Chapter 13

The first week settled into a pattern of specific failures.

Tuesday's Echoes class, Professor Aldridge gave me an adapted exercise. While the other students read the practice wall's layered history, I was supposed to focus on a single human trace and follow it as deep as I could. See if reading a person's residue could eventually lead me into the place-memory underneath.

It couldn't. I followed a student from the 1970s as far as I could, felt her frustration and determination and the particular way she pressed her palm flat against the stone, but when I tried to step from her experience into the wall's, I hit the same fog. The same blur. Like the wall was speaking through a closed window and I could see its mouth moving but couldn't hear the words.

Aldridge watched me try. Her expression wasn't unkind, but it wasn't encouraging either.

"The path from human residue to place-memory may not exist for you," she said. "Some readers are specialized. There's no shame in it."

There was no shame in it. She was right about that. But there was also no way to pass her class.

Wednesday's Drift practice was worse. Coach Vasquez had me try calling, probably hoping desperation would unlock something. I stood at my position and squinted at the field and called out pool locations that were wrong half the time and late the other half. Marcus ran his own plays. Dao chased runners he couldn't catch because I'd sent him to the wrong part of the field. Sasha called corrections over my corrections until we were both shouting and nobody was listening.

Afterward, walking back to the dorms, I overheard two students from another squad.

"The blind man's team." One of them said it to the other like it was already a nickname, established and circulating. They didn't know I was behind them. Or maybe they did.

Dao heard it too. His jaw tightened but he didn't say anything. Just walked faster, hands jammed in his pockets, the anger radiating off him like heat from an engine.

"Ignore them," Thaddeus said.

"Easy for you to say." Dao didn't look back. "Nobody's giving your squad a nickname because of you."

Thaddeus didn't respond to that. There wasn't anything to respond with. He knew Dao was right.

Thursday, I found myself outside Cross's office without quite deciding to go there.

The door was open. She looked up from a stack of papers and smiled.

"Eli. Come in."

Her office was smaller than I'd expected. A small window looked out over the grounds, where October was turning the trees to bone. On the windowsill sat a collection of objects that hummed with visible residue. A smooth gray stone radiating faint warmth. A tarnished silver locket pulsing with something that looked like captured moonlight. A small leather-bound notebook that glowed with quiet focus. And at the end, a small glass bottle with something dark inside that seemed to move when I wasn't looking directly at it.

I didn't know what they were. But I could feel them. Each one distinct, each one concentrated in a way that felt different from place-saturation. Smaller. More contained. Like the difference between a river and a glass of water.

"I've been getting reports," she said. "From Aldridge. From Vasquez."

"Bad ones?"

"Honest ones." She gestured to a chair. "Sit. Tell me how you're actually doing. Not the version you'd tell your father."

So I told her. The practice room and feeling people instead of places. Drift and calling directions I couldn't see. The nickname. The mounting certainty that I'd been brought here by mistake, that whatever she'd sensed in me back in Ohio wasn't what she thought it was.

Cross listened without interrupting. When I finished, she was quiet for a moment.

"Do you know why I recruited you, Eli?"

"Because you thought I had potential?"

"Because you were surviving." She leaned forward slightly. "When I found you, you'd been living with an uncontrolled ability for years. Reading everyone around you. Feeling everything they felt. And you hadn't broken. You'd found ways to cope. To function. To get through each day."

"I wouldn't call what I was doing surviving."

"I would. I've seen what happens to people whose abilities emerge without support. They crack. They withdraw. They hurt themselves or others trying to make it stop." Her eyes were steady on mine. "You figured out how to carry it alone. That's rare. That's valuable."

"It doesn't feel valuable when I can't do what everyone else does."

"Everyone else learned to read places because that's what the curriculum teaches. You learned to read people because that's what you had access to." She smiled slightly. "The curriculum can be adjusted. The ability to survive without support? That's harder to teach."

I didn't know what to say to that. My eyes drifted back to the windowsill.

