Combat training began on the third day.

  Raka had been dreading it, though he would not have admitted that out loud. He had spent two days watching the other students and taking mental notes — which ones moved like they knew what they were doing, which ones had the particular stillness of people who had been training privately long before they arrived. There were a lot of both. Astra Academy drew from families with generations of Aether history, and the gap between those students and someone who had discovered his ability three months ago at a river was not small.

  The class was called Applied Combat — Fundamentals, taught in the open-air training yard behind the eastern wing. The instructor was a woman named Serath, compact and unhurried, with the kind of scarring on her forearms that meant she had survived things she wasn't going to tell them about yet. She looked at her roster of students, then at the students themselves, with the expression of someone calculating how much of what she knew would be useful to people this inexperienced.

  'You will not be fighting each other today,' she said. 'You will be showing me what you have. One at a time, in whatever way feels natural. I want to see the ability, not a performance of the ability. There is a difference.'

  She looked along the line of assembled students — a mixed class, all years, all dormitories — and pointed.

  'Ignis. You. Start.'

  The Ignis student, a confident third-year, raised a hand and summoned fire with the ease of someone flicking on a light switch — a clean, bright flame that expanded and contracted at his direction, looping around his arm like a living thing. The watching students murmured appreciatively. He was good. He knew he was good. Raka could see him knowing it in the angle of his chin.

  More students followed. Wind. Stone. Water coiled into precise geometric shapes. A Lumina girl produced light so concentrated it left afterimages. An Umbra student wrapped himself in shadow until only his eyes were visible, then stepped out of it three meters away from where he'd been standing.

  Then Instructor Serath pointed at the Dormitory Seven section of the line.

  'Seven. Let's see what you've got.'

  A silence that was approximately one degree more pointed than regular silence.

  Lenne went first, to nobody's surprise. She stepped forward, planted her feet, and held out both hands, palms up. For a moment nothing seemed to happen. Then the air around her fists began to vibrate — not visibly, but palpably, in the way that very loud sound before it becomes audible. Then a pulse of pure kinetic force shot outward and hit the practice dummy at the end of the yard hard enough to crack its wooden frame straight down the center.

  The dummy was the type used for heavy combat training. It weighed approximately eighty kilograms.

  It folded.

  'Kinetic amplification,' Serath said, writing something. 'Unclassified variant. Next.'

  Damar stepped forward, squared his shoulders, and — stopped. Or rather, the world around him stopped. Just briefly, just a few seconds — enough for Raka to see the leaves of the nearby trees freeze mid-fall, the sweat on a classmate's brow hang motionless, even the light itself seem to thicken. Then it released. Damar stepped back.

  Serath had not been frozen. She wrote something with no visible reaction.

  'Temporal Pause. Unclassified variant.' She looked up. 'You can't move while it's active, can you?'

  'Not yet,' Damar said.

  'Work on that.'

  Mira stepped forward. Stood very still. Then said, clearly: 'The training dummy in bay three will fall forward in four seconds.'

  Everyone looked at bay three. The training dummy in bay three — untouched, far from anyone — stood motionless.

  One. Two. Three. Four.

  It tipped, slowly and without cause, and hit the ground with a hollow wooden crash.

  'Future Glimpse,' Serath said, with slightly more interest than she'd shown the others. 'Predictive, not prescriptive?'

  'I can see outcomes,' Mira said. 'I can't change them from here.'

  'Useful distinction. Next.'

  Sena stepped forward, and Raka watched the other students around him shift — not consciously, but the way people do when something adjacent to wrong enters a space. Sena stood for a moment in silence and then spoke in a language that was not any language Raka recognized. Not a human language at all, in the way that wind through ruins is not a human language: it had grammar, it had intent, but it operated on the wrong frequency.

  From the shadows under the eaves of the training hall, something looked back.

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  It wasn't large. It was roughly the size and shape of a cat, but made of the wrong materials — dark, translucent, with too many limbs arranged at angles that didn't quite follow the rules of joinery. It regarded Sena with what might have been recognition. She said something else. It tilted what was probably its head. Then it stepped backward and the shadows swallowed it whole.

  The training yard was quiet for a full three seconds.

  'Void Communication,' Serath said, her voice perfectly flat. 'That was a juvenile Voidborn. They're harmless at that size. You'd be aware of that.'

  'They can't help what they are,' Sena said quietly.

  'No,' Serath said. 'Neither can we. Next.'

  Kai stepped forward. Or, rather, Kai had been standing in the line and then was not, and then was standing in a different place, and the exact moment of transition refused to be observed. He did nothing else, but the watching students shuffled uncomfortably, because there is something deeply unsettling about the edges of a person not catching the light correctly.

  'Existence Erasure,' Serath said. 'Perceptual or physical?'

  'Both, I think,' Kai said. He sounded mildly bored. 'I haven't fully tested the limits.'

  'That's either reassuring or deeply concerning. I'll decide later.'

  She turned to Raka.

