Alina pressed her palm to the cold wall, fighting the swirl of dread and shame. These people were not simply criminals or fanatics; it was much more complicated. They were desperate enough to debate robbing an outpost for scraps. It left her stomach hollowed out and empty. While she had been moving around pastel-colored sweets on her plate, they had been starving all along. She felt more out of place than ever.
A heavy hand swept the map aside, parchment creaking. Alina flinched, unnoticed. The first man’s voice rumbled: “Talk’s waste. We wait for Kael. He’ll choose.”
Kael was gone? Where to?
Finn leveled an unseeing stare at the battered table. “And if Kael never returns?”
A boy’s voice piped up. “Then we starve or we fight. I’d choose fight.”
Silence settled like a shroud. The candle guttered. No one moved, each weighing the cost of hunger versus the risk of stealing right from under the noses of the King’s men.
Alina eased back from the door, her breath coming in quick, shallow bursts. She understood now why Kael disappeared into these councils night after night, why the rebels clung to him like a last handhold above an abyss. These weren't the bloodthirsty fanatics her tutors had painted in lurid detail during her lessons. They were people with their backs to the wall, gambling with their lives because the alternative was unthinkable. She felt something unexpected twist inside her—a reluctant empathy, perhaps, or understanding. Whatever it was, she resented its presence.
She was just about to slip away when a scrape of boot against stone startled her. The sound of feet slapping to the floor and padding to the door, then a boy crossed the space visible to her, head tilted like a curious bird that had heard a worm wriggling underground.
Alina froze, flattening herself against the cold stone as if she could melt into it. She held her breath until her lungs burned, counting each soft footfall approaching the threshold. The hinges protested with a low whine as the door opened another inch, and stopped. The person on the other side stood and was probably listening.
She pressed harder into the wall, still not breathing, eyes pressed shut. don’t hear me, don’t look behind the door, go back inside…
One heartbeat. Two. Three. When she finally dared to look, the door was closing from the inside, the voices muffled through the door.
Alina’s heart hammered so loud she feared it might betray her. She waited until the voices inside rose again, until Finn’s laugh echoed down the hall, before she exhaled and slid away from the doorway.
She moved quickly, retracing her steps, careful not to run or appear suspicious in any other way. She ducked through the hide curtain, then followed the corridor as it wound upward, putting as much distance as possible between herself and the council chamber. Only when she was certain she was alone did she allow herself to stop.
She pressed a palm to her chest, feeling the frantic beat against her ribs. She was not safe—she was never safe, not really—but for now, she was unseen. She let herself savor the small victory, if only for a second.
Then she straightened, smoothed her hair, and moved on. If she was to survive in this world, she would need more than courage. She would need secrets. And she had just found a new one to keep.
The Caves spat Alina out into a pocket of night where the air was sharp and cold and the ceiling—high, arched, almost like a cathedral—gave the impression of being outside, even though she knew they were still buried a half mile under the forest’s roots. Here, the mountain’s skin thinned to a layer of limestone, and the engineers among the rebels had hollowed a space large enough to serve as both drill yard and amphitheater. The torches lining the walls threw wild shadows, their flames lashed by currents that seemed to have no source but their own violence.
Alina hugged her arms to her chest. The council room had left a bitter aftertaste, the scent of hot wax and sweat clinging to her skin. She needed space, air that wasn’t breathed by fifty bodies beforeher. The yard delivered, the wide emptiness giving her the illusion of solitude.
Except for the dozen rebels in motion, with three instructors moving between them.
She paused at the threshold, letting her eyes adjust to the contrast between the gloom of the corridors and the blaze of torchlight. The first figure to catch her attention was a girl, maybe her own age, her hair cropped close and dyed the color of wet sand. She stood barefoot on the stone floor, both hands gripping a wooden sword. It was no ordinary fencing lesson: with every pass, she summoned wind in a visible arc, a force that bent the blade’s path and sent dust spinning from her toes in concentric rings.
The girl’s instructor, a man with a limp and a voice that could strip paint, barked commands from five paces away.
“Again, Adair. Harder. You're coddling it like it's a baby bird.”
The girl’s teeth flashed white. “If I go harder, you'll lose what little hair you have left. Starting with the eyebrows.”
“At least then people would notice my charming personality,” the man shot back, “instead of being distracted by this devastatingly handsome face.”
Adair twisted, brought the sword down in a two-handed cut, and a blast of air howled across the space. It clipped the instructor's cloak, spinning him halfway around. The torches flared, and the wind rattled through Alina’s bones.
She shifted, staying in the shadow of a support pillar, unwilling to be noticed but unable to look away.
At the far end of the yard, a different kind of training unfolded. Here, the Gift was earth, not air. A man in battered leathers stood with his back to a rising wall of stone, his face set in grim determination as he shaped the material under his palms. Itresponded with a slow, grudging obedience, rippling and folding in on itself until it formed a low rampart. He moved with the deliberation of a man digging his own trench, and maybe he was. Alina watched as he placed a palm flat against the wall and pushed; the stone slid forward, clean as a slice of bread from a loaf.
“Again!” barked the woman pacing the wall, her gray hair pulled back so severely it seemed to drag her ears back. “Faster, and don't you dare cut those corners. My grandmother could shape stone more precisely, and she's been dead twenty years.”
The man grunted, wiping sweat from his forehead with a grimy sleeve. “Your grandmother probably had better tools than my bare hands.”
“My grandmother had arthritis and a bad attitude,” she shot back. “What's your excuse?”
He muttered something under his breath and returned to the wall, fingers digging into the stone. The Gift didn’t seem to be powerful in him—but what he lacked in innate talent, he made up for in sheer stubborn effort. Each movement betrayed the cost: trembling muscles, whitened knuckles, the tight set of his jaw. The Gift, even in its crudest form, always demanded payment.
