The Academy woke before dawn and pretended it was not afraid. Torches burned blue in the inner court and turned breath into white threads. Steel buckles clicked. Canvas sighed. The flagstones underfoot had the look of things that have seen too many boots.
Students gathered in blocks, packs sealed and tagged, uniforms traded for field cloth and leather that could forgive a fall. Association handlers checked lists without looking at faces. Instructors spoke in the clipped grammar of people who had already said the same words too many times. The air smelled of lamp oil, wool, and the ghost of soap from laundry vents that had not slept.
Kade stood with his hands behind his back and his eyes on the crowd the way a map looks at a man. He did not wear armor. He did not need it. Lysanne shifted at his left shoulder with a temporary badge clipped to her collar that made nobles whisper. Inquisitorial assets do not sit school exams, someone said behind a glove. Apparently they do now, someone else answered, not loud enough to sign a report.
Rem rolled his neck and felt the heavy dagger settle in the small of his back like a promise that weighed too much. The strap across his chest had been rubbed with oil until it forgot to bite. From the far side of the court, a few students watched him the way young wolves watch lightning. Others watched Evelyn because they had seen her in posters or heard senior instructors say her name like a warning.
She stepped out of a knot of nobles and found him with half a step of distance that read as nothing to anyone who did not know her. Her hair was pinned back with field needles. She had traded the Academy cape for a jacket cut for movement. Her eyes took in his pack, the way his wrist band sat quiet, the easy set of his weight on the flagstones.
"You stay in range," she said, very calm.
"No heroics," Rem said with a straight face.
She did not smile. The corner of her mouth softened as far as it ever did in public. "If you stop listening, I pull you back."
He nodded. "Do your job, Nerd."
She did not scold him for the name. That meant she was thinking about other things.
Lucien stood with his own block of students on the far side of the court, jaw tight, pride like a bad bandage. His friends clustered tight around him, a hedge of bodies shaped like apology. He had healed enough to walk and to posture. He had not healed enough to forget.
A line of plainclothes cut a channel through the crowd for the Prince with a quiet that made more noise than orders could. He did not come closer than necessary. He did not speak. He watched the handlers check seals and anchor discs and then looked away as if something in his own head were louder.
Kade let his eyes follow the movement and then brought them back. "Listen," he said. "Groups drop separated. Objective is the central beacon. Secondary objective is to plant one team beacon en route to confirm survivability. That means you carry something bright and stupid that tells everyone where you have been."
"Like bread crumbs," Lysanne said.
"Like a trail you hope the wrong people hate to follow," Kade said.
A bell rang once. The court stiffened. The handlers took positions around the transfer platforms. Someone rolled up the canvas to show circles carved into the stone and inlaid with dull silver that remembered questions. Glyphs ringed each platform. They did not sing. That was the point. Short range. Cheap. Brutal.
The chief logistician climbed a small stand and read from a board. His voice had the steady nothing of men who do not want to be remembered.
"Field assessment parameters. Placement by anchor circle in separated zones along the island. Partial wards. Fluctuating mana. Class II artifacts and below only. No long-range communication. Team beacons must be planted at designated intervals and registered with the central tower to confirm team viability. Injury protocol: flare green for nonlethal extraction, flare red for lethal risk, wards will respond when they can. Cheating will be prosecuted by honor boards and the Association."
A student near Rem whispered, too loud, that the honor board scared him more than red flares. The boy next to him laughed and then bit the sound in half.
The logistician turned a page and continued. "This is tradition. This is curriculum. This is how you learn."
Rem heard something else in the way the man did not raise his voice. We are dropping children with knives onto a live node and pretending the node cares about your transcript.
Kade leaned near enough that only Rem would hear him. "Stay glued to her," he said. "Chatter says someone wants her off the board before her House finds its feet. If she goes down, she will not get back up alone today."
Rem did not let his jaw change. "Then she does not go down."
Lysanne touched the cuff at her wrist and made sure the threads inside knew how to listen without being polite. Evelyn tugged her glove tight and checked the clamps on her Beacon case, a cylinder the size of a thick thigh with an Imperial seal that looked like it had never learned to be wrong.
Teams stepped up to their circles in turns that tried to look orderly and almost managed it. The first group vanished without flash or glory, only a low sound like a bell pressed to a pillow. The second went after two breaths. The third followed with a boy looking like he had tried to swallow his breakfast twice and failed both times.
Kade turned to their handler. "Team A-17, ready," he said.
"Anchor set," the handler replied. "Hold breath on my count. If you fight the pull you will wish you did not."
Evelyn's glove brushed the small of Rem's back and stayed there. He did not look at her. He felt the pressure of her palm as a fact. His band tightened but did not bite.
"Three," the handler said.
The circle came alive without moving. Silver lines filled in with slow light. The air pressed on the inside of Rem's ribs as if a hand reached through bone and tried to take the breath out through his spine. He did not fight. He had learned. He let the ground betray him and took nothing personally.
Heat bloomed under his sternum as if someone had lit a match in a place that hated fire. The band gripped. Evelyn's hand was sudden cool on his spine. Lysanne made a small sound and turned it into a cough. Kade's feet found the same part of the stone he had always been on, even while the stone forgot what city it belonged to.
The world let go and gave them another.
Rain, warm and fine. Air thick with wet green and the chew of salt. Something chirred in the trees like a coin spinning too long on a table. The ground leaned a little when Rem set his weight, not like a slope but like something that breathed and did not care if you had opinions about that.
They stood inside a shallow bowl of ferns as tall as a man's chest. Mangrove roots coiled out of mud and pretended to be furniture. Trees made cathedrals of their own and did not invite architecture. Far off the ocean dragged itself over stone with old manners.
