Chapter 12

After dinner I walked. I didn't have a destination. I just needed to be somewhere that wasn't the dining hall or my room or anywhere else full of people who could do what I couldn't.

The grounds were larger than they looked from inside. Paths wound between buildings and through gardens that were probably beautiful in spring but now, in October, had gone brown and brittle. Leaves skittered across the paths in the evening wind. The trees had thinned enough that I could see the sky going dark between their branches.

I passed the building Thaddeus had mentioned. The one that housed the Sign halls. Four wings branching off a central rotunda, each one radiating a different quality that even I could feel from outside. Warmth from one direction. Something sharp and protective from another. A pulling sensation from a third. And from the fourth, a sense of constant motion, like standing next to a river you couldn't see.

I should probably go in. Feel whatever I was supposed to feel. Find where I belonged.

I kept walking.

The lake was at the far edge of the grounds, past the athletic fields and through a stand of old oaks that seemed to lean toward the water. Students were warned about this place, though no one had told me exactly why. Just vague cautions about spending time there alone. The kind of warnings that sounded reasonable on the surface but had something underneath them that nobody wanted to name.

I sat on the bank and stared at the water and tried to feel something other than defeated.

The lake didn't feel like the practice room. It didn't feel like the dining hall or the dormitory or any of the saturated spaces I'd been thrown into since arriving. Those places felt layered with human experience, thick with emotion and memory pressed into stone. This felt different. Deeper and less human.

The water was perfectly still. It reflected the darkening sky like polished obsidian. Trees crowded the shore, their bare branches reaching toward the first stars, and the silence was so complete that I could hear my own heartbeat.

I found myself leaning closer without meaning to. Something about the water pulled at me. Not the way a Sign hall pulled, with direction and intention. This was older than that. Patient in a way that didn't have anything to do with human timescales.

My fingers brushed the surface.

Cold. Immediate, sharp cold that went deeper than temperature. Something underneath the cold that I didn't have words for. An age that made the practice room's centuries feel like yesterday. A patience that had nothing to do with waiting for anything specific, because it had been here before there were things to wait for.

For just a moment, I felt the lake the way I felt people. Not its history, not its memories, but something like its intention.

Waiting.

The word came from somewhere I couldn't identify. Not a voice, not exactly. More like understanding that arrived without being invited. The way you know the sun is warm before you step into it.

I jerked my hand back, heart pounding.

The water was still. Just water. No ripples, no indication anything had happened.

But it had happened. I sat on the bank with my hand dripping and my pulse racing and I knew that something had changed. For the first time since arriving at Mudwick, I'd felt a place instead of just the people who'd been there. Not clearly. Not the way the other students read saturated spaces with their glowing hands and their visible breath. Just a flash. A crack in the wall between me and whatever everyone else could already see.

A place had finally talked to me. And it had been the one place everyone said to avoid.

I didn't know what to do with that. So I sat there. Watched the water go darker as the sky lost its last light. Let my heartbeat slow down. Let the moment exist without trying to explain it or fit it into the framework of everything I'd been told about how this world worked.

The lake didn't care about frameworks. The lake had been here long before anyone started building them.

"You shouldn't be out here alone."

I didn't jump. I'd felt Sasha approaching, her particular emotional signature becoming familiar enough to recognize. Careful and controlled on the surface, with something more complicated underneath. She moved through the world like someone who'd learned to take up exactly as much space as she was allowed and not a centimeter more.

"Everyone says that. No one says why."

"Because no one knows exactly why." She sat down beside me, keeping a careful distance from the water. "Just that people who spend too much time at the lake start hearing things."

"What kind of things?"

"Voices. Whispers. Some people say it's old spirits. Some people say it's just the saturation playing tricks." She pulled her jacket tighter. The evening had gotten cold fast. "Either way, the school discourages solo visits."

"And yet here you are."

"I come here to think sometimes. When the main buildings get too crowded." She looked out at the water. "I grew up in a house with six people and one bathroom. My parents and my grandmother and my two brothers, all in a three-bedroom in Silver Spring. Quiet space is valuable to me."

It was the most personal thing she'd said since I'd met her. Sasha traded in facts and analysis. She organized the world into categories and felt safe inside the structure. Admitting she needed quiet felt like watching someone take off a glove.

"It's not just the noise," she continued, and I got the sense she was saying things she didn't usually say. Maybe the lake helped with that. Maybe the dark did. "It's the expectation. Everyone here has a map. Old family kids have their parents' maps. Legacy kids have institutional maps. Even Dao has his family's history to push against, which is its own kind of map."

"What do you have?"

"A scholarship and a highlighted schedule." She said it flatly, without self-pity. Just the shape of the thing. "My parents don't know what this place is. They think I got a grant to attend a gifted boarding school in Connecticut. I can't call them when I'm scared because I can't explain what I'm scared of."

"That sounds lonely."

"It is." Two words. No elaboration. She let them sit in the cold air between us.

"I can't explain any of this to my dad either," I said. "He thinks I'm at some special program for gifted kids. He doesn't know about any of this. Reading people. Saturation. Places that remember."

"So we're both liars."

"I prefer 'selectively honest.'"

She almost smiled. The almost was what made it real.

We sat in the silence for a while. The lake held itself still, that ancient patience radiating off the surface. I didn't touch it again. Once was enough for one night.

"Drift practice was bad," Sasha said eventually.

"That's one word for it."

She pulled her knees up to her chest. "The game assumes you can do something you can't do."

"That's one way to put it."

"It's the accurate way. Drift is built around reading the field. If you can't read the field, you're playing with half the information everyone else has."

"Thanks. That's very encouraging."

