She gestured to the asset. "You can let her go. She's useful, but not to you."

Soren did, because he didn't believe in holding onto anything that didn't want to stay. The woman limped to Lethren, paused, then turned to Soren and offered a nod, for what, he didn't know, or care.

Lethren said nothing else. Just watched as the security detail peeled off, leaving Soren and Kale alone on the plaza.

Kale bent over, hands on knees, breathing like he'd just run a marathon in sand. "You ever get tired of being the study group for the next disaster?"

Soren shrugged, then put pressure on the blue-black swelling at his hip. It tasted like glass, like victory, like a memory that wasn't his but that he couldn't quite let go of. "You alive?"

Kale spat a tooth into the slush. "Yeah."

"Then we're doing fine," Soren said. He looked up at the spire, the lights fracturing the darkness, and wondered where the real enemy would come from next.

The morning after, Soren filed the report with the economy of a man whose words would be ignored. He noted the breach, named the injuries, signed off with three lines of self-incrimination and one lie for the benefit of anyone reading upwards in the chain.

Then he found the rec room, where Lira and Liane were already tearing the shell off a fresh deck, playing some game that required lying to everyone else at the table before you could win.

Seren was there, too, hovering in the corner, arms folded, saying nothing.

He walked over, waiting for either the guilt or the pride to settle first.

"They tried to kill you," Seren said, not a question.

"Not the first time," Soren said. He felt the inside of the cut at his hip, pressed until it hurt, smiled through it. "Not the last."

She looked at him, as if counting up the years it would take for everyone to get tired of trying.

"You think it matters if we outlast their tests?" Seren asked.

He shrugged. "I think it matters that we keep coming back."

The twins called Soren over to the table, demanded he play. He did, refusing to win, learning the pattern, choosing when to lose. He knew what he was being measured for, now—the ability to see the endgame and still keep playing.

That night, in his bunk, he thought about the other thing Cirel had said, the thing beneath the offer: "Decide which side you're on." He didn't know if he had sides left. Only people, and the edge between them.

He slept, and for the first time in months, didn't dream of the Academy, or the corridor, or even the testing room where his name was still probably being diagrammed on a board somewhere as a reminder of acceptable loss.

He dreamed of the spire, blue in the moonlight. He dreamed of the line he'd someday cross. And the city, waking up every morning, already ready to forget the names of the people who'd kept it standing.

In the morning, the training deck was his.

The whole of Meridian was, eventually, just a series of overlapping latitudes—lines of power, lines of sight, lines that divided the remembered from the forgotten. Soren stood at the top of the annex, the city below mapped in frost and shadow, and felt, for a moment, that the division between test and tester had at last been erased.

He wondered if he should have been happy. Instead, he just watched the lights of the city blink and fade, the patterns repeating, free for anyone who could see them.

He thought of Jannek, and the twins, and Rehn, and the trace of bleach in the air under Cirel's office door. Most of all, he thought of Lethren, and the way her voice lingered, even after the tests were done.

He waited for the future to come hunt him, and he let it.

And, in the space between one breath and the next, he built a plan.

The council chamber floor resembled a diagrammed murder: black glass, etched in sigils that flickered with the slow pulse of torchlight, each geometric cell holding more threat than promise. Soren knelt at the center, as if expecting to be dissected. Sweat prickled under the collar of his new coat, which fit like a shroud. According to the summons, he was to present himself "in full regalia, bearing the insignia of prior office." The latter was a joke, since no one in Meridian wanted to remember what happened to the last "prior office."

Two steps ahead, the dais rose like a breaking tooth. On it, Archon Lethren and Magister Cirel sat in the kind of unison that implied the rest of the hierarchy wasn't needed for this verdict. Lethren's coat was not the usual blue but a gradient of black shot through with metallic threads that suggested, in the right light, either nobility or a history of chemical fires. Cirel, by contrast, looked like she'd been poured into her uniform by a series of precise, uncaring machines. The two of them together made Soren feel like a lab rat waiting for the needle.

"Report," Lethren said, voice so smooth it could have been a blade's edge.

Soren recited the events of the last two weeks, containment breach, asset retrieval, the forced reroute, the deaths, but never gave them the satisfaction of a flourish. He kept the account clean, the way the Academy liked its stories: stripped of context, all blood and no marrow.

Lethren nodded at the summary, then looked past Soren, as if someone might step out of the shadows to finish the job.

"Containment Division is yours to command," she said, and the words landed with all the warmth of a gravestone. "Effective immediately."

Soren understood the offer. It was not trust, not even punishment. It was observation, dressed up as command. "My preference is to retain current personnel," he said, watching the way Cirel's mouth flickered at the suggestion.

"Approved," Cirel said. "You will also take on probationary intake from House Velrane. Cassian resumes as first officer under your direct authority."

He felt the old fracture in his wrist, remembered in a single flash every time Cassian had tried to break it. "Understood," Soren said. He waited for the knife in the handshake.

Lethren made a show of standing. "The Division is not a reward, Vale. It is a solution to a problem. Don't fail to understand which part you play." She walked out, the echo of her boots disappearing before the doors even closed.

Cirel remained, tapping her pen against the sigil-etched table. "You have a history of improvising," she said, not looking at Soren. "They think giving you a cage will make you the warden instead of the wolf."

Soren almost smiled. "Wolves don't last in cages."

Cirel's lips twitched, but she said only, "Dismissed."

He left the council chamber, the mirroring on the obsidian floor warping his reflection into something thin and hungry.

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