Chapter 32.
The Battle Brief hall filled the way it always did — loud and fast and all at once, riders funnelling through the wide double doors in a current of black uniforms and clipped conversation.
The amphitheatre seating tiered upward from the floor in sweeping rows, each section claimed by wing and section and squad through a combination of habit and unspoken rank.
The mage-lights above burned steady, warm gold against the stone ceiling.
Aeliana filed in with the rest of Second Wing Claw Section, Third Squad.
She kept pace with the group without walking beside anyone in particular — the particular social geometry she'd mastered by now. Close enough not to draw attention through obvious separation. Far enough that no one had to decide whether to acknowledge her.
Varrin took the end of the row. The squad slotted in beside him in their natural order — Noira on his left, Kellen and Tavira behind, Daerid and Milla next.
Bran dropped into the seat two down from Aeliana with the energy of someone who had already decided this hour was beneath him.
Seth arranged himself with the deliberate ease of a person who was taking notes on everything and pretending to take notes on nothing.
Camren sat next to her.
He didn't say anything, but he didn't immediately move either, which for Camren was practically a social overture.
She looked straight ahead at the floor below, where the large tactical maps were already unfurled and anchored. The Navarrian border, annotated in three colours. The eastern ridge. The Draithon pass. Smaller markers clustered in the northeast quadrant, denser than last week.
She'd been watching those markers move across the weekly briefings for two months.
"Riders."
Devera looked at her for a moment — the specific look of someone recalibrating an assumption without announcing that they're doing it. Then she turned back to the hall.
Captain Devera's voice cut through the room like a blade through canvas — not raised, not amplified, just built for carrying.
She stepped onto the briefing floor from the side entrance, purple hair sharp against the black of her uniform, medals catching the light.
Markham followed a half-step behind, cream-coloured tunic and spectacles, already studying the map with the expression of a man who had read every document about this region and was quietly annoyed that reality kept adding new ones.
The hall settled.
Not gradually, the way a room usually quieted. Immediately. Devera had that effect.
"The Draithon ridge," she said, without preamble. She pointed to the northeast cluster without looking at it. "As of forty-eight hours ago, griffen activity in the middle segment has increased by thirty percent over the monthly baseline."
Markham stepped forward and touched two points on the map. "The attack pattern for the past three weeks has concentrated here, and here. Both locations correspond to ward anchor points — not the walls themselves, but the ground fixtures that reinforce them at range."
Murmuring. Low, controlled — this was a room of riders, not first-years in a history class — but present.
Aeliana looked at the two points.
Then she looked at the older annotations on the western edge of the map, the ones she'd been tracking across previous briefs. The baseline marks that predated the current cluster by several months.
They're testing, Virvolior said in her mind — quiet, unprompted, the way he spoke when something had caught his attention. The ward anchors.
She didn't respond aloud. But she agreed.
"The prevailing tactical read," Devera continued, "is opportunistic probing. Poromiel scouts looking for weaknesses in the eastern line." She looked up at the room. "That's a reasonable read. It may also be incomplete."
Markham took over without transition, the way they always did — like two halves of a single argument.
"Griffen activity is not self-directed to this degree.
They do not concentrate around ward infrastructure by accident.
Something is coordinating them. That something is what Command is currently trying to identify. "
"Which means," Devera said, "that what you're seeing on this map is not the problem. It's a symptom."
The room was very quiet now.
Aeliana's pencil moved across the brief sheet in small, precise marks — not copying what was on the map, but noting the pattern of it.
The dates of each attack. The time gaps between them.
The shift in concentration over the past month, from random-seeming distribution toward something that, when she connected the points, described a slow arc.
She drew the arc lightly, in the margin.
"The assessment from Central Command," Markham said, adjusting his spectacles, "is that we are likely looking at a dry-season push — an attempt to stress the wards before autumn reinforcement cycles. This has precedent in the campaigns of 411 and 447."
He looked out at the room, which was his version of making eye contact with everyone at once.
