (Annex C).

  The main file is sealed with everything else. But Annex C has been separated, physically removed from the primary report and refiled in the diagnostic section under a different classification. Sloppy, or deliberate. A copy left where it shouldn't be, or a copy kept where someone could find it if they knew to look.

  I open it.

  Most of the page is redacted, heavy black bars across the data fields, the text beneath them reduced to fragments. But the header is intact, and the header is enough:

  DIAGNOSTIC SUMMARY — WELL FEEDBACK ANALYSIS Subject: Vale, Kal (Cadet, Second Year) Date: [REDACTED] Administering Healer: Linnea Ashford Finding: AMPLIFIED FEEDBACK SIGNATURE (FLAGGED) Recommendation: Further investigation warranted; feedback ratio exceeds

  The narrative has been taken without authorization; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident.

  The rest is black. Redacted. Cut off mid-sentence by a reclassification stamp that reads: INCONCLUSIVE. Reclassified per Instructor Torvin, I. Approved: Commandant's Office.

  Amplified feedback signature. Flagged.

  I memorize the annex page number. The header. The administering healer's name. The reclassification chain. Then I close the drawer, exit the archive, and walk through the dark corridors toward the meeting I was summoned to attend, carrying the weight of evidence I can't use and truths I can't speak.

  Not yet. Not without proof that my father can't bury.

  But the shape of the thing is clear now, and it has teeth.

  The Commandant's study smells of lamp oil and control.

  It occupies the highest accessible level of the Aerie's central spire, a circular room with windows on three sides that frame the mountain range like a threat assessment. The furnishings are spare: a desk the size of a small battlefield, two chairs positioned for subordination, and walls lined with tactical maps and academy citations that serve less as decoration than as evidence of jurisdiction.

  My father stands behind the desk. He does not sit when subordinates are present. He does not sit when he wants the room to remember who owns it.

  Torvin is already here.

  He occupies the left chair, a concession the Commandant has granted him, which tells me their relationship is either more collaborative than I assumed or more adversarial than it appears. Torvin's clipboard rests on his knee, his posture relaxed, his expression the practiced blankness of a man who has rehearsed this meeting.

  "Kade." My father's voice is the same temperature as the room: cold, controlled, precisely calibrated. "Sit."

  I sit. The chair is hard and slightly too low, another design choice, another reminder. In this room, everyone looks up.

  "Instructor Torvin has requested your technical assessment of the harness failure during the formation drill." The Commandant opens a file on his desk, thin, organized, incomplete. "Your observations were noted at the time. We'd like them formalized."

  This is not what this meeting is about. This is the surface, the administrative architecture that justifies the summons and provides documentation if anyone asks why the Commandant's son was called to his office at dawn. The real meeting happens in the spaces between sentences.

  "I inspected the mounting pin from Cadet Lorne's harness after recovery," I say. My voice is level, precise, the voice of a senior rider delivering a technical report. Mask on. Rules engaged. "The locking detent showed evidence of mechanical modification consistent with deliberate filing. The leather at the primary stress point showed evidence of chemical treatment inconsistent with standard maintenance compounds."

  I pause. Let the words settle. Watch my father's face for micro-expressions and find nothing. His mask is better than mine, which is unsurprising, since he built mine.

  "Chemical treatment." Torvin's voice is smooth, interested, the voice of a man taking careful notes. "Could that be consistent with a supply-chain contaminant? Non-standard compounds in maintenance shipments have been documented at other academies."

  There it is. The box. Torvin is building it in real time: a plausible, boring explanation that transforms sabotage into paperwork. Supply-chain contaminant. Bureaucratic failure. No one's fault. No one's design.

  "It could," I say. "If the modification to the locking detent were also attributable to a supply-chain irregularity. The filing pattern I observed was consistent with hand tools, not manufacturing variance."

  Torvin's pen pauses. Half a second. Then resumes.

  "Manufacturing tolerances can produce artifacts that resemble sabotage."

  "The filing was directional," I say. "Consistent strokes. Uniform depth. Applied after the pin was installed, based on the overlap pattern with the mounting hole's edge."

  Silence.

  My father watches me the way he watches everything, without expression, without warmth, weighing data and calculating leverage. Torvin's composure holds, but I've put a crack in his narrative, and he knows I know it, and the room knows we all know it, and the dance continues anyway because this is how power works in the Aerie: not through truth but through the management of truth.

