Chapter 11

Lunch was loud and crowded and I was starting to understand the rhythms of it. The dining hall had its own geography. Upperclassmen claimed the tables near the windows. First-years scattered through the middle. The scholarship kids, I was learning, tended to cluster near the door, as if maintaining easy access to the exit was a habit they couldn't break.

Dao was already there when I arrived, halfway through a plate that looked like he'd taken a little of everything. He waved me over with a fork that had something unidentifiable on it.

"How bad was Echoes?"

"I'll survive."

"That bad?"

"Everyone's hands were glowing except mine. One guy made his breath visible from the cold. I stood there like an idiot while the walls refused to talk to me." I sat down and poked at my food. "So yeah. Great start."

"Blackwood was better," he guessed.

"Blackwood was fine. He talked a lot about portals and I understood maybe twenty percent of it, but at least I didn't feel like a complete failure."

Sasha appeared across from us with a tray organized so precisely it looked like she'd used a ruler. Protein on one side, carb on the other, vegetables forming a neat border. She was reading between bites, some kind of academic paper that she held at an angle to avoid dripping on.

Thaddeus arrived last with an extra roll that he set on my tray without comment.

"You don't have to feed me."

"My mother would rise from the grave if I watched someone eat dining hall rolls without intervention. Those are from the faculty kitchen. Dao showed me where they keep them."

"Dao showed you where they keep them because Dao believes food inequality is a social justice issue," Dao said. "Also because the faculty rolls have butter already in them and the student ones taste like compressed sadness."

I bit into the roll. It was, objectively, better. "How do you get into the faculty kitchen?"

"I know a guy."

"He found a hallway that connects the storage rooms," Sasha said without looking up from her paper. "The lock was old. He picked it."

"You pick locks?"

Dao shrugged. "I take things apart. Have since I was a kid. Locks, watches, old radios. My grandmother used to bring me broken stuff from the neighbors and I'd sit on the porch and figure out how it worked." His hands were doing the thing again, fidgeting with a bread knife, turning it over and over in his fingers. "Turns out school locks are easier than the ones my uncle had on his toolbox. Which, in retrospect, should have been a red flag about what was in the toolbox."

"What was in the toolbox?"

"We don't talk about the toolbox."

I laughed. The sound surprised me. It felt foreign in my mouth, like a word in a language I hadn't spoken in weeks.

Sasha set down her paper. "Have you visited any of the Sign halls yet?"

"I don't know what that means."

"The four halls," Dao said. He ticked them off on his fingers. "Hearth, Thorn, Gate, and Tide. Every student eventually declares for one. It's part of how they track your development, match you with mentors, all that."

"First-years are technically Unmarked," Sasha added. "But most people start feeling a pull toward one Sign or another pretty early. The halls have different flavors. Different kinds of saturation. You're supposed to visit all four and see which one resonates."

"It's not destiny," Sasha continued, and the way she said it had the particular emphasis of someone correcting a popular misconception. "It's pattern recognition. Your brain aligns with certain types of saturated environments based on neural architecture and developmental exposure. The Signs are categories, not cosmic sorting hats."

Thaddeus tilted his head. "That's one way to look at it."

"It's the accurate way."

"My grandmother said her Signing felt like coming home. Like walking into a room she'd been trying to find her whole life." He wasn't arguing. Just offering a different frame.

"Your grandmother grew up in a family where Signs were treated as spiritual identities. Her experience would naturally be interpreted through that lens." Sasha paused. Seemed to hear herself. "That doesn't mean it wasn't real to her."

"Thank you."

"I'm just saying the mystical framing obscures the actual mechanism."

"And I'm just saying sometimes the mechanism isn't the point." Thaddeus bit into his roll, and the conversation sat between them, unresolved but not hostile. Dao and I watched like spectators at a match neither player was trying to win.

"And if none of them resonate?" I asked.

They exchanged a glance.

"They usually do," Thaddeus said carefully. "Eventually."

"What if someone feels pulled toward more than one?"

Dao shook his head. "That doesn't really happen."

"Why not?"

"Because the Signs are different. Really different." He gestured with his fork. "Hearth is about homes and belonging. Thorn is about boundaries and protection. Gate is about connections and passage. Tide is about change and flow. They're not compatible flavors. You might have a mild interest in a second Sign, but when you feel yours, you know."

"Everyone says that," Thaddeus agreed. "It's like asking what if someone's favorite color is all of them. You just have one that feels more right than the others."

I filed that away, troubled by how little it matched what I'd felt in the Portal Hall when I arrived. Every doorway had pulled at me. Not equally, but none of them had felt wrong either. More like they were all speaking the same language and I just couldn't understand any of them yet.

Great. Another thing I probably couldn't do the normal way.

"I'll add it to the list," I said. "Right after 'learn to read places' and 'stop being foundationally unusual.'"

Across the dining hall, a kid was eating alone. Expensive clothes, sharp jaw, expression that suggested the food had personally insulted him. He sat at a table meant for six with enough empty space around him to feel deliberate.

"Who's that?"

Dao followed my gaze. "Marcus Holloway. Third-gen. Old family name, not much left behind it. His grandmother was somebody, from what I've heard. She's sick now. Real sick. He transferred here to be closer to her, I think. The rest of the family's been sliding ever since."

"He looks angry."

"He looks like that all the time." Dao turned back to his food. "Rich kid with a chip on his shoulder because the money ran out. There's a few of them here."

I caught a flash of something from across the room. Not enough to read, not from this distance, but enough to feel the shape of it. The anger was real. But it was layered over something else, something heavier and older than a teenager should be carrying. Armor, and something underneath it that the armor was built to protect.