"The difference," he said, "is that in both 411 and 447, the activity preceded a larger incursion within sixty days."
The murmuring returned. Louder this time.
"That is not a prediction," Devera said, cutting through it. "It is a data point. Your job is to know it."
Aeliana looked down at her arc in the margin.
Then, without deciding to, she drew a second line from the arc's endpoint — projected forward, following the same rate of shift.
The endpoint landed on the central pass.
She stared at it.
Yes, Virvolior said.
She looked up.
Devera was pacing slowly along the front of the briefing floor, arms clasped behind her. "Questions," she said. "Tactical. Not political."
Hands went up across the hall.
A third-year from First Wing. "Are the Griffens working in coordinated formations, or independent sightings?"
"Coordinated," Devera said. "They're moving in drift formation — groups of six to eight, sustained contact with our patrol riders. They're not scattering." She moved on. "Next."
Second Wing, a rider Aeliana didn't know. "Has Poromiel claimed responsibility?"
"Poromiel doesn't claim anything," Devera said flatly. "That's not how this works. Next."
Aeliana's hand was in her lap. She looked at her margin note, then at the room — the rows of riders, the cluster of section leaders standing along the upper wall, Devera pacing the floor below.
She'd learned early not to volunteer things in rooms this large.
The attention it drew wasn't always the useful kind.
But she'd also spent the better part of a year learning to tell the difference between caution and the kind of quiet that was just a habit she hid behind.
She raised her hand.
A small shift in the room. Not hostile — she was past the point of generating hostile silences just by existing — but present. Aware.
Devera pointed at her without expression.
"The red cluster sits in the middle segment," Aeliana said.
"But the older baseline markers from earlier in the season were concentrated in the western segment.
The approach changed." She paused. "The drift arc over the past six weeks, if you extend it at the same rate, points to the central pass — not the middle segment.
" She kept her voice level. "If the western approach was abandoned because it was being watched, and the middle segment is drawing our patrols now—"
She didn't finish it.
She didn't need to.
The room was very quiet.
Devera turned to the map. She looked at it for several seconds, in the particular way of someone who was checking an observation against everything they already knew rather than hearing it for the first time.
She turned to Markham. "The 411 survey — where did the incursion breach?"
Markham had already reached for the document. He scanned it, moving his finger along the text, and then he stopped.
"Central pass," he said.
The sound of that landing in the room was almost physical.
"If Sorynne's read is correct," she said, to the room, not to Aeliana, "then the middle segment activity is not the threat. It's the preparation for it." She paced once. "That changes what we should be watching. I'll be raising it with Command." She moved on without ceremony. "Next question."
The brief continued.
Aeliana looked back down at her notes and kept writing. She didn't look across the hall to where Liam's section was seated, didn't look for Ridoc's reaction, didn't check the upper wall where the section leaders stood.
She kept her head down and her pencil moving.
But she felt, with the particular awareness that had nothing to do with sight, that somewhere in the room, someone was still looking at her long after Devera had moved on.
~
The auxiliary cliff in winter was a different creature entirely.
In autumn it had been crisp, manageable — the kind of cold that sharpened focus without punishing it.
Now, deep into December, the wind off the mountain had teeth.
Frost edged every flat surface in white.
The pine trees below the cliff's edge stood dark and still, their branches heavy with the week's snowfall, and the sky above them was that particular shade of pale grey that meant more was coming before nightfall.
Aeliana stood at the launch point and turned her face into the wind for a moment, reading it.
Virvolior stood behind her, wings folded, utterly unbothered by the temperature in the way that dragons were unbothered by most things that inconvenienced humans.
Professor Kaori arrived without fanfare, as he always did — materialising from the path up the cliff face with his cloak closed against the cold and his notebook already open. He glanced at the sky once, the way sailors glanced at weather, assessing without drama.
"Wind's variable," he said. "Gusting from the northwest at irregular intervals." He stopped a few paces from the launch edge and turned to face her. "Which means today is not easier than Tuesday. It may be harder."