  "Your thoroughness is noted," the Commandant says. "The equipment integrity review will incorporate your observations. Instructor Torvin will oversee the full audit."

  Torvin. Overseeing the audit of evidence that points to Torvin. The fox running the henhouse with a clipboard and a clear conscience.

  I should stop here. Submit my report, accept the containment, let the narrative close around the evidence like a fist.

  I don't.

  "I'd also like to review the incident file for Cadet Kal Vale."

  The room changes temperature.

  My father's eyes don't move, don't blink, don't register surprise, but the stillness that follows my request is the stillness of a man whose son has just stepped onto ground he was explicitly told to avoid. Torvin's pen stops entirely.

  "Cadet Vale's file is a sealed matter," the Commandant says. "Resolved. Classified."

  "The current harness failure shares characteristics with—"

  "It shares characteristics with a maintenance failure. Which is being reviewed." My father's voice drops half a register. Not louder. Colder. "Sealed files remain sealed, Kade. That is not a suggestion. It is the architecture of this institution's discipline."

  "The diagnostic records—"

  "Are classified. The incident report is classified. The review findings are classified." Each word is a door closing. "These matters were resolved under my authority two years ago, and they will remain resolved. What you are doing right now is not curiosity. It is destabilization."

  The word lands like a slap. Destabilization. My father's term for anything that threatens the narrative he's constructed, the carefully managed reality in which the Aerie functions, the Drays command, and inconvenient truths stay buried under reclassification stamps and sealed cabinets.

  "Your role," the Commandant continues, "is to fly. To lead. To perform at the level this institution requires." He pauses. Lets me feel the weight of what's coming. "And to fulfill your wingmate obligations with the discipline expected of your rank."

  There. The pivot. From Kal's file to Liora, in one sentence, a redirect so smooth it barely registers as a threat until the implications bloom.

  "Cadet Vale's supplementary assessment tomorrow is a necessary measure," he says. "Her bonding event was anomalous. Scyllax's history is... complicated. The training council has determined that her channeling profile requires individual evaluation to ensure that she is not a strategic liability."

  Strategic liability. The same language he used for Kal. The same cold, administrative framework that turned a rider's death into a filing error and a family's grief into a cautionary tale for first-year orientation.

  "The assessment is standard," Torvin adds. His voice has recovered its smoothness, the crack I put in his narrative plastered over with professional concern. "Given the circumstances, the age of her dragon, the cross-cohort pairing, the family history, it would be negligent not to evaluate her thoroughly."

  Family history. Kal. Sear. The implication that the Vales are genetically predisposed to overchanneling, a narrative Torvin has been cultivating for two years, and one that my father has allowed because it serves the containment.

  "I'll observe the assessment," I say. "Wingmate protocol. I have standing to—"

  "You have standing to do what you are told." The Commandant's voice is quiet. Absolute. The voice that ended arguments when I was eight and ends careers now. "Your proximity to Cadet Vale is by design, Kade. Not yours."

  The leash. There it is, visible now, the mechanism laid bare. He paired me with Liora not to protect her and not to control me, but to do both simultaneously: keep me close enough to monitor, keep her close enough to contain, and if either of us steps out of line, use the other as the consequence.

  "If the assessment reveals anomalies," my father says, "they will be addressed through appropriate channels. If your wingmate obligations require adjustment, they will be adjusted. And if your attachments interfere with your judgment or your usefulness, I will address those as well."

  Attachments. He knows. Not the specifics, not the corridor, not the Sear episode, not the impossible thing her hand did to the feedback loop. But he knows the direction. He sees the vector. And he's telling me, in the elegant, bloodless language of command, that if I let myself care about Liora Vale more than I care about the architecture of his power, he will dismantle whatever I've built with her and use the pieces to reinforce the walls.

  "Understood," I say.

  The word tastes like ash.

  "Good." The Commandant closes the file on his desk. Meeting over. The surface has been maintained, the documentation filed, and the real conversation, the one that happened in the silences and the subtext, has established the boundaries I am not permitted to cross.

  I stand. Torvin stands. We leave the study like two men who've just agreed on the weather while the building burns around them.

  In the corridor, Torvin falls into step beside me.

