Chapter 20 CHAPTER TWENTY: Eat Something
CHAPTER TWENTY: Eat Something
I found him in the east courtyard.
Not at a meal table. Not on his way to class. He was standing in the courtyard alone in the early morning light with his arms at his sides and his eyes on the stone wall across from him and the specific stillness of someone who is holding a very large thing very carefully.
I sat on the bench.
He did not look at me.
"You skipped breakfast," I said.
"I was not hungry," he said.
"You were hungry," I said. "You just did not trust the food."
He said nothing.
"Skipping meals does not protect you," I said. "It weakens you. The lower table food is clean. She only touches the upper preparation line."
He turned his head slightly. "You are certain of that."
"Sera is certain," I said. "She has been inside this academy for seven years tracking what Thane does and does not control. If she says the lower table is safe, it is safe."
He was quiet for a moment.
"I sat down last night," he said, "and I thought about every meal I have eaten at the upper table since I arrived. Every morning. Every evening when I stayed late in the upper study hall and the staff brought food up." He paused. "Twelve meals. I counted."
"Twelve is not enough to cause damage," I said. "The process takes months. You have time, but only if you stay functional."
He looked at the wall again.
"My core feels different," he said. "Since last week. I thought it was the new training environment. The different Aether density at this altitude." He paused. "It is not that."
I said nothing.
"It is moving faster than it should," he said. "I can feel it. I have been feeling it and telling myself it was normal." He looked at me directly. "How do I slow it down."
That was the question I had been thinking about since Davan described the acceleration process.
"Reduce your core output," I said. "In training, in daily use, in anything that draws on it. Keep it as quiet as possible while we work on the larger problem."
"If I reduce output in training, Vayne will notice," he said.
"Tell her you are conserving ahead of the midterm assessment," I said. "It is a reasonable explanation. Upper-rank students do it."
He considered that. Then nodded once.
"Eat," I said. "Lower table. This morning. Sit wherever you would naturally sit if the upper table did not exist. Do not make it a statement."
He almost said something. Then he stopped.
"You have done this before," he said. "Not this specific thing. But managing people through a crisis without letting them know the full shape of it until they are ready."
I looked at the courtyard.
"Yes," I said.
"In this life?" he said.
He said it the way someone says something they have been sitting on since the night before. Carefully. Watching for the reaction.
"No," I said.
He held that.
"You said in this life twice now," he said. "And both times you meant it."
"Yes," I said.
He looked at me with that focused, calculating expression that was becoming familiar. He was not scared of the answer. He was measuring it, the way he measured everything, against what he already knew and what still did not fit.
"The historical cores," he said slowly. "The ones classified as errors. The records that did not match standard categories." He paused. "Some of those records were people who had died. And came back."
I said nothing.
"That is a real thing," he said. "Not just a story."
"Yes," I said.
He breathed out once. Not a gasp. Not shock. More like a door opening that had been closed a very long time.
"How many times," he said.
"Once," I said. "Only once. And not by choice."
He nodded slowly.
"Is that what your core is," he said. "Something from before."
"Something from before, fused with the Aether of this world," I said. "It does not follow the rules of either. That is why the scanner could not read it."
He was quiet for a long moment.
"That is why Thane wanted you here," he said. "A core like that would be the most valuable thing she has ever found."
I had thought about that too. But I had not said it out loud to anyone yet. The fact that Sable had arrived at it in under a minute told me something about how his mind worked.
"Yes," I said.
"She does not know yet," he said. "What it actually is."
"Not fully," I said. "That is the only advantage I have."
He looked at me.
"Then we need to move before she figures it out," he said.
"Two days," I said. "You meet the others. Then we move on the archive."
He started toward the door. Then he stopped.
"Ardell," he said without turning.
"Yes," I said.
"In your past life," he said. "Were you someone important."
I thought about what honest looked like in this moment.
"I thought I was," I said. "I was wrong about what that meant."
He stood there for a moment.
Then he walked inside.
I stayed on the bench for a few minutes in the cold morning air and turned over what I had just said, and why I had said it.
I had always framed my past life as preparation. As a resource. As the reason I could do what needed doing in this one.
When I was twenty-nine and dying on a cold stone floor, the thing I regretted was not the wars I had won or lost or the campaigns I had led. It was the people I had not let in. The distance I kept because I had decided, a long time before the end, that connection was the same thing as weakness.
I pressed my hand flat to my chest.
The core was warm. It had nothing to say, which I took as agreement.
I got up and went to morning class.