Rena crouched in the pale shade at the lip of her campsite, one knee tucked beneath her, the other planted so she could balance the tablet across her thigh. The watch at her wrist pulsed a faint heartbeat of light—linked to the academy's network, logging her vitals, her coordinates, the seconds that slid by like grains of warm sand. The island wind moved through her silver-white hair, combing it sideways so the red-tinted tips whispered against her shoulder. She breathed in, long and even. Salt and sun. Wet leaves. Earth cooling after a brief morning burn.
Her camp was nothing grand, just a low, quick-pitch tent in a small clearing cupped by breadfruit and pandanus, with a narrow trail that stitched through scrub and fern and spilled toward a creek that chuckled over black stones. She'd picked the spot for three reasons: a break in the canopy to let moonlight through at night, the proximity to drinkable water she could run through her filter, and the way the ground itself felt steady underfoot, like a promise. She was not nervous. Not exactly. But the urge to move—to do—buzzed under her skin.
On the tablet, task icons bloomed and faded in slow waves across a map of Atlas Island. She slid her fingertip and zoomed the view, watching a cluster of opportunities pulse to the northeast. One tag brightened: MENTAL: MATH—DURATION 00:30—REWARD +25 SURVIVAL, +? BONUS. Range: ~200m. She smiled. A warm-up. No mana necessary. She tapped "ACCEPT," felt the watch give a polite haptic nod, then stood in the same smooth motion, stowing the slab into her side pouch. She left tent, bedroll, and cookware where they were. No need to lug gear for two hundred meters.
Her sports suit—the adaptive mana weave Naoko had procured—tightened subtly at her hips and thighs like a partner ready to run. Rena rolled her shoulders once, then bolted.
She didn't use spellcraft. Didn't need it. The half-dragon in her did the math the moment her foot struck soil: stride length, ground yield, branch clearance, lateral stability across root-latticed loam. She skimmed. Ferns parted in whispering bows; thin vines swung aside and tapped her elbows like playful snakes. Sunlight strobed through canopy rifts: coconut palms with their bristling crowns; ironwood pines sighing; glossy breadfruit plates; a parade of orchid sprays hung like jewelry from knotted boughs.
The island smelled alive. Not just "green," but symphonies of green: bruised leaf and raw sap; damp duff fermenting politely; sea salt and iodine and the distant, metallic cleanliness of the tide flats. Hermit crabs in hand-me-down shells scuttled between speckled shade pools. A wedge-tailed shearwater cried—thin, laughing—somewhere beyond the ridge. Little anoles did push-ups on a warm black rock, electric with pride. Overhead, a myna bird hopped along a branch, head cocked, as though betting on her finish time. She grinned at it as she blurred past.
A patch of mushrooms flashed at the margin of her vision: russet caps with white gills, glossy as lacquer. Nearby, a puff of fern sporangia dusted her shin with green. She vaulted a downed palm whose trunk was laced in neon-green moss and skirted an explosion of red ginger blossoms, the color so saturated it felt hot.
Six minutes. That's what the watch whispered when the underbrush shivered open into a pocket glade. A few makeshift wooden tables stood in the clearing, legs sunk into the earth, their surfaces smoothed by a thousand forearms. A banner of woven palm fronds and tide-bleached twine hung between two hibiscus trees. The scent of charcoal and pencil shavings mixed with the faint pepper of hibiscus pollen.
The proctor sat at the center table: an elderly woman with round spectacles perched halfway down her nose and a pen tucked behind one ear like a single feather. She had the relaxed posture of someone who had seen every permutation of panic and triumph more times than she could count. A cluster of students filled the outer tables—some from the first year, like Rena, others older. A few looked composed. A few looked existentially betrayed by integers.
Rena slowed to a respectful walk. She inclined her head. "Good morning."
"Good morning, dear," the woman said, voice as soft as sandalwood smoke. "Tablet, please."
Rena slid it forward. The proctor's fingers moved with invisible mana—strictly administrative, part of the academy's sanctioned field network. The tablet chimed as it authenticated. "Participant: Rena Emberhart," the screen read. Year: First. Status: Solo.