"Understood," she said.
He looked at her. Then at Virvolior, briefly, with the expression he always had when looking at Virvolior — something he kept carefully neutral but that wasn't quite neutral.
"Hover hold," he said. "Full sequence. I want the launch clean, the ascent vertical, and I want you at height before you open into the hold." He opened his notebook. "Don't rush the opening. If you open too early you'll be fighting the gust at altitude and never stabilise."
"And if I open too late?"
"Then you've wasted the ascent, and we'll do it again."
She turned to Virvolior and checked her harness — buckle, brace, strap — the way she checked it every time without having to think about it anymore.
The wind is moving in sets, Virvolior said. Listen for the gap between gusts. That's where we open.
She nodded.
And don't overcorrect in the third second.
You've said that.
You've done it every time.
I know. She settled into the saddle, pressing her thighs into the brace, feeling his warmth beneath her even through the cold. Not this time.
Virvolior made a sound that might have been agreement and might have been skepticism, and then, without further discussion, he spread his wings.
The cold hit her face first. Then the altitude dropped away beneath them in a rush of white-edged pine and frost-pale stone, the world tilting as Virvolior angled into the vertical ascent, wings beating in long, powerful strokes that pushed them skyward fast enough to press her back in the saddle.
She leaned forward into it. Adjusted her grip. Let her weight fall into her lower back rather than fighting the movement with her shoulders.
The wind shifted at thirty feet — a hard gust from the northwest, exactly what Kaori had said, hitting them broadside and trying to push the ascent into a drift.
Virvolior corrected without her asking, tilting his body fractionally into the gust and continuing upward as if it were nothing.
She stayed with him.
At height — the right height, the one she'd learned to feel in her body rather than judge by sight — Virvolior levelled his wings and opened into the hold.
The hover.
This was the part that had taken her the longest. It looked, from the ground, like nothing.
Like stillness. Like simply being in the air without moving.
What it actually required was a continuous negotiation between dragon and rider and wind, a constant series of micro-adjustments so small they had to become instinctive or they happened too late.
She felt the first second settle.
The second.
The third second came with a familiar whisper of wrongness — the wind shifted, not hard, just enough, pushing from the right — and she felt the old impulse rise: correct left, lean into the correction, push back against the instability.
She didn't.
She stayed where she was.
Virvolior felt it — the shift, and her choice not to fight it — and he absorbed the adjustment himself, a movement so small it barely registered, redistributing their weight across his wingspan rather than requiring her to compensate.
The hold steadied.
She breathed.
Ten seconds. Fifteen.
Her thighs burned where they pressed into the saddle brace.
The cold was relentless at this altitude, cutting through her jacket, finding the gaps at her collar.
Her right arm pulled faintly at the extension, the scar tissue objecting to the sustained tension the way it always objected in the cold — not sharply, not dangerously, just insistently.
Twenty seconds.
Don't think about the arm, Virvolior said.
She stopped thinking about the arm.
Twenty-five. Thirty.
The wind came again — another gust, this one from slightly further north, a different angle, less predictable. It hit them on the upswing between two wingbeats, the worst possible timing, and for a fraction of a second, the hold wavered, Virvolior's left wing dipping a degree as he compensated.
She felt the dip. Absorbed it through her knees. Didn't fight it and didn't follow it.
Thirty-five.
There, Virvolior said quietly. You have it.
Forty.
She was aware of counting without meaning to — the number running in the back of her mind the way a pulse ran, without instruction.
Her body had reached the point where it was no longer fighting to maintain the hold but simply maintaining it, the adjustment continuous and below the level of conscious thought.
Forty-one.
She exhaled.
Virvolior eased out of the hold without being asked, the transition smooth — a natural glide downward rather than a drop, wide and controlled, turning them back toward the cliff in a long slow arc. She let her grip soften. Felt the tension leave her thighs in stages.
They landed at the edge of the cliff with a sound like wind settling.
