AWAKENED

QUESTIONS

The third week at Nexus brought the first round of formal assessments, written exams and practical demonstrations that would determine each student's ranking within their year and their race, and the entire academy hummed with anxious energy as students crammed for tests and practiced their spells in every available corner. Kira studied her magical theory notes until the words blurred on the page and her eyes ached from the dim light in the outcast wing's small library, but it didn't matter how much she studied because the practical assessment required magic she didn't have, and you couldn't study your way into an Awakening that had never happened.

The practical assessment took place in the Grand Arena with the entire faculty watching from the judges' box and every student seated in the stands waiting for their turn to demonstrate what they could do. One by one, the first-year students walked onto the arena floor and showed their power, Dragonkin producing flames of various intensities and Elves manipulating wind in graceful patterns and Witches casting spells that ranged from impressive to adequate, and Humans performing their modest elemental tricks that looked pathetic beside the other races but at least it existed, which was more than Kira could say.

When her name was called, a murmur went through the crowd that was half confusion and half amusement, because everyone knew the Null girl and nobody understood why she was being assessed at all. Kira walked onto the arena floor with her chin up and her shoulders back and her expression carefully blank, refusing to let them see how much it hurt to stand in the center of this massive arena with thousands of eyes on her and have absolutely nothing to show them.

"State your name and your demonstrated ability for the record," the assessment proctor said, a bored-looking Elf who didn't even glance up from his clipboard.

"Kira. No demonstrated magical ability."

The proctor's pen paused over the clipboard and he finally looked up, his eyebrows raised in mild surprise that quickly smoothed into professional neutrality. "No ability at all? Not even elemental potential?"

"None."

A ripple of whispers spread through the arena stands and Kira heard someone laugh, a short sharp sound of dismissal that made her hands curl into fists at her sides. The proctor cleared his throat and made a note on his clipboard. "You are classified as Null. There is no practical assessment available for your category. You may step down."

Kira walked off the arena floor with her head held high and her back straight, but inside she was crumbling, because standing in front of all those people and admitting that she had nothing was a different kind of pain than she had prepared herself for, a humiliation that went deeper than bullying and touched the rawest part of her. She made it all the way to the corridor outside the arena before she had to stop and press her back against the wall and close her eyes and breathe, just breathe, in and out, in and out, until the burning behind her eyelids faded and the tightness in her chest loosened enough to let her move again.

She was so focused on holding herself together that she didn't hear the footsteps approaching until a voice spoke from right in front of her.

"You're still here."

Kira's eyes snapped open and she found Cade standing a few feet away, his silver-white hair gleaming in the light from the arena doorway and his coldly handsome face arranged in an expression of cool assessment that was somehow less offensive than Maren's open contempt but more unsettling in its own way. His elven features were sharp and precise, a blade made of ice and silver, and his pale blue eyes looked at her with a calculating intensity that made her feel like a specimen under glass.

"I was just leaving," Kira said, pushing off the wall and trying to step around him, but Cade shifted to block her path with a casual grace that didn't even look intentional.

"Your hair is unusual," he said, and his voice was cool and clipped and very Elven, each word precise. "Silver at the roots. I've never seen that coloring on a human before. It's almost elven."

"I get that a lot," Kira said flatly, her heart picking up speed because the last thing she needed was an Elven Noble asking questions about her hair that she couldn't answer. "It's just a genetic anomaly. Means nothing."

"Silver hair means something in my culture," Cade said, and his pale blue eyes held hers with an intensity that felt like a gentle but insistent probe trying to push past her defenses. "It means royal blood. You're not royal, obviously, and you're not elven, so the resemblance is merely coincidental. But it's striking. You look like someone I might have seen before, though I can't imagine where."

"I have one of those faces," Kira said, and she was proud of how steady her voice sounded even though her pulse was racing. "Now if you'll excuse me, I have somewhere to be."

She stepped around him before he could respond and walked quickly down the corridor toward the outcast wing, not running but moving with purpose, and she didn't look back even though she could feel his eyes on her until she turned the corner and the sensation faded. Cade was smart, too smart, and if he started seriously investigating the silver in her hair he might find connections that Kira wasn't ready to face.

She found Riley in their dormitory and collapsed onto her friend's bed without asking permission, staring at the ceiling with a frustrated groan that said more than words could. Riley took one look at her and produced a cup of warm tea from somewhere, pressing it into Kira's hands and sitting beside her in patient silence until Kira was ready to talk.

"The practical assessment was a disaster," Kira said finally, holding the warm cup between her palms and letting the heat seep into her cold fingers. "I stood in the middle of the arena and told everyone I have nothing. And then Cade cornered me outside and started asking questions about my hair. He said it looks elven. He said it looks royal."

Riley's kind eyes sharpened with concern. "Cade is dangerous, Kira. He's smart and observant and he doesn't let go of things that interest him. If he starts looking into your background—"

"I know," Kira said. "But what can I do? I can't change my hair and I can't give him answers I don't have. I don't know why it's silver at the roots. I don't know anything about my mother except that my father loved her and someone took her away."

