Chapter 31.
He was there before she was.
That wasn't unusual — Garrick had always been an early riser, even before the quadrant had made it mandatory, even before the years of pre-dawn missions had rewired his body's sense of time.
But standing in the training room in the grey quiet of a morning that hadn't quite decided to begin yet, he was aware of the fact with more clarity than usual.
He was waiting.
He set up the mats without thinking about it — dragged the weighted bags to the far wall, stacked the sparring sticks in their rack, checked the tape supply on the bench. His hands moved through the familiar routine, and his mind did something it had been doing with increasing frequency lately.
It circled.
Three days.
He'd seen her in passing — at dinner two nights ago, a glimpse of fiery red through the mess hall crowd. Yesterday morning on the path, both of them headed in opposite directions. He'd nodded. She'd nodded. They'd kept walking.
Four days since their last session. Which was nothing. Barely a break. He'd cancelled on her for a full week in November, and the world hadn't stopped turning.
He rolled his right shoulder and told himself to stop counting.
The door opened.
He didn't look up immediately. He heard the familiar cadence of her — the particular quiet of how she moved, weight distributed evenly, no unnecessary sound. She'd had that since the beginning. Long before he'd taught her anything.
"Morning," she said.
He looked up then.
She looked — fine. Rested, even, which was new.
The shadows under her eyes had lightened.
Her braid was neat, jacket still on against the chill she'd carried in from outside, hands wrapped.
She was scanning the setup on the mats with that evaluating look she had, the one that clocked every detail before her expression gave anything away.
"You're on time," he said.
She raised a brow. "I'm always on time."
"You were four minutes late last Tuesday."
"I was waylaid."
"By what?"
"Ridoc."
He turned back to the rack and straightened a stick that didn't need straightening. "Right."
A brief silence settled between them — not quite comfortable, not quite uncomfortable. The specific variety he'd become familiar with lately, the kind that had weight to it without being hostile.
She dropped her jacket on the bench and began pulling her braid tighter. "How do you want to start?"
By figuring out what the last three days did to you, he thought. Aloud, he said, "Movement drills. Then contact."
She nodded and moved to the center of the mat without being told.
He crossed to the opposite end and studied her.
She stood with her feet set at shoulder width, arms loose, chin slightly raised.
Her posture had changed since autumn — not dramatically, not in any single way he could point to, but in aggregate.
She carried herself differently now. Less braced.
Less like she was perpetually waiting for the next hit.
There was a groundedness to how she occupied space that hadn't been there six months ago.
He wasn't sure when exactly it had shifted. He'd been watching closely enough that he should have caught the moment, and he'd still somehow missed it.
"Lead footwork first," he said. "Slow. I want to see where you're compensating."
She moved through the sequence, and he watched her right arm, the one that had nearly ended everything.
It tracked cleanly with the rest of her body now, no lag, no flinch at full extension.
The scar tissue had softened with use. Elira had been right about the timeline, even if Aeliana had pushed the edges of it harder than anyone had recommended.
He moved in halfway through the sequence and matched her pace, mirroring from a few feet away.
She adjusted without breaking stride, tracking him in her peripheral vision the way he'd taught her.
"You've been flying," he said.
Not a question. She was carrying herself differently through the hips, the specific kind of balanced core stability that came from hours in a saddle, from learning to absorb a dragon's movement through the whole body and not just the hands.
"Kaori's been working me hard," she said.
"And Liam."
A beat. "He offered."
"I know." He did know. Liam had mentioned it, briefly, in the same way Liam mentioned things he thought Garrick should know without making a point of it. Which meant Liam thought Garrick was paying attention, which meant Garrick was not being as subtle as he'd thought.
He came at her from the left — faster than the drill called for — and she pivoted clean, blocked with her forearm, and pushed him off without overcorrecting her weight. Her feet stayed under her.
He pulled back.
She looked at him with an expression that wasn't quite a smile. "Was that a test?"
"Everything's a test."
"Comforting."
He turned away before the corner of his mouth could do whatever it was threatening to do.
They worked through the full contact sequence — three rounds, progressively harder.
He pushed the pace in the third, coming in with enough force to require real reaction rather than anticipation.
She gave him more than he'd expected. Twice she nearly landed a hit he'd have felt the next morning.
Once she corrected a stumble mid-motion with enough precision that he actually paused, internally, to mark it.