She sat there for a moment, heart beating steadily in her ears, the cold biting at her flushed face.
Below, Kaori made a mark in his notebook.
Then another.
He didn't look up immediately. She'd learned that this was a Kaori thing — the way he processed, the way he let observations settle before attaching words to them. She waited.
"The gust at thirty-five seconds," he said finally, still writing. "You didn't correct."
"No."
He looked up. "Why not?"
"Correcting would have pulled us into the drift." She kept her voice even. "Virvolior had the weight. I just had to stay out of his way."
A beat.
"That," Kaori said, "is the correct answer." He made another mark. "It took most riders two years to understand that instinctively. Some never do." He closed the notebook, which was as close as Kaori ever came to a ceremonial gesture. "Forty-one seconds. Clean entry, clean hold, clean exit."
She didn't say anything.
She was aware that if she spoke right now the words that came out might not be as composed as she wanted them to be, so she said nothing and let Kaori continue.
"I'm going to speak with your squad leader," he said. "This week. About your formation readiness assessment."
The cold suddenly felt less cold.
She made herself breathe normally. "He'll have his own standard."
"He will," Kaori agreed, without softening it.
"Forty seconds was the threshold for this conversation.
It does not guarantee his answer." He tucked the notebook under his arm.
"But you've earned the conversation." He turned toward the path.
"Do it again. I want to see if forty-one was a ceiling or a floor. "
He walked back to his position at the edge of the cliff without looking back.
Aeliana exhaled slowly into the cold air, watching the mist of her breath disperse.
Floor, Virvolior said.
Don't get ahead of yourself.
I never do. A pause, warm at the edge of it. You do, sometimes. But not today.
She sat with that for a moment — the pale winter sky above, the frost-edged pines below, the quiet hum of three dragon minds at the edges of her thoughts like a fire left burning in the next room.
Then she settled her weight back into the saddle.
Again.
And Virvolior launched.
~
She didn't notice she was smiling until the cold hit her teeth.
The path down from the auxiliary cliff was narrow and frost-slicked, and she was taking it too fast for the conditions, boots scraping against stone, one hand briefly catching the pine branch that hung low over the first bend.
She didn't slow down. Her whole body felt like it was still three hundred feet in the air, still moving, still in the held moment between one wingbeat and the next where everything was balance and nothing was effort.
Forty-one had been the floor.
The second hold had lasted forty-six seconds. The third, fifty-one. By the fourth, Kaori had stopped writing between runs and simply stood at the cliff's edge watching, which was the closest thing to speechlessness she had ever seen from him.
Fifty-eight seconds on the fourth hold.
Clean.
She made herself walk at a normal pace when she reached the main path, where other cadets moved between buildings and training fields.
She made herself breathe normally. She looked at the ground and thought about dinner and whether the mess hall would still have the bread rolls with the seeds in them, and none of it worked because she was still smiling, and she could feel it, and there was absolutely nothing she could do about it.
"Sorynne."
She looked up.
Ridoc was sitting on the low stone wall at the edge of the east courtyard, boots dangling, apparently having been installed there for some time.
He had a bread roll in each hand, which answered one of her questions.
Liam stood beside the wall, jacket half-undone, mid-sentence with Rhiannon Matthias, who was perched on the wall on Ridoc's other side with her arms folded against the cold and her expression indicating she was about five seconds from ending the conversation through sheer willpower.
Sawyer sat at the far end of the wall, head bent over something he was writing.
Violet was there too — slightly apart from the others, reading, though she looked up when Ridoc called out.
"Why," Ridoc said, pointing a bread roll at Aeliana, "do you look like that?"
"Like what," she said.
"Like you just won something." He studied her. "Did you win something? Can you win things in flight training? Is there a trophy?"
Liam had turned at the sound of Ridoc's voice and was looking at her now with a different expression — sharper, more specific. He knew what her flight sessions looked like on a good day. This was not a normal good day expression.
"What happened," he said.
