(10 hours ago)
The western side of Atlas wore the afternoon like a damp cloak—warmth pooled low to the ground, held there by a canopy of breadfruit, coconut, and ironwoods that leaned inland from the wind. The trail the four friends followed wasn't much more than a scuffed ribbon in the green, a suggestion of direction stitched together by heel prints, crushed sedges, and the occasional flag of someone else's broken fern. Air hung heavy with salt and the green-apple tang of crushed pandanus. A lazy breeze wandered in from the sea, tasting of iodine and reef, then lost interest and drifted off again.
Ethan walked point, a long, easy stride made for covering distance, blue hair damp at the temples, blue eyes gone almost dark with the glare. He carried his pack like he'd forgotten it was there, but the band of sweat across his shoulder straps told the truth. Leona kept pace a half-step behind, white hair bound high to keep it off her neck, eyes the color of a bright noon sky flicking from understory to mid-canopy and back to the trail—a hunter's habit of checking vertical and horizontal both. Nox fell a few paces to the side, not quite rear guard, not quite beside, the twin to Leona in hair and eyes if you only counted the surface. His expression wore quiet like armor. Lilia brought up the true rear, green hair braided and tucked, green eyes calm; she moved with the economical grace of someone who conserved effort now to spend it later, the long case of her collapsible bow riding like a second spine along her pack.
"Do you think Rena's okay?" Leona asked, not quite whispering, not quite willing to let the forest hear the softness in the question. Sand and loam swallowed half her voice; cicadas ate the rest with their electric sawing.
"She will be," Lilia said, and though she glanced at Leona, her gaze rested a heartbeat on Nox's back before returning to the path. "I'm worried too. But Rena is… Rena. She doesn't break the way other people break. She bends around things and then stands up sharper."
Nox's shoulders hazed with a tension he didn't turn into words. The light through the canopy slipped and stuttered over him, bright pieces sliding off the pale of his hair. The feeling—that feeling—pressed at the back of his thoughts like a hand on glass. The same sensation that had found him in the deep of the In the forest when he was at his family's house years ago: a thread pulling at the inside of his chest, a whisper that spoke in metal and salt, a promise of heat the way flint promises spark. It was not hunger; hunger was simple. This was… a tilt toward edge. Blood, the thought said, bright as a knife's laugh. Yours to command, yours to spill. It offered images he crushed as soon as they flowered: a palm with a red line across it, the delicate curve of Leona's throat, the memory of a rabbit's quick, terrified heart under his hands years ago when learning snares. He pinned the thought like a bug and told himself it was nothing but stress. Noise. He was not that.
"More worrying, less walking," Ethan said over his shoulder, not unkind but not soft. The wind kept small pockets of cool where it could, and he found each one with the instinct that drew sailors to shade at noon. "We need points, and we won't gather them standing in the trail naming our feelings after clouds."
"Nox?" Ethan tried again when the silence lengthened past comfort. "You listening, man?"
"Yes," Nox said. He didn't look back. "Stop talking, Ethan. Your voice attracts mosquitoes." There was a thin slice of humor in it; there was a thin slice of something else too. He lengthened his stride, sliding ahead as if the path had called him privately by name.
"See?" Ethan said to nobody in particular. "Fine. He's fine." But his eyes tracked Nox's back, the small adjustments of scapula and belt. He'd known Nox long enough to recognize when a quiet wasn't peace, only control.
"Points," Lilia said, practical as rain. She pulled her tablet from a side pouch and shaded the screen with her palm, the glass reflecting an abstract of fronds and her own green-shadowed face. "Team Achievements: 1500 . Trade: 14. Options showing… nearest four are: Tug Test, Courtball, Stealth Course, Sparring."
"Tug," Nox said, no hesitation. "Closest. Short. Clean."
"Closest it is," Lilia agreed. "Three hundred meters northeast by east from our position. Five minutes." She slid the tablet away. "Let's move."
The trail shouldered them into a different microclimate within twenty steps—Atlas did that, switched environments like changing rooms. Heat climbed out of the soil. The ground became crumbly laterite that stained their soles, the grains of it catching in socks and against skin. Bracken ferns lifted lacy hands to brush their calves. The smell of resin announced a knot of ironwoods before they saw it. Above, a pair of black-naped terns arrowed toward the sea, voices like silver bells cut thin, while in the understory a skink skittered and froze, little sides pulsing with outrage at having to share the world with boots.
