Chapter 21

The four weeks before Declaration Day passed in a blur of preparation.

Sasha took point on research. Every evening she'd show up to the empty classroom with new pages of notes, new connections, new questions. She'd dug into Headmaster Vane's history with the same methodical intensity she brought to everything else.

"Aldric Vane. Forty-seven years old. Gate practitioner, solid but not exceptional. Became headmaster eight years ago." She spread papers across the table. "Here's what's interesting. He wasn't supposed to get the job."

"What do you mean?"

"The previous headmaster died unexpectedly. Heart attack. There was a succession plan and Vane wasn't on it." She tapped one of the documents. "Three candidates ahead of him. All of them declined or became unavailable within weeks of each other."

Dao leaned forward. "That sounds orchestrated."

"It does. But I can't prove it." Sasha pulled out another page. "What I can tell you is that Vane's been a good headmaster. By every metric. Student satisfaction up. Graduation rates improved. The school runs better than it has in decades."

"So he's competent."

"Very. At the things he's allowed to control." She looked at me. "But there are gaps. Committees he's not part of. Decisions that get made above his head. It's like he runs the visible school, but something else runs the parts that matter."

I thought about the man in gray at the facility. His calm certainty. The way he'd talked about people in charge already knowing. About this being preferable to the alternative.

"He might not know everything," I said. "Vane might be as much a pawn as anyone."

"Or he might know exactly what's happening and choose to look away." Dao's voice was hard. "Wouldn't be the first time someone traded their conscience for a comfortable position."

"That's what we need to find out." Sasha closed her notebook. "When you shake his hand, when you read him, look for the gaps. The things he knows but won't acknowledge. The doors he's afraid to open."

"And if his walls are perfect?"

"Then we learn that too. But I don't think they will be." She looked at me with those analytical eyes. "Cross has had decades to build her walls. She knows exactly what she's hiding. Vane? I think he's someone who suspects but doesn't want to confirm. That kind of uncertainty leaves cracks."

Dao handled surveillance.

Not of Vane directly. That would be too obvious. But of the faculty in general, watching for patterns, noting who talked to whom, mapping the invisible networks that connected people.

"Cross meets with someone off-campus every Thursday," he reported one evening. "Takes a portal somewhere. Gone for three or four hours. Comes back looking tired."

"Do you know where she goes?"

"No. But I know she doesn't log the destination. Checked the portal records. Thursday afternoons, her name just shows 'personal business.' Nobody else gets that kind of privacy."

Another piece of the puzzle. Another question we couldn't answer yet.

I practiced.

Not the kind of practice Cross had taught me. Not filtering, not controlling, not building walls. The opposite. I practiced pushing. Reaching into people without their permission. Reading deeper than the surface emotions they projected.

It felt wrong. Every time I did it, I remembered Cross's voice telling me about boundaries, about respect, about the ethics of reading minds. But Cross might be the enemy. Her rules might be chains disguised as guidance.

I started small. Strangers in the dining hall. Students I didn't know, whose secrets wouldn't matter to me even if I found them. I'd brush past them, make contact, push just a little deeper than I should.

Most people didn't notice. Their surface thoughts were too loud, too consuming. They were worried about exams or relationships or whether their parents would be proud of them. The usual noise of teenage existence.

But some people had layers. Walls within walls. And when I pushed against those, I felt resistance.

One afternoon I found myself behind a third-year in the library. Tall kid, dark hair, hunched over a table covered in books. I didn't know his name. Didn't care. He was just practice.

I reached for a book on the same shelf, let my elbow brush his shoulder.

Surface read came easy. Stress about an upcoming exam. Frustration with a passage he couldn't understand. Normal stuff.

I pushed deeper.

The walls were there. Not professional walls like Cross had, but the natural defenses everyone builds. The things we don't want to think about. I pressed against them, gentle at first, then harder.

Something gave.

Underneath the exam stress was shame. Old shame, calcite-thick, layered over years. A memory flickered through, not mine but his. A younger version of him standing in a hallway while someone shouted. His father, maybe. Words I couldn't quite hear but could feel the shape of. Disappointment. Failure. Not good enough, never good enough.

The third-year flinched. Looked around. His eyes passed over me without recognition, but I felt his confusion. Something had touched a wound he kept buried, and he didn't know what.

I pulled back. Walked away with my heart pounding.

That was someone's private pain. Something he'd spent years learning to live with. And I'd reached in and poked it because I needed the practice.

Cross would have been horrified. The ethics lectures, the careful discussions about consent and boundaries. All of it designed to prevent exactly what I'd just done.