She was getting there.
Which was its own particular problem, in ways he hadn't fully sorted out yet.
When he called time on the last round, she was breathing hard, her face flushed, a new bruise forming on her forearm where she'd caught a block wrong. She stood in the center of the mat and pressed the back of one of her wrapped wrists to her forehead, catching her breath.
He handed her the water flask from the bench.
She took it without comment.
He leaned against the wall and watched her drink, the way he watched things when he was trying not to look like he was watching.
Three days. It had been three days.
And there was something in her expression this morning, something settled and quiet and subtly different from the last time they'd stood in this room, that he didn't quite have a name for yet.
Like she'd been somewhere in the interim that had given her something back.
Something internal that he hadn't been the one to give her.
He wasn't sure how to feel about that.
"Kaori gave you a drill list," he said.
She looked at him over the flask. "Liam told you."
"Liam tells me things."
She handed the flask back. "The spiral descent timing is still rough. But I held three hover holds clean yesterday evening."
"How long?"
"Twenty seconds. Twenty-three on the last one."
He nodded once. Twenty-three seconds was real. Twenty-three seconds was not recovery, it was progress.
"You'll want to push that to forty before Varrin clears you for formation," he said. "He'll test you on hover before anything else. It's the first thing he uses to decide whether someone's a liability."
"I know."
"I know you know." He pushed off the wall and began rolling the mats back. "I'm telling you so you have a target."
She was quiet for a moment. Then, in a tone that was careful without being fragile: "Three days."
He stilled.
"I'm not—" She stopped, clearly choosing the next words. "It wasn't a complaint. I just... it felt longer."
He didn't answer right away. He picked up the edge of the mat and kept rolling.
It did, he thought. For me too.
"I had things to deal with," he said.
"I know."
Another silence. This one with less weight to it, or maybe a different kind of weight, something that had been set down and left on the floor between them, not resolved, but acknowledged.
She picked up her jacket from the bench and tugged it on.
"Same time Thursday?" she asked.
"Wednesday," he said. "I'll be in Xaden's brief on Thursday."
She nodded, and something in her expression shifted, something brief and unguarded that was gone before he could read it properly.
"Wednesday," she agreed.
She crossed to the door. Stopped with one hand on the frame.
"I landed a clean spiral yesterday," she said, without looking back. "First really clean one."
Then she was gone.
Garrick stood in the empty training room for a moment longer than he needed to.
He picked up the remaining mat, rolled it to the wall, and told himself, firmly, unequivocally, the way he told himself most things, that forty seconds was a reasonable next target.
That was all this was.
Targets.
~
The infirmary smelled the same as it always did — clean linen, dried herbs, and something faintly medicinal that Aeliana had long since stopped noticing.
She pushed the door open with her shoulder and stepped inside, blinking against the brightness of the afternoon light coming through the high windows.
Elira was at her workbench, back turned, bent over something in a small stone mortar. Her cropped curls were escaping their tie, and there was a streak of something green across her left wrist that she clearly hadn't noticed.
"I have a check-up," Aeliana said by way of greeting.
Elira didn't look up. "I know. You're three minutes late."
"I was on the other side of the building."
"Then you should have left earlier." She set down the pestle and turned, sweeping a glance across Aeliana in that quick, practiced way she had — not rude, just efficient. Like her eyes were already conducting the first layer of the examination. "Sit."
Aeliana sat on the edge of the nearest cot, pulling back her sleeve without being asked.
Elira crossed the room, drying her hands on a cloth as she came. She set down the cloth and reached for Aeliana's arm, turning it gently in both hands and running her thumb along the line of the scar with the careful attention of someone who had memorised its progress.
"Range of motion," she said.
Aeliana rotated her wrist, extended her elbow, raised the arm to shoulder height, and then above it. No hesitation. A faint pull at the top of the extension, but nothing that bit.
Elira watched all of it.
"Good," she said, and she sounded like she meant it. "The scar tissue's softened considerably since last month. You've been doing the stretches."
"Every morning."
"And the resistance band work?"
"Every morning," Aeliana repeated.
Elira gave her a look. "I'm going to choose to believe you."
"You should. It's true."
Elira made a noncommittal sound and moved her grip slightly lower and then paused.
Her thumb had found the bruise.
It sat on the inside of Aeliana's forearm, three inches below the elbow. Dark, already deep violet at the centre, the specific colour of something that had been hit hard and recently. Elira pressed the edge of it with two fingers, measuring the spread.