Riley was quiet for a moment, turning something over in her mind. "Have you ever tried to find out more about her? Asked your father, searched records, anything?"

Kira shook her head slowly. "My father shuts down whenever I bring her up. He gets this look in his eyes like something inside him is breaking all over again, and I can't do that to him. He loved her so much and he lost her so badly and whatever happened left a wound that never healed. I can't pick at it just to satisfy my own curiosity."

"Maybe it's not just curiosity," Riley said gently. "Maybe there are answers you need, Kira. Answers about who you are and why you're different and why you survived when no other half-blood ever has. You said yourself that you shouldn't be alive, that something about your existence breaks every rule the world has established. Don't you want to know why?"

Kira stared into her tea and didn't answer, because the truth was that she did want to know, she wanted it more than anything, but wanting answers meant asking questions and asking questions meant exposing wounds that she had spent her entire life learning to protect, and she wasn't sure she was strong enough to survive what she might find.

The next morning brought a new torment from Maren, because she had apparently decided that public humiliation was more effective than physical threats when it came to breaking a Null. Kira woke to find that someone had broken into her room during the night and destroyed most of her belongings, her clothes torn and scattered, her books ripped apart, her hand wraps cut into pieces, and a single word burned into the wooden headboard of her bed with concentrated fire that left the wood charred and smoking.

FREAK.

Kira stood in the middle of the destruction and felt the anger rise up inside her like a tide, hot and sharp and almost overwhelming in its intensity, and she had to close her eyes and breathe through it for a full minute before she trusted herself to move without doing something she would regret. When she opened her eyes the anger was still there but it was controlled, and she methodically began picking up the pieces of her ruined belongings and sorting what could be salvaged from what couldn't.

Vanessa appeared in her doorway twenty minutes later, summoned by the commotion, and the dormitory enforcer took in the destruction with a single sweep of her black eyes and then looked at Kira with an expression that was not quite sympathy but was at least recognition of the injustice. "I will investigate this," Vanessa said flatly. "In the future, I recommend warding your door. I can teach you a physical lock mechanism that doesn't require magic."

"Thank you," Kira said, and she meant it, because Vanessa could have dismissed this as the natural consequence of being a Null in a school of the powerful but instead she was treating it like the crime it was.

Vanessa hesitated in the doorway as if she wanted to say something else, and then she spoke in a voice that was slightly less cold than her usual tone. "I watched your combat demonstration last week. You move well. Your technique is better than three-quarters of the students in this academy, including most of the Dragonkin who rely on their enhanced strength instead of learning proper form. It won't help you against real magic, but it's something."

It was the closest thing to a compliment Kira had received from anyone in authority at this school, and it landed in a place inside her that was hungry for recognition and acknowledgment, even from a cold and distant Dark Witch who would probably bind her to the bed for breaking curfew without a second thought. "Thank you," she said again, and Vanessa nodded once and disappeared into the hallway, shadows trailing behind her.

Riley and Tim and Sophie helped Kira clean up her room and replace what could be replaced, and Tim produced a spare set of hand wraps from his own limited supplies and pressed them into her hands with a grin different from his usual joking expression. "Now you can keep hitting things," he said. "Preferably not me."

"I make no promises," Kira said, and she wrapped the new bandages around her knuckles and felt the familiar comfort of cotton and leather against her skin, the feeling of being armed even when her hands were empty.

That evening, Kira went to the training yard alone and ran through her combat forms, the anger, the humiliation and the questions she couldn't answer had all been burned away by physical exhaustion, leaving only the clean tired emptiness that was the closest thing to peace she ever felt. She was practicing a complicated combination of blocks and counterstrikes against an imaginary opponent when she sensed rather than saw that she was no longer alone, and she turned to find Drex standing at the edge of the yard watching her with those with an unreadable expression that she was starting to recognize as his default state.

"You train harder than anyone else at this academy," he said, and it wasn't a question or a compliment, just an observation delivered in that low, rough voice. "Why? You'll never be strong enough to fight magic with your fists, no matter how good your technique gets."

Kira lowered her hands from her defensive stance and faced him across the yard, her chest still heaving from exertion and her skin flushed and damp with sweat that cooled rapidly in the evening air. "Maybe not," she said. "But I'll be strong enough to fight everyone who thinks I'm nothing because I'm a Null. I'll be strong enough to stand when they want me to kneel. That's enough."

Drex was silent for a long moment, his red eyes tracing over her face and her hair and her stance with an intensity that felt like a searchlight, and then he made a sound that might have been acknowledgment or might have been something else entirely. "It's not enough," he said finally. "But it's more than most of them have." He turned and walked away without waiting for a response, and Kira watched him go and wondered why the most powerful student at the academy kept showing up in her life when she was supposed to be invisible, and whether his attention was a warning or a promise or something she hadn't learned the word for yet.

That night she dreamet of falling through darkness toward a light she couldn't reach and a voice she couldn't hear, and she woke up with her a name on her lips, a name that dissolved back into the void before she could catch it and hold it and finally understand what she had been trying to remember her entire life.