Kiana walked toward Sagiri across the cracked formation while the black marks climbed past his collar, and nothing in her face answered the sight the way an enemy's face should.
He knew that stillness from somewhere older than the extraction ring, a silent girl behind the examination screen who had worn a name that was not hers.
'Aruke,' he thought, Nokai humming low in his grip, 'a presence trained to vanish, not a girl born empty.'
"You sat through that exam without blinking once," Sagiri said, boots grinding broken sigils, "and the proctors filed you under a null tribe because that lie was cheaper than the truth."
"The concealment was accurate enough for its purpose," Kiana answered, tilting her head like a tool checking its own calibration, "do you know what Fifth Tribe blood reads as before someone teaches it to read as a weapon?"
"Nothing," Sagiri said, jaw tight, "which is exactly the problem you were built to solve."