"This is new," she said.
"Training this morning."
"With Varrin?"
"Garrick."
Elira made the same noncommittal sound, but with a different quality to it.
She continued examining the bruise without comment for a moment.
"Nothing cracked. Just surface damage." She released Aeliana's arm and turned back to the bench.
"I'll make you a salve. It'll take the ache out and speed up the colouring. "
"I can make one."
Elira stopped.
She turned back, one brow raised. Not dismissive — genuinely curious. "You know how to make a bruise salve?"
"Comfrey root, yarrow, and beeswax as a base." Aeliana rested her forearm on her knee. "The healer I worked with in Rathmere used sweet almond oil instead of the standard neutral oil. Said it absorbed faster."
Elira was quiet for a second. Then she tilted her head, a look crossing her face that was somewhere between interest and the particular satisfaction of someone who had found an unexpected equal.
"I've been using jojoba," she said. "For the same reason. Lighter than most."
"Does it work?"
"Better than the standard. But I haven't tried the almond. Where did she source it?"
"Traded for it, mostly. Rathmere's close enough to the southern routes that the markets carry things you don't see in the central regions." Aeliana glanced at the bench. "What do you use for the primary anti-inflammatory?"
"Arnica, usually." Elira moved back to her workbench, and with the air of someone who had quietly decided to continue this conversation properly, she began pulling small jars from the shelf above.
"Though I've been experimenting with meadowsweet.
Takes longer to prepare, but the result is more consistent. "
"The healer used both. Arnica for fresh bruising, meadowsweet for anything older than a day."
Elira looked up from the shelf. "That's actually smart."
"She was practical," Aeliana said simply.
The word carried something underneath it — not grief exactly, more like weight. The quiet kind that came from distance and time and a chapter of life that had ended without warning.
Elira didn't press it. She set the jars on the bench and glanced at Aeliana sidelong. "How long did you work with her?"
"Four years, give or take. More toward the end, when she started teaching in earnest." Aeliana looked at her hands.
"I mostly just helped with the cataloguing at first. Running errands.
Then she started letting me grind the compounds, then mix, then — eventually — I was doing the simpler preparations myself. "
"What made her start teaching you?"
Aeliana thought about it. "She said I had steady hands and no squeamishness." A beat. "And I think she was lonely."
Elira laughed — a real one, soft and quick. "Healers usually are." She began measuring the arnica into the mortar, her movements precise and unhurried. "Nobody comes to see us unless something's gone wrong."
"You see me when nothing's wrong."
"You come in bored and pretend you need a check-up all the time."
Aeliana pressed her lips together. That was fair.
Elira was still smiling as she worked. "What else did she teach you?"
"Wound cleaning. Basic suturing — nothing complicated.
Poultices. Tinctures for fever and inflammation.
Recognising the difference between a fracture and a deep bruise by feel.
" She paused. "She also knew a lot about herbs that aren't typically in the standard texts.
The Tyrrendor variety, mostly. Things that grow at higher altitude. "
At that, Elira stopped grinding.
She looked over properly. Something had sharpened in her expression — not alarm, but genuine, focused attention.
"Like what?"
Aeliana met her eyes. "Frostbite weed. Silverbell root. Black-capped nettle." She watched Elira's face. "I'm guessing those aren't in the standard curriculum."
"No," Elira said, slowly. "They're not." She set the pestle down entirely. "The frostbite weed — is it the same plant that some of the older texts call veradhal?"
"I don't know the Navarrian name for it. In Rathmere they just called it frost weed. Purple flower, silver stem, grows near the snowline."
Elira turned fully and looked at her with the expression of someone rapidly revising a set of assumptions.
"I've been trying to source that for eight months.
One of the senior healers mentioned it in a lecture, said it had analgesic properties that outperformed most of what we currently use for deep tissue damage, but couldn't tell me where to find it. "
"It doesn't grow below the first snowline," Aeliana said. "Your supply chain would have to come from Tyrrendor."
"Which explains why no one has any." Elira leaned back against the bench and crossed her arms, studying her. "How much do you remember about the preparation?"
"Most of it." Aeliana glanced at the bench. "Do you have parchment?"
Elira was already reaching for it.
