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The Rift was beautiful, but it wasn't a lesson room. It wasn't a diagram, a specimen jar or a controlled simulation where someone reset the walls when the exercise ended.

It changed.

It hid things.

It punished assumptions.

I had spent my entire life learning enough to believe I was ready for it. Ahead of me, Corian was already assigning the camp perimeter while Alex complained about carrying everything despite the fact nothing had actually touched his hands for hours. Nykos told him to suffer quietly. Halver returned to human form beside the river and immediately caught me looking at him.

I raised one finger.

His eyes narrowed. I let out a small laugh, and somewhere behind it, quiet enough that I almost missed it myself, I realized I hadn't once today wished I was somewhere else.

Chapter Nine: The Things She Never Learned

Halver

By the seventh morning in the Water Rift, Ashter still hadn't taken solid form.

Jade stood near the edge of camp with one hand planted on her hip and the other held in front of her face. A band of dark smoke circled her wrist, dense enough to hide her skin, with a muted red glow moving through it whenever Ashter tightened his hold. He had spent most of the week there, emerging only as a pair of ember-bright eyes when he wanted food before sinking back into smoke the moment the damp air touched him.

"You cannot spend the entire mission pretending you don't have legs," Jade told him.

The smoke wound higher around her forearm.

"You have four of them."

A quiet laugh came from the equipment shelter. Dannian stood beneath its canvas roof with a bundle of observation stakes braced against one shoulder, making no effort to hide that he had been listening.

Jade turned her head. "Do you need something?"

"No. I'm enjoying the argument." His gaze dropped to the smoke around her arm. "You brought a Fire Rift creature into a Water Rift and expected him to be happy about it. Everything here is wet, including the air. He probably thinks the island is trying to drown him personally."

"He's survived the rain."

"Rain stops." Dannian looked out at the dripping canopy surrounding camp. "This place has made moisture a personality."

Ashter's eyes opened in the smoke, fixed on Dannian for a moment, then disappeared again.

Jade pointed at the place where they had been. "Do not encourage him. He has been sulking for a week."

"I think he's showing excellent survival instincts."

She looked back at her wrist. "You are a Rift creature."

The red glow pulsed once.

"A different Rift is still a Rift."

Ashter slid beneath the edge of her sleeve and vanished from sight.

Dannian laughed hard enough that one of the stakes slipped from his shoulder. Jade gave him a look that should have ended it, but her mouth had already begun to twitch, and Ashter sent a thread of smoke curling from her collar as if he knew she was losing the argument.

I watched from beside the cold remains of the breakfast fire. A few weeks had taught me that Jade would talk Ashter in circles before she'd ever just tell him what to do. She could have ordered Ashter into solid form, and he might have listened, but she had spent seven mornings attempting to reason with him instead. She did the same with the rest of us in smaller ways. She asked questions that sounded like challenges, offered help as though she expected refusal and left food within reach without admitting she had noticed anyone miss a meal.

I had been watching her closely enough, from early enough, that noticing had stopped being a choice sometime in that first week. It started the first time she looked at Ashter like he was hers to protect and her entire world. Something in me went quiet and paid attention. It never stopped.

I had a private name for her by then too. Sprite. Quick, sharp, easy to underestimate right up until she wasn't. I'd never said it where she could hear.