The path widened and the trees fell back. They walked out into a clearing punched into the forest like a held breath. Bare earth lay tamped and level, a rectangle the size of a small ballfield. On the far side, a device sat like a patient animal: a squat machine roughly the size and dignity of a deep freezer, its casing slate with a faint shimmer where mana runes slept. Heavy stakes bit into the ground on either side, anchoring it. A broad rope coiled from a narrow slot in its face, braided as thick as a man's thigh, the fibers burnished by many hands. Above the slot, a glassy panel waited, powered but dim. The whole assembly exhaled a smell like sunwarmed rope and cold iron.
At the center, a figure struck a match against the edge of the world and lit a cigarette with a calm that said she was the most dangerous thing in the clearing. Adalia did not have to announce herself. The dark fall of her hair—the color of wet teak, cut long and blunt—told a story; the eyes, darker still, polished stones with very little patience carved into them, told the rest. The academy's tracksuit looked different on her, less uniform than uniform weaponized. Smoke curled and then obeyed, slanting away from her as if reprieved.
She glanced up when the four stepped from green to dirt and did not bother with the kind of smile people perform when they are being watched. "Here," she said, voice level as a plumb line. "Devices."
Leona was already moving, tablet in hand. "We're competing as a squad, ma'am."
"Mm." Adalia took the slate and connected it to the machine with a cord that looked like common cable but hummed like a restrained note. She didn't consult the screen while she tapped through the registration steps; the system had the sense to bend to her. "Tug Test. 25 Achievement per participant, scored individually. No mana. Feet on the ground. You pull until the machine decides you've told it the truth about your body." She flicked her cigarette ash neatly to one side without looking. "With four of you, the sum is 100—if none of you waste my time."
"Start in five minutes?" Ethan asked, but Adalia had already turned and walked toward the rope as if she owned every line in the clearing and could pull any of them to any conclusion she chose.
"Start now," she said, without raising her voice. She tapped the panel. It blinked from winter glass to tropical lagoon: readouts blossomed, a row of zeros warm and ready. She set her cigarette on the edge of a stone, balanced perfectly. "Order: blue hair, sky eyes, plants, the quiet one." Her gaze found Nox on that last and held a fraction too long, as if she was taking a reading only she knew how to interpret. "Hands on. Breathe. Pull like you mean it."
Ethan stepped in, grinning because that was how he entered the world when he could. He rubbed his palms along the rope, testing bite and give. The fibers rasped, left a faint tattoo of dust on his skin. He braced—left foot a touch forward, knees soft, hips back, shoulder blades locked. He looked up at the sky for one half second—blue meeting blue—and then leaned into the world. The rope took his force and made a low satisfied sound in the machine's gut. The panel's numbers ran up like a child clattering stairs. 140, 190, 230, 260—his breath in his teeth, arms a clear set of lines; 267. The rope tried to slide back. He held the peak a heartbeat—felt the shake in his forearms—then eased off, a controlled retreat.
"267," Adalia said, as if confirming a fact she had already known and arranged on a shelf. "Write it down," she added, though the system had obviously logged it, just to remind them that she allowed the machine to keep records for her, not instead of her. She flicked her gaze at Leona. "Sky eyes. Let's see if you remember to use your legs and not your pride."
Leona had already chalked her hands—she'd plucked the metal tin from a hook on the machine without asking, dust flying like pale feathers. She planted. The rope knew this grip; it hummed. Leona drove through her heels and the ground answered, pressing her back. The muscles along her thighs woke in a clean sequence. The panel numbers zipped like minnows: 120, 180, 230; then past Ethan's mark—she knew it without looking and she didn't let herself smile—270, 276, a breathe-breathe-push—280. The plateau trembled, her shoulders sang a warning, she held one second longer because she could, then let the rope take back what was its.
"280," Adalia said. "You used your legs. You didn't forget your spine. Don't practice that expression in mirrors; it makes you look like you're in love with yourself." There was no cruelty in it; there was also no praise. Leona's grin showed anyway as she stepped past, dusting her palms, breath quick.
"Plants," Adalia said without looking around, and Lilia moved through the space with the exactness of a bead sliding on a string. She was not ashamed of her quiet frame; she also did not pretend it was something it wasn't. She wrapped the rope calmly, set her stance exactly as Adalia had commanded, breath slow in, slow out. She pulled. The machine's voice lifted but did not grow loud. 60, 75, 81, the line sloped up, steadied. Lilia's mouth compressed but she didn't add face to force. The number ticked: 82, 80; settled at 80 the way a cup finds a tabletop. She let go and stepped back, no apology, no excuse.
