The dining hall went quiet when Noah walked in.It didn't happen all at once. It spread table by table, like a ripple. Forks stopped. Somebody near the back said his name, somebody else shushed them, and the shushing only made it louder.He kept walking. Six months ago he could have crossed this room on fire and nobody would have looked up. Now he couldn't pick up a tray without forty people watching him do it. Across the room Aria glanced up from her table, then quickly away."Say something," Dax hissed from the corner table. "They're waiting for a speech.""I'm getting breakfast.""Champions give speeches.""Champions are hungry." Noah dropped into the seat across from him. His forearm still ached where Ferris had caught it, a dull, honest ache he almost liked. "Nobody told me the hard part was the morning after.""The hard part is that you're famous and you're eating dry toast." Dax shoved a plate of eggs at him. "Eat. Kade's already planning your spar. He's drawn up a schedule.""

Dax's bed was empty, same as most nights lately. Noah was grateful for it.He sat on the edge of his own bed and looked at the spent fragment on the nightstand, still wrapped in its scrap of cloth. Dull, cold, the light long gone out of it."It's dead," he said. "I can't open it again."**[The fragment is spent. What it showed you is not. That memory is in you now, host. This is recall, not replay. Go slowly.]**"Slowly."**[The memory was not yours when you first saw it. It will come back sharper than you expect.]**Noah lay back and shut his eyes.It came. Not like a dream. Like walking back into a room he'd left an hour ago, everything still where he'd put it. The noise first. Voices, glasses, the string quartet near the dais. The gold light off the chandeliers. His mother laughing with her head tilted. He didn't linger there. It hurt too much, and it wasn't what he'd come for.The great doors swung open.He made himself watch it properly this time. Not the fire, not the chaos that

Lyra Frost had stopped thinking about Noah Gray months ago, and she did not like being wrong about things.She stood at the edge of the training yard with her arms crossed, waiting for Adrian to finish whatever had kept him late. Across the grass, Instructor Vess was running the open class through his pattern drills, the same ones every student had hated since their first year. Partners tossed marked weights. The catcher caught them without looking at their hands. It was supposed to train instinct. In practice it trained embarrassment.She wasn't watching the class. She was watching one boy in it.It had started small. Three days ago, a corridor, Noah passing her with his head down and a bruise of exhaustion under each eye. She'd noticed because everyone had noticed him that week. The champion. The boy with no wolf who'd made Ferris look slow. The whole academy was still arguing over whether it was luck.Lyra didn't believe in luck. She believed in patterns, and Noah Gray was developi

Noah didn't turn around.He kept his cheek against the cold glass and his hands flat on the brick, and he listened. One set of boots behind him, close, maybe twelve feet. A second set, farther off, circling wide to the left. The driver's door of the car opened and shut.**[Two men on foot. Neither has drawn a weapon. The nearer one is carrying a flashlight, which he has not yet switched on.]**"Great," Noah breathed. "Thanks.""What was that?" the voice said.*Think.* He was a kid in a dark jacket on a stack of crates, looking through a window. There were worse things to be. Drunk. Lost. Stupid. The academy's whole reputation was that its students were arrogant enough to do idiotic things.He turned his head slowly, keeping his chin low, the collar of his jacket high around his jaw. "Sorry," he said, and let his voice crack on it. "I was trying to find the harbour road. I got turned around. There was a light up here, so I...""So you climbed a wall.""I wanted to see over it.""Over i

Noah skipped dinner and went out through the gate at four.He told Dax he'd be in the library with Priya. He told Priya nothing, because Priya would have looked at him with that flat, patient stare and he'd have told her everything. The guard was reading a newspaper and didn't glance up. By ten past four Noah was on the river road, walking fast with his hands in his pockets, and by five he was inside the dock district.He didn't go anywhere near the green lamp.He'd had a long night to think about it. *Think before you act.* So he thought. The yard behind the building was watched. The side door was watched. Anyone who tried to stop the old man in front of two bodyguards would be finished before he got a sentence out.He needed a place where the old man would be alone.**[You are assuming such a place exists,]** the System said, once he'd climbed onto the catwalk of a rusting crane two rows over. **[This System would remind you that a man of his rank is rarely unaccompanied.]**"He wal