"Just how did we end up here," Lucas muttered, narrowing his eyes at the horizon as he stood beside Sylvia and Nova on the deck of a cruise ship that had absolutely no business being part of a school tournament.

The ship moved steadily across the open ocean, cold wind brushing across the deck in steady gusts. Cadets were scattered everywhere around them — some leaning lazily against the railings watching the water, some clustered in loud groups catching up after the chaos of the first round, some stretched out on the long cushioned loungers like they’d forgotten there was supposed to be a second round coming.

"To wherever the second round is supposed to happen, I’d assume," Gideon said from beside him, with the calm of someone who had accepted that information would arrive when it arrived and worrying about it beforehand served no purpose.

Before boarding, Beatrice had given them precisely one sentence of guidance.

’We will begin the second round at a certain location. All cadets, board the cruise immediately.’

And that had been the entirety of it.

The result was that the atmosphere on deck had gradually settled into something that felt considerably more like a holiday than an examination. Cadets eating snacks and laughing too loudly. Older year students asleep on loungers in the sun. The general energy of people who had survived something difficult and were taking the unexpected gift of downtime with both hands.

Celia leaned over the railing slightly, her eyes following the movement of the water below with quiet curiosity. After a moment she turned her head. "Hey Nova, look — there’s a dolphin down there. The color kind of looks like your hair."

Nova was sitting dead in the center of the deck, directly between any railing on either side, as far from the edge as geometrically possible, looking like a person who had been told to sit down and had interpreted the instruction very seriously. He did not look toward where Celia was pointing.

"Fck whatever that thing is, I ain’t looking down there." he said, the words coming out in a flat line. His smile was technically present but required significant structural support. "You could tell me a sea dragon’s dancing and I still wouldn’t check. I would hear about it later. From land."

Lucas looked at him for a second, and then the memory arrived without being invited — Nova standing on the academy spire, looking over the edge once, going rigid, and then spending the rest of the time staring at a specific cloud formation with intense focus.

The laugh came before he could stop it.

Sylvia’s eyes shifted sideways toward him when she heard it.

"What?" Lucas asked, catching her looking.

"Nothing," she said, and looked away.

Nova, still statue-straight in the center of the deck, muttered something under his breath. "If this thing rocks one more time I’m considering my options." 𝗳𝐫𝚎𝗲𝚠𝚎𝗯𝕟𝐨𝘃𝚎𝗹.𝗰𝗼𝗺

"You’d jump off?" Celia asked, clearly fighting her own laugh.

"I can barely function as it is."

Gideon shook his head with the tired patience of a man who had come to terms with the specific person Nova was.

Lucas smiled wider.

Celia rested her arms along the railing again, watching the dolphins disappear back beneath the surface, the last fin slipping under with a quiet efficiency that left no trace behind.

"Honestly, this is a pretty decent break after that first round. Feels like they’re letting us breathe a little before throwing us into whatever comes next."

Nobody disagreed with that.

The ship moved on. The ocean spread out in every direction. The sun sat at an angle that made the water look like something worth painting.

Then Celia tilted her head slightly.

"Huh." She was still looking down at the water. "Why did the dolphins disappear?"

Something shifted in Sylvia’s expression.

Lucas’s eyes moved across the deck on instinct — not because he’d decided to scan, but because something in the quality of the air had changed in a way his body registered before his mind caught up. The noise around them felt the same on the surface but underneath it, something was different. Something had stopped.

Then —

"Lucas."

He turned toward her voice normally, the way you turn when someone says your name from nearby, and his eyes went wide.

Sylvia was already mid-air.

She crossed the space between them in less than a second and hit him with enough force to take him fully off his feet, her weight driving him down and backward, the deck rising up to meet him —

He braced for the back of his head to connect with the floor.

It didn’t.

Something stopped it. Something warm and soft, arriving between his skull and the deck a fraction of a second before impact — Sylvia’s hand, placed there in the same motion that had taken her across the deck and brought him down, like she had calculated both things in the same instant without choosing between them.

The thud of landing moved through the rest of his body. His back, his shoulders, the breath leaving him from the impact. But his head rested in her palm, cushioned, held.

He lay there for a second, processing.

Sylvia was above him, knees bent beside his waist, her other hand pressed into the deck for balance, close enough that he could feel the warmth coming off her even with the ocean wind moving around them. Her hair had come loose in the movement, several strands falling forward and brushing across his cheek, light and unintended. Her face was inches from his own.

Her eyes were moving over him quickly, checking.

"Are you okay?" she asked, her voice quieter than usual, something underneath the calm of it that she wasn’t managing quite as well as she usually did.

Lucas stared up at her.

His brain was doing several things simultaneously and completing none of them. "Y-Yeah," he said, and his voice came out fine for the first word and less fine immediately after.

The warmth reached his face before he could do anything about it.