Raka began training in secret on the fifth day.

  Not secret from the dormitory — he told them, because there was no point keeping things from people who lived three meters away and would notice immediately. Secret from the rest of the academy. He found a section of the Training Forest, behind the eastern ridge where the paths thinned out and the older trees grew close enough together to block lines of sight, and he went there every morning before the official schedule began.

  The goal was control. Specifically: to touch someone else's Aether signature without drowning in it.

  The problem with Aether Resonance — as Raka was learning, one bruised arm at a time — was that it had no volume dial. He could reach for a signature, but the moment contact was made, the full force of it came through. Lenne's kinetic amplification. Damar's temporal stillness. Mira's forward perception, which was worse in some ways than the physical abilities because seeing fractured glimpses of the next five seconds while also trying to exist in the current second was deeply disorienting.

  He did not try to copy Sena's ability. He had the instinct — unverified but strong — that reaching toward Void Communication and pulling it into himself without knowing what he was reaching into would be a mistake of a specific and serious kind.

  He did not try to copy Kai's ability either. This was partly for the same reason and partly because he was not entirely sure Kai's ability could be copied. When he reached in that direction, he felt something that wasn't quite an absence but that behaved like one — a texture that slid away from contact the way wet stone slides away from a grip. He let it go.

  That left four abilities he could reach for. He worked through them methodically, the way Instructor Serath had taught them to approach unfamiliar combat: slow first, then controlled, then fast only when control was established. He reached for Lenne's frequency every morning and held it for as long as he could manage without letting it discharge, which began at approximately three seconds and improved, by the end of the week, to eleven.

  Eleven seconds of borrowed fire. The elbow still hurt. But it hurt less.

  * * *

  On the seventh morning, he was not alone in the forest.

  He heard the footsteps before he saw anyone — unhurried, deliberate, the footsteps of someone who was not trying to sneak up on him but was also not announcing themselves. He dropped the resonance and turned.

  Instructor Serath stepped out from between two broad-trunked trees and looked at the scorch mark on the ground where he'd been practicing discharge control, and at the four indentations in the soil where previous discharges had gone sideways.

  'How long?' she said.

  'Since the fifth day.'

  'Every morning?'

  'Yes.'

  She walked a slow circle around the practice area, studying it with the attention of someone reading a map. The soil told her things — the progression of the marks, the way the earlier ones scattered and the later ones concentrated, the direction of the force.

  'You're trying to put a ceiling on the input,' she said. 'Not limit what you copy, but limit how much of it comes through at once.'

  'I can't figure out how,' Raka said. 'When I make contact, all of it comes through.'

  'That's because you're approaching it like a door,' Serath said. 'Either open or closed. You need to approach it like a valve.'

  She sat on a fallen log and looked at him with the expression of a person deciding how much to say.

  'I knew a Resonance user,' she said. 'Once. A long time ago, when I was still a student here. She was much older than me — a senior instructor at the time. She had learned, over thirty years, to filter what she took in. Not all of it. But enough to not break herself every time she borrowed power.'

  'Thirty years,' Raka said.

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  'You don't have thirty years,' Serath said. 'I'm aware of that. But the principle is the same regardless of time. The filter isn't in the ability. It's in the intention. You reach for everything because you're afraid of missing something. Reach for less.'

  Raka thought about this.

  'What happened to her?' he asked. 'The instructor.'

  Serath was quiet for a moment.

  'She retired,' she said. 'Several years before she should have had to. The accumulation of borrowed ability does something to the body over time. Each time you copy, you're running power through channels not built for it. That causes damage. Some of it heals. Some of it doesn't.'

  The forest was very quiet around them. Somewhere above them, something moved in the branches.

  'You're telling me this so I understand the stakes,' Raka said.

  'I'm telling you this so you train smart,' Serath said. 'Not so you stop training. There's a difference.' She stood. 'Valve, not door. Try it.'

  She walked back into the trees without further comment.

  Raka stood in the clearing for a moment, looking at the scorch marks. Then he closed his eyes, found Lenne's frequency in the background hum of the dormitory's sleeping Aether signatures — still detectable from this distance, faint but recognizable — and reached.

