[External POV]

The knock came at 21:00.

Three sharp hits. Persistent. The kind that communicated something needed addressing and wasn’t prepared to wait any longer about it.

Nyx had pretended not to hear it. She was at a climax point in her novel, which was genuinely inconvenient for whoever was on the other side of that door. They could wait one more page, or better still, her roommate could handle it.

She hadn’t been banking on that last option though. Not when Seraphine had been attached to that bed like an art installation — something purposefully positioned there and not intended to move. Nyx had only seen her relocate once, somewhere around midnight, presumably for the bathroom. And since arriving two days ago, she’d barely eaten anything at all.

What is her deal, honestly.

The knock came again. Louder.

Nyx looked over. "You going to get that?"

Seraphine’s eyes didn’t move from her phone. Scrolling through something that was clearly not making her happy.

Nyx lowered her eyes at her. "Fine."

She pushed herself up with more aggression than strictly necessary, crossed to the door and cranked it open a fraction. A boy was standing there with the posture of someone who had been about to give up and leave. Nyx registered the blue eyes first. Everything else followed shortly after.

"Uhm, hi." He said. "Is Sera here?"

Nyx stepped back from the door. "You have a visitor."

The moment Seraphine looked up and saw him, she was off the bed and moving — grabbed his hand without a word and pulled him out of the division, around the corner, into a small space swallowed by shadow.

"What are you doing here?" She asked. More anger in it than she’d intended, probably. "Why did you come looking for me?"

Zael’s expression deepened. "Why, am I not allowed to?" He shifted his weight slightly. "Are we complete strangers now? Is that what we’re doing?"

"I asked first, Zael."

"Well..." He cleared his throat, his eyes finding somewhere else to be for a moment. His hand moved to his pocket and came back out with a small box of chocolate chip cookies. He held it out to her. "I didn’t see you in the crib. Figured you were probably starving yourself again." He extended it further. "Take it."

"I don’t want it." Seraphine said. "I’m not a toddler. I can manage myself."

"That’s your issue, not mine." He took her hand and gave her the box anyway, the gesture brief and practical. "I have bigger problems than looking after you." He held her gaze for one moment — something genuinely worried moving behind it — then waved it off with a frown that was performing nonchalance with varying success. "I’m going now. Try coming to the crib tomorrow morning. Not for any particular reason. Just because it would be strange to hear that you starved yourself to death at camp."

He turned to leave.

"Why are you doing this?" Her voice came before he’d taken a step.

He turned back.

"You know we broke up, Zael." She said it quietly. "Any reasonable person would be resentful. Especially when I didn’t even give you a real reason why."

Zael looked at her for a moment. Then a small, cheeky smile settled on his face.

"I’m not just any person, Sera. I’m Zael Voss." He said it without irony. "And if I’m being honest, I’ve thought about it more than I should have. The reason. I’m still asking the question. But if you think that’s enough to make me hate you, then you’re giving me way less credit than I’ve earned." The smile shifted into something quieter, more real. "I actually miss us, you know."

Seraphine tightened her grip around the box. Looked away from his eyes. Something in what he’d said wanted her to say it back, to close the distance, let the guard come down, just for a moment.

She held the wall up instead.

"Goodnight, Zael." She said. "Good luck at the trials tomorrow."

***

[Author’s POV]

Why did it hurt more than it was supposed to?

No. That wasn’t even the right question. The real question was why it hurt at all— why Aria saying she didn’t have feelings for me had landed somewhere specific and stayed there.

I’d lost my sense of normal around her, and worse, she’d noticed. My awkwardness. The way I’d excused myself before dinner was even technically over.

Thinking back on it, I’d acted like a complete fool. A child, honestly.

Especially after I’d openly denied having any feelings for her.

Until tonight I hadn’t seriously considered that Aria was anything more than someone I’d developed a complicated and irritating tolerance for.

She’d managed to earn the word ’friend’ at some point, which had surprised me more than it probably should have given that I genuinely still hated her guts.

I just also happened to be used to her. And apparently, there was a version of being used to someone that produced other things if you weren’t paying close enough attention.

The surge in my chest had been cold and completely unwelcome. And honestly, she had guts. Denying the whole thing so openly that it made me quietly question what I’d been feeling.