A few heads turned. Rena felt the eyes—curious, measuring, occasionally sticky with something like hunger. The first-year boys gave themselves away quickly: their gaze snagged on the color contrast of her hair, slid to the sharpness of her jaw, and lingered—too long—where the suit drew clean, unapologetic lines across her torso and hips. The older girls assessed her differently, attention passing over the set of her shoulders, the relaxation in her knees, the way she weighted her stance as though it was second nature to be ready.
Rena didn't mind the looks. She'd been looked at before. She set her palm on the table, took the tablet back, and nodded to the proctor.
"There's a seat under the gum tree," the woman said, eyes smiling. "You may begin when you're ready."
Rena chose a stone just outside the cluster of tables, set the tablet on her lap, and exhaled slowly. The canopy above was a quilt of light and leaf. Between the leaves, she could see a slice of sky—so bright it made her think of sword steel.
The test popped into being with a polite on-screen flourish:
MATH MODULE—DURATION: 15:00—REWARD: +25 SURVIVAL, +? TRADE, +? ACHIEVEMENT
Q1: Convert/Verify line characteristics. Given: . Determine slope, y-intercept, and provide the equivalent slope-intercept form.
Q2: Applied geometry—Earth & horizon. Volcano Hualālai rises 2.52 km above sea level. Approximate the line-of-sight distance from summit to horizon. Assume Earth's radius . Provide nearest km.
A silent smile tugged at her mouth. She'd expected something more… elaborate. But "simple" wasn't the same as "trivial." People bled points on simple when they rushed.
She set a mental metronome: eight minutes for both, with margin.
For the line: . Divide both sides by 5. . Slope . Intercept . She typed it cleanly, then, for completeness, added the decimal approximations—m = −0.4, b = −0.2—so the grader wouldn't have to convert.
Her fingers hovered for half a second. Good. Next.
The horizon problem. She remembered the formula—she'd read it on a ferry poster as a child and then derived it herself in boredom on a windowsill. For a sphere: distance to horizon , with large and small relative to . With km and km, the term contributes a sliver, but not nothing.
She typed her work out, because showing thinking earned soft points in this format:
She did the product in her head in two bites—; .
Twos first: . Half: . Two hundredths: .
Sum: .
Add : .
Square root: a little under 180.3… She nudged it mentally—; . So 180 point something. She keyed: .
She checked units, rounded to nearest kilometer, and submitted.
The island carried sound strangely—through the verticals of trunks and the horizontal veils of leaves—so the clearing felt quiet and loud at once. Someone at the far table swore softly at a denominator. A lizard chirped. A coconut thunked against another coconut like a lazy drumbeat far up in the crown. Rena rested the backs of her knuckles on the stone, letting the stone's heat seep into her hands. She looked past the proctor's hut toward the little slice of ocean the trees permitted. The water out there was not the polite blue painters use on plates. It was a living gradient—smoke-glass near shore, then teal, then a dark that could swallow anchors whole.
She thought, briefly and sharply, of Jin.
Three days.
It surprised her—the way the empty space where his teasing should be still felt busy, like an echo room that kept returning her own breath to her. He would have teased her about picking a math task first. He'd say something about "warming up the brain so the body stays scared," and then he'd smirk because he loved getting a rise out of her. She almost rolled her eyes at the phantom of him.
Keep moving, Rena.
A minute later, her watch buzzed. The proctor's voice followed, warm and amused. "Rena Emberhart—eighty-five percent. Highest score this session."
She blinked—not because the score surprised her, but because she'd expected the perfect. Which question docked her? The system didn't say. It rarely did in the field modules. Some days the graders were hair-splitters about unit presentation; some days they weren't.
The watch chimed again, neat little ledger lines scrolling across her vision:
+25 SURVIVAL +4 TRADE +2 ACHIEVEMENT (session leader bonus)
She stood and slid the tablet back into her pouch. As she approached the center table, the proctor reached under it and produced a cloth bag tied with twine. "Bonus for top slot," the woman said. "Two cups of rice. The good kind. Sticky."
"Thank you," Rena said, and meant it. Staples mattered. With rice, a creek, and the right leaves, you could turn a day around.
She took the bag, bowed her head slightly, then faded from the clearing. The wood tables and murmuring students sank behind her like a little town in a storybook as the forest closed again. Her body wanted to run, so she let it. The suit kept pace, easing joint load, translating micro-vibrations into less noise. She didn't bother wiping the little dust blooms that her steps kicked up; the island possessed dust like an animal possesses freckles.