  "Your observations about the pin were thorough," he says. Conversational. Collegial. The voice of a mentor offering professional feedback. "I'll ensure they're incorporated into the audit."

  "The chemical residue—"

  "Will be tested." His smile is small, closed, a door locked from the inside. "These things take time. Supply-chain analysis requires coordination with external laboratories. The process is rigorous."

  The process is burial.

  "Kade." Torvin stops. Turns. His eyes are flat and dark and patient in a way that reminds me of deep water, still on the surface, with currents underneath that can drown you. "Your father values your judgment. So do I. But judgment requires perspective, and perspective requires distance. The Vale girl is—"

  "My wingmate."

  "Your assignment. There's a difference." He holds my gaze for three seconds, long enough to be deliberate, short enough to be deniable, and then walks away.

  His boots echo down the corridor. Measured. Unhurried. The footsteps of a man who believes he controls the board.

  I stand in the empty corridor and feel the walls press in.

  Through the vow, Liora is awake.

  I feel it, the shift from sleep's grey hum to the bright, kinetic frequency of consciousness. Her emotional signature floods the link with the particular intensity of someone waking into a day they know will test them: determination edged with controlled anger edged with something underneath that she probably thinks she's hiding.

  Fear.

  Not the paralyzing kind. The kind that sharpens you, that makes you fly harder and think faster and refuse to flinch when the world tells you to blink. The same fear I felt in the canyon when she dove toward a falling cadet without calculation, the fear of someone who's more afraid of failing than of dying.

  I feel a tightening around my lungs. The wall flexes.

  I want to go to her. The impulse is immediate, irrational, and so strong it makes me stop walking, my feet planted on cold stone, my hands clenched, every trained instinct screaming move while every rule I've built screams not to. I want to find her in the first-year barracks and tell her that the assessment is not what they say it is, that Torvin is not what he claims to be, that the files are sealed because the truth would crack the Aerie open and my father would rather let riders die than let a failing foundation show.

  I want to tell her about Kal. The real story. The one I was there for, the one I carry like shrapnel lodged too deep to extract.

  I want to feel her hand on my shoulder again and let the relief pour in like the first breath after drowning.

  It is not a comfortable want. It has weight and heat and edges, and it lives behind my sternum in the same place the ghost-Vow used to live, the cold absence that has been there since a link severed. Except this is the opposite of cold. And it frightens me more than the cold did because the cold was just loss. This is something that could become loss. This is something I could still prevent from becoming loss, if I am careful enough, if I hold the wall, if I don't move.

  I don't move.

  A man who needs someone that badly isn't protecting them. He's consuming them.

  Instead, I redirect. Channel the impulse into action, tactical, contained, useful. The way I channel everything: through the harness, through the mask, through the three rules that keep me airborne when the winds should have grounded me long ago.

  I find Linnea in the infirmary at the shift change. She's organizing patient charts with the methodical focus of someone who's learned to keep her head down and her records accurate, and when I close the door behind me, her hands still.

  "Senior Rider Dray."

  "I need information about tomorrow's channeling assessment. Assessment Room Three. The individual evaluation ordered for Cadet Vale."

  Her expression doesn't change, but her fingers tighten on the chart she's holding. "That assessment is under Instructor Torvin's authority. I'm not—"

  "You're the administering healer for all first-year medical diagnostics. If a cadet undergoes a channeling assessment that produces adverse effects, you're the responder. You'll have been briefed on the room's configuration."

  Linnea is quiet for a moment. Then she sets the chart down.

  "Assessment Room Three was reconfigured last week," she says. "New ward architecture. Standard rooms use broad-spectrum monitoring to measure channeling output across all five disciplines. Room Three has been fitted with resonance-specific filtration wards. Designed to isolate and amplify a single magical frequency for detailed analysis."

  My stomach drops.

  "What frequency?"

  "The work order didn't specify." Her voice is careful, precise, each word placed like a foot on uncertain ground. "But the ward configuration matches a pattern I've only seen in theoretical literature. It's designed to detect and measure..." She meets my eyes. "Regulation resonance. The ability to modulate external magical feedback. It's exceptionally rare. Most riders don't even know the term."

  Regulation resonance. Liora's ability, the impossible thing she did in the corridor, the smoothing, the stabilizing, the way she reached into my Sear and turned the frequency down like adjusting a dial. The ability that she doesn't have a name for, that she thinks is a fluke, that she agreed to keep secret because we both understood what would happen if the wrong people discovered what she can do.

