(POV: James)
The low, steady hum of the refectory was a universe away from the oppressive silence of Everhart's training chambers. Steam rose from plates of synth-steak and nutrient paste, mingling with the scent of recycled air and our collective exhaustion. Our team was a study in contrasts around the circular table. Drake, for one, was murdering his dinner, stabbing at a piece of protein with a fury that had nothing to do with the food itself.
"It's a stupid test," he grumbled, the fifth time by my count. "When are you ever going to need to thread a seismic pulse through a keyhole? The whole point is to shatter things, not tickle them."
"You're missing the point," Kara countered, her tone light as she nudged my arm. "Someone's a little grumpy." Her attention then shifted fully to me. "You, on the other hand, are wound so tight you might actually shatter. Relax, James. It's one drill."
"Everhart doesn't see it that way," I mumbled, pushing a now-cold piece of synth-steak around my plate. My appetite had vanished hours ago.
Xander, ever the theorist, leaned forward, his glasses catching the overhead light. "His reaction was statistically disproportionate," he mused. "It wasn't about your failure, but the nature of it. The resonance cascade… fascinating. It suggests your power doesn't conform to standard energy dissipation models." He adjusted his spectacles. "Speaking of anomalies, I've been tracking intermittent, low-level energy signatures from the sub-levels. Probably just sensor glitches from the old conduit shielding, but the pattern is… odd."
Drake snorted. "Or a pipe is loose. Who cares?"
Our gazes drifted to Luna. She'd been unnervingly still, her fork hovering over her untouched plate, her focus lost somewhere in the middle distance. She seemed smaller than usual, folded into herself, wrapped in a quiet that felt ancient and deep.
"Luna?" Kara's voice was gentle. "You okay?"
Luna blinked, her focus snapping back to us. She offered a small, hesitant smile that was a ghost on her lips. It never reached her eyes.
"It's not a glitch," she said, her voice a fragile whisper that sliced through the refectory's din.
The table fell silent.
"The feeling from down there…" she gestured vaguely toward the floor, "it's not a machine. It's… hungry."
The word dropped like a stone into a deep well. An uncomfortable, prickling silence descended, so absolute that the distant clatter of a dropped tray sounded like a gunshot. Drake froze, his fork held aloft. Xander opened his mouth to offer a scientific explanation, then closed it, his certainty gone. "Hungry" had transformed his harmless anomaly into something primal and wrong.
As she said it, I felt a faint, sympathetic thrum deep in my chest. It was a low-frequency vibration that resonated with her word, the exact same sensation I'd had just before the practice lattice imploded—the feeling of my power being pulled by something else. I instinctively tried to smother it, telling myself it was just nerves.
"Hungry for what?" Drake finally asked. His earlier bravado was stripped away, replaced by a raw, wary curiosity.
Luna just shook her head, her eyes falling to a loose thread on her sleeve, as if it held the world's most fascinating secret. "I don't know," she breathed. "But it's been getting stronger."
The noise of the refectory, the laughter from other tables, the automated kitchen announcements—it all faded into a meaningless background hum. The casual, normal academy life we were trying to piece together had fractured. Suddenly, the ghost stories we'd all heard about the lower vaults, of missions gone wrong and entities that whispered through the walls, felt less like rumor and more like a warning we were already too late to heed.