Lysanne bent double, not in panic, in a controlled decision to be lower than her stomach for a heartbeat. When she straightened her eyes were clear. "I am fine," she said to the wet leaves. "And if I were not, I would still be fine."
Evelyn lifted a hand, palm up, and felt the rain touch it. Mana ran under the soil like someone had forgotten to put a lid on a pot. "This is not a school field," she said. "This is a node."
Kade turned in a slow circle and pointed without pointing. "Beacon there," he said. "A hundred and twenty degrees from the mangrove fork. We plant when we have ground that cannot be easily read back to here."
Rem breathed. His shoulders loosened in a way that made other people more tense. He did not tell his body not to like this. He accepted that sweat in this place would mean he was alive. The dagger rested against the small of his back like a truth.
"Form up," Kade said. "Evelyn reads. Rem walks front. Lysanne marks and listens. I watch everything you forget because you are doing your job."
They set off between ferns that thought about cutting skin if they were given a reason. The band sat quiet. Rem counted his footing the way he counted breath on a yard. He let the big roots teach him where to place his heel and how to lie to a blade by telling the ground the truth.
Evelyn's eyes tracked things other people could not see. Distortions in the way the rain fell on one patch of leaves and not another. Air that rang a little wrong where there should have been nothing for it to strike. She lifted a hand once, and Rem stopped without a sound because it was easier to trust her than to ask why.
"There," she said. "Quiet."
Lysanne went on one knee and set a thread between two blades of grass with the care other people reserve for children or ancient glass. The space they looked at was a quiet so clean it made her itching finger want to scratch it. "Mask," she said. "Not natural."
"Man-made," Kade said. "We go around. If you walk into that, you will not learn anything except how to lose a boot."
They curved around the quiet and found ground that did not mind carrying four people. The slope taught their calves to pay attention. A cluster of pale flowers turned toward them and then turned away, uninterested when they did not offer food or blood.
They heard metal before anything else told them humans had been here. Not steel like swords. Not chain. Something smaller and more administrative tapped under the trees and then forgot to stop.
Rem flicked two fingers to Kade without looking. Kade answered by shifting his angle a fraction so that if something wanted to see a target, it would see him first and be wrong.
The clearing was not a clearing, only a place where the trees had agreed to make less shade. In the center, a stub of rock stuck out of the ground and held a secondary beacon someone had already planted. It was the height of a small boy and had an Imperial seal on the side that said this belonged to people who could spell the word standard.
Lysanne approached with a professional offense on her face. "They beat us here?" she said, and did not mean the words. She ran a fingernail across the etched letters. The font weight was wrong. The spacing had come from a hand that did not know how Imperial scribes do their math. She smiled like a person who has finally found a pebble in her shoe. "Printed offsite," she said. "The seal stamps correctly. The letters do not. And this glue is younger than our morning."
Kade crouched and looked at the base where mud had dried in a way mud does not dry when the thing you are drying is actually old. He did not touch the mud. He breathed at it until it decided to tell the truth. "Whoever set this learned their craft in a hallway," he said. "Not a swamp."
Evelyn went lower until her knee pressed into wet stone and ran one fingertip along the edge where the beacon met the rock. The rain there smelled sweet the way spoiled meat sometimes smells if you do not listen long enough. She drew back and rubbed her thumb against her forefinger until the feeling left her skin. "Same signature," she said, quiet. "They are here."
Rem did not trust the urge to break the beacon with his hands. He let himself want it and then stood the want next to Evelyn's face in his mind until it learned to be patient. He set his palm on the rock and pushed down as if to ask whether the island minded. The ground pushed back like a friend who does not stop you from making a bad decision but grunts to let you know it will be there when you are done.
Lysanne pressed the edge of the seal with a pin she had not told anyone she was carrying. A curl of ink lifted and let go like a hair. On the lower lip of the beacon a small emblem had been painted in a color at war with rain. Black circle. Clean sigil. If you had not been on your knees you would have missed it.
She did not breathe for a heartbeat. Then she looked up and her eyes were very bright. "Token mark," she said. "Same motif as at the Academy. Someone carried the pipeline here in a bag."
Kade straightened, the slow kind of standing that lets you learn the weight of what you have found. "It is not an infiltration of a building," he said. "It is an operation. And the island is part of it."
Evelyn rested her forearms on her knees and looked at the emblem until she knew it well enough to remember it wrong on purpose for strangers later. "They knew where we would plant," she said. "They knew how and when. They were waiting for us."
Rem's voice did not rise. "Then let them wait."
The trees answered that thought before anyone else did. Something heavy settled its feet in the dark to their right. Not human. Not alone. The sound had a wet intelligence to it, like a creature that has learned to listen to rain so it can find you even when you hold your breath.
Kade did not say ready. The word would only have wasted a second. He stepped left without looking and let his shadow lie long. Evelyn's hand opened and spirit threads flickered around her fingers like a nest of patient fireflies. Lysanne rolled backward, slid the Beacon case behind the rock, and set two pins at ankle height where something that did not know about ankles would cut itself and get annoyed.
Rem set his feet and felt the ground tell him what it wanted. He saw the outline of trunks and the thin line between them where a body could come through if it trusted its weight. The band at his wrist tightened once. He breathed in for four and let six go.
The sound in the trees came closer and did not hurry. It did not need to. The island was not on their side or anyone else's. The island had opinions about who belonged, and it was ready to see who lied best about that.
"Eyes," Kade said when the shape became lines. "Do not overcommit."
"Undercommit then adjust," Lysanne said, very cheerful.
Evelyn's voice went steady. "On my mark."
Rem let his hand find the grip of the dagger and did not draw it. The weight was a fact. The fact did not own him. He could feel his body grin the way wolves grin when the night finally gets interesting.
The trees moved. The first of the island's opinions stepped into their clearing.