Ash and Ember

CHAPTER ELEVEN: Midnight

One day someone will make it safe. I've stopped waiting for that. Which is maybe why it catches me so completely off guard when something changes at midnight on a Tuesday with no warning at all.

Two weeks in. I have a routine.

I know where everything is , the training halls, the mess, the library on the second floor where the older students go to avoid each other. I know which instructors look at new arrivals' pack designations before they look at their scores. I know the girl from the senior table who's been cataloguing the new cohort , her name is Priya, second-year, fast and calculating and not yet sure what she thinks of me, which is the ideal state for someone I may eventually need to deal with. I know that Sophie has made three friends in two weeks through the mechanism of sitting next to people who looked uncomfortable and asking them one specific, genuine question about themselves. I know that the mess hall's morning porridge is edible at six but congealed by seven.

What I don't know is how to sleep.

The sleeping badly is not new , I've never been a good sleeper, too much internal inventory to get through. But this is different. I wake at two most mornings with my chest warm and my hands hot, a pressure behind my ribs like something that spent the day compressed and has now decided the night is its time. During training I hold it at a simmer. During assessments I pull it back further. The fire obeys, but obedience has a cost, and the cost is apparently paid at two in the morning when my eyes open and the room is dark and everything I've kept small all day wants to be bigger.

I've been going to the practice field.

Nobody out there at this hour. No assessment ledgers, no cohort rankings, no instructors with their particular pauses before they write my name. Just the cold and the dark and the stars and enough space to let the fire move without managing where it goes.

Tonight I go through the combat circuit twice before I start losing track of time.

This is the best part , when the tracking stops. When the fire stops being something I'm making decisions about and starts being something that simply moves through the form, responding to technique the way water responds to a channel. My strikes are faster with it than without. Not because it adds force , or not only that , but because the fire has its own instinct, a directional intelligence I'm still learning to read, and when I stop overriding it and let it inform my movement it finds lines through the drills I wouldn't have found on my own.

I'm getting better. Measurably. The record book, if I still had it , I don't have it, it's under a floorboard in a room I will not be returning to , would show the improvement clearly. I carry the numbers in my head instead. I am improving in the dark, alone, without credit, and this time I don't mind.

This time it feels different. This time the record is for me and for whatever comes next.

I push harder.

The fire responds , surges past the threshold I've been holding, expands outward in the way it did in the tribunal hall, and I feel the field under my feet before I see it: the grass browning, crisping, the scorch moving out from where I'm standing in a ring that is growing faster than I intended.

I pull against it.

The pulling doesn't work. That's the problem I haven't solved yet , at a certain level of output the fire stops being something I'm directing and becomes something I'm riding, and pulling back feels like leaning against a current that has decided it's done accommodating me. I clamp down. The fire pushes back. I clamp harder. The scorch ring widens another foot and the heat in my hands goes past warmth into something that starts to hurt, which has never happened before, which means I've found a new threshold I didn't know existed,

A hand closes around my wrist.

Not a grab. Not the panicked snatch of someone trying to stop damage. Just , a hand, arriving with complete steadiness, wrapping around my wrist and holding without pressure, the specific contact of someone who has decided to be present in a situation rather than react to it.

I almost ignite it.

The fire reads the contact as an intrusion and moves toward it, and I catch it , barely, by instinct, some part of me faster than the part that's struggling , and pull it back from his hand by about half a second.

I turn.

Derek Voss. Standing in the middle of the scorched field, coat unbuttoned, hair slightly undone from sleep , and his expression is the same expression he carries everywhere, the one that costs nothing and reveals nothing and is somehow, in this moment, the most disorienting thing I've ever encountered. Not performance-calm. Not the managed stillness my father used as a tool. Something more structural than that. Like a deep current , not still at the surface but steady all the way down, and the depth is the thing that holds.

He is not afraid of my fire.

He stepped into it. He looked at the ring of scorched grass and the gold light moving over my hands and he walked across the field and put his hand on my wrist, and he is standing here closer than anyone has voluntarily stood to me when the fire was visible, and he looks , curious. Attentive. Like this is a problem he's interested in.

"Breathe," he says. Quiet. Even. "You're fighting it. Stop fighting it."

"I am breathing."

"You're breathing like someone in a fight. Different thing. Slower."

I slow my breathing.

It is very annoying how much this helps.