"You're wondering about the objects," she said.

"I can feel them. They're saturated, but it's different from reading a place. More contained."

"Tokens." She stood and walked to the window, picking up the smooth gray stone. "Objects hold residue just like places do. That's why antiques feel different from new things. Why your grandmother's ring isn't the same as one you bought yesterday."

She turned the stone over in her palm. "This came from a battlefield in Pennsylvania. Practitioners learn to collect them. Stones from significant places. Pages from old libraries. Items that absorbed something worth carrying."

"Like portable saturation."

"Exactly. A well-prepared practitioner brings a kit. Different tokens for different needs." She touched the stone. "Courage here." She gestured toward the leather notebook. "Focus there." The silver locket. "Calm in this pocket. They run dry eventually. You have to return them to their source locations to recharge. But they mean you're never completely dependent on wherever you happen to be standing."

"What about that one?" I pointed to the glass bottle with the dark contents.

Cross didn't answer right away. She set the stone back on the sill and looked at the bottle without touching it.

"Some tokens hold things you don't want to draw from casually. That one's from a place I hope you never have to visit." She turned back to me, and the conversation shifted like a door closing on a room she wasn't ready to show me. "The point is, you're already sensing the difference between place-saturation and object-saturation. That's good. It means your instincts are developing, even if they're not developing in the expected direction."

"And if the expected direction is the only one that matters here?"

"Then we find another path. That's what I'm here for." She sat back down. "Come back next week. We'll check in again. And Eli? If anything else happens, anything that worries you or feels wrong, come to me directly. Don't try to handle it alone. You're not alone anymore."

I left feeling slightly better. Cross believed in me. That had to count for something.

Friday brought news about Drift teams.

First-years were being assigned to permanent practice squads. These would become official teams in second year, but the groupings were being established now. Five students per team, locked in for the rest of the year.

Dao brought the roster to breakfast.

"We're together," he said, sliding into his seat. "You, me, Sasha, Thaddeus. And Marcus Holloway."

"Permanently?"

"Locked in for the rest of the year." Dao stabbed at his eggs. "I was hoping they'd shuffle him somewhere else once they saw how practice went."

"Maybe being official will change things. More pressure to actually coordinate."

"You think pressure is going to make Marcus Holloway a team player?" Dao shook his head. "The guy treats us like furniture."

Thaddeus sat down with his tray. "I heard. Marcus is our fifth."

"You don't seem surprised."

"I'm not. The old family kids don't want him because his family fell too far. The scholarship kids don't want him because he acts like he's above them. We're the misfit squad. Where else would he end up?"

"Lovely," Sasha said, joining us. "Eight months of watching him run his own plays while we scramble to keep up."

"Maybe he'll come around," I offered.

Nobody looked convinced.

Saturday morning I went to the Drift field early. I don't know why. Maybe I thought the pools would be easier to see without nine other people's emotions clouding my senses. Maybe I just needed to stand somewhere open and feel the sky.

The field was empty. Or I thought it was.

Marcus Holloway was already there.

He was moving across the terrain with his hands slightly extended, palms down, like he was feeling the air above a hot stove. When he passed over a pool, I could see the shimmer flow toward him, rising from the grass and curling around his fingers. He drew it in without effort, the way most people breathe. No concentration. No technique. Just absorption.

Then he pushed. The air rippled outward from his palm in a wave I could feel from fifty feet away. A practice target, one of the straw dummies Vasquez set up for drills, flew backward and landed hard.

He did it again. Walked, drew, pushed. Each time smoother than the last. Each time more powerful.

I watched for a while before he noticed me.

"You're up early." Not hostile. Just flat. Like he was noting the weather.

"Couldn't sleep."

"The rooms do that." He didn't elaborate on what the rooms did. Stood there with his hands at his sides, the last shimmer of drawn power fading from his fingers.

