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She kept her back to the platform as Halver dressed, her arms folded more tightly than usual and her attention held on the bare stone ahead with a concentration the dissolving illusion did not deserve. Jade had only known us for a day, and at twenty-one she was six years younger than every man standing around her. The heat lingering across her face was a sharp reminder that she had not grown into these routines beside us. She was still learning them one uncomfortable moment at a time.

I gave everyone five minutes for water while the Illusion Master reset the controls. By the time Halver had his shirt pulled over his head, Jade was already crouched in front of him again, asking about the way he'd changed the Cinderhound's stance.

That caught my attention.

She wasn't defending the profile she'd started with or explaining why her original assessment should have worked. She wanted to know why it hadn't.

By the time I called her back to the center, she'd already made Halver explain the difference between the natural animal's behavior and the choices he'd made while wearing its form.

Jade came toward me expecting a judgment. She didn't ask whether she'd done well or look for reassurance, she simply stopped in front of me with the same focused expression she'd worn at the beginning of the session, as though whatever I said next was another piece of information she could put somewhere useful.

"You know the procedures," I said. "You understand formation work, and you learn spacing quickly. You also trust accurate information for longer than you should."

Her eyes narrowed slightly. "Nykos wasn't wrong."

"I know it's the point." She said it before I'd finished the sentence, sharper than she probably meant it, then caught herself. "I mean. I already worked that part out. Somewhere around the second time I called something wrong that wasn't."

That stopped me for a second, mostly because I hadn't expected her to get there on her own quite that fast.

"His report was accurate when he gave it," I said anyway. "By the time you acted on it, the situation had changed. You lost time deciding whether his report or what you were seeing was the mistake."

"I corrected."

"You did. Alex broke formation and your first instinct was to put him back where you thought he belonged instead of asking why he'd moved. Halver changed the Cinderhound's behavior and you called it wrong."

"It was wrong for a Cinderhound."

"It was wrong for the profile."

Her mouth flattened, but she didn't interrupt again. I nodded toward the training floor where the last of the illusion was fading from the stone.

"Field conditions don't care whether the profile was accurate when somebody wrote it. Animals learn, people panic, routes collapse and information ages. Sometimes the person doing something strange has seen something you haven't."

"I know that."

"I believe you do."

That irritated her more than simply telling her she'd made a mistake. Knowledge clearly mattered to Jade. She had spent years being trained to have the correct answer, and from what I'd seen of her records, somebody had rewarded precision often enough that knowledge and application had probably been treated as the same thing. They weren't. Knowing exactly how a Cinderhound behaved under ordinary circumstances was useful, but only until the animal in front of you decided not to cooperate.

"You adapted faster every time the situation changed," I continued. "By the end, you stopped rebuilding my original formation and built a new one around what Halver was actually doing. That's what I needed to see."

Her attention sharpened. "Needed?"

"I told you this morning I was working out how you fit into Nephrite."

"You were assessing whether I can deploy."

"We'll deploy when orders arrive. Neither of us gets a vote on that."

Something in her face eased, although only slightly. "Then what were you assessing?"

"What responsibility I can give you when we're there."

"And?"

"The Cinderhound engagement was yours."

"Because you gave it to me."