"I'm not trying to encourage you. I'm trying to understand the problem." She turned to look at me directly. "You read people. Their emotions, their intentions, even their decisions before they make them. You were doing it during the drill today. Watching Marcus move, feeling where the other team's runners were going. You called two of their directions before they committed."

"And we still lost."

"Because you were trying to do two things at once. Read their movements AND translate that into positioning for our team. That's too much for one person who's still learning what they can do." She paused. "What if you just fed me raw information? What the other caller's looking at, where their attention is going, what they're about to do. Let me turn that into positioning."

"That's still not seeing the pools."

"No. But it's seeing through someone who can." She stood up, brushing dead leaves off her clothes. "You can read people. That's not nothing. That might even be something important. But you're never going to figure out what it's good for if you sit by this lake feeling sorry for yourself."

"I wasn't feeling sorry for myself."

"You absolutely were. And you're allowed to, for a little while. Today sucked. But tomorrow you get up and you figure out how to make what you have work for what they need." She offered me a hand without thinking, then pulled it back. "Sorry. Habit."

"It's fine." I stood up on my own. "You're surprisingly good at pep talks for someone who says she's not trying to encourage me."

"That wasn't encouragement. That was tactical analysis." But she almost smiled again.

We walked back toward the main buildings together. The grounds were quiet now, most students inside for the evening. The weight of the place pressed against me from every direction, but it felt more manageable with someone beside me. Someone who also didn't have a map.

Back in my room, Dao was in bed but not sleeping. His phone was propped on his pillow, casting blue light across his face. He turned it off when I came in.

"Late for a first day."

"Went for a walk. Ended up at the lake."

"The lake." Something shifted in his voice. Not quite worry. Caution. "By yourself?"

"Sasha showed up."

"Good. That place is weird." He rolled onto his back. "My grandmother told me about it once. Said there are spots in the world where the saturation isn't from people. Where it was already there before anyone arrived to feel it. She called them natural wells."

"What does that mean?"

"Hell if I know. She said a lot of things that sounded like poetry and might have been science. Hard to tell with her." He was quiet for a moment. The room was dark enough that I could barely see his face. Just the outline of him against the window where campus lights leaked through.

"Can I ask you something?" I said.

"You're going to anyway."

"Your family. You said your grandmother was one of the strongest of her generation. But Dao isn't a name that opens doors here. I can tell from the way people react to it."

He didn't answer right away. The silence stretched long enough that I thought he might not answer at all.

"My grandfather," he said finally. "Arturo Reyes. He was a practitioner too. Worked with sacred sites in the Philippines, places that had been accumulating for thousands of years. Places older than anything in this country." His voice was steady, but underneath it I could feel the edges of something sharp. Old anger, carefully maintained. "Someone accused him of draining a site. Pouring decades of accumulated memory into himself for personal power."

"Was it true?"

"The accusation was never proven. Which, in the Zant world, means it doesn't matter. The accusation was enough." He picked at a thread on his blanket. I could hear the small sound of it in the dark. "After that, the money dried up. The connections faded. People who'd been family friends for years stopped returning calls. The Reyes name went from respected to suspicious in about six months."

"I'm sorry."

"Yeah." Another long pause. "The thing is, I don't know if he did it. I've asked my grandmother and she changes the subject. I've asked my parents and they give me the party line about false accusations and family honor. But nobody looks me in the eye when they say it."

"And not knowing is worse than either answer."

"Not knowing is the worst thing there is." His voice had a roughness to it now that he was trying to control. "If he did it, at least I'd understand why everything fell apart. If he didn't, at least I'd have clean anger. But this middle space where I can't trust the story I was raised on and can't prove the alternative, that's where the real damage lives."

We lay in the dark. The traces of former students pressed gently against my awareness from every direction, their old anxieties so familiar now they were almost comforting. Like ambient noise you stop noticing.

"My grandmother used to bring me old locks," Dao said after a while. His voice had shifted again, the sharp edges folded away, the conversation steering itself somewhere lighter. "From garage sales, thrift stores, neighbors' junk drawers. She'd set them on the kitchen table and say 'figure this out.' I'd sit there for hours, working the mechanisms, feeling the pins, learning how each one was different."

"Is that a metaphor?"

"It's a fact. I literally picked locks on my grandmother's kitchen table." I could hear the grin even though I couldn't see it. "But yeah, maybe. Everything's a locked door. People, places, families. The trick is learning which tool opens which one without breaking something you can't put back together."

His breathing slowed. Not asleep yet, but getting there. The room settled around us, its old weight becoming something that held us in place rather than pressing us down.

"Eli."

"Yeah?"

"The lake. Did you feel anything? When you were there?"

I thought about the cold water. The word that came from nowhere. The crack in the wall that had always stood between me and whatever everyone else could already see.

"Maybe," I said. "I don't know yet."

"Okay." He accepted that without pushing. "Good night."

"Good night, Dao."

I stared at the ceiling. Thought about natural wells and locked doors and families that fall apart. Thought about Sasha drawing maps because the unknown terrified her and Thaddeus carrying a name he hadn't earned and Dao picking apart the mechanisms of things because understanding them was the only power he trusted.

And the lake. That ancient, patient, inhuman thing that had spoken a single word to me and then gone silent.

I was surrounded by people with stories I was only beginning to learn. Each of them carrying something heavy enough to shape the way they moved through the world.

I thought about calling Dad. It was late, but not that late. He'd be in his chair, probably. TV on, volume low. The house quiet around him in the way it got after I left.

I picked up my phone. Put it down again.

Tomorrow. I'd call him tomorrow.

I fell asleep listening to Dao's breathing and the old walls settling around us, and somewhere in the distance, if I strained hard enough, I could almost imagine I heard the lake.

Still waiting.