They spent the better part of an hour at the workbench after that — Elira finishing the salve while Aeliana wrote out the preparation notes she remembered from the healer's kitchen in Rathmere, the ones she'd absorbed without quite meaning to, the way she'd absorbed most things in that house.
By feel. By repetition. By watching someone who was good at something do it well.
Elira asked precise questions. She had a healer's mind — methodical, focused, not satisfied with approximately or something like that. Aeliana found herself answering with more detail than she expected, pulling at threads of memory she hadn't known were still intact.
At some point, Elira pressed a small tin of the finished salve into her hand.
"For the bruise," she said simply.
"You didn't have to—"
"You gave me three months of research." Elira returned to her notes. "Take the salve, Aeliana."
Aeliana looked down at the tin. It was small and neatly sealed, the lid stamped with a simple cross. Nothing remarkable.
"Thank you," she said.
Elira waved a hand without looking up. "Come back Thursday. I want to see the arm after another few days of Garrick's training."
Aeliana stood, tucking the tin into her jacket pocket.
"And Aeliana?"
She looked up.
Elira was watching her now, pen hovering over the parchment. Her expression was warm but careful, in the way it got when she was about to say something she'd been holding back.
"That healer in Rathmere," she said. "She did a good job."
Aeliana held her gaze for a moment.
"She did," she agreed quietly.
Then she turned and walked out into the afternoon.
~
She found a corner table in the far end of the mess hall, away from the evening crowd, with the small tin of Elira's salve open beside her elbow and the bruise on her forearm halfway through being dealt with.
The parchment in front of her was covered in notes — the herb preparation she'd written out for Elira, with her own additions in the margins.
Additions that had nothing to do with bruise salve.
Frostbite weed properties. Silverbell root at altitude.
Things she'd been meaning to write down for months and had never quite gotten around to.
She was so absorbed that she didn't hear the tray land across from her.
"What's that smell?"
She looked up.
Ridoc was already sitting down, apparently having decided this was a conversation he intended to have regardless of whether she'd invited him. His tray held an improbable amount of bread and two cups of something warm.
"Arnica salve," she said.
He leaned forward, squinting at the tin with the expression of someone who had not gotten the answer they expected. "You're... making medicine."
"Applying it."
He looked at the bruise. His eyes sharpened. "Who did that?"
"Training."
"That's not an answer."
"Garrick," she said.
"Ah." He sat back, tone shifting into something drier. "Right. The friendly educational kind of brutality."
She didn't respond, returning to her notes. He picked up a piece of bread and ate it with the easy patience of someone who had decided he was staying regardless of her engagement level.
It was, she had learned, a very Ridoc tactic.
"The cliff the other day," he said after a minute.
She glanced up.
He was looking at the table rather than at her — which was unusual. Ridoc almost always made eye contact. It was one of the things that made him both easy and mildly unnerving to talk to.
"I've been thinking about it," he said. "Since we got back." He turned his cup slowly. "Virvolior."
She capped the salve tin and waited.
"I read about the Valaari once," he said.
"In a first-year history text. One paragraph, buried in a chapter on pre-Navarrian dragon classification.
It called them—" He stopped, working at the memory.
"A category of dragon whose existence remains contested by modern scholars.
" He looked up. "One paragraph. Contested. "
"I know."
"He's real," Ridoc said. Not like it needed saying — more like he was still completing the thought, tying off the end of something that had been loose in his mind all day.
"Yes."
"And he talks to you."
"Full sentences."
Ridoc exhaled through his nose. Then he looked at her directly. "What's he like? When he talks."
She hadn't expected that question.
Most people, when confronted with something extraordinary, asked about what it could do. What did the signet manifest as. What would happen in a battle. They asked about the power, the threat, the edge it gave.
Ridoc had asked what he was like.
She turned her cup in her hands. "Dry," she said after a moment. "Reads situations faster than anyone I've met. He lets you figure things out yourself when he knows you can, and steps in when he thinks you've been slow enough." She paused. "Patient. Occasionally insufferable."
Ridoc's mouth twitched. "So basically you."
She looked at him.
"I mean that as a compliment," he said, with the tone of someone who absolutely meant it as a compliment. "It's not a bad thing."
She looked back at her notes. But the edge of something had loosened in her chest — some small, habitual bracing — and she let it.
"He said you were loud," she said.
Ridoc considered this. "He's not wrong." He picked up his second piece of bread, untroubled. "Did he say anything else?"