I could feel him from here. The armor was thick, built for distance, built to keep everyone on the other side of it. But this early, this alone, it wasn't at full strength. The edges were soft enough that I could sense what was underneath without even trying.

"Can you read me right now?" he asked.

The directness startled me. "I try not to read teammates."

"But you could." Something flickered behind his eyes. Not fear. Curiosity layered with something harder to name. The desire to be known fighting the terror of it. "What would you see?"

I could lie. I'd lied before, to people who asked questions they didn't actually want answers to. Told them I felt nothing, that my ability was weaker than it was, that they had nothing to worry about.

Looking at Marcus Holloway in the early morning light, with the Drift field empty around us and his defenses at their thinnest, I didn't want to lie.

"Pain," I said. "Something you're carrying that's too heavy for one person."

He went very still. The armor slammed shut so hard I could almost hear it, everything soft retreating behind walls that had taken years to build. His jaw set. His shoulders squared. The kid who'd been standing in the morning light a moment ago was gone, replaced by the version of Marcus the rest of the world got to see.

"Stay out of my head." He walked past me without looking back. Gathered his things from the sideline. Left the field.

I stood there feeling the echo of what I'd read. Not just grief, though there was plenty of that.

And then, deeper than the rest, something that made my chest tighten. A woman. Old and frail, fading in a room that smelled like disinfectant and waiting. Someone he loved. The only person left who remembered what his family used to be.

Dao had said she was sick. He hadn't said how bad it was.

This was bad. The slow, terrible countdown of watching someone become less day by day, knowing each visit might be the last one where she still knows your name.

And underneath even that, something older than the illness. A family that used to mean something. A legacy crumbling so slowly you couldn't point to the moment it started, could only look back and realize it had been happening your whole life.

Marcus Holloway wasn't angry because he was arrogant. He was angry because he was mourning something that wasn't finished dying yet.

Practice that afternoon proved us right to worry about coordination. Marcus showed up late. He stepped into pools like gravity was a suggestion, drew power like breathing, pushed with enough force to stagger people twice his size.

But he still didn't communicate. Ran his own angles, chased his own plays, left the rest of us scrambling.

Then something small happened.

We were running a positioning drill. Vasquez had set up a scenario where our squad had to move as a unit to capture a flag position. Sasha was calling, I was trying to feed her whatever I could read from the opposing squad, and Dao was running a route that left him exposed near the left boundary.

Marcus saw it before I did. The opposing runner was drawing from a pool near Dao's blind side, charging up for a push that would freeze him in place. Dao was focused forward, running a route toward their flag, completely exposed.

Marcus adjusted his line. Cut across the field at an angle that didn't make sense for his own play. Drew from a pool he was passing through and pushed the opposing runner before she could fire on Dao. Not a massive push. Just enough to freeze her for two seconds and waste the power she'd built up.

Dao never even knew he'd been in danger. He kept running, hit an open lane, and grabbed their flag. Looked confused about how easy it had been. Turned to say something to Marcus, but Marcus was already walking back to his starting position. Nobody commented on it. But everyone noticed.

After practice, I fell into step with Sasha as we walked back. The others were ahead of us, Dao still talking about the capture in the tones of someone trying to convince himself it happened.

"His hands were shaking," Sasha said.

"What?"

"Before practice. Marcus. He was holding them behind his back. Pressing his fingers together to make them stop." She didn't look at me. Just walked, watching the path ahead with that analytical focus she brought to everything. "Nobody else saw."

"How did you?"

"I notice things." She said it simply, without emphasis. "Everyone's always watching what he does during practice. The pushes, the draws, the speed. I was watching what he did before practice. Standing by the equipment shed, by himself, trying to get his hands to stop shaking."

She didn't interpret it. Didn't assign it meaning. Just put the observation into the air and let it exist there.

We walked the rest of the way in silence, and I thought about Marcus's shaking hands and Sasha's steady eyes and what it meant that she'd been looking at the one thing everyone else had missed.