She stopped walking. Looked at the group of them — Ridoc still pointing the bread roll, Liam with that focused look, Rhiannon who had sat up straighter the moment she'd heard the word won, Sawyer glancing up from his notes, Violet watching with the quiet attention she brought to most things.
She could play it down. She was good at playing things down.
"The hover hold," she said. "I hit forty-one seconds this morning."
Liam went very still.
"And then I did it again," she said. "Forty-six. And then fifty-one." She paused. "And then fifty-eight."
Silence.
Then Ridoc said, at a volume slightly too large for a courtyard, "Fifty-eight?"
"Keep your voice—"
"Fifty-eight seconds?" He looked at Liam. "Is that good? That sounds good. Tell me that's good."
"The threshold for formation clearance is forty," Liam said, and his voice had gone a little rough at the edges. He was looking at her the way he looked at things he was quietly, deeply pleased about. "She did forty-one and then kept going."
"Three more times," Aeliana said.
Ridoc threw his bread roll in the air and caught it. "That's—" He pointed at her again. "I want it on record that I knew, from the very beginning, that this was going to happen. I said it."
"You've never said that," Rhiannon said.
"I thought it very loudly."
Rhiannon had unfolded her arms and was looking at Aeliana with the direct, warm attention that was characteristic of her — not gushing, just genuine. "Kaori's session?" she said.
"Yes."
"And he—"
"He's talking to Varrin this week."
Rhiannon's expression did something complicated and then settled into something that looked a lot like the particular satisfaction of someone who had been waiting for a specific thing to happen and had not been wrong to wait. "Good," she said. "Good. You've been working toward that."
"What will Varrin say?" Sawyer asked. He'd put down his notes. His expression was attentive in the way Sawyer's usually was — less effusive than Ridoc, but present.
"Don't know." She shifted her bag. "Kaori said he'll have his own standard."
"He will," Liam said. "But Kaori wouldn't say it to Varrin unless he's confident. He wouldn't waste the conversation." He looked at her properly, the way he had that first morning on the cliff when he'd watched her run the spiral descent and called it smooth. "Fifty-eight seconds, Aeliana."
She looked at her boots for a second.
Then back up.
"Virvolior said it was the floor," she said.
Ridoc made a noise. "Of course he did." He hopped down from the wall, bread roll still in hand, and held the other one out to her. "Here. You deserve this more than I do."
She looked at it.
"It's got seeds," he said.
She took it.
Violet, who had been quiet through most of this, closed her book over her finger and looked at Aeliana with an expression that was careful and warm in equal measure.
"Fifty-eight seconds is extraordinary," she said simply.
"Considering how late you started, you learned really fast. To be honest, I'm not sure I can hold it that long yet. "
"Thank you," Aeliana said. "And you will be able to hold it for that long, don't doubt yourself." Violet smiled at that.
"Kaori is going to tell Varrin you're ready." Violet tilted her head slightly. "And Varrin is going to have to agree with him, because he can't argue with fifty-eight seconds." Something moved in her expression — knowing, maybe, or careful. "How does it feel?"
Aeliana thought about that for a moment.
The cold was still sharp around her, her thighs still ached from the morning, and the scar tissue on her right arm had its usual quiet objection to the temperature. The bread roll in her hand was still warm from wherever Ridoc had been keeping it.
"Like a floor," she said.
Ridoc grinned. "And there it is."
Rhiannon slid off the wall. "Come on. If we go now we'll beat the second-years to the good tables." She looked at Aeliana. "You're coming."
It wasn't a question.
Sawyer had already gathered his notes. Liam fell into step beside Aeliana as the group moved toward the mess hall, the courtyard cold and bright around them.
"You know," he said, low enough that it was just for her, "I watched your first hover hold. Two seconds before you dropped."
She winced.
"And now fifty-eight." He nudged her shoulder with his. "You did that."
She took a bite of the bread roll.
"Virvolior helped," she said.
"Virvolior always helps," Liam said. "But he can't hold the weight for you. That part's yours."
