I sat on the edge of my cot and wrapped my feet for the next day. Wind the cloth. Check the blisters. Tuck the ends. The mechanical routine of maintenance that had become my version of prayer.

  Anxiety, too many thoughts. The channeling instructor's ledger. The mark he'd made. The question of who read those reports and what they did with gaps.

  "Cole."

  I froze.

  The voice came from outside the tent. Low. Controlled. I almost didn't hear it over the breathing of thirty sleeping men.

  I pulled on my boots and stepped out into the cold. The gray-eyed officer stood three paces from the entrance. I'd heard his name from other recruits. Lieutenant Aldric. But this was the first time he'd spoken to me directly.

  "Follow me," he said. "Don't wake anyone."

  He turned and walked toward the armory without waiting for an answer. I followed because refusing seemed worse than whatever was coming.

  The armory was a low stone building at the camp's edge. Dark. The smell of metal and oil on the cold air. Aldric led me around the back, where a patch of packed earth sat between the building and the palisade wall. Private. Out of sight from the main camp.

  He stopped. Turned. Studied me the way he'd been studying me all week. Up close, his face was harder than I'd expected. Not cruel. Just worn past the point where softness could survive.

  "I need you to answer me directly," he said. "No lying. No deflection. I'll know if you do."

  I said nothing. My heart was hammering.

  "The channeling instructor filed a report. Zero output. Not low. Zero. He tested you himself and found nothing." Aldric's voice was flat. "Meanwhile, Havel tells me you're reading combat patterns faster than recruits who've trained since childhood. You took six Core-enhanced strikes in sparring last week and walked away with bruises that should have been fractures."

  He let the silence sit.

  "Those facts don't go together, Cole. A man with no Core doesn't absorb punishment like that. A man with no training doesn't read movement like that. So either the channeling report is wrong, or the combat assessment is wrong, or you're something that doesn't fit into any column I've got."

  The cold pressed against my skin. Somewhere in the camp, a fire popped.

  "Which is it?"

  I could lie. I was good at lying. Eleven years of practice. But Aldric's eyes had the look of a man who'd already done the math and was testing whether I'd give him the same answer.

  "The channeling report isn't wrong," I said.

  He waited.

  "I don't have a Core." The words came out flat. Stripped of everything except the fact. "The Assessor who processed me. He put his hand on my chest and found nothing. Not Low Quartz. Not anything. Just empty. He was so terrified he branded me on the spot and shoved me back in line with a false rating before anyone could see."

  Aldric's expression didn't change. But something behind his eyes shifted. A door opening onto a room he'd hoped was empty.

  "The brand is a lie," I said. "Low Quartz is a lie. I can't channel because there's nothing to channel from. No Core. No crystal. No spark. Just a void."

  The silence that followed was long enough for me to hear my own pulse in my ears.

  "Come here," Aldric said.

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  He reached behind a crate and drew out a practice sword. He'd prepared. Brought it here ahead of time.

  "I'm going to hit you," he said. "And you're going to tell me exactly what you feel."

  He didn't wait for me to agree. The practice sword swung. Not a killing blow. A measured strike, the kind an instructor throws to test a student's guard.

  It hit my shoulder. Solid. Wood against muscle and bone.

  And the force didn't stay.

  It arrived sharp and immediate, then spread. Diffused. Radiated outward through my chest, my ribs, down into my legs. Like a wave hitting sand. Like dropping a stone into still water and watching the ripples carry the energy in every direction at once.

  It hurt. But not as much as it should have. The pain was distributed across my whole frame instead of concentrated where the sword had landed.

  Aldric was watching me with absolute attention. "What happened?"

  "It spread," I said. "The impact. It didn't stay where you hit me. It went everywhere."

  He hit me again. Harder. Same result. The force flooded in, dispersed, settled into a deep ache that was bearable precisely because it was everywhere instead of somewhere.

  Again. Harder still. I stumbled back a step but stayed on my feet.

