The walk back from the western ring was too quiet.
Not the silence of exhaustion. Not the silence of relief.
The silence of people replaying something they did not yet have language for.
Kael could feel it in the spacing between them.
Ren walked half a step farther ahead than usual.
Lira kept glancing at him when she thought he wouldn't notice.
Drax stayed close enough to intervene if needed.
Nyx, somehow, managed to make watchfulness look casual.
It wasn't casual.
They all saw what almost happened.
So had he.
Back in the unit room, the door shut with a hard click.
Nobody sat down.
Nobody pretended this would wait.
Lira spoke first.
"You were about to use it."
Kael crossed his arms automatically. "I didn't."
"That wasn't my point."
"I know."
Ren stood near the window, not looking at anyone, which somehow made his attention feel heavier instead of lighter.
"You lost focus on the target," he said. "You reacted to the residue."
Kael looked at him. "Because it reacted to me first."
"And that's supposed to make this better?"
Kael's temper sparked. "No. It's supposed to make it more complicated."
Nyx leaned against the wall by the door, blade gone but danger not. "It also makes it repeatable."
That one landed badly.
Kael turned on him. "What's that supposed to mean?"
"It means," Nyx said, "this is the third time something irregular has identified you before you identified it."
No accusation in his tone.
Just pattern.
That made it worse.
Drax folded his arms. "And the second time in two days you nearly crossed a line in front of us."
Kael stared at the floor for one second too long.
Then looked up. "I stopped."
Lira's voice sharpened. "Because we called you back."
He didn't answer.
Because yes.
Because that was the problem.
Because if Drax hadn't shouted in the ring, he wasn't sure where his hand would have gone next.
The room tightened.
Ren turned from the window at last. "We need rules."
Kael blinked. "Rules?"
"Yes."
"For me?"
"For all of us," Ren said. "About you."
That should have angered him more than it did.
Instead, it made his stomach feel strangely hollow.
Because some part of him had expected this from the moment he entered Ember Hold.
Lira nodded once. "Agreed."
Nyx gave the slightest tilt of his head. "Needed."
Drax looked at Kael directly. "Better than pretending."
Kael laughed once without humor and leaned back against the wall nearest his bunk. "Alright. Fine. Let's hear it. Go ahead and explain my own danger to me."
Ren didn't rise to the tone.
"If anything irregular addresses you, reacts to you, or shifts behavior around you, you say it immediately."
Kael opened his mouth.
Ren kept going.
"If your right hand starts reacting, you say it immediately."
That shut him back up.
Lira added, "If you feel the urge to use that power inside formation, we need warning before you act."
Kael looked at her. "Warning usually requires time."
"Then make time."
Easy for her to say.
Drax's contribution came next, quieter than the others but somehow harder to ignore.
"If you think you're losing control, you fall back. No argument."
Nyx spoke last.
"And if you lie to us about any of this, we stop treating you like a teammate and start treating you like a threat."
The room went still after that.
No one softened it.
No one looked away.
Kael let out a slow breath.
"Great," he said. "Love the trust exercises."
Lira's eyes narrowed. "This is trust."
He looked at her.
She held the stare.
Then she said, more quietly, "This is what trust looks like here."
That changed the shape of the moment.
Not enough to make it easy.
Enough to make it honest.
Kael dragged a hand through his hair and looked away first. "Fine."
Ren watched him. "Fine what?"
"Fine, I'll tell you."
"That's not an answer."
Kael glared at him. "It's the only version you're getting before I throw something."
For one second, Kael thought Ren might actually keep pushing.
Instead, he nodded once.
Good enough.
For now.
That should have ended it.
It didn't.
Because once the rules were spoken, the rest of the questions came with them.
Lira sat on the edge of the table this time, not because she was relaxed, but because she looked like she needed the posture to keep the conversation from becoming a fight.
"What do you remember," she asked, "from the moments right before you almost use it?"
Kael frowned.
He hadn't expected that.
He looked down at his hand.
Then answered more honestly than he intended.
"Pressure first," he said. "Then attention."
"Attention?" Drax asked.
He nodded slowly. "Like something is there. Looking back. Not at me exactly. At… whatever this is."
His fingers tightened unconsciously.
"And then?"
Kael swallowed. "Then it stops feeling like a choice and starts feeling like the obvious thing to do."
No one interrupted him.
That silence felt deliberate now.
Respectful, even.
He continued.
"It's not like hearing a full conversation. It's more like an answer I already want before I know I've asked the question."
Nyx's expression gave nothing away. "Compulsion."
"Maybe."
Lira studied him. "Or resonance."
Kael frowned. "That sounds worse somehow."
"It means your power may not be activating at random," she said. "It may be reacting to a class of target."
Ren's expression hardened immediately. "Which means if the pattern spreads—"
"We don't know that it can," Lira cut in.
"We don't know that it can't."
There it was.
The divide.
Not emotional this time.
Strategic.
Kael watched it happen in real time.
Lira wanted information before fear.
Ren wanted limits before disaster.
Drax wanted structure.
Nyx wanted certainty where there wasn't any.
And Kael—
Kael was the argument sitting in the middle of the room.
A knock sounded at the door.
Everyone tensed instantly.
Nyx moved first, crossing the room in two silent steps and checking the hall through the side viewing slit.
"Seris," he said.
Of course it was.
She entered without ceremony when Nyx unlatched the door.
Her gaze swept the room once and took in everything—standing positions, tension levels, the fact that nobody looked relaxed enough for this to be a social visit.
Good.
At least someone should suffer.
"You've been reassigned," she said.
No greeting. No lead-in.
Kael frowned. "To what now?"
"Evening archive support."
The room reacted in four different ways at once.
Lira's suspicion sharpened.
Ren's entire posture tightened.
Nyx went still in a dangerous, unreadable way.
Drax said the words all of them were thinking.
"…Why?"
Seris looked directly at Kael.
"Because if irregularities are climbing out of my training sectors, I want the one person they keep reacting to where I can measure the response."
Kael stared at her. "That's somehow the worst explanation you've given me yet."
Seris didn't disagree.
"You leave in ten minutes."
When she was gone, nobody moved for three full seconds.
Then Kael looked around the room.
"So," he said. "Anybody else getting tired of me being useful in all the wrong ways?"
No one answered.
Not because they disagreed.
Because they didn't.