She didn't answer.
But she didn't argue either.
The mess hall was already loud when they pushed through the doors, the warmth of it hitting like a wall after the courtyard cold — bodies and cooking fires and the particular dense heat of a room built from stone that had spent centuries absorbing winter.
The smell was good tonight. Something with herbs. Bread that was not yet gone.
Aeliana glanced toward her squad's table out of habit.
The bench was empty.
She looked for a moment longer, confirming it — Varrin's seat, Noira's, Kellen's, the whole stretch of it unoccupied. Wherever they were, they hadn't come through yet. Or they'd eaten early. Or they were still in whatever debrief Varrin ran on Wednesdays that he didn't include her in.
She looked at the empty bench.
Then she looked at Liam, who had already picked up a tray and was heading toward the food line without checking whether she was following.
She picked up a tray and followed.
Varrin's rule was clear enough — they sat with their squad for meals unless excused by him. She had not been excused by him. She was also the only one of her squad currently present, which felt like a technicality she could reasonably exploit.
She set her tray down across from Rhiannon and next to Ridoc, who had already acquired an improbable amount of food and was arranging it with the focused energy of someone taking a project seriously.
"You're not supposed to be here," Ridoc said, without looking up from his plate arrangement.
"Varrin's not here either."
"Good point." He moved a bread roll to the left. "Sit down."
The table filled up naturally — Liam across from her, Violet beside Rhiannon, Sawyer at the end with his notes still tucked under his arm despite being at dinner, which was either dedication or a cry for help. The noise of the hall settled around them into something comfortable.
For a while, they just ate.
It was the particular peaceful quality of people who had been moving all day and had collectively decided, without discussion, that the next twenty minutes belonged to food and not to anything else.
Aeliana ate her bread and the soup that was thick with something she couldn't identify but which was warm and good, and let the conversation build up around her without forcing it.
Ridoc broke first, as Ridoc always did.
"Okay," he said, pointing his spoon at Sawyer. "Explain to me why you're taking notes at dinner."
Sawyer looked up. "Strategy theory. Emetterio's assessment is next week."
"We all have that assessment."
"Some of us are prepared for it."
Ridoc pressed a hand to his chest. "I'm prepared."
"You told me this morning you weren't sure what a flanking formation was."
"I knew what it was. I was just confirming."
"By asking me to define it."
"That's what confirmation is."
Rhiannon pointed her fork at Ridoc. "Flanking is when you split your force to attack from the side while maintaining pressure at the front."
Ridoc looked at her. "See? I knew that."
"You're welcome," Rhiannon said.
Violet, who had been following this exchange with the expression of someone watching a very familiar play she'd seen many times and still found faintly entertaining, looked at Aeliana. "How long have you known Kaori was going to talk to Varrin?"
"He told me this morning."
"He didn't hint at it before?"
"Kaori doesn't hint," Aeliana said. "He either says something or he doesn't."
Violet nodded slowly, like this confirmed something she'd already suspected. "He's the same in dragon class. You either get a response, or you don't, and there's no pattern you can predict." A pause. "It used to drive me mad."
"It still drives you mad," Liam said.
"It drives me less mad," Violet said, with dignity.
Liam gave Aeliana a look across the table. She looked back. Neither of them said anything, which was its own conversation.
"What happens if Varrin says no?" Sawyer said. He wasn't being cruel about it — it was just Sawyer, who had the particular habit of naming the thing other people were carefully talking around.
"Then I keep training until he changes his mind," Aeliana said.
"How long do you think that takes?"
She considered it. "Kaori gives him the session data.
Varrin's rule-bound, but he's not irrational — he won't ignore numbers that are over threshold just because it's me.
" She turned her spoon in the soup. "He might make me do a demonstration.
In front of the squad, or in front of the section. Prove it's not a fluke."
"Could you?" Rhiannon asked. Not doubtfully. Just asking.
"Yes," she said.
She said it without hesitation, which was new. She noticed it was new. She didn't point it out.