She kept watch for more than roots and stones. She watched for information: scuffs where someone had slid off trail in a hurry; broken twigs at shoulder height that said a taller student had forced a way through; a cigarette butt crushed under heel—Adalia's brand, by the scent of the tobacco and the paper. The academy wanted them to be observant. The island, simultaneously, demanded it.
A green vine lassoed her calf. She stepped free. The creek gossiped louder. The water was clear as polished glass, skimming over dark rocks veined with pale quartz, with little ochre leaves drifting like lost boat sails between shallows. She could smell the creek before she saw it: the mineral fizz of it, the way it sheened coolness over the air.
She kneeled at the lip and filled her bottle, then fitted the filter and watched patient drips collect in the clean reservoir. Above her, the leaves kept falling—science, not poetry: the twist of petiole, the swash of broad lamina, the sudden torque of a breeze. But it felt like the island was making punctuation marks around her thoughts.
Rice would be better if she added a little coconut milk. She eyed the palms. Young coconuts would be easiest. She scanned the boughs, spotted a tight-skinned green sphere hanging at a tempting angle, and mapped the bark's ladder in her mind. She could climb it in six seconds, unassisted, but she was playing fair today—no old-world spectacle in a new-world exam. She found a fallen palm rib, sharpened its edge against a handy stone, and used it to nick the stem until the fruit sighed free. It hit her palm with a satisfying weight. She tapped, listened for the slosh, smiled.
Back at camp, the clearing welcomed her like a room she'd built. She opened the tent flap, placed the rice on her little cloth "pantry" stack, and set one cup into a small pot. She cracked the coconut with an efficient heel-stone strike—three taps on the equator seam, twist, and the shell opened like a book. The smell rushed up: sweet and green and faintly floral, like a bakery that had learned the ocean's dialect. She drank a little, saved the rest. A splash in the pot with creek water, a swipe of peeled pandanus for scent, a tiny pinch of salt from her ration. Rena set the pot on the field stove, the flame's breath barely audible over the cicadas beginning their noon thrum.
Cooking in a test wasn't indulgence. It was control. Heat, water, time. You make something consistent from things that could be chaos. The rice bloomed. She let the pot sit, covered, and turned back to the tablet.
Tasks mapped themselves like stars. A challenge track to the west—basic first-aid for +30 points and a trade voucher if completed within the hour. North, a "precision throw" range—wooden discs and a wind-compensated target, timed turns, +20. A "micro-ecology survey" near the mangroves, where she could earn achievement points by cataloging five species in ten minutes without disturbing them.
She marked the survey. Not for the points. For the practice of seeing.
Her mind drifted while she planned a path: creek to mangroves, swing back past a breadfruit cluster, try a long, quiet loop that brought her behind a rocky knoll she'd noticed earlier, where the ground changed character from sandy loam to pebbled basalt. She'd camp there tomorrow, maybe. Better breeze, fewer mosquitoes. Her wrist buzzed—8:00 a.m. bonus allocation: +10 survival points simply for still being in the game at twenty-four hours. The watch displayed her ledger neatly. She found comfort in numbers lined up. You could't always predict the world. But you could count some of it.
She ate when the rice was ready—quick, neat bites with a small pair of collapsible chopsticks. It tasted like the sun had taken up residence in each grain. She laughed at herself softly for the thought and tucked the coconut half into her food bag.
Her eyes wandered again. The island sky carried a light haze now, the kind that softened edges and sent heat to sulk in the middle distance. Dragonflies stitched bright lines above the creek, their wings catching the light as if drawn with sequins. Farther away, she heard a rustle and turned—and there, brazen as a prince, was a monitor lizard as long as her forearm, flicking its tongue toward her tent with the bored disdain of a street critic. It paused when her gaze landed on it. They considered one another. Rena tipped her chin. The lizard, satisfied that she was not an interesting rock, waddled off with the slow arrogance of a creature with armor for clothing.
She finished eating, cleaned her pot in the creek with sand and a whisper of filtered water, and stowed everything precisely. Efficiency mattered almost as much as speed. A messy camp cost time later.