"That you weren't sure about the spiral descent timing."
"Again — not wrong." He propped his elbow on the table. "Does he talk about everyone?"
"Only the ones he finds interesting."
A beat.
"Huh," Ridoc said, quietly, and didn't hide the fact that pleased him.
They stayed like that for a while — her writing, him eating, the noise of the mess hall carrying on around them without requiring anything from either of them. It was easy in a way that snuck up on her, the kind of comfortable that didn't announce itself.
At some point, Ridoc leaned over and looked at her notes without asking permission, as was entirely on brand.
"What's silverbell root?" he said.
"Painkiller. Grows at altitude."
"Is that from the healer you worked with?"
She looked at him. "How do you know about that?"
He gave her a mild look. "You told me. The first week of October. You said you'd worked with a healer before, when I asked why you wrapped Derin's hand better than the second-years." He tilted his head. "You don't remember."
She didn't. But she believed him.
"Rathmere," she said. "There was an apothecary. I helped her for four years."
Ridoc looked at the notes again. "So you can actually make things."
"Some things."
"What else?"
She told him about the simpler preparations — fever tinctures, wound poultices, the altitude herbs.
He asked questions that were actually good questions, which surprised her, and she answered them without quite deciding to.
By the time she'd run through the basics, she realised they'd been talking for the better part of an hour.
She capped her ink.
"You're strange," she said, without heat.
Ridoc grinned. "I've been told." He pushed his tray aside. "It's a gift. My mother always said I could make anyone talk eventually." He looked at her, and for a moment the humour softened slightly. "You can tell me to go away, you know. If you want."
"I would have an hour ago," she said.
He nodded once, understanding.
Then he reached into his jacket and produced a small, battered deck of cards. "One round of Bastard's Bluff," he said. "And then I'll leave you to your herb notes."
She looked at the deck. Then at him.
"You're not going to leave either way," she said.
"No," he agreed, already shuffling. "But it sounded polite."
It was not one round of Bastard's Bluff.
It was four by the time the mess hall had emptied to a handful of stragglers and the staff had begun wiping down the far tables with pointed efficiency. Aeliana had won two of them. Ridoc had won one and protested the other loudly enough that a second-year three tables away had looked over twice.
"That was a legal hand," he said, still, as they pushed out through the mess hall doors into the cold of the corridor.
"You folded before you saw mine."
"Strategically."
"You thought I was bluffing."
"You were bluffing before that."
"And then I wasn't." She pulled her jacket tighter. "That's how the game works, Ridoc."
He made a sound that was not quite concession and not quite argument, the noise of someone who had decided the discussion wasn't over but was willing to table it temporarily. He fell into step beside her at the corridor junction, hands in his pockets, breath misting in the dim.
"Same time next week?" he said, when their paths diverged.
She gave him a look.
He grinned. "I'll work on my bluff aura."
"Please don't."
He lifted a hand in parting and turned down the left corridor, unhurried, already humming something tuneless under his breath.
She watched him go for a moment, then turned and started toward the stairs.
She was halfway up the first flight when Virvolior's voice settled into her mind — quiet, in the way he was quiet when he'd been listening rather than observing.
You told him I found him interesting.
She kept walking. You said he was loud.
I said I wasn't sure about him. A pause, deliberate. Those are different things.
Are they.
You know they are. Another beat. She could feel his attention on her the way she always could — not heavy, just present, like sunlight through a window you'd stopped noticing. Why did you tell him that?
She reached the top of the stairs and turned toward her room.
"Because it was true," she said.
Virvolior was quiet for a moment.
He asked what I was like, he said finally. Not as a complaint. Not as a question either. More like someone turning something over to look at the other side.
He did.
Most of them ask what I can do.
I know.
She stopped outside her door and leaned her shoulder briefly against the cold stone of the wall. The corridor was empty. Somewhere below, a distant door closed.
He's different from the others, Virvolior said.
She didn't answer that. But she didn't have to.
She could feel, at the very edge of their bond, something that wasn't quite approval and wasn't quite uncertainty — something in between, the particular feeling of an ancient creature genuinely reconsidering its position.
Don't tell him I said that, he added.
Her mouth curved before she could stop it.
Wouldn't dream of it.
She pushed open her door and went inside.
~
The morning drill started before the sun had finished rising.