"No, Ren." I pressed my fingers against my temples. "Don’t trust it. It’s probably just an infatuation."

"What’s an infatuation?"

Malik. He was sitting up in his bunk, looking across at me with the full attentiveness of someone who had not been asleep at all.

"Why are you still awake?"

"Couldn’t stop thinking about the training." He shifted his weight against the frame of the bunk, facing me properly. "What about you?"

"Same reason," I said flatly.

"That Pokey guy." His aggression settled into something lighter. "He had no intention of letting any of us touch it. I could tell he stopped holding back after you pushed him— he moved differently after that."

He said it in a way that landed as a compliment whether or not he’d intended it as one. "He made a big point about tactical intelligence being one of the criteria. What if the first trial is designed around that specifically? Doesn’t that make most of us finished before we start?"

He wasn’t wrong. And I’d already noticed he was smarter than the compass introduction had suggested— he’d been paying attention to the right things during training, reading between what Pokey had said and what he’d actually been demonstrating.

"I suppose we fold and go home then," I said.

"Hey, Ren." He sat up fully with the energy of someone whose brain had just finished an equation. "Now I think about it, that training room had a setup."

"What do you mean?"

"Before my turn I was studying the ceiling and the wall architecture. The roofing wasn’t just structural — there were metal sheets that looked mechanical. Hinged, almost. And the walls were thicker than they needed to be for a room that empty." He paused, running it back in his head. "I think that room is a deployable training facility. Like a flex room, except underneath it there are weapons, floor systems, real training equipment— all of it folded away until someone activates it."

"And what makes you think you’re right?"

"I don’t." He said it honestly. "But we could go check."

"No way!" I opted out. "We could get caught—"

"Technically, we’re not breaking in. We’re just finding the switch, confirming the theory, and leaving."

I looked at him. "Tell me how that is meaningfully different from breaking in."

He let the silence stretch between us for a few seconds with the expression of someone waiting for me to arrive at the correct answer on my own.

"I’ll just go myself then." He stood. "You stay here. Play it safe. Lose the trial the same way you lost against Pokey."

That last line. It always had to be the last line.

Maybe there was some curiosity underneath it too, but the main driving force was how specifically irritating it still was to have been planted into a wall by a man with a documented leg injury. If the room was deployable the way Malik was describing, and if there were clues in there about the shape of the first trial, then it was worth fifteen minutes of discomfort to find out.

Hidden things were usually hidden for a reason.

The walk to the training hall took over fifteen minutes — including several minutes of moving carefully and staying out of sight of the staff patrols. When we got there, the main door was already open. Either left that way intentionally or someone had been careless about locking up.

We went in without the lights. Malik had a small flashlight that blinked intermittently and was contributing minimally to the situation. I had nothing except a growing awareness that I wasn’t sure what I was supposed to be looking for.

"What exactly are we looking for?" I asked.

"Something that looks out of place." He was running the light along the base of the walls. "A button. A switch. A loose thread somewhere."

I didn’t exactly find a loose thread. What I found was a crack between two wall panels that didn’t look natural. The spacing between them was too even, too protruding; the kind of precision that happened when something was designed to be opened rather than just built.

"Come look at this."

Malik crossed over, examined the gap, and pressed his fingers into it. One firm pull. Something behind it shifted, small, but definite. Just enough to confirm there was more wall behind the wall.

"I’ve got something." He reached into his pocket and produced a crowbar.

"Where did that come from?" I stared at it. "Do you always have that in there?"

He didn’t answer. He got the crowbar underneath the panel and worked it out, levering it open until there was enough of a gap to grab properly. He handed the crowbar to me, pulled the false panel the rest of the way free, and set it quietly on the floor.

Behind it was a lever.

"Bingo." He didn’t hesitate.

The moment he pulled it, the room groaned — a deep, structural sound that moved through the walls and the floor simultaneously. Then the mechanical clicking started. Gears engaged, teeth finding teeth, something large and orderly beginning to unfold.

The walls opened like curtains being drawn back. The ceiling sections separated and pulled apart. What had been underneath them— stored, compressed, waiting — began to rise into the room.

Weapons. Multiple types, locked into racks. Floor segments separating into panel configurations. The cold smell of metal rising through the air alongside fresh lubricant.

A deployable training facility.

I stood there and just looked at it.

"Holy shit."