One month to the trial.
Levi had been counting without meaning to. Thirty days. The trial was a fixed point and everything between now and then was preparation — which was fine. Preparation was something to do.
Saturday morning, Melissa set down her tea and said: "I'm going to train the three of you before the trial."
"The three of us," said Sylvia.
"You, Levi, and Priscilla. She's on her way — she'll be staying here while we train."
Sylvia's expression moved through surprise, delight, and a pointed look at her mother. "You're only telling me now?"
"I wanted to surprise you."
"She's already on her way!"
"Which is the ideal time to tell you, since there's nothing left to argue about." Melissa picked up her tea. "Go get ready."
Levi said: "What kind of training?"
Melissa looked at him with the slight smile of someone who had already decided not to answer. "You'll see at two."
—
Priscilla arrived with a single bag and the unhurried ease of someone who'd been here before. By noon all three of them were on the patio — Priscilla with a small marble orbiting her head, Sylvia reading, Levi looking at the training field and thinking about nothing, which he was getting slightly better at.
"She's not going to tell us, is she," said Priscilla, without opening her eyes.
"No," said Sylvia.
"My last three sessions with her involved things I didn't know my body could do," said Sylvia. "Most of them hurt."
"But you were stronger after."
"Yes."
"Then it could be worse."
Priscilla opened one eye. "He's very calm about this."
"Personality trait," said Sylvia. "I've decided."
The marble continued its orbit. Two o'clock arrived.
✦ ✦ ✦
Melissa sat down on the grass cross-legged and gestured for them to do the same.
"Inner realm," she said.
The three of them looked at each other.
"You've had the theory from Ryan. Today you find out if you can actually do it." She settled. "The inner realm isn't in your brain specifically. It's in the space between your Flux and your sense of self. When those two things are in the same place at the same time — that's the door."
"What does the door look like?" Priscilla asked.
"Different for everyone. Don't force it. Force closes it." Her voice had shifted — quieter, the register of someone speaking from somewhere they knew well. "Just breathe. Let yourself be in the space that's already there."
Levi closed his eyes. He breathed. The field sounds became less specific — wind, birdsong, the distant city — and then less present, and then—
Something shifted. Not dramatically. Just a quality change, the way a room changes when you've been in it long enough. One moment: grass and afternoon sun. The next: somewhere that had its own light entirely.
✦ ✦ ✦
Sylvia arrived first, and she knew it because the heat told her.
Not gradual — total. As if heat had always been the natural state and everything cool had been the aberration. She opened her eyes.
Fire. Every direction.
A forest — or what had been one, the tree shapes still present as architecture, trunks and branches outlined in orange-white — and the fire moving through it the way fire moves through things it has claimed: unhurried, already finished with the question of whether it was going to burn. The sky above was the colour of embers.
And it was hers. That was the part she hadn't expected. Not safe, not warm, not decorative — just completely, undeniably hers.
A figure stepped from the burning treeline. Her own face, wearing older knowledge.
"You got here faster than I expected," the figure said. Her voice had the quality of something burning — not destructive, just thoroughly warm.
"I'm Aivlys," she said, before Sylvia could ask. "And yes — I'm both of them."
She raised one hand. Fire bloomed from her palm — and then, seamlessly, shifted. Becoming denser. Heat folding into augmentation, into strength, fire and enhancement expressed as a single continuous gesture. Two abilities Sylvia had always run in sequence, shown as one thing that had never been two.
"They were never separate," Sylvia said.
"Never. The intermediate phase is learning to run them as one." Aivlys looked at the burning forest around them. "You have real work ahead."
"I know." Sylvia looked at her fire, her ember sky. "I've always liked work."
✦ ✦ ✦
Priscilla's inner realm had no ground.
She registered this with the body first — the brief instinct to fall, finding nothing, being forced to recalibrate. She wasn't falling. She was in a space where down was a suggestion rather than a rule.
She floated in an open sky without a horizon. Pale grey-blue, neither dawn nor any time she knew. And throughout it, at every depth and distance, things floated too — sections of land, buildings, objects of every size, all of it suspended in perfect stillness. Held. Precise.
Someone was sitting on the nearest platform, legs dangling, watching her with patient amusement. Her own face, but where Priscilla's expression was warm and slightly mischievous, this version had settled into something quieter.
"Allicirp," Priscilla said.
"You worked it out fast." Allicirp looked around at the floating city. "Everything here is held. That's what you do — you understand the position and weight of things well enough to place them differently. Your telekinesis isn't force." She paused. "It's knowledge."
Priscilla thought about the marble she kept orbiting her head without thinking — the constant passive awareness of its position and weight. "It's always felt like that," she said. "I just didn't have the words."
"You have them now." Allicirp looked at her steadily. "The ceiling is much higher than you've been using. Come — reach out and move something."
Priscilla reached. Carefully at first. Then with more intention.
Everything moved.
✦ ✦ ✦
In the waking world, Melissa sat with her eyes closed and her hands in her lap, monitoring.
Sylvia had gone still almost immediately — the particular quality of absence that meant she was somewhere else entirely. Priscilla a few seconds later. Both of them in trance, breathing slow, unreachable.
Levi was still.
Melissa opened one eye and looked at him. His breathing had changed. The Flux around him had shifted — she could feel it the way she could feel weather changing, a subtle pressure difference, the energy drawing inward rather than radiating outward.
She closed her eye.
Whatever was waiting for Levi Baron on the other side of that door — she had her suspicions. She'd had them since the entrance exam. Since the report from Velvetia. Since the night she'd looked at his inner realm description and felt the particular weight of someone recognising something they'd hoped for but hadn't dared to expect.
She'd find out soon enough.
On the grass of the training field, Levi's eyes moved behind closed lids — and stopped.
He was in.