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"I am."

"You're doing the thing with your jaw."

I made myself stop doing the thing with my jaw. He was far too observational at times.

Corian checked the scoring board bolted beside the staging gate, ten squad names listed under this morning's rotation, Nephrite's sitting at the top. A full season's worth of results, printed and displayed for the entire Citadel to measure us against, and every point of it had existed long before I walked through Janus's office door. That fact didn't seem to matter to anyone whispering behind their hands this morning.

I watched him study the board a moment longer than the numbers required, jaw set the same careful way it had been since the yard, and found I didn't have the anger left to keep it pointed at him. I understood why he'd done it. Understanding didn't make it right, but it made it human, an ordinary mistake from someone still learning where my lines actually sat instead of guessing at them from a file. Staying angry through an entire morning wasn't going to fix anything. It would just leave me with less in me for the parts of today that actually needed it.

I let it go. Finally.

"First rotation is an extraction drill against Garnet," Corian said. "Downed operative, hostile terrain, timed course. Standard rules. Ashter stays on the sideline."

Ashter, coiled warm around my wrist, gave an indignant pulse of heat that I chose to interpret as agreement.

Near the top of the observation rail, Elira leaned over the barrier far enough that Taren had one hand fisted in the back of her shirt to keep her from going over it entirely, and when she caught my eye she didn't lower her voice at all.

"Break their knees, but not literally!"

A few heads turned. I didn't care which ones. Whatever had been sitting tight across my shoulders eased half a degree anyway, small and stupid and useful, the kind of foothold that made the rest of the whispering easier to walk past.

The gate rose on a course built from raised platforms, angled walls and a downed-operative dummy slumped inside a collapsed framework near the far end, close enough in weight and awkwardness to a real body that I understood immediately why the Citadel used it. Alex went first over the wall, floating himself in a fluid arc that would have looked showy if it hadn't also been fast. Halver cleared the ground scent markers without breaking stride, calling clean lanes back to Corian in short, flat words.

I stayed a half pace off Corian's shoulder, weight low, watching the terrain for the things a timer couldn't measure. Loose gravel that would turn an ankle. A support beam angled wrong for the weight it claimed to hold. None of it required my ability. Most of the drill didn't. That was the part nobody watching seemed interested in.

The debris made it look as though the dummy was trapped near the front, but I could just see it wedged behind the collapsed framework. I directed Nykos two strides to the left of where he'd been heading.

"Left," I said. "It's further back than it looks."

He didn't ask how I knew. He'd stopped asking weeks ago.

We crossed the finish marker with the dummy slung between Halver and Alex, and the numbers went up on the board before I'd finished catching my breath.

Fastest time of the morning.

The hall went quiet when we finished, but it wasn't the impressed kind. A few people near the Garnet section began to clap, only for the sound to disappear beneath a murmur spreading along the observation rail. Snatches of conversation reached me, half-finished sentences that didn't need finishing.

“Convenient.”

“I wonder how.”

“Of course they did.”

Corian kept his attention on the course, but the tension in his jaw showed how hard he was working not to answer them. Once, mid-stride, his eyes found mine instead, checking rather than asking, and whatever he saw there eased something in his shoulders that had been sitting stiff since the confrontation in the yard. He didn't say anything about it. He didn't need to. I looked away first, and some part of me was glad he'd noticed without making me explain it.

Alex was still smiling, though only if you weren't close enough to see his face properly.

"They said that after last season too," Halver said, low, mostly for me.

"Did it stop?"

"No."

At least he didn't pretend otherwise.

Silvaria found us before the equipment had finished being cleared off the course, trailing two of her squadmates close enough behind her that the approach had clearly been planned rather than wandered into.

"Fastest time of the morning. How convenient."