Page 87 of Embers of Midnight
Rell’s voice from last week is a clean line: Freeze the beads. Cut between. Don’t yank like a hero and lose a hand.
I push a small, thin cold into the beads with the kind of control I used to think was not for people like me. The metal tightens on itself a fraction when the temperature drops. I cut between.The line falls harmless at my feet. The dummy doesn’t get a face tattoo it didn’t ask for.
“Time,” Holt says, watching his device. The rest of the block runs clean. No one gets cute again.
Surprise module. Voss does not telegraph it, and yet everyone on the front bench knows it’s coming. A ref at the far corner flicks a dead net toward the center with a practiced wrist.
My body wants to flinch. My breath refuses. Two short in. One long out. I catch the line with staff and foot, pin the beads where they can’t kiss skin, and do the same two-step—cool, cut, discard—without turning it into a Broadway number.
“Noted,” Rell says to no one. Holt’s mouth does the smallest satisfied thing. Hyssop, from the rack, holds up the staff with the earlier chalk X as a cautionary tale like a man teaching future students how to not die.
There’s one last attempt at noise from the stands: a hair-fine frost filament tickling the left margin of the ring, aimed at the place my breath counts live. It taps once, looking for a seam. Caelum’s tab hums on my notebook like a small animal. The filament fizzles. I don’t chase it with my eyes. I behave like nothing happened because that is the same as not giving it a stage.
Voss calls end. I don’t throw the staff or do any of the things adrenaline wants. I stand where I am and let my hands stop shaking before they start.
The panel does its little theater:
Rell: “Priority on shielding the noncombatant was correct. Your decision to de-escalate the null threat rather than dramatize it is the point of verification.”
Holt, deadpan: “Axis work tight. Efficient turns. You made a ring look smaller for the right reasons.”
Hyssop, waving the audited staff: “This is what you bring me if you find a groove. You used the one with clean grain. Thank you for not making me fill out the other form.”
Voss, forced into civility: “Acceptable demonstration of control.”
Draven doesn’t give speeches. He rises, steps to the edge of the ring, and says, in a voice that carries exactly as far as it needs to, “Demonstration passed.”
The tribunes exhale. Nyra, somewhere near the front, gives a single wolf-whistle like a punctuation mark. Kieran taps his device off and does that small nod people save for good woodworking. Thorn claps once and breaks a bench slat by accident; he looks apologetic and holds it like a penitent. Taya launches a noise that shouldn’t come out of a human throat. Laz films legal seconds and then tucks the phone away like a bomb with a safety on.
I step out of the ring and my knees tell me they exist. Darian is there with a cold pack already cracked. He presses it into my hand with a look that says use it and does not say please. I do.The cold rewrites the tremor into something I can file. He taps my wrist once, then twice, then the long anchor. I breathe with it.
Ash appears with a bottle of water and a grin he should be fined for. “You were boring in the sexiest way possible.”
“New kink,” I say, hoarse. He preens like he invented it. “Don’t tell anyone.”
“Already printed on shirts,” he says.
Ronan doesn’t make it a moment. He passes behind me with his palm along my lower back, a single line of heat, and says, “Eat,” like it’s step five in a six-step program. He drops a protein bar into my pocket without breaking stride. The twitch at the corner of his mouth is applause in Ronan.
Kieran peels off the railing and does a lazy circuit along the stands. He pauses near a post, crouches, and touches something along the base with the end of a pen. Frost residue, a thin scum like the lip of our recycling bin last week. He doesn’t yell. He lifts the pen tip toward Laz with two fingers. Laz is already there with a swab and a bag, delighted by legal collecting.
“Later,” Kieran says, sotto voce. Translation: we’ll quietly have receipts.
I feel eyes on the back of my neck that don’t belong to any of my people. I don’t turn. I keep my body language boring and my file in my head updated: frost thread at ring margin, residue atpost, after-beat tried and penalized. We are done performing for today.
The cleanup is function, not pageant. Hyssop racks the weapons. Voss signs a paper and pretends he didn’t. Rell tells a first-year to stop gawking and read the rulebook. Draven leaves without disrupting the air. The ring goes back to being a ring.
We walk home. It’s just us five. The temperature drops two degrees on the path; the wards along the fence hum the way they always hum when you’ve passed all the checks and the house recognizes you.
Inside, I make it as far as the kitchen counter before the tremor I held off gets the last word. It’s not fear. It’s after. I brace both hands on the wood and breathe until my ribs open.
Ash claps his hands once, decision made. “Victory food,” he declares. “I refuse to pretend self-control isn’t exhausting. I’m baking a cake. A boringly excellent one.”
“You have an apron that says ‘I will burn your bureaucracy,’” I remind him.
“It’s in the wash,” he says. “I’ll improvise menace.” He looks at Ronan, already preheating. “We do layers.”
Ronan sets out bowls without asking what. “You will measure,” he says, not to Ash—he trusts Ash to chaos—“to Sera.” He puts the mixing bowl under my hand like it’s a task and a tether. It works. My hands like being useful more than they like shaking.