"Virvolior would love that," Ridoc said. "A demonstration. He'd show off."
"He'd be extremely dignified about it," Aeliana said. "Which would be worse."
Ridoc snorted. "Yeah, that tracks."
Liam had been quiet for a moment, eating with one elbow on the table in the way Varrin would absolutely have corrected if Varrin were here. He looked up. "When I first started flying with you," he said, "you were fighting the wind on every hold. Like you were trying to overpower it."
"I know."
"You're not doing that anymore."
"Virvolior told me to stop."
"When?"
She thought about it. "A week ago. He said I was overcorrecting in the third second."
Liam set his spoon down. "I watched you do that for two weeks and didn't catch it."
"You were watching from the outside." She shrugged. "He was watching from underneath."
Liam laughed — a real one, short and warm. "Fair."
Rhiannon leaned forward on her forearms. "Can I ask something about Virvolior?"
Aeliana looked at her.
"What does it feel like?" Rhiannon said. "Flying on him specifically. Ridoc and Liam say there's something different about how he moves — that even from the ground, they can see it. He's quieter than other dragons."
"He doesn't displace as much air," Aeliana said.
"His wing stroke is different from a Daggertail or a Scorpiontail — it's longer and shallower.
Less power, more efficiency." She paused, thinking about how to say the next part.
"And he adjusts constantly. Not in big movements.
In tiny ones, before they're needed. Like he's reading the air ten seconds ahead of what we're flying through. "
Rhiannon was watching her with genuine interest. "Does that make it easier or harder to ride?"
"Both," she said honestly. "Easier because he compensates for most of what would knock me off balance. Harder because you start to trust it, while other dragons don't do that."
"Have you ridden another dragon?"
A pause. She thought of Chradh — Garrick's dragon, the one time he'd taken her up in the early months. She thought of Giollis and Daennia, enormous and ancient in the mountain dark, though that was something else entirely.
"Once," she said. "It was fine. Just louder."
Violet was looking at her with that quality of attention she had — the kind that felt like being read carefully rather than watched.
Ridoc, who had been uncharacteristically quiet for the last thirty seconds, chose this moment to re-enter the conversation by stealing one of Sawyer's bread rolls.
Sawyer looked at him.
"Don't," Sawyer said.
"I need it for morale," Ridoc said.
"Your morale is not my responsibility."
"As a squadmate—"
"Take your own bread."
"Mine's gone."
Rhiannon pushed hers toward Ridoc without looking up, and Ridoc took it with the satisfied expression of someone who had known this would happen. Sawyer retrieved his own roll from Ridoc's reach and held it pointedly close.
Aeliana looked around the table — the noise of the hall around them, the warmth of it, the food, the particular easy chaos of people who knew each other well enough to argue about bread without it meaning anything.
She thought about the squad table behind her, still empty.
She thought about fifty-eight seconds in a winter sky.
She took another piece of bread from the basket in the centre of the table and didn't think about either of those things for the rest of the meal.
-
He almost didn't go to the mess hall.
He'd eaten late the past two days — mission debrief running long on Tuesday, Xaden needing to talk through something on Wednesday that took the better part of three hours and left Garrick in no state to sit in a loud room full of cadets.
This afternoon he'd been planning to get something from the kitchen directly and eat it somewhere quiet.
He changed his mind somewhere between the east corridor and the main stairs, for no reason he cared to examine, and went the long way.
The mess hall was thinning out by the time he arrived — the peak of lunch had passed, and riders were filtering back into the afternoon in clusters, jackets pulled back on, conversations drifting into the cold corridor air. He moved against the current, scanning the food line.
He heard Ridoc before he saw any of them.
The laugh was unmistakable — too loud, completely unrepentant — and it came from the group pushing out through the main doors ahead of him.
Liam's squad. He could see the back of Liam's head, Rhiannon's braid, Sawyer's carefully maintained posture.
Ridoc already halfway through some story that had Rhiannon shaking her head.