  "You're not blocking it," Aldric said. His voice had changed. Quieter. Careful. "You're not deflecting it. You're absorbing it."

  "Yes."

  "And the energy. After it spreads. Where does it go?"

  I focused inward. The residual warmth from his strikes was still there. Faint. Distributed through my body like the last heat in cooling metal.

  "It stays," I said. "Some of it. It fades slowly, but right now I can still feel it."

  He lowered the practice sword. Leaned it against the armory wall. His face had gone very still.

  "I've seen this before," he said. "Once. A long time ago."

  I waited.

  "During the border campaigns. Twenty years back. There was a woman on the enemy side. She could take hits that should have killed her. Channeled strikes, mage fire, things that shattered armor. She absorbed it all." He paused. "Then she released it. All at once. Killed everyone within twenty feet. My unit. Her own people. Everyone."

  The cold suddenly felt colder.

  "The Inquisition called her a Hollow," Aldric said. "They said the bloodline was supposed to be extinct. They took her. I never saw her again." He looked at me directly. "The old records say Hollows don't have Cores. They have voids. They absorb energy instead of generating it. And they can hold it. Release it."

  "That's what I am," I said. Not a question.

  "That's what you might be." His voice carried a weight I hadn't heard before. Not fear exactly. Respect for a danger he'd seen up close. "And if you are, you need to understand something. The woman I saw. She started the same way you are now. Taking hits. Holding the warmth. Wanting more of it."

  He stepped closer. Close enough that I could see the scars on his jaw, the lines around his eyes.

  "The wanting is the danger," he said. "Not the power. The wanting. It grows. It starts as relief. The first time you feel something after being empty. Then it becomes hunger. Then it becomes the only thing you think about." He held my gaze. "She couldn't stop. She kept absorbing. Kept wanting more. By the end, she wasn't a soldier anymore. She was just an appetite."

  The void in my chest pulsed. Or I imagined it did.

  "I'm not telling you this to scare you," Aldric said. "I'm telling you because nobody told her. Nobody trained her. Nobody taught her to control it, and by the time someone tried, there was nothing left to control." He straightened. "You're in my cohort. That makes you my responsibility. And I am not going to watch it happen again."

  "What are you going to do?"

  "Train you. Every night. Behind the armory. We figure out what you can hold, how long you can hold it, and how to let it go without killing everyone around you." He picked up the practice sword. Held it out. "Nobody knows. Not your squad. Not Kolt. Not anyone. As far as the army is concerned, you're Low Quartz and you're unremarkable."

  I took the sword. The wood was warm where his hand had been.

  "And the Inquisition?" I asked.

  "If the Inquisition finds out what you are, you disappear. The same way she did. The same way every Hollow before her did." His voice was flat. A man stating facts. "So we make sure they don't find out."

  He turned toward the camp. Paused.

  "The warmth you're feeling right now. From the strikes. It feels good, doesn't it?"

  I didn't answer. Didn't need to.

  "Remember that feeling," he said. "And remember that it's the first step on a road that has only ever ended one way." He walked into the dark. "Get some sleep. We start tomorrow night."

  I stood behind the armory for a long time. The practice sword in my hand. The residual warmth from his strikes fading through my body. The void underneath it, patient and still, waiting for more.

  I thought about the woman who'd absorbed too much and killed everyone within twenty feet. About the Inquisition and the word extinct and the fact that I was supposed to be impossible.

  And I thought about the warmth. How it had felt when the strikes hit. How the pain had spread and softened and left something behind that wasn't quite pain and wasn't quite pleasure but was, for the first time since I could remember, something.

  I put the practice sword back where Aldric had found it. Walked to the barracks. Lay down on my cot.

  The void pulsed. Quiet. Hungry.

  Tomorrow night, behind the armory, I'd start learning what I was.

  I wasn't sure I wanted to know.

  But I was sure I didn't have a choice.