Her thoughts, despite herself, circled back to Jin. The shape of his grin. The way he'd throw a towel at her just to hear her protest and then act wounded when she retaliated. She let the memory prick her and then let it go. She would see him again. Fifty-seven days would pass. In the meantime, Sarafina. The word felt like ice pressed to the tongue: crisp, a little numbing. Rena could taste the challenge again, could hear the sugar-poison tone Sarafina used when she said "dear," could feel the satisfying arc of the slap—No. Save that weather for the day it matters.
Movement. Action. Now.
She stood. The suit flexed. Her watch drew a new line through the map—a path she'd hidden earlier, just for herself. She checked the wind with her cheek. It brought her the scent of something faintly musky—boar, perhaps, or damp fur. A squirrel, gray with a fox's tail, rattled at her from a branch and then launched, sailing three meters in a neat arc to a neighboring tree. High in a palm, a coconut slipped in its cradle, reconsidered gravity, and stayed put.
She jogged southeast first, not northeast, because the creek seemed thinner that way, which meant a crossing somewhere, which meant a natural choke where you could learn who else had passed. The soil underfoot changed from dark brown sponge to a paler, sandier grit that scrunched chh chh chh under her soles. She let the rhythm climb into her muscles. Her breath settled. The suit adjusted its weave across her knees. She passed a cluster of orange cup fungi, their tiny bowls speckled like citrus, and a hawk moth that pretended to be a dead leaf until the last second, when it exploded into the air and went somewhere urgent.
At the mangroves, the light turned green-silver—reflected light, slippery light, the kind that made the undersides of leaves glow. The roots rose like the legs of a thousand small archways, each one muddy to the knee. Fiddler crabs popped out of holes and waved their ridiculous oversized claws as if bidding her welcome to an emperor's reception. The smell here was different—salt damp, yes, but also the faint sweetness of decaying leaf and the copper trace of brackish water. She squatted on a dry hummock and began her survey, voice a whisper as she counted into the tablet:
"Rhizophora mangle… juvenile, knee-high. Uca vocans, male, claw display. Egretta garzetta—little egret—fishing, twenty meters east. Cerithidea decollata snails on prop roots. Gryllidae species under log—acoustic confirmed."
The watch pinged approval. She took two more minutes, because she wanted to, because practice made seeing better: a mudskipper wriggling like an ambitious fish-frog over a slick; a flatworm that looked like a living ribbon; the print of a human shoe half-erased by the tide. She crouched and touched the print's edge; it was an hour old, maybe less. She glanced along the mangrove aisle and saw the ghost of a path where someone had parted the thin branches and let them spring back.
There would be other students near. Maybe Sarafina, maybe not. It didn't matter. The island was large; the day was long.
She took the long way back—a side path over basalt beads where the ground gave her spring instead of drag. From there the jungle stepped back and she could see farther out—the sea hemming the island like a blue sash drawn tight. On a horizon this clean, she thought, you could almost draw triangles in the air and watch them become boats.
She laughed at herself again and filed the thought under "Jin would mock this."
By the time she returned to camp, the sun had tilted just enough to sharpen shadows. The tent's fabric glowed faintly when light struck it, and the small, neat stacks of her gear looked like confidence assembled: stove, pot, filter, rope, knife, little packets of salt and chili and tea. She pulled the tablet and checked the boards. Her points had updated; a new wave of tasks mid-island was waking. A movement drill to the south promised +15–30 if you made the checkpoints like beads. A team challenge flashed—ignore. She was solo by design.
She adjusted the strap of her pouch, tested the flex in her calves, and inhaled the island again—louder now, hotter, insect-song rising like steam. The red at the tips of her hair caught the light, so that when she moved her head, the color feathered like flame. She smiled, small and dangerous and very herself.
"Okay," she said, to the jungle, to the rules, to the future version of herself who would sit here again tonight and inventory the new bruises on her shins. "Let's keep going."
She slid into the trees and let the island take her, each step measured, each breath a note, each glance a ledger entry. Atlas was big enough to hide scores of students and small enough to make everything matter. Somewhere, Sarafina was also moving, frost logic braided with arrogance. Somewhere, the director's threats still hung in the air like banners. Somewhere, Jin slept under moons she could not see.
Here, now, Rena ran.