And then, slightly behind the group, her.
He didn't clock it immediately. He saw her the way he always saw her when she was in a room — registered the position, the movement, the particular way she carried herself. Reflex by now.
But something was different.
She was smiling.
Not the small, careful thing she sometimes did when Ridoc said something that caught her off guard, the one she tried to contain before it got away from her.
This was — different. She was talking to Violet Sorrengail beside her, gesturing slightly with one hand, and she was smiling, full and unguarded, in a way that did something extremely inconvenient to Garrick's thought process.
He stopped walking.
He was aware that he had stopped walking and was standing in the mouth of the mess hall like an obstacle, but the awareness did not immediately translate into movement because he was busy watching Aeliana Sorynne smile like she'd forgotten to be careful about it.
Then she looked up.
Their eyes met across the corridor.
The smile didn't disappear — it shifted, changed slightly, became something more specific.
She said something brief to Violet and stepped away from the group, crossing toward him while the others continued on.
Ridoc, turning back to say something, clocked the direction she'd moved and then clocked Garrick, and Garrick watched him do the maths and choose, for once in his life, not to comment.
Liam glanced back too. Just once. Then turned away.
She stopped in front of him.
Her cheeks were still flushed from the cold, or lunch, or whatever had put that expression on her face, and she was looking at him with a kind of restrained energy that reminded him of the way she looked right before the end of a good sparring session — like something was running through her that she was choosing to hold rather than release.
"I did it," she said.
He looked at her.
"The hold." She held his gaze. "Forty-one seconds this morning. Clean. And then I did it three more times." A pause, and something in her voice went quiet and certain. "Fifty-eight on the last one."
He heard it.
Forty-one had been the threshold. Forty-one was what he'd told her — the number that would get Kaori talking to Varrin, the number that would start the conversation about formation. He'd said forty. She'd gotten forty-one and then gone back up three more times and come down with fifty-eight.
He looked at her face.
He'd seen her after bad sessions — jaw set, eyes ahead, the particular blankness she wore when she was processing something she hadn't wanted to happen.
He'd seen her after good ones too, the quiet steadiness of someone who'd done what they needed to do and was already thinking about the next thing.
He had not seen this.
This was something that had gotten through her defences before she'd had a chance to put them back up, and it was — he filed this away somewhere he wasn't looking at — it was one of the best things he'd seen in a long time.
"Fifty-eight," he said.
"Yes."
"This morning."
"Kaori's session." A flicker of something at the corner of her mouth. "He's talking to Varrin this week."
Garrick exhaled through his nose. He looked at the ceiling briefly, the way he did when he needed a second, and then back at her.
"Forty was the target," he said.
"I know."
"I set it as the target because I thought it would take you another month."
Something moved in her expression — not quite surprise, but close. "And?"
"And you did it within the week." He looked at her steadily. "And then you did it three more times."
She didn't say anything. She was watching him with the careful attention she had, reading his face the way she read training rooms and tactical maps, looking for the honest version underneath whatever was on the surface.
He let her find it.
"Fifty-eight seconds is not a fluke," he said. "Varrin can't argue with that number, and he knows it." A pause. "You know that, right?"
"You told me not to celebrate yet."
"I'm revising that," he said. "Slightly."
The corner of her mouth moved.
He wanted to say more. There was more — months of it, the whole accumulated weight of watching her drag herself back from an injury that would have ended most people, watching her run every morning before the quadrant woke up. There was a lot he could have said.
He said: "Good work, Sorynne."
It wasn't enough. It was also the most he was going to manage right now, standing in the mouth of the mess hall with the corridor full of cadets moving around them.
But she looked at him like she heard what was underneath it.
"Wednesday," she said, after a moment.
"Wednesday," he agreed.
She held his gaze for one more second — warm, steadier than usual — and then she turned and walked back toward the corridor.
He watched her go.
Then he went and got his lunch, and ate it in the quiet he'd been planning on, and didn't think about it.
He thought about it the entire time.