They followed the quadcopter. They watched it float off the runway lip and into the Academy’s east intake corridor - legs tucking, rotors giving back the air they’d borrowed - and then the d doors sealed with the quiet finality of things that don’t take visitors. The eight stood there a beat too long, legs still braced for alarms that weren’t ringing anymore.
The corridor to the Vanguard dical wing was brighter than the rest of the Academy: white that felt watched. The eight caught only a flash of Hazel as the cart turned - face slack under anesthesia, two neat bands of living light cinched at thigh and forearm, staff laid across her like a friend permitted to cross thresholds. Then she was gone, swallowed by a door labeled with a sigil none of them recognized.
Rune didn’t go in.
He leaned against the wall just outside, wingsuit unzipped halfway and hanging from his hips like ripped skin. The pale blue of his hair was dark with sweat, pasted to his forehead. His hand hadn’t unclenched from the twin-blade spear haft he wasn’t holding anymore - the mory of it kept his knuckles white. He wasn’t looking at anything in particular. He was looking at the last three seconds and getting nowhere.
Alteea crossed to him without slowing. She didn’t soften her face and she didn’t harden it either - she just took his jaw with her eyes and took his shoulder with her hand.
"Save it." she said. "Bla won’t patch a wound. Your report will."
He nodded, one short chop. No "yes ma’am." He wasn’t being disrespectful, he was just rationing breath.
Alteea turned to Kori long enough to be polite in the language soldiers use when polite is useful. "I’ll need the miracles tomorrow on V-1. You’ll get a request."
"You’ll get them," Kori said.
Alteea’s chin tipped. Then she and Rune disappeared behind a door that frost-glassed itself as it closed, the world on the other side turning into silhouettes and umber shadows, voices cut to muffled shapes.
Kori rolled the tension out of her shoulders with an economy that didn’t waste a single muscle. She checked the ti with a glance at a wall clock none of the eight had noticed and hooked her thumb over her shoulder.
"Don’t blow anything up" she said. "Back before midnight. If you get arrested, text. Preferably not"
"What?" Arashi’s eyebrows tried to negotiate with her mouth. "You’re - where are you going?"
Kori had already started down the hall, feet soundless on the floor. She lifted a hand over her shoulder like a story’s last line. "Obviously, sothing including pastries."
And she was gone.
The eight stood in a suddenly too-wide corridor, the silence of a place working as designed pressing in around the edges. Even Esen’s rings chose not to make a sound. Feris hugged the whale she still inexplicably carried - pressed it to her side like it was a buckle. Lynea’s fingers worried a seam on her sleeve she hadn’t noticed until it complained.
"Park?" Keahi offered, voice rougher than she ant. "So air?"
No one argued. No one wanted to be the one to say: I don’t want to hear anyone breathe in here.
They cut away from the white and the hum of organized crisis into a corridor that rembered how to be stone. The Academy’s garden sat just beyond the east wall, a neat patch of green pretending not to sit over a runway that had lifted and swallowed a jet as if it had never been there. By the ti they reached it, the lane had already sunk back. Grass lay over it like a sheet smoothed by a hand. Only the faintest seam, a line that made no demands, traced the place where ground rembered.
They drifted the way people drift when they are trying to be left alone together. A bench took Raizen and Hikari. Another took Feris and Lynea, the plush whale’s button eye staring up at clouds. Keahi stayed standing, because sitting would have admitted sothing she wasn’t ready to let in. Arashi sat halfway and then stood again and then pretended that had always been his plan. Esen sat on the back of a bench and not on the seat, heels on the slats like a cat. Ichiro remained a step away from all of them, not because the distance was safer but because he didn’t know if the distance belonged to him or to the stone in his shoulder.
No one spoke.
A breeze rembered them briefly and moved on. Sowhere in the main quad, a bell marked a half-hour it didn’t care whether they counted. Through the high fra of the Lighthouse and its petals, the clouds dragged their gray like tired coats.
Raizen’s hand found the inside pocket of his jacket on its own, checked that the folded little packet was still there, and stopped before it could beco ritual. Hikari noticed and pretended not to; she stared at her shins and the grass stain she had acquired sohow on a day when no one sane would have thought to get grass on their clothes.
Finally, Ichiro took in a breath like a man who had found a sentence that might let the rest of the day exist.
"You want to know, don’t you" he said. He didn’t put a question at the end of it. He didn’t make it an invitation. He said it like you say the weather and it’s true regardless.
No one moved. That was a good enough answer.
"The first thing I rember is already being on the streets," he said. He hooked his fingers in his cloak and then let it go like he’d rembered doing that didn’t make it less true. "I don’t know how long. Long enough."
Keahi’s jaw worked and didn’t make sound. Arashi looked at his boots because looking anywhere else felt like a betrayal.
"Neoshima doesn’t like strays," Ichiro went on, the words light and heavy at once. "City likes tidy. I respect that, but people who fall between the tidies get picked up and stacked sowhere until soone stops counting."
"I’m..." Hikari started, then decided what she ant was not helpful, and closed her mouth. She folded her hands tighter in her lap.
"I lived in vents," Ichiro said, as if that were a normal detail. "Behind laundries. Inside a crate once until soone forgot to open it."
Feris made a small sound - protest compressed to sothing polite.
He shifted, and the wrong gold at his shoulder pulsed, a dull, quiet heartbeat seen through skin. The color crept a little down his arm, then faded. He didn’t look at it. He had learned not to give it that.
"The Wardens found ," he said, the way you say "the rain ca." "Once. Twice. I ran. There’s tricks you learn. Where caras forget to be eyes. Which courtyards have a tree you can get up if they learn your na. It was a lot of good luck. That ran out eventually."
Hikari had been holding her breath for too long and let it out, slow.
"They tagged ," he continued. "Took down. Not to a dorm. Under."
"The Underworks," Esen said softly.
Ichiro nodded once. The pulse in his shoulder answered again, as if the word had touched it. "They didn’t keep long. Not their place. Soone else was already looking."
"The Moirai" Raizen said, before he could decide whether saying it was a violence. He didn’t say Takeshi’s na out loud. He felt it like a hand on his shoulder anyway.
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