One of the corridors between the office and the courtyard had four doors on the right side and two windows on the left, both of them looking out toward the wall.

Mod noted every one of them on the way. Not by counting aloud, and not by stopping to inspect them, either. She noticed them the way she always noticed everything, as a constant background vigilance while her face gave away nothing at all.

The courtyard, when she came through the entrance, was what Hild had left behind.

The cracked floor, the ridge of earth cutting across the old chalk marks, the three stone fragments near the bowed wall. The herb plant in the corner, its roots half-pulled loose and its leaves still faintly stirring in the afternoon air.

She stood in the entrance and took all of it in before she walked forward.

"Looks like you guys had fun," she said, to no one in particular.

"In a way, I suppose" Beorn raised his eyebrow.

Mod moved toward the far wall without being told to, the one with the most intact stonework opposite the bowed section.

Aestrith was already against the near wall with the crutch braced at her side.

Beorn noted they had that much in common in the way they set themselves before the room could decide for them.

He stopped near the middle and opened the ledger. "We’ll do exactly as Hild. Show me what you can do."

He glanced down at the page, then back up. "Whatever comes first, before I make specific requests."

Mod stood with her back almost to the wall, arms at her sides.

She looked at the courtyard floor, coated in a thin grey layer of dust from Hild’s broken stone. She exhaled and tried.

The dust lifted.

It rose from everywhere at once, the whole grey coating peeling off every surface in a muddy cloud, every particle drifting inward from all directions toward a center that would not stay put.

The stone fragments near the bowed wall shifted a few inches, then stopped, then shifted again in a slightly different direction, dust lifted from the top of the timber target’s crossbeam at the far wall. There was no clean rhythm, only everything in the courtyard moving restlessly, reaching toward a point that kept changing its position.

It lasted four seconds.

Then it crashed at once, the dust dropping back to the floor in a grey film, the stone fragments where they had ended up.

Beorn looked at the courtyard. "That’s interesting. Would you say you bent the air?" he said.

Mod looked at him. "No? I didn’t felt like that," she said. "It’s more like I push it away, or well, create a zone there isn’t any."

He stopped for a second. "Right," he said, and wrote ’vacuum’ with a question mark.

Aestrith had watched the motion of the dust the entire time.

She had not needed to use her gravity field, as nothing had moved fast enough, or toward anything important enough, to require containment.

But she had felt the void differently from the way she felt Hild’s earth bending, the specific sensation of pressure missing from a place where it ought to have been. She shrugged that away without saying it aloud.

"That was too unrestricted." she said to Mod.

She kept her eyes on Mod as she finished. "The way it spread everywhere because you didn’t set up a limit. Pick the border first, decide how far the ability can go before you start."

Mod mulled over the advice.

There was no need for her to turn it into some type of metaphor, she only nodded once and turned back toward the center of the courtyard.

This time she was still for twenty full seconds before anything happened.

Then the dust in a circle roughly the width of a doorway lifted from the floor all at once, rising and moving toward a point at the center of the circle, the motion clean and defined. Outside the circle, the dust stayed where it was.

The stone fragments inside the circle slid slowly toward that central point, grinding softly over the cracked floor. The ones outside the circle did not move.

She kept it there for five seconds, then seven, then released it.

The dust crashed back without the chaotic collapse of the first attempt, slower, the stone fragments stopping where they reached, the dust descending in a tight cone that landed roughly at the circle’s center.

Beorn had been writing the whole time.

"Can you make it larger?" he said.

She tried.

The zone expanded beyond the first circle, and dust from a wider stretch of floor began to lift. The limit lost some of its sharpness as it grew wider, somewhere around twice the original size, the boundary started to blur.

But the central pull remained. Fragments that had been near the bowed wall section slid several inches toward the middle of the zone before she stopped expanding it.

"Hold it steady for longer," he said.

She went back to the smaller zone.

She kept it there, and the dust inside simply stayed floating, drifting slowly inward while nothing outside the boundary moved at all. The clean line between the zone and the rest of the courtyard remained obvious at the exact place where the dust stopped.

She maintained it for close to a full minute, and the boundary did not waver.

Then she let it settle and sat down against the wall without ceremony, without checking whether anyone had noticed, without acknowledging the broken stone and dust beneath her. She was finished, and the wall was there.

Beorn wrote the duration in the margin.

Then the range. Then a note about where the boundary quality began to weaken.

Aestrith looked at the small mound of dust gathered at the circle’s center.

"I guess not every single one of you girls were suppressing the power?" she said to Mod.

She let that settle, then continued. "The way you adapted to my advice and his requests imply familiarity with how to use this ability."

She looked at her directly. "That’s a good thing, you were better than I expected."

Mod looked at the dust mound. "I know," she said, to the courtyard rather than to Aestrith. Not dismissive. Just already on to the next fact.

Beorn looked at the notes.

The mines emptied on air from the surface, and every collapsed shaft in the Badlands eventually turned into a pocket of poison gas and stale air, where men died underground because fresh air could not reach them fast enough.

The foundry furnaces needed constant draft to stay hot enough for proper ironwork. A weak airflow meant uneven heat, wasted fuel, cracked metal, and entire production runs ruined before they ever left the forge.

A stable low-pressure zone, placed at range and maintained without wavering, could pull smoke from tunnels, drive furnace drafts hard enough to melt better steel, feed underground fires, clear burning buildings, spread smoke through enemy fortifications, or strip the air from a sealed room entirely.

He closed the ledger partway. "Thank you, that’s enough. When you go back, send Beadu."

Mod stood from the wall without any real transition between sitting and upright and then she walked out.