  'Last one. Seven.'

  Raka stepped forward.

  He had been thinking about this moment for two days. He'd run through scenarios — try to demonstrate the resonance carefully, copy something small, something controlled, don't let it get away from him. He'd had it planned. He had a whole plan.

  Standing in front of Instructor Serath and two dozen watching students, the plan evaporated.

  He focused. He could feel the Aether signatures around him the way you can feel heat from a nearby fire — Lenne's kinetic pulse, Damar's temporal stillness, Mira's forward-reaching awareness, Sena's frequency that touched the Void. And the others. All of them, each one a different texture of the same fundamental force.

  He reached toward the nearest one, the way he'd reached toward the river.

  Lenne's kinetic amplification flooded into him all at once.

  It was nothing like he'd imagined. It was like putting your hand into a current and discovering the current was moving ten times faster than the surface suggested. His body lit up with force that had no outlet, that bounced between his bones looking for somewhere to go, and his arm shot forward entirely without his permission and the air in front of him detonated with a crack of raw force that hit the back wall of the training yard and left a crater the size of a dinner plate in the stone.

  Then it was gone. His hand was shaking. His elbow hurt in a way that suggested a hairline fracture. He was still standing, which felt like a qualified success.

  The training yard was very quiet.

  'Aether Resonance,' Serath said, and there was something underneath her voice that hadn't been there before. Not fear. Closer to the feeling of a navigator who has just recognized a landmark they weren't expecting to see. 'You copied Lenne's ability.'

  'I didn't mean to copy it that hard,' Raka said.

  'Your body can't handle the volume. You're pulling in power calibrated for someone else's physiology and running it through yours.' She looked at him for a long moment. 'That's going to hurt every time you do it, isn't it?'

  'It's fine,' Raka said.

  'That's not what I asked.'

  He met her eyes.

  'Yes,' he said. 'It's going to hurt every time.'

  Serath wrote something in her register. Then she looked at the crater in the wall, and at the broken training dummy, and at the shadow under the eaves where nothing remained of the juvenile Voidborn except a faint coolness in the air.

  'Dormitory Seven,' she said, and Raka couldn't read exactly what was in her voice. 'You're going to be interesting.'

  * * *

  News of the training yard demonstration reached the rest of the student body by dinner. Raka knew this because he could track it moving through the Refectory the same way he'd tracked the whispers on his first day — as a ripple, visible in the posture of people who had just heard something.

  The difference was in the quality of the attention.

  Yesterday it had been pity, or amusement, or the comfortable condescension of people looking down. Today there was something more careful in the eyes that found him across the hall. Not respect, not yet — but its precursor. The recalculation that happens when something you've written off turns out to be more complicated than you assumed.

  At the Ignis table, Drev Casson looked at his food with an expression of deliberate neutrality that meant he was thinking about something he hadn't expected to think about.

  Raka ate his dinner and said nothing about any of this.

  Across from him, Lenne was describing the crater to Tobas with gestures that knocked over a glass of water. Damar caught the glass before it hit the floor, without looking up from his map, which he had expanded to include three additional buildings.

  'How's the elbow?' Mira asked Raka quietly.

  'Fine.'

  'It isn't.'

  'I know,' he said. 'But it will be.'

  She looked at him with those just-slightly-ahead eyes. 'Yes,' she said. 'It will.'

  He wasn't sure if she meant it as reassurance or as information. With Mira, he was beginning to understand, the two were often the same thing.

  * * *

  That night, Raka sat on the edge of his bed with the curtain of his alcove drawn and his left arm resting on his knee and thought about the training yard.

  He had copied Lenne's ability without choosing to. He had felt the resonance engage before he'd consciously decided to use it — like a reflex, a reaching that happened below the level of intention. He had done the same thing at the river. Something threatening, something overwhelming, and his Aether had reached outward without asking permission.

  That was the part that worried him. Not the pain, which was real but manageable. Not the power, which was extraordinary but also obviously dangerous. What worried him was the reaching. The resonance didn't wait for him to choose. It just — responded.

  What happens when it reaches for something I can't handle?

  What happens when it reaches for something that reaches back?

  He lay back on the bed and stared at the ceiling of the alcove, narrow and low, and listened to the sounds of the dormitory around him — Lenne's restless movement, Tobas turning pages, the profound and complete silence from Kai's corner that was somehow louder than anything else.

  From somewhere far below the island, or perhaps from somewhere that was not a direction at all, Raka felt something.

  Not a sound. Not a sensation he had words for. It was the feeling of being noticed by something that noticed the way a glacier notices — slowly, massively, without anything that could be called a thought. A weight of attention, from somewhere very far away.

  It lasted a single second. Then it was gone.

  Raka lay still for a long time afterward.

  Dormitory Seven was dark and quiet, and the academy floated in its barrier of protective magic above the ordinary world, and three hundred years of history pressed down on the island like a hand, and none of that felt like nearly enough.

  Something is out there.

  And it already knows we're here.