Home felt strange in the particular way it always did after significant travel — familiar and slightly foreign at once, Kingsley's hallways somehow both exactly as she'd left them and subtly different, colored now by the accumulated weight of everything Budapest had taught her about the scale of the sport she'd chosen to pursue.
"Round of sixteen at Junior Worlds," Priya announced at lunch, practically glowing with secondhand pride. "In your first appearance. Do you understand how insane that is? I looked it up — most junior fencers don't even qualify for their first Worlds appearance until they're considerably further into their competitive careers."
"Coach Volkov keeps telling me that too. I still feel like I have so much further to go."
"That's called ambition, and it's a good thing,