But I kept practicing anyway. Because Vane would have better walls than that third-year. And if I couldn't push past a teenager's defenses, I'd never crack open a headmaster who'd spent decades learning to protect himself.

The balance was impossible. Push hard enough to learn something, but not so hard they knew what I was doing. I got better at it over the weeks. Learned to slip in sideways, to follow the cracks instead of forcing through walls. Learned to take what I needed and leave before they noticed.

Every time, I felt a little more like the kind of person I'd always been afraid of becoming.

Drift practice continued.

Our team was struggling. Orin was competent but disconnected, and without Marcus and Thaddeus, the chemistry was gone. We won some matches and lost others. Stayed in the middle of the first-year standings, neither embarrassing nor impressive.

But something was changing in how I played.

The match against the Ashford team started like any other. Their reader was a stocky boy named Kieran who moved with surprising quickness across the field, his attention sliding between pools with practiced ease. I tracked him the way I always did, feeling his focus shift, calling out positions to my teammates.

"He's pulling from the eastern cluster. Dao, cover the approach."

Dao moved. Sasha flanked. The rhythm was familiar, almost automatic.

Then something shifted.

Kieran's attention swung toward a pool near our territory. I felt his intention to activate it, the buildup of focus that preceded a freeze. Normal. Expected. I opened my mouth to call it out.

But the words died in my throat.

Because I wasn't just reading Kieran anymore. I was feeling the pool itself.

It pulsed beneath the grass like a slow heartbeat. Energy coiled there, patient, waiting to be shaped. The freeze was coming, yes, but I could feel it building in the pool before Kieran even finished directing it. Like watching a wave form offshore, knowing exactly when it would crest.

"Freeze incoming, northwest pool. Three seconds."

Sasha looked at me sharply. The pool wasn't active yet. Nothing visible, nothing any normal reader should be able to detect.

Two seconds.

One.

The freeze erupted. Sasha had already moved, was already clear. The Thornwood striker stumbled into the trap meant for her and went down hard.

"How did you know that?" Sasha called across the field.

I didn't answer. Couldn't. My attention was fracturing across the field, the pools revealing themselves like stars coming out at dusk. Faint shimmers at the edge of my perception. Energy moving through the ground like slow rivers, connecting, flowing, responding to the readers' attention in ways I'd never seen before.

It was too much. I tried to focus on Kieran again, on the familiar territory of reading a person, but the pools kept bleeding through. The field was alive in a way I hadn't understood until now.

We won the match. Barely. My calls got erratic toward the end, overwhelmed by information I didn't know how to process. But those early moments, when I'd seen the freeze before it happened, had given us enough of an edge.

Afterward, Sasha found me sitting on the grass, staring at nothing.

"You called that freeze before it happened. The pool wasn't even active yet."

"I felt it building."

"You felt it? You don't feel pools. You read people."

"I know." I didn't have an explanation. Just another crack in what I thought I understood about my abilities. "Maybe I was reading our opponents, sensing their intention to activate it."

"Maybe." She didn't sound convinced. Neither was I. "That's not what it looked like. It looked like you were seeing the field. Actually seeing it, the way I do."

"I'm not a place-reader."

"No. You're not." She sat down next to me. "But something's changing in you, Eli. Whatever you are, I don't think the old categories fit anymore."

That night I lay awake thinking about the facility. About feeling the portal's hunger. About the hidden door I'd sensed behind the wall. About the lake, patient and vast, waiting for me to come back. About the pools on the Drift field, pulsing like heartbeats beneath the grass.

I read people. That was what I did. What I'd always done.

But something else was opening up. Something that felt bigger than just people. Bigger than places, even. Like I was starting to sense the connections between things. The patterns that held the world together.

I didn't know what that meant. Didn't know if it was good or dangerous or both.

I just knew that Declaration Day was getting closer, and when it came, I'd need everything I had.

Two weeks before the ceremony, I called Dad.

"Hey, kid. How's the countdown going?"

"Stressful." I leaned against the wall of my room. "There's this ceremony at the end of the year. Choosing your specialization. Everyone's nervous about it."

"You know what you're going to pick?"

"Not really. None of the options feel right."

"That sounds familiar." I could hear him smiling. "You know what your mother always said? 'The right choice is usually the one that scares you most.' She picked her college that way. Her job. Me, eventually."

"Were you scary?"

"Terrifying. I had a mullet and drove a Camaro with a bad muffler. Any sensible woman would have run." He laughed, then got quieter. "She always said fear was a compass. Points you toward the thing that matters."

