MY TEAM WILL NEVER BETRAY ME AGAIN

CHAPTER 3: A BOND THAT SHOULDN'T EXIST

Sleep did not come easily after that. James spent the following nights buried in the Academy's restricted archive terminal, cross-referencing every scrap of information he could find about Bond Link's classification history, the glow of the screen the only light in his dorm room until well past two in the morning, while by day he quietly, carefully, began testing the boundaries of what remained of his severed connections.

He discovered something unsettling almost immediately: the bond didn't simply vanish when a team dissolved. It thinned. It dimmed. But it lingered, like a wound that had scarred over without ever truly closing, and through that lingering thread James could feel fragments of his former teammates' emotional states from across campus — fear here, tension there, a persistent undercurrent of guilt that told him at least one of them hadn't made peace with what happened, even if none of them had said so to his face.

He decided to test something he probably shouldn't have.

Standing alone in an empty stairwell after curfew, the emergency lighting casting everything in a dim amber that made the whole building feel like it was holding its breath, James focused on the faint thread connecting him to Priya and did what Bond Link had always let him do — reached toward it, gently, the way he used to reach toward a teammate mid-battle to stabilize their coordination. A line of pale light unspooled in his vision, thin as a hair, connecting his chest to some invisible point across the campus, pulsing faintly in time with something that might have been her heartbeat.

Priya's potential reading flickered into view.

61% → 64% → 69%.

James watched the number climb in real time, and ice-cold understanding flooded through him, spreading outward from his chest until his fingertips went numb against the stairwell railing. He wasn't just reading her potential. He was moving it. Actively, in the moment, simply by holding the connection open, he was accelerating something inside her that should have taken weeks of dedicated training to shift, weeks she hadn't earned and didn't even know she was receiving.

He severed the connection immediately, breathing hard, backed against the stairwell wall like the numbers themselves might reach out and grab him by the throat.

Bond Link wasn't a passive lens. It was a lever. And he had just discovered he could pull it on people who had no idea he was touching them at all — an intimacy so total it felt closer to trespass than to friendship, no matter how good his intentions might have been.

The implications terrified him enough that he almost gave up experimenting entirely. Almost. But three days later, walking past the training yards long after most students had gone to dinner, the sky already bruising toward evening, he saw a girl throwing herself against a target dummy again and again, missing every single time, her control ability visibly fighting her rather than obeying her, each failed attempt met with the same tight, furious silence.

He recognized her distantly — Mia Bennett, a name that circulated through the Academy mostly as a punchline. The girl whose ability should have been devastating and somehow never worked right. The girl the instructors had quietly stopped believing in, the one whose file, James imagined, probably had more red flags in it than actual notes on her progress.

Something made James stop walking. Maybe curiosity. Maybe the ache still sitting in his chest from being discarded himself, recognizing a kindred loneliness in the way she trained alone, unwatched, unencouraged, throwing herself at the same wall over and over with nobody left to tell her to stop or to try differently.

He formed a bond with her without asking permission — a reflex more than a decision, something that happened before he'd consciously chosen it — and the resulting number nearly knocked the breath out of him.

POTENTIAL: 12%.

Twelve percent. Almost nothing. It matched exactly the reputation she'd been given, the failure everyone assumed was simply the ceiling of her ability, the number that would have justified every dismissive whisper he'd ever half-heard about her in the hallways.

Except James, still shaken from what he'd learned about Marcus, didn't quite believe in ceilings anymore. He held the connection a moment longer than he should have, curious, careful, testing the boundary of what a small deliberate push might do, watching the number the way someone watches a candle flame in a draft.

12% → 14%.

A warning bloomed across his vision, sharp and sudden enough to make him flinch, his shoulder knocking against the cold stone wall of the training yard.

BOND DEPTH: 1%.

POTENTIAL SYNCHRONIZATION AVAILABLE.

Then, beneath it, in text that felt less like a system message and more like a warning from something almost alive, something that had seen this exact moment happen before and hadn't liked how it ended:

DO NOT BOND WITH TOO MANY INDIVIDUALS.

MAXIMUM SAFE BONDS: UNKNOWN.

James stood frozen in the dim training yard, the target dummy still swinging faintly on its chain, Mia oblivious to the invisible thread connecting her potential to a boy she hadn't even noticed watching her from the shadows near the equipment shed. He had no idea what "unsafe" meant in this context. He had no idea what happened if he crossed a threshold no one had bothered to define, no manual, no precedent, nothing but a cold warning and his own uncertain judgment standing between him and whatever came next.

But for the first time since the betrayal, standing there in the fading light with a stranger's buried potential glowing quietly in his mind, he felt something other than grief.

He felt the terrifying, electric shape of a second chance.

He didn't approach her that evening. He told himself it was caution, the responsible thing to do after a warning that specific, but the truth sat closer to fear — fear of what it would mean to try building something again, only to have it collapse the way his last team had. He walked home slowly, replaying the number in his mind, twelve percent becoming fourteen becoming a question he couldn't stop asking himself. If a girl the whole Academy had given up on could move that easily, what else had everyone gotten wrong, and how much of it was James's job now to fix.