Weeks passed and the three of them found their rhythm.
Moto trained. Sheu trained. Sukai, whose abilities sat somewhere in the middle of their class rather than the bottom, trained alongside them anyway because he seemed to actively prefer their company to the groups that would have taken him. They ate lunch in the same corner, walked the same routes between buildings, and collectively developed a finely tuned awareness of where Mukai was at any given moment.
It wasn't a bad way to spend a school term, all things considered.
Thursday afternoon, behind the classroom block, in the narrow strip of shade that was theirs by default.
"I'm so tired of hiding," Moto said, kicking a pebble into the wall. "Is this really what surviving school looks like?"
Sukai checked the time and stood. "The King's home for a family dinner. I have to go." He looked at them both. "Stay out of trouble."
"We'll try," Sheu said, which was the honest answer.
They trained until the light went orange and long, until the school was quiet and Mukai would be long gone. Walking home, Moto let the smoke drift out lazily, curling it up into the warm air, and Sheu picked up the wisps with careful gusts, coaxing them into shapes. She was trying for a heart. The smoke kept losing its edges, collapsing into something lopsided.
"You've almost got it," Moto said.
The shape was just beginning to hold when a water bubble materialised from the side and burst through it, scattering everything.
Mukai stepped out from behind a tree, arms folded, wearing the expression of someone who had been waiting and found the wait satisfying.
"Did you think you could run forever?"
Moto stepped forward. "We don't want trouble."
"You should have thought of that before you ran your mouth."
"What is your actual problem?" Moto said.
"Weaklings don't belong in my class," Mukai said, flat and certain. "And they don't get to be disrespectful on top of it."
He didn't wait for an answer. The water came out in long, snaking tendrils - precise, practised - pushing both of them back, keeping them at distance where smoke and wind were at their worst. A geyser drove Moto into the ground. Sheu hit the tree behind her and the water pinned her there.
Moto pushed himself up onto his knees.
The smoke that came off him then was different. It didn't drift. It poured - thick and black, seeping from his skin in a way that had nothing lazy about it, spreading outward and downward, swallowing the ground and clinging there even as the evening air moved around it. The angrier he got the denser it became, until the light inside the cloud was gone entirely and his necklace flared once, gold against the dark, before that disappeared too.
Sheu, still pinned, went still.
Mukai stepped into the edge of the cloud. He raised his fist. And then he looked at Moto's face, and he paused - just a half-second, something uncertain moving through his expression before he controlled it.
"Mukai." Sukai's voice came from the treeline, breathless from running. "Stop. Please. This isn't right."
"Stay out of this."
"No." Sukai stepped forward, and his voice cracked slightly on the next word. "This has gone too far."
Mukai held for a long moment. Then he dropped his fist, turned with a sound of disgust, and walked away toward home.
Sukai missed his family dinner.
He spent the evening cleaning their cuts instead, the three of them sitting in tired quiet while he worked. He apologised more times than was necessary and they let him, because it seemed to help him more than them.
"I'll talk to him again," he said. "And Sheu - I'll ask the King about your father as soon as I see him. I promise."
"Thank you," Sheu said. "For that. And for earlier."
"Yeah," Moto said, managing something close to a real smile. "Thanks."
Najo arrived the next morning with genuine lightness in his step for the first time in weeks - Ginimbi had given him the day, and he'd come to surprise his friends.
He found them covered in fresh bruises.
"Who did this." It wasn't a question.
Sheu nodded once.
Najo was out the door before either of them could speak. He crossed the school in a straight line and put his foot through the classroom door.
The electricity came off him in visible arcs. Students scrambled backward. Mr. Jumbo rose from his desk.
"Mukai." Najo's voice filled the room. "What did you do?"
Mukai looked at him. "I have nothing to say to you."
Najo swung. Mr. Jumbo was between them before the fist arrived, absorbing the charge with a calm that suggested this was not his first time.
"Enough." He held both boys at arm's length without visible effort. "This is not a zoo. If you want to settle something, do it properly. Formal challenge."
"I'm going to-" Najo started.
"I accept," Mukai said.
"Nyika arena. Two o'clock." Mr. Jumbo released them both. "Until then, you will behave. Go back to your class, Najo."
Word moved through the school in minutes.
Sheu thought it was a terrible idea. Moto's chest felt three sizes too large. Their friend, who had every reason to keep his head down, had walked into a classroom and declared war on the King's son for their sake.
Across the school, Sukai found his brother and tried, one more time, to talk.
Mukai hit him - open palm, sharp, the way you swat something irritating away - and turned back to his preparations. "Stop telling me what to do. I see the same weakness in you that I despise in Moto." A pause. "And in our father."
Sukai didn't say anything after that.
By 1:55 the arena was full.
Students pressed into the terraces in two distinct masses - Lightning on one side, Water on the other - the divide so clean it looked choreographed. The noise was the kind that fills a space from the walls inward.
Sheu leaned toward Moto. "You understand what this actually is, don't you? The son of the King against the son of Ginimbi. The two ruling classes of this nation, in front of everyone." She watched the terraces. "I don't think Mr. Jumbo allowed this by accident."
Moto looked at the packed arena, at Najo somewhere across the field rolling his shoulders, at the water students and the lightning students who had not mixed by even a single person.
"I think you're overthinking it," he said.
Sheu said nothing, which was its own kind of answer.