CHAPTER 202: 202: THE FIRST SEMESTER XXV

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Sleep after fights comes in little packets, not long sheets. They opened what they were given. Shifts that weren’t really shifts followed: two awake, two trying to convince muscles to be citizens again. The jungle tried exactly twice more to reconsider their arrangement and was told no both times — once by Rhea’s humming line of heat that sang a violin note any foot would respect, once by Fizz’s hissed insult delivered with such conviction that a prowling Ridge-back actually reevaluated its choices in life, reconsidered its relationship with crosswinds, and moved to another county.

In the hour when everything thin grows honest, the east thought about being light. The ironwoods exhaled a smell like old coins and dew. Bugs resumed whatever important government they had been conducting before carnage took the floor. A bird that never sang at night cleared its throat in a way that suggested it had been considering a letter to the editor.

Fizz, who had been awake on purpose for three hours and awake by mistake for all the others, finally allowed himself to flop next to John and declare, "Battle rating: flamboyant. Floor rating: three leaves, two twigs, one stubborn ant. The ant has opinions and I respect them." He pointed gravely at a tiny soldier hauling a crumb that might once have been hardtack and was now a legend.

Rhea stretched the long stretch of someone who does not apologize for muscles. Vertebrae made polite sounds along her spine. She tied and retied her red ribbon until it surrendered to a bow that meant business. She checked the edge on her knife with her thumb pad and let the blade kiss it just enough to promise.

Ray groaned and tried to pretend it was a stretch. He failed and converted the groan into a cough. Then, because pride had to wear a smaller hat after a night like that, he rubbed grit from his eyelids and tested the bite of his flame, summoning a coin of heat and making it hold perfectly still above his palm. He nodded to no one. The coin dissolved with tidy obedience.

John sat up with care. The line in his chest was intact, humming a slightly different song than yesterday. If he stayed very quiet inside, he could hear it practicing a new measure, something with a step up in it. He didn’t know the words yet. He would learn them. He rolled his shoulder. It reported, present. His forearm ached the way tools ache when they’ve done what they were made for. His palm felt empty in the good way.

They did a quiet count — cores, wounds, dignity. Cores: a respectable fistful of third-class caught in pouches and tucked in cloth, nothing flashy, everything earned. Wounds: Rhea’s scrape, Ray’s near-miss, Fizz’s single-circle, John’s collection of hurts that would age into knowledge by noon. Dignity: they had enough of the first to be proud, few of the second to be honest, and the third came and went like weather; it would return when it remembered where it had left its coat.

Rhea tied her ribbon tighter one last time. "We fill the tally to five points and go," she said. "We do not parade. We do not invite cousins. We do not sign autographs."

Fizz saluted with the entire top half of his body, tail stiff as a metronome. "Team Lord Fizz does not parade," he agreed solemnly. "We saunter with purpose. We weave through destiny carrying snacks." He peered under the nearest fern. "Where did the ant go. I felt a connection."

Ray almost smiled. It looked good on him. He decided to keep it for later when someone needed to be confused by his face being kind.

John looked toward the line of jungle where the night had learned to be polite. He spoke quietly, so only the ironwoods could hear. "Next time, I finish it." He did not mean the fight. He meant the number inside him that had turned into a door.

Rhea heard anyway. "You will," she said, in the tone of someone who says I put the kettle on. "But not this breath. This breath is for walking."

John nodded, accepted the wisdom, and then set his mouth the way you set a nail. He stood and the world did not tilt; it bowed a hair and then straightened, which is all a man can ask of a morning after.

He turned to his team. "Pack," he said. "Then breakfast."

Fizz gasped like a small opera. "There is a word for this," he said. "It starts with p and ends with ancakes."

"Porridge," Rhea said, entirely unamused, because some jokes must be held to account.

"Pancakes," Ray said, completely sincere, because hope is a discipline.

"We have hardtack," John said, cruel but honest. He dug out the square of edible masonry from his bag and displayed it like evidence.

Fizz clutched his chest. "I will roast it until it forgets it was born stale," he vowed. He breathed a thin ribbon of heat over the surface until the edges darkened and the center decided to be an idea rather than a punishment. He snapped off a corner, winced, chewed, brightened. "It tastes like victory if victory were absolutely lying."

They laughed because the sun had decided to be kind for a minute, and they took the minute. Fizz flipped another shard of hardtack like a coin, caught it in his mouth, choked theatrically, recovered, and declared himself a genius. Rhea rolled her eyes so hard a small breeze happened. Ray ate like a man who had discovered food works better if you put it inside your body rather than arguing with it.

They were busy again.

Bedrolls rolled, ties tied, ashes scattered. Ray doused the last of the thumb-lamps with two fingers and a small twist of wrist he had learned in the night without calling it learning. Rhea kicked dirt over a scuffed place and made the ground look as if no one had ever been there except the ground. Fizz zigzagged through the air, retrieving exactly four things everyone had forgotten: a pouch, a cork, a strip of cloth, and a crumb he refused to explain. John checked the edge of the camp where the bait had been and nodded once to the nothing there now; the stink had gone honest again.

Before they stepped off toward the proctor’s post, John looked at his palm one last time and spoke the last of the night out loud, in case the world needed to hear it to make it true. "Let me take the next ones," he said. "Alone. I am almost there to rank up. This fight will push me through."

No one argued. Not because they didn’t care. Because they did, and because sometimes loving someone means letting them walk toward a door and trusting them to choose the right side to stand on when it closes.

They broke camp and moved out in a stagger that would read as happenstance to anyone who did not know how to read. Rhea took point with the calm of a whetstone. Ray watched the rear with the attention of someone who had been embarrassed by the world and preferred to schedule the next time himself. Fizz patrolled their middle height like a small ridiculous saint of vigilance. John walked between them, palm easy, steps quiet, the line in his chest singing that new measure under his breath.

The ironwoods watched them go. The thumb-width sun through the trunks elongated into honest bars. Somewhere far back in the void, a small black egg turned over in its sleep —and if eggs could smile, this one would have— dreaming of teeth and wings and the kind of dawn that bites back.

They heard the wind change first.

Not the forest’s slow breath, but a cut of air on purpose — wings beating in formation, canvas catching a spell, the quick clap of boots that belong to people who arrive after the danger and insist on taking its pulse anyway.

Rhea’s head tilted. "Proctors are coming," she said.

Fizz rose a handspan and made a face. "Ah. The cavalry, fashionably late, smelling faintly of paperwork."

Three gliders dropped through the ironwoods with neat, practiced arrogance — flat ovals of stiffened canvas buoyed by glyphs that hummed like bees too well-educated to sting. Cloaked figures stepped off at a run before the frames had finished settling. One man in green leather —burrs stuck to him out of habit— did a fast perimeter read. A woman in gray sets —Academy cut, East House stripe— headed straight for the ring of scorched dirt where the line of heat had sung, and where the night had tried twice to remember their names and had been discouraged.

Behind them came two more: a healer with a basket and calm hands, and a beastkeeper with a chain of spell-caps jangling like metallic seeds.

"Hold," the green-leather man barked, low but carrying. "Any wounded. Any breaches. Any tails."

"None," Rhea answered. "We kept the battle short."