I thought about Declaration Day. About standing in front of everyone and refusing to declare for any of the four Signs. About what that would mean.

It scared me. Which maybe meant it was right.

"Did you ever call Shelby?" Dad asked.

The guilt came back like it had never left. "Not yet."

"Eli."

"I know. I will. After this ceremony thing. When I have more time."

"That's what you said last month."

"I know." I didn't have a defense. "It's just... complicated. There's so much I can't explain to her. Every conversation feels like lying."

"Maybe she'd rather have a friend who lies sometimes than no friend at all."

He wasn't wrong. But the weight of everything I couldn't say felt heavier every day. How do you maintain a friendship built on secrets? How do you pretend to be normal when normal has stopped meaning anything?

"I'll call her," I said. "I promise. After Declaration Day."

"I'll hold you to that."

We talked for a few more minutes. Normal things. The weather. His latest project at work. The tomato plants he was trying to grow in the backyard. By the time I hung up, I almost felt like a regular person with regular problems.

Almost.

The week before Declaration Day, Sasha called an emergency meeting.

"I found something." She was more animated than I'd seen her in weeks. Papers covered the table, covered in her dense handwriting. "About the Accord."

Dao and I leaned in.

"Marcus's grandmother mentioned it. The symbols in the facility connected to it. But there's almost nothing in the official records." She pulled out a page. "Until I found this."

It was a photocopy. Old. The text was faded and the language was formal, almost archaic.

"It's from a journal. One of the founding families' private collections. I found a reference to it in a bibliography and managed to get a copy through the library's special request system." She pointed at a passage. "Read this."

I squinted at the cramped handwriting.

"'The Accord binds the Seven as one. What was given freely cannot be taken back, but what was taken can never be replaced. The Wellspring knows the difference, even when we forget.'"

"The Seven," Dao said. "Not four. Seven."

"Exactly. The official history says there are four Signs. Hearth, Thorn, Gate, Tide. But this document talks about Seven. And it mentions the Wellspring by name."

"The door nobody approaches," I said. "The Sign that officially doesn't exist."

"It existed once. And whatever the Accord is, it's connected to all seven Signs. Not just the four we're allowed to know about."

I thought about standing in the Portal Hall. The way all the doors had felt like they were whispering at once, too quiet to understand. The pull I'd felt from multiple directions.

"What if I'm not meant to choose one Sign because I'm connected to all of them?" The words came out before I'd fully formed the thought. "What if that's why none of them feel right? Because they all feel partial?"

Sasha and Dao exchanged a look.

"That's not supposed to be possible," Sasha said carefully. "Everyone has one Sign. That's how it works."

"Everyone we know about. But the Accord predates the school. Predates the modern system. What if the rules were different before? What if they were changed for a reason?"

Nobody had an answer.

"Declaration Day," Dao said finally. "We read Vane. We see what he knows. Maybe that gives us a piece of the puzzle."

"And if I refuse to declare?"

"Then you make them show their hand. See how they react when someone doesn't follow the script." He grinned. "Might be chaos. Might be nothing. But at least we'll learn something."

Sasha gathered her papers. "One week. Let's make sure we're ready."

The night before Declaration Day, I couldn't sleep.

I walked the grounds instead. Late enough that the paths were empty, early enough that the sky was still dark. The air smelled like late spring, flowers and cut grass and something electric underneath.

I ended up at the Portal Hall.

The building was locked at night, but I could feel the doors through the walls. All of them. Hearth warm and welcoming. Thorn sharp and defensive. Gate vast and connecting. Tide fluid and changing.

And somewhere above or below the main hall, muffled but unmistakable, three more. The hidden Signs. The ones nobody talked about. I couldn't tell which was which, but I knew the Wellspring was one of them.

I pressed my hand against the outer wall of the building. Felt the stone, centuries old, saturated with the passage of countless students. All their hopes and fears and choices layered on top of each other.

And deeper than that. Deeper than the human residue.

Something else. Something that felt like the lake had felt. Patient. Vast. Waiting.

The building itself. Aware in some way I couldn't explain. Holding secrets in its foundations that nobody had thought to ask about.

I pulled my hand back. My heart was racing.

Tomorrow I'd shake the headmaster's hand. Push past his walls. See what he was hiding.

And then I'd stand in front of everyone and refuse to play by their rules.

Fear was a compass, Dad had said. Points you toward the thing that matters.

I was terrified.

Which meant I was probably heading in the right direction.