Morning came with Ha'ken still in the chair by the door.
Lysander saw him first, sat up immediately, and pointed. "He didn't move," he announced, deeply impressed by this.
"I moved," Ha'ken said, without looking up.
Lysander stared at him. "When?"
"Several times."
Lysander looked deeply unconvinced but chose not to press it. He scrambled out of bed and pulled on his boots with urgent focus, as though the day had already started without him and he needed to catch up.
Eve was already upright and ready. Lilith sat on the edge of her bed and looked at Ha'ken and thought about the conversation in Tu'Shan's quarters a few hours ago. Ha'ken looked back at her briefly — a short, steady look. I know. She got up.
Ha'ken walked them through the day's structure over breakfast. Prayers first. Education after. Then the disciplines, where the three of them would be separated.
Lysander looked up at the word separated.
"Where do I go?" he said.
"Training," Ha'ken said. "With the other children of the chapter serfs."
Lysander's face shifted through several expressions before settling on cautious excitement. "What kind of training?"
"Appropriate for your age."
"Will it be hard?"
"Yes."
He put his fork down and nodded with great seriousness. "I'm ready," he said. Then he picked the fork back up because he hadn't finished eating and food was also important.
Prayers were held in a hall that smelled of incense and old stone. The Chaplain's voice carried through it with the flat certainty of someone who believed every word and expected the room to follow. The three children sat with the chapter serfs' families in the rows assigned to them.
Lilith listened and her memory locked every phrase on the first pass.
Eve sat straight and attentive.
Lysander recognized some words from the orphanage prayers and mouthed them quietly, nodding each time they matched. At one point he nudged Eve and whispered "that bit's the same as ours" and Eve looked at him and gave one nod. Lysander looked very satisfied.
Education followed with a serf who had a patient manner and started from what they already knew. Lilith answered questions and asked several of her own. Eve answered accurately and briefly. Lysander answered with enthusiasm and took several significant detours that the serf redirected with practiced ease, though he did pause once to genuinely consider one before deciding it was still a detour.
Then the disciplines.
Three Librarians waited in the Librarium. Lilith recognized the senior one from the assessment after the briefing room — lined face, eyes carrying decades of looking at things not meant to be seen. He looked at her when she entered and was quiet for a moment.
"Sit," he said, nodding at the chair in the center of the room.
Lilith sat.
Questions first. What she'd experienced, when, under what conditions. She answered fully. Two Librarians took notes and the senior one just watched her face.
Then he asked her to reach.
Not toward anything. Just open the connection she had to the Warp and hold it without directing it.
"I've only used it twice," Lilith said. "Both times were reactive. I don't know if I can do it deliberately."
"Try," he said.
She reached inward and this time something was there. Faint but present, like a door already slightly open.
All three Librarians moved at once.
The senior one's eyes sharpened and his posture tightened. The one on the left took a half-step back, his hand going to the hilt at his side. The one on the right gripped the edge of his chair, knuckles pale, and went rigid.
"Stop," the senior Librarian said.
Lilith released it.
The room settled.
"You've had no formal training," he said.
"No."
"And you've accessed the Warp twice. Both times reactive."
"Yes."
He looked at the other two briefly. Then back at her. "An untrained psyker reaching for the Warp produces something chaotic and unfocused and dangerous in ways that are difficult to contain," he said. "What you just produced was none of those things."
"What did I produce?" Lilith said.
"Something large," he said. "And coherent in a way we don't see from someone without training." He sat back. "Either you have a natural control we've rarely encountered, or something about what you are shapes the access regardless of training. Possibly both."
"We'll work on containment first," he continued. "Control before direction. Direction before application. We don't rush this." He looked at her steadily. "Especially not with you."
The implication sat in the room and he didn't elaborate on it.
Lilith nodded.
Eve's assessment was in a different wing.
Ha'ken had briefed the examining team beforehand — standing in the anteroom with the senior Librarian and the Apothecary, giving them everything he knew. The project designation. The Pariah gene-seed. The field's effect on humans and its considerably more pronounced effect on Orks. The dynamic with Lilith — not proximity-based, he clarified, but connection-based. As long as Lilith was alive and the bond between them held, Eve's field was suppressed. Distance was irrelevant. The Apothecary had filled half a page before Eve walked in.
Brother Forren was the Apothecary — older than Ha'ken, with the steadiness of someone who trusted his instruments and his eyes equally. He'd brought in additional equipment: auspex arrays, biometric measuring devices, a psychic resonance scanner borrowed from the Librarium that he'd spent the previous evening learning to operate correctly.
Eve walked in and sat down.
Forren looked at her. Then at his scanner. The reading was flat — not the low ambient baseline of a non-psyker, but the active suppression a Pariah gene produced. Except it wasn't there. He checked the calibration. Fine. He checked it again.
"You're not projecting," the senior Librarian said.
"I know," Eve said.
"Do you know why?"
Eve was quiet for a moment. "Lilith is alive," she said. "When she woke up — back on the ship — the empty feeling stopped. I don't know what that means. I just know that's when it changed."
"The empty feeling," Forren said, without looking up from his notes. "Describe it."
Eve considered this with the focused attention she gave questions worth answering. "Everything was wrong before," she said. "Not painful. Just wrong. Empty." A pause. "Lilith filled it."
Forren wrote this down. "And when does the field project outward?" he said.
"The Ork attack," Eve said. "I was fighting. The empty feeling came back but it pushed outward instead of staying inside." She thought about it. "The Orks went strange faster than the nun with me. Much faster."
"Describe strange," Forren said.