  Torvin knows. Or suspects. And my father has authorized a room specifically designed to confirm it.

  "Linnea." My voice is level. Controlled. The mask is on and holding, but underneath it, the ground is moving. "What happens to a Regulator in a room warded for resonance-specific filtration?"

  "In theory? The wards would detect her frequency and map it for analysis." She pauses. "In practice, with the amplification settings I saw in the work order... it would be like putting a candle in a hall of mirrors. Every facet of her ability would be reflected, magnified, and visible. She wouldn't be able to hide what she is."

  "And if she's identified?"

  Linnea's silence is answer enough. But she gives me more, one final piece, delivered with the quiet fury of a healer who has watched too many riders broken by an institution that calls the breaking discipline.

  "There's a new classification directive. Signed this morning. Commandant's authority." She pulls a slim document from beneath her charts, a copy, not the original, obtained through whatever careful network of principled dissent exists in the Aerie's medical corps. "It establishes protocols for identifying and managing what it calls 'anomalous resonance profiles.' Riders who exhibit non-standard magical signatures are to be flagged for monitoring, restricted training, and—"

  She hands me the document. The final line reads:

  Riders exhibiting confirmed Regulator-class resonance are to be classified as strategic containment assets and placed under direct command oversight.

  Strategic containment assets.

  Not a rider. An asset. A tool to be managed, leveraged, or discarded, the same language my father uses for everything he controls, including me.

  Including Kal.

  I fold the document. Place it inside my flight leathers, against my ribs, where the heat of my body will keep it close and the leather will keep it hidden.

  "Tomorrow," I say. "0600. I'll be at Assessment Room Three."

  "Under what authority?"

  "Wingmate protocol. I have standing."

  Linnea studies me. Whatever she sees in my face, past the mask, past the control, past the careful architecture of a boy who was raised to be a weapon, makes her nod once.

  "I'll be there too," she says. "Medical oversight. In case the assessment produces adverse effects."

  I leave the infirmary.

  The corridor is dark. The oath marks line the walls, name after name after name, riders who flew and fell and became lessons carved into stone. Kal Vale's name is up there, and Liora walks past it every day carrying the weight of a lie she doesn't know is a lie, and tomorrow morning at 0600 she's going to walk into a room designed to strip her bare and classify her as property.

  Through the vow, I feel her. Still awake. Still determined. Still afraid and still refusing to let the fear win.

  Something breaks through the wall. Not the possessive surge from the dueling ring—something quieter, more dangerous. A pulse of warmth that wraps around the steady rhythm of her breathing like a hand cupped around a flame against the wind. Protective. Furious. Tender in a way that I have no right to feel and no ability to stop.

  I crush it. The containment hurts, a bright, sharp pain behind my ribs that has nothing to do with Sear and everything to do with the specific agony of caring about someone in a place designed to weaponize caring.

  But even as I lock it down, even as the wall rebuilds and the mask settles and the three rules reassert themselves with the desperate authority of a man who knows his foundations are cracking, I am already walking toward her.

  Not to warn her. Not yet. Not like this, with Torvin's attention and my father's directive and the document burning against my ribs. A warning delivered carelessly becomes evidence. Evidence becomes leverage. Leverage becomes a leash, and there are already too many leashes in this mountain.

  But I will be at Assessment Room Three at 0600. And I will be watching Torvin's hands. And if the wards in that room so much as flicker in a direction that threatens her—

  The thought completes itself before I can contain it. It comes from the place where the wall is thinnest. The place where her breathing lives.

  I will burn the room to the ground.

  And the man who built it.

  And the man who ordered it.

  And the three rules that were supposed to keep me safe from exactly this.

  Three rules. I built them before I could shave. And Liora Vale, in one corridor, with one hand and one counted breath, has turned them from walls into windows. I can still see out. I am beginning to suspect I can no longer keep anything out.

  I keep walking. The mountain is dark around me, and somewhere in its depths, Scyllax stirs, a presence vast and ancient and watchful, his bond-echo reaching toward Iskra's cold geometry like a storm front meeting a blade's edge.

  Tomorrow at dawn, they will try to put Liora Vale in a cage made of classification stamps and containment protocols.