CHAPTER 206: 206 : THE FIRST SEMESTER XXIX

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A little of the pull slipped, like a dog trying a door. John took it by the collar and shut it. "I will learn to control it," he said. "I will imagine it as valves. I will practice until my breath can open and close them the way a smith can make a fire taller without making it leave the hearth."

Rhea had come over in time to hear the metaphors and approve of the lack of poetry. "Good," she said.

They ate quick food meant for the living rather than the happy. They drank water that tasted like iron and promises. They laid their bedrolls where the ground remembered last night’s chaos and smelled like the inside of a beast’s bad decisions. John kept the pull tucked as tight as a coin in a fist. When he let it expand enough to feel the shape of it again, the nearest lantern leaned on its hook, and he pulled it back without being asked.

Once, a senior boy in bone light armor came too close out of ordinary swagger and stopped there inexplicably — one boot planted, the other boot insisting on a new friendship with soil and physics. He frowned like the earth had cheated and moved on with a rare humility he did not enjoy.

As the afternoon folded itself into the color of late, the proctors shrugged into the kind of relief you only get when all the worst things did not happen on your watch. The first years did their best not to brag and failed. Someone lit a little string of glowstones and strung them between two poles and pretended it was for safety rather than celebration.

"Now," Fizz declared quietly, once the ledger closed and the last official voice finished being official, "we test."

They went to the quiet margin beyond the barrels where the trampled ferns tried to remember how to be plants. Rhea drew a line in the sand with the toe of her boot. "Pull to here," she said, tapping the mark. "Not past. Not shy. Exactly here."

John nodded. He chose a fallen knot of roots half buried in dirt. He lifted his palm. He imagined the mark like a warm coin on the ground. He made the space between himself and the coin a slope only he could feel. The root mass twitched, wriggled free with the stubbornness of old wood, floated, and clicked into place on the line like a puzzle piece that had finally been apologized to.

"Again," Rhea said.

He obeyed. A broken helm. A rusted clasp. A pebble. A pebble the size of a fist. A cluster of pebbles that wanted to argue with one another and had to be coaxed to travel as a family. Each time he gated the pull tighter, made the rim smaller, imagined the empathy field as something that could be folded like cloth and tied off with a thought. Each time he felt the itch behind his ribs, he answered with the number of his breath instead of the speed of his wants.

Ray watched with the plain, helpless fascination of a boy seeing a better trick than his own and knowing he would steal it someday if he could. Fizz watched with the proprietary glee of a man whose brand had just gone luxury.

As the sun slid down the ribs of the ironwoods, a hush larger than exhaustion settled on the camp. It was not fear, and it was not contentment. It was the feeling people have when they have been to the edge of a story and come back with enough left in their pockets to live. Proctors told each other the same jokes they always told and did not need them. A few students, more honest than the rest, cried once, quietly, and then pretended they had gotten something in their eye, which in a forest is always true.

John sat on his bedroll with the gravity cupped small and the void humming a pleased note that kept rhythm with a heartbeat that was not his. Far down in the dark room inside him, the egg turned a small circle as if amused by the new skill and its new complications. The pull tugged at it too, as if the void itself enjoyed jokes.

Ray stretched and groaned and declared that his flame would be taller tomorrow and that his cousin would stop treating him like a child or he would become taller out of spite. Rhea cleaned her knives with the affection some people reserve for letters from home. Fizz invented pastries combinations that did not exist and then slept with a speed that suggested he had been pretending to be awake for the last hour.

Stars arrived with their old reliable trick of being beautiful and far. The camp contracted into the sort of quiet where snores become topography. John lay down and did not close his eyes yet. He stared into the jungle’s dark suggestion and counted, because counting was how he made promises to himself without using words.

He would learn to gate the pull so well that even a scarf would not think to lean.He would keep the empathy field a tool, not an accident.

He would make sure nobody mistook borrowed gravity for permission to feel anything they did not choose.

Tomorrow they would turn in their cores, and there would be points and envy and noise. Tomorrow would be a new pile of rules to obey cleverly. Today he would rest with the pull tucked in and the void purring and the memory of a fight that had asked him to be dangerous and a team that had let him be exactly that.

From the far edge of the camp, a late proctor’s lantern swung. It did not quite point toward John. It thought about it, then remembered the rules of lamps, and kept its manners.

"Better," Rhea murmured from her bedroll without opening her eyes. She could feel the field settle the way a fighter can feel the mood of a room without looking. "Keep it there."

"I will," he said.

Ray, drowsy and hopeful in the way of boys who did not die and thus think the world owes them breakfast, muttered, "If your gravity breaks my plate in the morning, I am suing."

"For what," John asked.

"For making me go hungry," Ray mumbled, then slept.

Fizz snored like a small soft kettle trying to boil and getting distracted by its own reflection.

The jungle said nothing at all.

When he woke at first gray, the pull sat where he had left it, obedient as a trained dog that had decided not to eat the couch. He stood and stretched and rolled his shoulders, and nothing around him leaned more than it should.

"Control," Rhea said, up on one elbow, seeing the way dust did not gather at his boots. "Good."

John nodded. "Good," he agreed.

They would have new problems by noon. That was the shape of their days now. But he had stepped into Circle Three and given the world a new reason to notice him without giving it the right to choose what it noticed for him. That would do for a morning.

They packed. They ate. They endured Ray’s grumbling about porridge. They endured Fizz’s insistence that porridge was sweet cake if you believed hard enough. They followed the proctors’ markers toward the post where points became lines and lines became hard truths.

On the path, a pair of first years coming late to yesterday’s panic glanced up as John passed and then glanced again without meaning to. He kept the pull tight and the empathy field tied like a ribbon on a gift not meant for opening. They blinked, shook themselves, and stumbled on, gossip already spread... they would happily live under for the rest of the week or a month.

"See," Fizz whispered, smug and fond, as he cruised at John’s shoulder. "You are a gentleman magnet no longer. Only a responsible menace."

John snorted. "I will embroider that on a scarf."

Rhea’s ribbon fluttered in laughter and immediately pretended it had not.

By the time the camp came into view and the warden with the ledger lifted her chin in their direction, the day had decided to behave. The teachers had found their late composure. The students had found their early pride. And John had found the quiet between a new power and a new problem and set up a house there like a man who knew the rent would come due but also knew he could pay it with his body.

They stepped into the light together, and if the shadows at their heels reached for John a little as if not ready to let him go, that was between him and the physics he had married. He did not need to tell anyone about that. He had learned, finally, how to keep certain kinds of love private.

And the black jungle, which had seen much worse than a boy learning to bend gravity, allowed itself the luxury of being green.