The bulletin went up before sunrise.
Three sheets, blue ink, neat borders. The notice hall smelled like wax and damp stone, the kind of morning that pretends to be clean. Students slowed without admitting it. Eyes skimmed the same lines as if reading could change them.
By order of the Imperial Heir and the Office of Inquiry: incident classified as an incompetent attempt. Campus secure. Classes resume. Gratitude to responders. Do not circulate rumor that could hinder investigation. Report irregularities at the ward office.
Rem read to the last period, felt the weight of the word incompetent, and almost smiled. He could hear Kade in that sentence and the Prince in the punctuation.
People stared. Not everywhere. Enough. You could tell who had been in the stands for the coliseum exam by how long they looked at his hands.
Evelyn crossed the hall like water cutting stone. Uniform crisp, hair braided back, expression set to a temperature that burned without showing it. The crowd parted for her and pretended it was for the notice board.
Lysanne slid into the space between them as if the floor had quietly asked her to. Whites immaculate, silver detailing tidy, a bright barrette holding back a sweep of hair. She carried a small lacquered notebook and a smile like morning.
"Officially good," she said, eyes on the bulletin. "Unofficially complicated." She tipped the notebook at Rem's wrist. "I am required to log how many times you breathe near something stressful. The notice board qualifies."
"Morning, Badge," Rem said.
"Morning, Mister Lock," she said. "We both know I am going to win the nickname war."
Evelyn did not slow. "Keep up."
They moved with the tide toward the first lecture. Professor Ardent was already at the front when they entered, sleeves rolled, chalk sharp. He looked like an argument that had learned manners. The room quieted without being told.
"Structure," Ardent said. He wrote the word once. "And improvisation." He wrote that too. "You think the first prevents mistakes. You think the second saves you from them. You are wrong twice."
He paced between the benches. "Structure defines what you can reach in time. Improvisation decides whether you admit it. Both can be taught. Both can be abused."
His gaze passed over faces, paused on Rem for a breath, moved on. Not approval. Weighting. He gestured at the diagram he had drawn without looking.
"Case one," he said. "A door meant for three locks opens without sound. You have structure. You have a plan. The plan assumed the door told the truth. Improvisation says get the Heir out. Structure says by which route and how many steps. If you do not know the answer before you stand, you are not improvising. You are panicking politely."
A few laughs, thin and honest. Ardent let them happen.
"Assignments are posted," he said. "Your bodies do not learn when you are clever. They learn when you repeat. Yard after this. Bring a weapon you can actually hold."
Rem leaned toward Evelyn, low. "They look at me like I stole the bells."
"Ignore them," she said. "Or smile and break them later."
"Please do not break anyone before lunch," Lysanne said without looking up from her notebook. "I have paperwork."
Ardent capped the chalk with a neat click. "If you are waiting for the world to feel normal," he said, "you will wait a long time. Class dismissed."
They stepped into a morning that had learned to be bright. The training yard's sand was newly raked. Instructors marked lanes with twine and iron stakes. A reserved section had been roped off for their cohort, a concession to the fact that people pointed better from a distance.
Rem buckled the sheath at his lower back and drew the dagger. The blade looked like someone had polished night until it took a shine. It pulled at his shoulder the way the river pulls at a ferry rope.
"Clamp step," Evelyn said. She stuck narrow markers in the sand at angles. "Foot here, hip through, elbow closes. Keep the spine tall."
Lysanne stooped and traced a faint grid the color of salt across the lane with a white stylus. It did not glow. It felt like a promise not to let something get worse.
"White Lattice," she said, cheerful. "In case our data source experiences turbulence."
"Our data source has a name," Rem said.
"Mister Lock," she said. "I am nothing if not respectful."
He set the blade vertical and let it test his balance. The weight wanted to drag him down and left. He wanted to let it. He did not. Clamp step. Hip through. Elbow closes. Repeat. The metal sang the way a deep bell does when you do not quite hear it. Sand took his footprints in a straight line, like a sentence that knows where it ends.
"Again," Evelyn said.
He did it again. The blade tilted less. The sand took the same sentence twice.
"In four," she said. "Out six."
He breathed to the count and felt the exhale settle the way a boat settles when the ferryman finds the center of the river again.
A cold touch kissed his wrist.
Lysanne was already there, fingers light on the band. Her voice turned soft and exact. "Look at me. In four. Out six."
Evelyn's hand anchored at the back of his neck, heat and command. "Here."
The cold hummed, then slid away like water off oiled stone. Rem blinked once. The yard returned in parts. He rolled his shoulder and set the blade again.
"I am fine," he said. "The dagger is not."
"Good," Evelyn said. "Hurt the metal, not the ground."
He moved. The markers caught his feet and corrected them without shouting. He felt where the hip had to drive, where the elbow had to fall. The vertical cut landed on the practice pylon with a sound like a clean word. Wood split down the center without the shock back through his arms that meant he was lying to himself. The sand behind stayed a smooth sheet.
From the edge of the yard, Ardent watched the line in the earth, not Rem's shoulders. He nodded once to no one and made a note.
"Again," Evelyn said, but her mouth tilted half a degree. Praise in her language.
Rem reset. Cut. Reset. Cut. Sweat found his ribs. Breath counted. The world did not narrow. It clarified. The heavy blade wanted to own him. He let it think so and then made it go where he chose.
Lysanne timed him without a watch, gave him water when he forgot to ask, and wrote three lines in her neat book that only she and someone in white would read. When he knocked the pylon four handspans off center and kept his lane clean, she clapped once.
"Acceptable," she said.
"High praise," Rem said.
"Do not get used to it," she said.
