"The most honest confessions are never spoken. They live in the adjustment of distance, in the direction of attention, in the particular quality of silence between two people who know they are lying to themselves."
He placed third in the tournament.
This was precisely what he had aimed for: visible enough to produce the desired record entry, not so visible as to require a category the official framework didn't accommodate. Second would have been a problem; first would have been a crisis. Third was interesting. Third was a promising development in an unlikely student. Third was the kind of result that earned a conversation with Matron Vor, which it did, two days after the tournament concluded.
The conversation covered his cohort placement, the observed disruption-type technique, and whether he had received combat instruction outside the standard curriculum. He acknowledged Elder Theron's supplemental sessions with the vague and factual non-answer that the sessions were focused on theoretical study of his rare affinity. Matron Vor was not entirely satisfied by this but was also, he perceived, not motivated to pursue it aggressively: the outcome was institutionally flattering, and institutions prefer to be flattered.
She recommended, formally, a cohort reassignment consideration for the following term.
Jade Cohort. Which is where this was going. The middle tier. Visible enough to demonstrate progress, accessible enough to maintain the supplemental sessions without drawing Theron into the spotlight.
He thanked her and returned to the Grey Cohort's corridor.
Caelum had placed seventh, which was the single best Grey Cohort result in the tournament's recorded history, and he was accepting congratulations with the uncomplicated pleasure of someone who has done a thing they are proud of without complication. He grinned at Luceo with the specific grin of a person who has decided to be genuinely happy rather than strategically gracious.
"You pulled your last three rounds," he said.
"I competed at my ability level," Luceo said.
"Your ability level is something significantly more interesting than third place," Caelum said. Not accusatory. Observational, with the same perceptive ease that Luceo had been noting for months.
"Perhaps next year," Luceo said.
Caelum considered this.
"The plant is still alive," he said. "The one on the windowsill. Three months now."
"Remarkable."
"I water it every morning. I use the suppression anchor every day. I practice the technique you showed me for sustained wind output at low Aether cost." He paused. "I'm going to be a good cultivator, I think. Not extraordinary. But good."
He has done his own calibration. He knows where he is and what he is building toward and is at peace with it. This is a kind of wisdom that most people never develop.
"Good is underrated," Luceo said.
"I know." Caelum paused. "I want you to know that whatever you're doing, whoever you are — I don't need to know the details. But if you need someone who is unremarkable and reliable and will not ask questions you don't want to answer, I am that person."
Luceo looked at him.
He just offered himself as a resource, carefully, without overextending. He knows enough to know there is more, and he is offering support rather than interrogation. This is the rarest kind of loyalty: the kind that does not require explanation.
"I'll remember that," Luceo said.
"Good," Caelum said. And went back to his notes.
✶
On the weekend following the tournament, he walked to Ardenveil, and Seris was not at the safehouse.
This was not alarming by the network's own protocols: contacts left messages for each other through the relay when their schedules changed, and her message through the relay said only that she was delayed, and would meet him at the market's north entrance at midday.
He arrived at the market's north entrance at midday, and she was there, and something had happened.
He could read it without the Void Sight. She was composed, as she always was, the armor intact, the posture controlled. But the composure had the specific texture of composure that has recently been applied over something raw: too deliberate, too sustained, the careful maintenance of a person who has spent recent energy on something other than rest.
"Walk with me," she said.
They walked through the market. He did not ask. He waited.
After three minutes:
"The Hold has a name in the Unmarked network," she said. "The Pale Hold, we call it. But its official designation is the Ashkar Research Institute. It appears in Pantheon administrative records as a facility for advanced Aether cultivation studies. Its director is a woman named Cultivator-General Oressa Vann, who has been at the facility for eleven years."
"You have new information."
"The Unmarked contact who replaced the two dead ones," she said. "He was a former facility employee — a maintenance cultivator, not research staff, which is why he survived his departure. He's been in the Unmarked network for four years. I found him last week."
"And?"
"The facility holds sixty-three practitioners," she said. "Branded Hollowed, primarily. The holding conditions are — he described them as adequate. They're fed. They're kept in reasonable physical condition. The Aether bleeding from the brands is carefully managed to avoid depleting the practitioners, because a depleted Aether source is a dying source." Her voice was very flat. "They are being maintained. Like equipment."
"Your mother," he said.
"Is among them." A pause. "He described a woman matching her description. In the fourth holding block. She is alive." The word alive arrived with the weight of something that has been uncertain and is now, at terrible cost, resolved. "She is — he said there are people who have been there long enough that they have adapted. Who have found ways to exist in those conditions without losing themselves entirely. He thought she was one of them."
He was quiet.
Seris had stopped walking. They were at the edge of the market, near a wall where a vine of something dark-leafed climbed the stones. She was looking at the vine with the intensity of someone looking at a thing in order not to look at another thing.
"I have been," she said, "managing the information. For months. Taking in each piece, filing it, building the picture, not —" She stopped. "Not letting it be what it is. Because what it is, is that my mother has been in that place for three years being bled for her Aether and I have been fifteen minutes from a Pantheon Academy gathering information about guard rotations and —"
She stopped again. Her jaw was set with the particular set of a person who will not, will absolutely not, perform vulnerability in a public space.
"Seris," he said, quietly.
"Don't," she said. Her voice was precise and hard, the same voice she used for operational information, the voice that meant: this space is not available.
He did not.
He stood beside her at the wall and said nothing, and after a minute she let out a breath that had too much in it for a breath, and then she was composed again, armor fully re-engaged, only the slight over-control of her hands giving anything away.
"Three months," she said. "To develop the plan properly. I want to be operational in three months."
"Three months," he said.
"Can you be ready?"
Honestly: uncertain. Three months from now, with continued development, Void Sight at higher resolution, negation technique at combat calibration, and the Resonant track further developed. Against a facility with Aethic Guard presence and Sovereign-adjacent administration. Honestly: I don't know.
"I will be," he said.
She looked at him. The assessment was quick and thorough and arrived at its conclusion.
"All right," she said.
They stood at the wall for another moment, and he was aware, in the acute way that the Void made him aware of things — the resonant impression of the world's texture — of the precise distance between them. Close enough that she could have leaned. Not quite close enough that the lean was a given.
She is choosing not to. For the same reasons you are choosing not to. Because some things, once changed, cannot be changed back. Because what you two are to each other is too useful to complicate. Because she needs someone reliable and you need someone honest and those things require a certain structural distance.
This is true and insufficient.
He looked at the vine.
She looked at the map she had produced from her coat pocket, already planning.
They walked back toward Ardenveil and talked about the guard rotation, and the gap in the eastern perimeter, and the question of how to approach a Pantheon facility from the outside with two people and no institutional cover.
It was productive and entirely adequate and neither of them mentioned the wall.