I’m swept along past the windows where the grounds stretchunder the light dusting of snow. Out on the lawn, a few of the visitors move between buildings under escort—dark uniforms, different crests, different postures. Even from a distance they look… sharper. Like the air around them is trained to be obedient.
A cluster of students press against the glass, faces smeared into reflections.
“Is that them?” someone breathes.
“I saw them come through the gate. Gods, they’re?—”
Her friend squeezes her arm to quiet her as a professor walks past.
But the girl is grinning too hard to stop. “—beautiful.”
“Well,” her friend hisses, gleeful, “then I’ll be happy to helpimprove foreign relationsinanyway I can.”
Another girl makes a strangled noise. “Shhh. Someone will hear you.”
“Let them,” the first girl says, practically giddy. “Let them know Whittaker’s been starving all term and they just walked in looking like the main course.”
A pair of visiting students pass directly beneath the window. On their shoulders: a black shield stamped with a silver three-peaked mountain—the Vikhrostrum crest. Uncomfortably close to Krovya’s in shape, even if the details differ.
Their gazes rake the campus walkways with the casual assessment of predators.
The girl beside me goes quiet. Her smile falters.
And that’s when I feel it—under everything, beneath the excitement and the hunger and the spectacle: rivalry.
Not friendly. Not playful.
Real.
Whittaker likes to pretend we are civilized. But the Caldera is older than our rules, and every student here knows it exists for one reason: to remind us what we are when the leash comes off.
As the rest of the student body bounds off toward the Caldera, I turn the other way—toward the second floor of the Logistics building.
Professor Ching is waiting in the doorway, sleeves rolled up, expression tight with purpose. His hair is slightly wild, the way it always is when he’s been thinking too hard. I promised that I’d help with a particularly tricky compound today.
Inside, the air is thick with the scents of rosemary, metal, and something sharp like crushed stone. Across the benches, reagents sit arranged like offerings.
Ching gestures me over. “Weldver Salt,” he says without preamble. “Restorative. Packed into deep lacerations—seals torn skin as if the wound was never there.” He sets a mortar and pestle in front of me like a test. “Grind the matico leaves into a fine powder. And don’t waste any.” His gaze flicks to the jar, then to my hands. “It took me three months to get this after the supply line in Peru was hit.”
“Hit?” I repeat. “Attacked?”
“Rebels.” He says it like a nuisance, not a warning. “They took out the train tracks feeding the supply chain.” A shrug—dismissive, but his fingers are already measuring, already counting. “Shortages always make people anxious. Particularly when they lead to wounds that continue to bleed.”
I start grinding, slow and thorough, until the leaves surrender into green dust. Ching leans in just long enough to inspect, then gives a single nod.
“Good. Now fold in the moonsalt. Slowly.”
He pours sangre de grado—dragon’s blood resin—with maddening precision, drip by measured drip, until it threads through the salt like liquid starlight—beautiful and unnatural, the way a wound looks just before it closes.
“Now,” he says, pushing the bowl toward me. “Water. One thread. Not a wave.”
I swallow and lift my hand over the mixture.
Water answers. A fine filament rises from the air itself, drawn from the humidity hanging over the room, so thin it’s almost invisible. It touches the salt and the compound brightens, as if the moonsalt has remembered what it was made from.
Ching watches with hawklike focus. “Keep it moving,” he murmurs. “If it crystallizes too fast, it’ll burn when applied.”
My fingers tremble with the effort of being small and precise.A thread. Not a wave.