They broke before noon. The mess had swapped porridge for bread and tea and something with sugar that looked like a bribe. Kade met them at a side room with a table that had seen more maps than meals. He closed the door and set a slim booklet down in front of Rem.
"Routebook," he said. "Heir's movements for the week. You do not play hero. You close angles."
Rem thumbed the pages. Not just paths. Time stamps. Bottlenecks. The places where the ground did not let you lie about how fast you could cross it.
"Ward keys are frozen for audit," Kade said. "A second mirror glyph turned up in the east corridor, lower molding. Same hand as the safe room. Someone is practicing being invisible."
"Someone inside," Evelyn said.
"Or someone who thinks they are," Kade said. "Which is worse."
The Prince stepped in without escort, hair still damp, uniform clean again. He carried a cup of tea and the sort of fatigue that sits under the eyes like ink. He nodded to each of them and set his cup down where the map did not need it.
"Classes continue," he said. "The statement is out. If anyone asks you for color, you say it was bright and then dim and then bright again. If someone tries to provoke you, measure what you break."
"I like that one," Rem said.
"Please like it quietly," the Prince said. His mouth almost smiled. "Professor Ardent wants to keep you in one piece long enough to teach you something, Avern. Let him."
Lysanne tapped the band on Rem's wrist with her stylus, very lightly. "Embed rules remain. I sit near you in class. I stand near you in the yard. If you blank, I follow Lady Verran's lead. Full stop."
"Good," the Prince said. He looked at Evelyn. "You have the quietest hands in a panic. Keep them."
Evelyn inclined her head a fraction. The Prince drank his tea like someone who had told his body that sleep was a rumor and expected it to believe him.
They ate fast and left faster. The afternoon tried to be ordinary and almost managed. Rem learned that the yard sand held prints differently when the humidity rose. He learned that the band hummed once if he pushed too fast into a pivot and not at all if he breathed first. He learned that the dagger had a voice and it would get louder if he let it.
By dusk the campus was a map of lamps and long shadows. Library windows held rectangles of yellow light. The old corridor along the north stacks felt older tonight, stone wearing its age without apology.
Rem knew the feeling of the band now. Cold like a coin you forgot you were holding. It came again, soft as a question.
He stopped. "Do you hear that."
"I do not hear anything," Lysanne said, but she was already looking at his wrist. "I feel something."
Evelyn had her palm on the stone before either of them spoke again. The wall felt like a drum under her hand. One beat. Then nothing.
"Here," she said.
They followed the line of the baseboard with their eyes. One section sat imperfect by a finger's width. Rem knelt. He pried the strip up with the back of his knife and set it aside. Dust sighed.
Behind the board a cavity the size of a palm cut into the stone sat like a secret that had not decided how long to live. Chalk dust gathered in a corner. A figure traced there had been wiped clear in a hurry and without talent. Mirror lines remained, faint and backward.
"Same hand," Lysanne said quietly. She unspooled a fine thread from a little white reel and set it across the gap. The filament looked like nothing. It felt like an instruction to the air. "Binding Thread. Minimal hold. Enough to hear if someone breathes on it."
Evelyn splayed her fingers over the stone. There was a smell beneath the chalk, thin and wrong, like cold iron with a sweetness no plant ever had. It pulled at the part of her that catalogued signatures. She remembered a dungeon that had taught her the shape of absence.
She did not name it. She would not.
Footsteps tapped at the far end of the corridor. Not guards. Not faculty. A student messenger in half uniform, hair damp with haste, eyes too wide. He saw them and chose flight over lies. He turned and ran.
A lacquered token slipped out of his sleeve and kissed the stone before it spun to a stop. Rem scooped it up. Smooth. Black. Clean sigil stamped in the center, no flourish. Nothing you could accuse in court. Something you could find again if you knew where to look.
"Go," Evelyn said.
Rem took two fast strides and then stopped. The band on his wrist cooled and held, not alarmed, simply present.
"We do not chase a shadow into a crowded hall," Lysanne said, breath even. "We tag the pattern and live longer."
Evelyn looked at the cavity, at the thread, at the token in Rem's open palm. "They are not finished. They will come back to press again."
Rem turned the token once between thumb and forefinger. He could feel the way the sigil caught light and then refused it. It reminded him of the blade. It reminded him of a seal that had stayed cold.
"Drop since lunch," Lysanne murmured, studying the chalk grit under a nail with a little glass. "Two hours. Three at most. Someone is casual or someone is confident."
"Or both," Rem said.
They restored the board as if nothing had happened and walked on. The library exhaled ink and vellum. Students moved through the stacks with the quiet relief of people who had not known if they would be allowed to be bored again.
Outside, the courtyard held the last of the day like a cupped hand. Bells practiced different stories at different towers and failed to agree. The sky settled into a deep gray that ate the edges of things without malice.
Rem let his eyes rest on the upper windows and the white light behind them that had learned to behave. He could feel the edge where a school was a school and something else pressed at it like a thumb against paper.
"Lead the way, Nerd," he said softly.
"Always," Evelyn said. The word was not soft at all.
Lysanne smiled and did not put herself between them, which was tact dressed as cheer. "I am very normal," she said. "And absolutely everywhere you are."
"Congratulations," Rem said. "That is not normal."
"For me it is," she said.
They reached the student wing. Doors clicked, voices muffled, shoes scuffed. Ordinary sounds had a shine you could love if you were careful not to show it. Rem paused at the threshold, token in his pocket, breath counted without being told. The band on his wrist cooled once and then remembered to be metal.
Inside the wall, behind a baseboard that fit better than it had any right to, the faintest tremor shivered through a thread that looked like nothing. It hummed as if a finger had plucked it and stopped before the sound was born.
The band cooled again. The wall breathed once. Someone inside the Academy had pressed the same mirror twice.