Sister Vael worked in silence.

  That was the first thing Jace noticed - not the sting of the salve she applied to his forearm, not the cool pressure of healing mana threading through blistered dermis, but the absence of the usual clinical narration she provided while treating students. Most visits to the infirmary came with a running commentary - *this is a clean fracture, two days rest; you've strained the lateral ligament, ice and elevation; your mana channels are inflamed from overcasting, three days off spellwork.* Sister Vael believed in educating her patients. She said it made them less likely to do the same stupid thing twice. Jace had been here often enough in recent weeks to know the rhythm.

  Tonight, the rhythm was off.

  She'd treated the burn first - standard procedure, address the worst damage, stabilize, then work outward. Her hands were steady, her mana signature the familiar controlled warmth that Jace associated with professional healing. The blisters flattened. The angry red faded to tender pink. The pain receded from sharp to dull to a low background hum that his Pain Tolerance skill filed away as manageable.

  Then she moved to the ribs. Pressed two fingers against his left side, closed her eyes, and went still.

  The stillness lasted too long.

  "Deep breath," she said.

  Jace breathed. It hurt.

  "Again."

  He breathed again. Less hurt. Her mana was working on the contusion, reducing the inflammation around the impacted tissue, but that wasn't what held her attention. Her fingers hadn't moved from the spot over his ribs. Her eyes were still closed.

  "Sister Vael?"

  "Quiet, please."

  Across the infirmary, Mara was cleaning and bandaging Torrin's forearm scrape while Elara sat on the adjacent cot with her notebook open, documenting their injuries with the detached efficiency of a field researcher. Torrin sat motionless, his swollen knee elevated on a pillow, his expression suggesting he'd experienced worse pain before breakfast and wasn't particularly interested in discussing it.

  Sister Vael opened her eyes. She removed her fingers from Jace's ribs. She looked at him - not at the burn, not at the bruising, but at *him* - with an expression he'd never seen on her face before. It wasn't concern. It wasn't curiosity. It was the look of someone recalculating a familiar equation and arriving at an unfamiliar answer.

  "Mara," she said, without looking away from Jace. "Please take Torrin and Elara to the secondary treatment room. There's a cold compress kit in the cabinet by the window. Apply it to Torrin's knee - twenty minutes, then remove. I'll check his ligaments when I'm finished here."

  Mara hesitated. She glanced at Jace.

  "Go," Jace said. "I'm fine."

  "You have second-degree burns and rib contusion. You are the opposite of-"

  "Mara."

  She went. Torrin limped after her. Elara paused in the doorway - her gaze moving between Jace and Sister Vael with the focused attention of someone collecting data she didn't yet have a framework for - then followed.

  The door closed. The infirmary was quiet. The mana-lamps hummed.

  Sister Vael pulled a stool to Jace's bedside and sat down. She folded her hands in her lap. For a moment she simply looked at him, the way she'd looked at his ribs - not at the surface, but at whatever lay beneath.

  "How long have you been cross-training?" she asked.

  The question surprised him. "Six weeks. Maybe seven."

  "Using [Wayfaring] to acquire skills outside your class role."

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  "I don't have a class role. That's sort of the point."

  "And your [Mana Sense] - how frequently are you activating it?"

  "A few times a day. Short pulses. I can't sustain it for long."

  "A few times a day." She repeated it the way someone repeated a number that didn't belong in the column they'd found it in. "Mr. Miller. When I examine a patient, I perceive their mana signature as part of the diagnostic process. It tells me where they're injured, how their channels are flowing, whether there are blockages or inflammations that need attention. I've been doing this for thirty-one years. I have treated thousands of students."

  She paused. Let the weight of that settle.

  "Your mana signature does not match your class."

  The mana-lamps hummed. Jace felt something cold settle into his stomach that had nothing to do with his injuries.

  "I'm a [Nomad]," he said. "Normal-tier. That's what the Attunement Stone-"

  "I know what the Stone read. I was in the auditorium." Sister Vael's voice was unhurried. Patient. The quieter she spoke, the more carefully Jace listened. "Your class designation is [Nomad]. Your tier is Normal. That information is accurate. But beneath it - in the deep structure of your mana channels, in the way your signature *moves* - there's a resonance that doesn't correspond to any Normal-tier class I've encountered. It's faint. Undeveloped. Like a frequency that hasn't found its wavelength yet. But it's there, and it shouldn't be."

  "What does that mean?"

  "It means the System classified you, but it may not have finished." She held up a hand before he could speak. "I don't know what you're becoming. I'm not a System theorist. I'm a healer. But I've seen anomalies before - students whose class designation didn't fully capture what they were. Students who grew in ways the standard progression models didn't predict."

  "What happened to them?"

  Sister Vael's expression didn't change. But something behind her eyes shifted - a shadow passing across still water.

  "Some of them evolved. Advanced to higher tiers, unlocked unique class variants, became remarkable." She paused. The pause was the kind that had weight in it, the kind that made the air heavier. "Some of them attracted attention before they were ready. From the Conclave. From the Guild. From factions that view anomalous System behavior as either an asset to acquire or a threat to eliminate."

  The cold in Jace's stomach spread.

  "The System categorizes everything, Mr. Miller. It sorts, it labels, it assigns. When it encounters something it can't neatly categorize, it does one of two things." She leaned forward slightly. Her voice dropped to a register that was barely above a whisper and carried more authority than a shout. "It evolves it. Or it erases it. And you are not ready for either."

  The mana-lamps hummed. The infirmary smelled like herbs and ozone and the faint copper undertone of healing in progress.

  "What do I do?" Jace asked.

  "You keep your head down. You train quietly. You don't attract attention that you can't survive the consequences of. You don't let anyone with power and curiosity see what's growing inside you until you're strong enough to withstand whatever they do with that information." She straightened. The clinical mask resettled over her features, smooth and professional. "And you stop getting into fights in maintenance corridors. That would also be helpful."

  She stood. Picked up the salve. Applied a second layer to his burn with hands that were perfectly steady and perfectly warm.

  "The burn will take three days to fully heal. The ribs, five. I'm excusing you from combat practicals for one week. Light duty only." She capped the salve. "I'll send the others back in."

  She was at the door when Jace spoke.

  "Sister Vael."

  She paused.

  "Thank you."

  She didn't turn around. "Don't thank me, Mr. Miller. Get stronger. Quickly."

  The door opened. The door closed. Jace sat on the infirmary cot with herbs and ozone in his lungs and a warning in his bones and the faint, impossible sense - just at the edge of his [Mana Sense], just beneath the threshold of certainty - that something deep inside his class architecture was humming in a key he didn't recognize.

  The others came back. Mara checked his bandages. Elara asked precise questions about the treatment protocol. Torrin sat on the adjacent cot with his knee wrapped and his back against the wall and said nothing, which was his way of saying *I'm here and I'm not leaving.*

  Jace didn't tell them about Sister Vael's warning. Not yet. Not until he understood it well enough to explain.

  Instead, he said: "So. How bad is the disciplinary hearing going to be?"

  "Terrible," Elara said.

  "Awful," Mara agreed.

  "Doesn't matter," Torrin said.

  Jace looked at the ceiling. The mana-lamps painted it in sterile white. Somewhere beneath the white, beneath the plaster and the conduit pipes and the old-world concrete bones of Ironhold Academy, the Sunken Subway hummed with dungeon-Mana, and the world kept turning, and four students who'd lost a fight sat together in an infirmary and didn't leave.

  ---