Chapter 215: Doors
The Alliance medical district looked less like a hospital and more like a forge that had decided to be gentle. For a bit.
Cassian lay in a treatment cradle, shirt off, his ribs washed in pale blue light. Above him, an array the size of a dining table worked on his left side with energy threads finer than hair. Edius had healing arrays, sure; but Edius had nothing like this. The machine wasn’t just patching his channels — it was growing new ones, a hair’s width at a time, along junctions that had healed wrong a year ago. His body fought every single thread on the way in.
It looked exactly like what the General had promised. Slow. Ugly.
"Day one of renovations," Cassian said through his teeth, sweat stinging his hairline. "They found more water damage."
"Stop talking," the medic said.
"Can’t. I have a meeting."
He did have a meeting, too. The moment the session ended, the cradle tilted him upright; the cot became a command post. Three slates pinned in the air around him: team rosters on one, realm maps on another, a supply list on the third. The medic made one attempt to grab a slate, lost the argument without Cassian saying a word, and went to stand somewhere less frustrating.
"Route B has a chokepoint at the river stones," Cassian said, dragging a line across the map with one finger. His arm still trembled from the treatment. "Yuelan is not allowed to BE the chokepoint. Yueying holds the count. Eira, your kit doubles for both teams until we know the resupply times. Questions?"
"When do you sleep?" Eira asked.
"Between sessions. Next question."
— • —
Selene found them all there that afternoon, which saved her the trouble of saying it twice.
She stood in the doorway of the treatment bay in her instructor’s coat, looking around the room at the eight of them — seven standing, one wired into a machine and still holding a slate. She told them the way she told them anything. Plainly. Once.
"I’ve requested leave from my posting. It was approved this morning."
Nobody asked leave for what. There was only one thing behind the seclusion halls’ doors, and everyone in the room knew which one she’d been standing in front of for eleven years.
"The first-year wing will survive without me. So will you." Her eyes went around the room once, unhurried. "Don’t slack while I’m gone. I’ll know."
"How?" Yuelan asked, before her brain could stop her mouth.
"I’ll ask the mission boards." Selene almost smiled. "They don’t lie to me. Students do."
She left the way she did everything — without ceremony. The cohort followed her out into the gold afternoon anyway, keeping a distance she pretended not to notice. The seclusion halls stood on the quiet side of the inner district; they were low stone buildings with deep walls, built to keep the world out and one person’s war in. A hall attendant checked her registration at the entrance and stood aside.
At the threshold, Selene stopped. She didn’t turn around. She stood there for one breath with her back to the eight of them, coat still, shoulders level.
Then she went in, and the door swung shut behind her with a sound like a book closing.
— • —
The teams had been Cassian’s design, argued over exactly once and settled the way his plans usually settled — by being right.
Kaelen, Yuelan, and Yueying took the first roster: front line, front line, and the coldest head on the cohort to keep the two blades pointed the same direction. Lyra, Iris, Vesper, and Eira took the second — control, precision, a void-cat’s senses, and the medic every team wanted. First graded missions posted within two days. The academy’s old training realms were tame by Sovereign Dawn standards, which meant they would only occasionally try to kill a first-year.
Team two drew a culling contract: a pack of horn-backed things the mission slate called ridgeclaws, breeding past quota in a valley realm’s north woods.
It went clean. Mistwhisker found the pack an hour before the pack found them. Vesper walked the map like she was reading the cat’s mind, because she was. Iris set the ground — root-lines laid through the grass in a lattice only she could see. When the pack came through the treeline, the lattice closed, Lyra was already moving, and the whole contract was over in the time it took Eira to not be needed once.
"Eleven," Iris said, marking the last proof. "The slate said eight to ten."
"You sound offended."
"I’m adjusting the quota report. Someone’s count was lazy. I don’t like lazy counts."
They walked the valley trail back toward the extraction point ahead of the others, proofs stored, the sun doing one ordinary sunset instead of six. It was Lyra who broke the easy quiet, in the light tone of someone lobbing a training throw.
"You fight further left than your file says. I had to relearn your spacing twice."
"My file is out of date," Iris said. "I’ve improved. I improve at everything I don’t drop." She let two steps pass. "You should know I don’t drop things. Ever. It’s a flaw. I’ve decided to keep it."
The words were about footwork, but they weren’t about footwork at all, and both of them knew it.
Lyra laughed — soft, unbothered, no edge anywhere in it. "Good," she said. "Neither do I."
That was the whole conversation. Neither of them said a name, and neither of them needed to. When Vesper caught up with Mistwhisker riding her shoulders like a scarf, the two of them were arguing comfortably about quota reports as if nothing had been decided at all.
Something had been, though.
— • —
The route home from the mission hall passed the quiet side of the inner district. Nobody suggested it, and nobody argued either.
The seclusion hall sat in the evening light with its lamps unlit. Same stone, same deep walls, same door — closed exactly as far as it had been closed three days ago. That was all the news there was, and all the news there might be for a long time. Attempts like hers didn’t keep schedules. Days. Months. Years, if it went the way it went for most.
Yuelan stopped in front of it for a second, jaw working. Then she bowed to the door, quick and fierce and embarrassed about it, and stomped off toward the arena district to train.
One by one, without a word about it, the rest of them followed her.