I did not surge.
That was the thing I needed them to understand first — that what they had read about Tides in their centuries of research, the uncontrolled explosive power of a gift that operated in crisis mode, was not what they were going to encounter. I had worked for six days under Maren's accelerated training to make sure of that. The girl who had detonated in the training yard was not gone — she was the foundation. But she was not the ceiling.
I opened the channel slowly. Deliberately. The way you light something rather than the way something ignites.
Every Blackthorn wolf in the courtyard and at the perimeter felt it — I knew they did because I could feel them feeling it, the lift and expansion of their gifts under the amplification, the way each frequency rose to meet what I wa
