Sunny had been lying his whole life.
It was, in a sense, his oldest skill, older than the bladework and the lockpicking and the anatomical precision Anvil had spent years hammering into him. Before Bastion, before the Gateway, before the man in the vermilion coat had looked up at a fire escape and seen raw material, Sunny had survived the outskirts by being whoever the situation required him to be. A lost child for the sympathetic. An errand boy for the suspicious. A deaf-mute for the dangerous. He had carried a dozen identities inside his head the way other children carried toys, and he'd switched between them with a fluency that most adults never achieved.
Anvil knew this. It was one of the reasons he'd chosen Sunny in the first place.
So when the patriarch told him that the final stage of his preparation would focus on his cover identity for the Academy, Sunny expected it to be simple. He already knew how to be an outskirts orphan. He was an outskirts orphan. The performance wouldn't even require much invention, just a selective presentation of the truth, which was the strongest kind of lie because it didn't require remembering which parts were fabricated.
He was wrong. Not about the lying. About what Anvil wanted him to lie about.
"You can deceive people," Anvil said. "That was never in question. What concerns me is precision. The Academy will be full of Legacies, children who have been trained since birth by private tutors and Awakened instructors. They know what trained movement looks like. They will not be fooled by a generic performance of incompetence."
He was standing in the training room with his arms crossed, watching Sunny with the evaluative stillness that had not changed in six years.
"Show me how an untrained person throws a punch."
Sunny threw a clumsy, overextended haymaker with his weight too far forward and his thumb tucked inside his fist.
Anvil shook his head.
"That's a caricature. A Legacy would see it as a performance immediately, because real untrained fighters don't all fight the same way. Some overextend. Some barely commit at all. Some freeze entirely. The variation is the point. Your performance needs specificity, not generality."
He paused.
"You need to choose a particular kind of untrained, and you need to inhabit it so completely that the details hold up under scrutiny. Not just the gross motor patterns, but the micro-expressions, the hesitations, the specific way someone who has never been hit reacts to being hit for the first time."
It was a refinement, not a lesson. Sunny understood the distinction. Anvil wasn't teaching him to lie. He was sharpening a lie that already existed, the same way he'd sharpened Sunny's bladework by correcting angles that were merely good until they became exact.
They spent two months on it.
The work was meticulous. Anvil, who had trained hundreds of soldiers and observed thousands of combat performances across every rank from Dormant to Transcendent, had an encyclopedic knowledge of what untrained bodies did under stress. He catalogued the differences between an outskirts brawler, a sheltered middle-citizen who'd only ever fought in school, and a Legacy child whose training had failed to take root. Each type moved differently, breathed differently, panicked differently.
Sunny absorbed all of it and built his cover from the ground up. He chose a specific profile: an outskirts kid who had been in a few street fights but had no formal instruction, someone with decent instincts and fast reflexes but no technique. The kind of person who survived on grit and cleverness rather than skill. It was close enough to the truth of his childhood that the emotional texture would be authentic, and far enough from his actual ability that the gap would be invisible.
He practiced the profile until it was a second skin he could climb into without thinking. He could walk into a room as the outskirts boy and walk out as himself, and the transition happened behind his eyes where no one could see it. The outskirts boy hunched his shoulders and shifted his weight forward. He scanned rooms too quickly, with the darting attention of someone who expected danger from everywhere. He held weapons wrong in ways that were consistent rather than random, because real incompetence had patterns and a good observer would notice if those patterns changed.
Anvil tested the cover by bringing in three of his Awakened instructors and having them spar with Sunny while he wore the mask. Two of them noticed nothing. The third, the lean woman who favored short blades, frowned slightly during their exchange but couldn't articulate what had bothered her.
"Close enough," Anvil said, which was the highest praise he'd ever offered.
But the cover identity required something Sunny hadn't anticipated, and it was this requirement that turned the two months of preparation into something more complicated than a technical exercise.
To perform the outskirts boy convincingly, he had to feel like the outskirts boy. Not in some abstract, Method-acting sense, but practically: the outskirts boy's fear responses needed to be genuine, because genuine fear produced physiological markers that couldn't be faked with body mechanics alone. Pupil dilation, adrenal response, the particular quality of sweat produced under real stress rather than exertion. These were the details that Legacy-trained observers would catch, the microscopic tells that separated a convincing performance from a perfect one.
So Sunny reached back.
He reached past six years of training, past the creature kills and the surveillance exercises and the anatomy diagrams, and he found the boy who had sat on a fire escape watching a car in an alley. The boy who had weighed what a healthy five-year-old should weigh. The boy who had carved two lines into an old tree and planned to carve a third.
The boy came easily. He'd been there the whole time, curled up in a corner of Sunny's mind, waiting patiently the way Sunny himself had once waited in shadowed alcoves. He hadn't grown or changed in six years. He was still eight, still hungry, still afraid of the things that eight-year-olds in the outskirts were afraid of: cold, starvation, the slow grinding certainty that nobody in the world cared whether he lived or died.
And the boy, when Sunny let him look through his eyes, saw things differently.
He looked at the east wing and saw a cage. He looked at Anvil and saw a man who had purchased a child for the price of three meals a day. He looked at the empty room inside Sunny where the guilt for Theron should have been, and he felt something that the trained version of Sunny had sealed away behind layers of discipline and purpose.
Sunny put the boy back. He sealed the cover identity and stood in the training room with his real posture and his real breathing and told himself that the outskirts boy was a tool, a costume, a weapon like any other. The fears were part of the performance, and the performance was not the truth.
But something had shifted. The boy had looked, and what he'd seen couldn't be unseen, because Sunny and the boy were the same person, and the wall between them was thinner than Sunny had realized.
He did not mention any of this to Anvil.
It was the first secret he had ever kept from the patriarch. Not a lie, because he hadn't been asked. A silence, which was different. A silence was simply a truth you chose not to speak, and Anvil had never asked the right question to force it out of him.
Sunny suspected that if Anvil ever did ask, the answer would be complicated enough to concern a man who valued simplicity in his tools.
But Anvil didn't ask, because Anvil had stopped seeing Sunny as a boy a long time ago, and it did not occur to him that the material might remember what it had been before the forge.