Then he looked up and caught me watching. His expression didn't change but something shifted behind his eyes, like a door closing.

I looked away.

Afternoon brought Drift.

I'd heard the word mentioned since I arrived but hadn't really understood what it meant. Now, standing at the edge of an outdoor field roughly the size of a soccer pitch, I started to get the idea.

Capture the flag. That's what it was, basically. Two flags on poles stuck in the ground at opposite ends of the field, fabric snapping in the October wind.

But the field itself was wrong.

Not wrong exactly. Alive. Saturation pools shimmered across the terrain like heat distortion or oil on water. Some were obvious, bright patches that even I could vaguely perceive if I squinted. Others were subtle, barely-there ripples that my classmates pointed at while I saw nothing. The pools appeared, faded, shifted. A spot that looked empty suddenly bloomed with visible energy. A patch that had been bright a moment ago went dark.

Coach Vasquez explained the rules. Big man, ex-military bearing, the kind of person who talked like every sentence was a direct order even when he was describing lunch options. Players drew power from the pools to fuel pushes, which were bursts of force that could freeze opponents in place for a few seconds. The team with the best caller, the person who tracked the shifting pools and directed traffic, usually won.

"Callers are your eyes," Vasquez said. "Runners are your legs. Guards are your spine. The caller sees the field and calls the plays. Without a good caller, you're running blind."

He divided us into practice squads. Five per team. I ended up with Dao, Sasha, Thaddeus, and Marcus Holloway.

Marcus arrived late. He walked onto the field like he was doing it a favor by showing up. Those expensive clothes from the dining hall were gone, replaced by practice gear that still looked more expensive than anyone else's.

"Alright," Sasha said as we huddled. "Who can see the pools clearly?"

Marcus shrugged. "I can."

"So can I," said a girl from another squad who was close enough to overhear. She smirked at us. "Good luck."

"Anyone else?" Sasha looked around. Her eyes landed on me. "Eli. You're a reader, right? Can you see them?"

I looked at the field. Really looked. The obvious pools were there, sort of. Bright smears that I could almost track. But the subtle ones, the ones my classmates were pointing at and discussing like they were labeled on a map, might as well have been invisible.

"Barely," I admitted. "The big ones, maybe. The rest is like trying to read through fog."

"Great," Marcus muttered. "We've got a blind caller."

"I'm not calling anything. I can't see well enough to..."

"Someone has to." Sasha cut me off. "Marcus, you said you can see them?"

"I can see them fine. I'm not spending the whole practice yelling directions." He crossed his arms. "I'm fast. I'll run the flag."

Dao bristled. "So you'll just do whatever you want and leave us to figure it out?"

"Pretty much."

Thaddeus tried to organize something workable. He suggested Sasha call what she could see, Dao and Marcus run, himself on guard. Marcus was already walking away before he finished talking.

"He does that," Thaddeus said mildly. "Apparently."

What followed was twenty minutes of chaos. Coach Vasquez ran us through a basic drill, two squads scrimmaging, and we fell apart immediately. Marcus could see the pools. He stepped into them like he'd been born there, the shimmer flowing into him with an ease that made my chest tight. When he pushed, the air rippled with visible force, strong enough to freeze opponents for three or four seconds instead of the usual two.

But he didn't communicate. Ran his own angles, chased his own plays, left the rest of us scrambling to figure out what was happening.

There was a moment during the drill when Marcus drew from a deep pool near the boundary line. The shimmer flowed up his arms and across his shoulders, and for a second he was luminous. Every bit of natural talent on full display. He blew past two defenders without breaking stride, moving so fast the air distorted in his wake. Sasha stopped calling directions to watch.

Then he planted the flag and walked back to our side without looking at any of us. Like he'd done something unremarkable. Like it didn't matter.

We lost the drill badly. Not even close.

Vasquez pulled me aside after. "Your perception is atypical."

"So I've heard."

"You can't see the pools. That's a problem."

"I know."

"Figure out how to contribute or figure out something else. Your team needs you useful, not spectating."

He walked away to talk to another squad. I stood at the edge of the field and watched other teams run drills. They moved with coordination, their callers pointing at pools I couldn't see, their runners drawing and pushing in visible bursts of power.

Real magic. Visible, tangible, beautiful. And I was standing outside it.

Walking back to the dorms, Dao vented. "He didn't say a single word to us the entire drill. Not one. Just ran his own plays and left like we weren't even there."

"Maybe he doesn't know how to work with people," Thaddeus offered.

"Or maybe he doesn't care."

Sasha was quiet. She'd been quiet since the drill ended, which was unusual for someone who had an opinion about everything.

"He's not lazy," she said finally.

We all looked at her.

"Marcus. He's not lazy. Lazy people don't move like that." She was staring ahead, working through something in her head. "He's choosing not to engage. That's different."

Nobody responded. We didn't know what to do with that observation. Dao wanted to be angry at Marcus, and he had every right to be. Thaddeus wanted to give him the benefit of the doubt, because that's what Thaddeus did.

Sasha wasn't doing either. She was just seeing something the rest of us hadn't.

I caught it and filed it away. Didn't know what it meant yet.

The October wind picked up as we crossed the quad. Dead leaves skittered across the path in small tornados that lasted three seconds and died. Somewhere behind us, Marcus Holloway was walking alone, and somewhere in front of us, the dining hall was filling with people who'd had better afternoons than we had.

"Tomorrow," Sasha said. "We'll figure it out tomorrow."

It sounded more like a promise she was making to herself than to any of us.