  Not for all of it. For a thread of it.

  The kinetic energy came through like water through a narrow opening: still powerful, still more than he was built for, but contained. Manageable. He held it for twenty seconds before releasing it in a single controlled exhale that moved the leaves at his feet without detonating anything.

  He stood still for a moment after.

  Valve. Not door.

  He went back to practice.

  * * *

  The other members of Dormitory Seven were doing their own work.

  Damar had begun mapping not just the academy's physical layout but its patterns — which instructors walked which corridors at which times, where the gaps in supervision were, where the security Aethers were anchored. He did this without apparent urgency, the way he did most things, as if assembling information for its own sake. But Raka noticed that the map on Damar's desk grew more detailed every day and that certain locations were marked with a small asterisk whose meaning Damar had not yet explained.

  Mira had gone back to the library twice more and come back with her notebook full. She had not shared everything she'd found. Raka respected this — she was processing it, ordering it, deciding what was useful and when. Mira did not share information prematurely. It was one of her more valuable qualities and one of her more frustrating ones.

  Lenne had started working with Tobas. This was unexpected. Lenne's kinetic amplification was blunt-force by nature, and Tobas's ability — which had not yet been demonstrated publicly and which he discussed only reluctantly — appeared to be something Raka could only describe as structural perception: an awareness of load-bearing points in physical space, of where things would break and where they would hold. They made an unlikely pair. Lenne hit things. Tobas told her exactly where to hit them. The results were, Raka observed one afternoon in the training yard, precise in a way that pure force never was.

  Sena spent an increasing amount of time near the Void Observation Tower, which rose from the academy's northern edge and was used by senior students and instructors to monitor dimensional activity. She was not allowed inside — first years weren't. But she sat near it, and Raka suspected she could hear things through the tower's walls that its instruments couldn't measure.

  Kai disappeared for approximately six hours on the eighth day and reappeared at dinner with no explanation, slightly muddy, and with the air of someone who had established something to their satisfaction. When Raka asked where he'd been, he said: 'Checking the perimeter.' When Raka asked which perimeter, he said: 'The one that matters.' This was the longest conversation Raka had managed with him so far.

  * * *

  The confrontation happened on the ninth day, in the corridor outside the Aether Arena.

  It was not a fight — not technically, not yet. It was Drev Casson and two of his Ignis teammates walking toward Raka and Lenne from the opposite direction, and the corridor being, at that exact moment, not quite wide enough for comfortable passage on both sides without one group stepping aside.

  Neither group stepped aside.

  'Seven,' Drev said, by way of greeting.

  'Ignis,' Raka said.

  They stood approximately two meters apart. The Ignis boys behind Drev were watching Lenne with the specific wariness of people who had heard about the training yard dummy.

  'Heard you've been practicing in the forest,' Drev said. 'Early mornings.'

  'It's not a restricted area,' Raka said.

  'No, it's not.' Drev tilted his head. The gesture was casual, but his eyes weren't. 'You copied Lenne's ability in the training yard. That's what Resonance does — you take what other people have.'

  'Temporarily,' Raka said. 'And it damages me every time I do it.'

  'Still. That's a useful trick in a tournament.' A pause. 'The Academic Tournament is in six weeks. Individual and team brackets. Dormitory Seven has never fielded a team.'

  'There's a first time for everything,' Lenne said, cheerfully.

  Drev looked at her, then back at Raka. Something in his expression had shifted again — that recalibration, the one Raka was beginning to recognize. Drev Casson was not stupid. He was arrogant, but arrogance and stupidity were different things, and Raka had the sense that Drev revised his assessments when new information required it.

  'You'd need five for a team bracket,' Drev said.

  'We have seven,' Raka said.

  A beat. Then Drev stepped to the side, clearing the corridor. His teammates followed.

  'Six weeks,' Drev said, as they passed. His voice was level. 'Don't embarrass yourselves before then.'

  Raka and Lenne walked on.

  'Was that a threat or advice?' Lenne asked, once they were out of earshot.

  'I think,' Raka said, 'it might have been both.'

  'Good,' Lenne said. 'I was getting bored of just being ignored.'