Varrin called formation at half past six, and by the time the squad had assembled in the eastern training ring, the air was still sharp enough to sting. Frost edged the stone. Aeliana could see her breath.
The squad stood in their unofficial lines — second and third-years together, first-years in the rear — and Varrin swept his gaze across them without warmth.
It landed on her. As it always did.
"Claw formation drills," he said. "Full contact. No rotation — everyone fights until I say stop."
It started with footwork.
That was the part she did well now. Varrin knew it. She could see it in the way he said nothing as she moved through the sequence, clean and unhesitating. Silence from Varrin, she had learned, was the closest thing to acknowledgement she was going to get.
Then it moved to contact.
Kellen Rusk came at her first — not paired by Varrin, just by proximity, by the way the drill sorted itself out. He was bigger than her by a head and a half, shoulders like a doorframe, and he fought with the particular style of someone who had never really had to learn subtlety. He didn't need it.
He knocked her back twice before she found the angle.
Then Noira rotated in.
That was different. Noira didn't fight big — she fought precise, every strike placed to do maximum damage with minimum visible effort. She hit Aeliana across the shoulder inside the first three exchanges, and it was only the brace she'd been drilling for weeks that kept her upright.
"Weight's wrong," Noira said flatly, and pivoted away before Aeliana could answer.
Bran was after her — which was almost a relief, because Bran was loud and obvious and she could read him like a first draft.
He telegraphed his swings the way he telegraphed everything, with his whole body and several seconds of warning.
She slipped the first, blocked the second, and put him on the mat with a foot sweep that he absolutely should have seen coming.
He lay on his back for a moment, expression caught between outrage and something she might have called surprised respect, if she'd had the energy to care.
She didn't.
By the end of the second hour, everything hurt.
Her forearm — the bruised one — had taken another hit in the first ten minutes and hadn't forgiven her since.
Her thighs burned from the grip work Kaori had been drilling into her.
The scar tissue on her right arm pulled with every overhead block, not sharp, not breaking, but present.
A constant low-grade reminder of how much ground she'd had to recover.
She was still standing.
That was the only thing she let herself count.
Varrin called stop.
The squad dispersed — stretching out, reaching for water flasks, the ease of people who had trained hard but not beyond what they'd expected. Tavira exchanged a word with Kellen. Milla picked up the training sticks from the ground near the wall. Seth was already halfway toward the door.
Varrin looked at Aeliana.
"Sorynne."
She straightened despite everything that was screaming at her not to.
"You're on gym reset," he said. His tone was as even as ever. Not cruel, not particular. Just stated, the way Varrin stated things. "Mats, sticks, the sandbags against the south wall. Done by first bell."
The rest of the squad was already moving.
She looked at the spread of equipment across the training ring — the mats kicked half off their alignment, the scattered sticks, the weights that had drifted from their places over the course of two hours of full contact drilling. The whole space would take at least thirty minutes to put right.
By herself.
After two hours of having the entire squad hit her.
She held Varrin's gaze for exactly the right amount of time — long enough to be seen, not long enough to be insubordinate — and then said, "Understood."
He turned and walked away.
She turned and looked at the mats.
For a moment she didn't move, just stood there with her forearm pressed lightly against her ribs, breathing through the ache.
Then she picked up the first stick.
You should have let that last one land faster, Virvolior said in her mind. You hesitated on the pivot.
Thank you, she said dryly, bending to drag the nearest mat back into position. That's very helpful right now.
You asked me to tell you.
I asked you to tell me after sessions.
This is after.
She straightened the mat, moved to the next one.
He does this because he doesn't know what to do with you, Virvolior said, more quietly. Punishing something unfamiliar is easier than evaluating it.
I know.
It won't always be like this.
I know that too.
She dragged the second mat into place, and the third, and the fourth. The sandbags were heavy enough that she had to move them one at a time, and she did it steadily, without rushing, because rushing was how you dropped things or wrenched something that was already complaining.
The sticks she stacked by handle size, the way the rack was labelled.
The room came back into order slowly, one piece at a time, and by the time the last mat was aligned and the last weight set against the south wall, the first bell hadn't rung yet.
She stood in the empty room and looked at it.
Clean. Quiet.
She allowed herself one moment of sitting down on the edge of the nearest mat, forearms on her knees, eyes closed, breathing.
Then she picked up her jacket from the floor where it had fallen during the second drill rotation, shouldered her bag, and walked out.