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I looked at her and said nothing at all.

Her mouth tightened for half a second before she smoothed it away. Whatever reaction she'd expected from me, I hadn't given it to her. After the first few encounters it had stopped bothering me entirely, and I took secret pleasure in the look on her face when she walked away more frustrated than she'd arrived.

"I'd wonder how a squad with no losing season suddenly finds a member nobody trained, and somehow gets faster."

"Then wonder somewhere else."

Nykos arrived at my shoulder before I'd finished the sentence, and whatever calm he usually kept around Silvaria was gone entirely. "Don't."

"Don't what, Nykos? I'm making conversation."

"You're doing exactly what you always did. Finding the softest place and pressing until something gives." His voice had dropped into something flatter and harder than I'd heard from him before, quiet enough that it took real effort to hear the fury underneath it.

"It isn't going to work this time."

"How protective." Silvaria's smile sharpened at the edges.

"Careful, Nykos. People will start wondering why."

Corian stepped into the group before either of them said anything neither could take back, his voice pitched for the three of us and nobody else.

"The second rotation starts in four minutes. Silvaria, your squad's staging at the east gate."

"We were only talking."

"Now you're walking."

She held Corian's gaze a moment longer than necessary, then looked back at me with the same calm confidence she'd arrived with. It didn't quite hold. A crease appeared between her brows, and her lips pressed together before she turned and walked away. It's the small wins I was starting to cherish.

"Enjoy the rotation."

The second rotation was an obstruction drill, and the moment the gate rose I understood why the Citadel scheduled Cloak squads against everyone at least once a season. Silvaria's unit vanished the instant the horn sounded, no sound, no scent, no visible seam in the air where four bodies had been standing a heartbeat earlier. To every sense but mine, the obstruction course had simply gone empty.

To me they hadn't gone anywhere at all.

I sensed them the same way I sensed anything alive, through the beat of their hearts, the movement of muscle and the faint electrical signals running along their nerves. Their abilities hid them from sight, but not from me. Four separate bodies stood out across the false terrain. One crouched behind the second barrier, their pulse quick despite how still they held themselves. Another moved low along the eastern wall, breathing slowly and carefully. A third waited directly in our path, close enough that if I moved at full speed, I'd reach them before anyone else in the hall knew they were there.

That was the problem.

Nobody else could see it, and a healer who threw a perfect blind strike at empty air was a healer who'd just told an entire training hall she wasn't only a healer. Two hundred people had spent the morning deciding I'd been handed my place. I wasn't going to hand them proof of something worse, not here, not with Silvaria waiting for exactly this kind of mistake to build a case out of.

So I played slower than I was.

I forced my knife hand to wait, holding the blade a fraction longer than instinct wanted. Instead of following the crouched operative with my ability, I kept my eyes on the space where I knew they were hiding and waited until Halver moved, giving me a reason to throw that the judges could see. The blade struck the hidden operative anyway, but now it looked like skill instead of something impossible.

I was still pretending I didn't know exactly where the woman along the eastern wall was when she attacked. Her boot drove beneath my guard and slammed into my ribs, knocking the air from my lungs and dropping me to one knee. Pain flashed through three ribs, sharp and immediate, while my ability rose beneath it, familiar and effortless, ready to knit the breaks before I had time to think.

I didn't let it.

Healing myself mid-drill in front of two hundred witnesses was a different kind of confession. I forced air back into my lungs the hard way, pushed up off my knee, and kept moving with three cracked ribs grinding against every breath, because a bruise and broken ribs healing themselves in real time was a story that would outlive the drill by years.

That was when I felt Silvaria change direction.

At first, it felt like nothing more than her changing position. Then her pulse quickened, and some instinct I couldn't explain told me the movement had purpose. There was nothing I could point to for the judges, no visible threat or reason to leave my position, but I knew she was closing on Corian's exposed flank. I moved without calling it.

"Left flank," Nykos called before I reached her, loud enough to make it sound as though he'd sensed the danger through our link and sent me to intercept.

"Corian, left."