"They stopped being sure of themselves," Eve said. "Their attacks got messy. The nun felt sick but she stayed herself. The Orks lost the attacking part."
Forren looked at the Librarian. "Pariah field interaction with the Ork psychic gestalt," he said quietly. "The Orks run on a collective psychic frequency. The Blank field cancels it at the source. Humans feel psychic absence. Orks feel psychic cancellation. Very different effects."
Eve looked at him. "I didn't know that," she said.
"No reason you would," Forren said. He set down his pen and picked up a different instrument. "Physical measurements now. Strength, speed, reflexes, bone density, muscle fiber density. It'll take time and some of it won't be comfortable. Tell me if anything hurts."
Eve nodded.
Forren worked through the measurements with complete attention. The strength assessments required him to bring in additional weights twice because the initial range proved insufficient. He did this without comment, made a note, and continued. The reflex testing produced numbers he checked three times before writing down. The bone density scan made him go very still for a moment before he exhaled and wrote a figure and underlined it.
By the end Eve sat in the center of the room looking unbothered and Forren looked at his notes with the quiet focus of someone who had come in expecting something significant and found considerably more.
"One more thing," the senior Librarian said. "Ha'ken told us the field suppression is connection-based rather than proximity-based. I want to verify something." He paused. "I'd like you to try to project the field deliberately. Don't hold it back."
Eve looked at him. "I don't know how to do it on purpose," she said. "It just happened."
"Try anyway," he said.
Eve sat still and looked at her hands and tried to find the empty feeling and push it outward the way it had gone during the fight.
Nothing happened for a moment.
Then Forren's hand tightened on the edge of the medicae station and the Librarian's breath changed and the scanner reading inverted sharply — a deep sustained depression pressing against the psychic field in the room, the specific wrongness of fundamental absence made physical.
It lasted four seconds before Eve let it go.
Forren looked at the reading. Then at Eve. "That was deliberate?" he said.
"I think so," Eve said. "It felt different from the fight. Smaller."
Forren looked at the Librarian.
"Ha'ken's briefing was accurate," Forren said quietly. "If anything it was conservative."
Lysander's training was in the courtyard with six other children ranging from five to nine. They knew the drills. The trainer was a grizzled chapter serf who looked at Lysander when he arrived, looked at the others, and said: "Try to keep up."
Lysander looked at the other children. The nine-year-old was very tall.
He stood up as straight as he could and said "Okay," and meant it completely.
He wasn't fast. He wasn't the strongest or the most coordinated and the first drill was running, which didn't favor him, but he ran anyway with his arms pumping and his face set with the determination of someone who had decided finishing mattered more than position. His boots slapped the stone courtyard in a steady rhythm and he didn't stop.
He came in last.
He lined up for the second drill immediately.
The third drill involved a low wooden obstacle. Lysander misjudged the clearance and went over it sideways and scraped both palms on the landing and sat on the ground blinking at the sky.
The nine-year-old, whose name was Dekkan, looked over.
Lysander got up, wiped his palms on his trousers, and got back in line.
"Does it hurt?" Dekkan said.
"Yes," Lysander said cheerfully. "But it's fine."
Dekkan looked at him for a moment, said nothing, and turned back to the front.
By the end Lysander was breathing hard and his palms were scraped and there was a streak of courtyard dust across his left cheek he hadn't noticed. He looked at the trainer with bright, tired eyes.
"Same time tomorrow?" he said.
The trainer looked at him.
"Same time tomorrow," he said.
Lysander nodded firmly and went to find the others. He was the only one of the three who walked back looking entirely ordinary — no Librarians following at a careful distance, no Apothecary writing things down. Just a six-year-old with scraped palms and a dust smear and a new friend called Dekkan and things he wanted to tell someone about both of those.
He found Eve first and told her everything and she listened to all of it.
This became the routine.
Prayers. Education. The disciplines. Each day the same shape, filled differently as the work deepened.
Lilith's sessions grew harder each time, methodical and unhurried, building containment before anything else. Each session the senior Librarian grew more thoughtful, revising an already large assessment further upward each time she sat in that chair.
Eve's sessions moved from assessment into deliberate practice — Forren and the Librarians mapping what the field did when she reached for it intentionally versus when it came on its own, finding edges to something none of them had encountered in quite this form. Eve asked precise questions when she had them and absorbed the answers quietly.
Lysander scraped his other palm on the fourth day. On the fifth he didn't scrape anything. On the sixth he cleared the obstacle cleanly on the first attempt and Dekkan made a short approving sound. Lysander looked so pleased about this that Dekkan looked away to give him a moment.
The trainer said nothing.
But he stopped giving Lysander the new-child assessment and started giving him the same look he gave everyone else.
On the seventh day Tu'Shan came to the Librarium.
He stood in the doorway and watched without announcing himself. The senior Librarian acknowledged him with a nod and continued.
Lilith was mid-exercise — holding the reach, maintaining containment, keeping it steady under instruction. She didn't notice Tu'Shan. She was focused entirely on what she was doing.
Tu'Shan stayed until the session ended.
Lilith sat back, tired from sustained focus, and looked at the senior Librarian.
"How am I doing?" she said.
He considered this.
"Better than you should be," he said.
Lilith looked at him for a moment. "I'll take that," she said.
She reached for her journal and opened it and began writing. The senior Librarian looked up at the doorway where Tu'Shan had been standing.
Tu'Shan was gone.
But on the small table just inside the doorway sat a folded piece of parchment. The senior Librarian crossed to it and opened it and read it. He read it twice. Then he looked at Lilith, still writing, entirely unaware.
He folded the parchment, placed it in his robe, and said nothing.