The fire recedes. Not gone , never gone, I'm beginning to understand that gone was never actually an option, just a story I told myself to explain the days I didn't feel it , but receding, settling, the pressure behind my ribs moving back to the low, manageable warmth. I stand in the smoking field and I am aware of several things at once: the chill of the night air against my face, the faint smell of scorched grass, the hand still circling my wrist, and the way my heart is doing something I have decided not to examine at this particular moment.

He releases my wrist when I'm steady. Steps back , not far. Just enough.

He looks at the field. He looks at me. The expression on his face is thoughtful, which is the most disorienting thing anyone has ever aimed at me in this context , I'm used to frightened, or assessing, or the particular controlled neutrality of someone managing their reaction. He just looks like he's thinking.

"Do you always train at this hour?"

"When I can't sleep."

"And you can't sleep because,"

"It builds up." The sentence is out before I've decided to say it. I look at him and he looks back and he doesn't look like someone filing information for later use, just someone listening, and I continue before I can stop myself. "During the day I keep it small. I keep it at a level where nobody notices and I can manage the output. And then at night,"

"It pushes back," he says.

I look at him.

"Yeah," I say. "It pushes back."

He nods once. Not in the way people nod when they're waiting for you to finish so they can respond , in the way that means they've received something and are taking a moment with it. I don't know what to do with being understood by someone I don't know. I'm not sure I have the reflex for it. I've only seen it operate in Nara's cottage, and that took years, and this is a practice field at two in the morning and we have exchanged approximately forty sentences in our total acquaintance.

"How did you know I was here?" I ask.

"I saw the light from the instructor's corridor. The field glows."

I look at the scorch marks. The grass is still faintly luminescent at the edges where the fire was hottest. "I'll be more careful."

"That's not," He stops. Something shifts in his expression , the small adjustment of a person deciding something. "That's not what I was going to say."

"What were you going to say?"

He looks at me directly. No performance in it. No calculation running behind his eyes the way it runs behind most people's eyes when they look at me. Just , the look. Level and present, and the quality of the attention in it is something I'm running out of words to describe because the words I have for it are the words Sophie keeps trying to say and I keep stopping her from finishing.

"Controlling it and suppressing it aren't the same thing," he says. "You've been doing the second one since you arrived. Probably for longer. The fire reads that as conflict and it escalates. You can't manage it through compression , you have to learn its actual shape."

The accuracy of this lands somewhere slightly winded.

"I don't," I start.

"You're not my student yet," he says. "But come back tomorrow night. I'll," He stops. Something moves in his face that might be the beginning of reconsidering , a rare c***k in the structural calm. "That's not appropriate protocol."

"Then what?"

"Come to the advanced session at dawn. Ask to be reassigned."

"They won't reassign me. I placed third cohort."

"No," he says. Quiet. Certain. "You didn't." He looks at the field , at the scorch pattern, which I only now realise is not random. The marks trace the exact lines of the combat circuit. The technique is visible even in the damage. "Whatever you've been showing in your assessments isn't what you actually are. Is it."

Not a question.

"No," I say. Because there is no point in lying to someone who just watched me burn a perfect circuit into the grass.

"I thought so." He looks at me one more moment. Then he turns and starts across the field toward the building. "Come to the advanced session. Tell them Voss cleared it."

"Why are you doing this?"

He doesn't stop walking. "Because you're burning my practice field and I'd rather you burned it productively."

"That's not an answer."

He stops.

His back is to me. In the dark, in the coat that's still unbuttoned, with the faint glow of the scorch marks around us and the stars doing their cold indifferent thing overhead , he just stands there for a second, and I watch the line of his shoulders and I think: he's deciding how much to say. I know that particular stillness. I've been doing it my whole life.

He turns halfway. Not fully. Just enough that I can see the side of his face.

"Your grandmother wrote me three letters," he says. "The last one, six months ago. She said," He stops. Starts again, in the careful way of someone quoting something that mattered. "She said: when she arrives, don't let them put her in the third cohort. She'll let them if you don't stop it. She'll make herself small and she'll be good at it and you'll almost believe her."

The warmth in my chest moves in a way that has nothing to do with the fire.

"She said that."

"She said that."

I look at the scorch marks in the grass. At the circuit, precise and complete, etched in gold and char.

"What else did she say?"

He turns back toward the building.

"Come to the dawn session," he says. "And I'll tell you the rest."