"80," Adalia said, and for the first time a fractional nod. "You did not lie to the machine about who you are. Most people do. Waste of everyone's time." Her eyes cut sideways, and the cigarette on the stone sent up its delicate ladder of smoke. "Quiet."
Nox had been still enough to be mistaken for patience. He set his fingers to the rope like he was greeting a dangerous animal. The pull at his brain—the red thread—drew taut in one instant and thrummed. Now, the voice said. Now. Show them what it is to be made for edge.
He set his feet as Leona had. He dropped his hips lower than Ethan did. He let the teardrop of his lats lock down, navel toward spine, breath a piston. His hands bit. Something inside him stood up.
The machine did not hum; it answered. The panel's numbers shot in a clean slant: 160, 230, 300—Ethan's breath hitched in surprise; Leona's mouth went small; Lilia's green eyes flicked to the margin of the panel where it shifted scales—320, 350, 370. The rope creaked. Nox held, jaw carved, eyes unfocused in a way that made Ethan's scalp prickle. His forearms trembled, the small stabilizers in his shoulders burning thousand-matches bright, his boots digging two clean graves for their heels. He held one pure beat of the heart and then let the rope have its pride back.
"370," Adalia said, and the look she gave him was an audit, not admiration. "Full marks. You will sleep tonight like you fought someone." She plucked up her cigarette, drew once, exhaled a ribbon like string pulled off a spool. "Scores: Nox, twenty-five. Ethan, nineteen. Leona, twenty-three. Lilia, twelve. Sum seventy-nine. Logged." She made a flicking gesture with the hand that held the cigarette; at that motion, the machine chirped and the team's devices vibrated—a haptic acknowledgment and the mechanical equivalent of Adalia's nod. "You're done here. Go make yourselves useful somewhere that isn't my clearing."
She pivoted on her heel and was already walking away, smoke trailing like a small flag of surrender she did not mean. In profile, the line of her mouth said she had not been surprised by any of it. The rope settled, the machine's internal hum dropped an octave and then went to sleep.
Leona let out a breath she hadn't noticed she was holding and turned first to Lilia, palm up. Lilia pressed her chalky hand to it and squeezed—a thank-you for calm in the face of numbers. Ethan slapped Nox's shoulder and then, because the muscle there felt wired and hard in a way that warned him off, he turned the slap into a brief grip and then stepped back. "Monster," he said lightly. "Buy your biceps a drink later so they don't mutiny."
Nox rolled his shoulders once. The red wire inside him dimmed, not gone. "They don't drink," he said, dry. "They eat." It was a joke on the surface; Leona felt the hair rise at the back of her neck anyway.
Their devices chimed again—team tally climbing to 1,579 Achievement; 14 Trade steady—and then the forest took the clearing back, little by little. A pair of yellow butterflies crossed and recrossed the rectangle as if measuring it. The wind returned with a sheet of brine and the far off thud of a wave hitting something that didn't want to be hit. The sun shoved its shoulders lower; shadows lengthened, willingly.
"Courtball?" Ethan suggested, checking the map with a glance. "We're not all built to pull, but all of us can run."
"Stealth is closer," Lilia said, automatically balancing distance vs. potential gain. The algorithm of her brain kept score without a screen. "But the wind's wrong for it now—offshore, gusty. Leaves are loud on days like this. We'll get penalized for noise. Courtball's through that saddle and down. We can be there in fifteen."
"Then courtball," Leona decided, crisp. She glanced once more toward the machine, where the rope swayed minutely in an eddy of air, then toward the shadowline where Adalia had vanished. "Go."
They shouldered their packs and the clearing fell behind them quickly. The trail shoulder up a low ridge, flanked by ti plants with lacquered leaves and stems that gleamed crimson when the light hit right. Heat came up off the red dirt in soft breaths, sweat tracking the column of Leona's spine beneath her shirt in a straight, ticklish line. A myna hopped along a branch to yell unsolicited advice. Ethan pushed a fern frond out of the way and got a glitter of water on his knuckles—condensation from a leaf that had decided to collect the day's humidity like coin.
As they crested the saddle, the wind made itself bigger, shouldered through the shrubs and went looking for someone's hair to bully. It found Leona's loose wisps and Ethan's bangs and got into Nox's and decided his was too disciplined to be fun. The air cooled one shade; the light thinned, more silver now where it had been brass. The smell of sea grew stronger. From this height, between the boles of old trees, they could flash glimpses of water bladed with light, then forest again, then the speck work of a sand spit that lanced out into the shallows like a pale finger.
"Drink," Lilia said, and they obeyed, unslinging bottles in a practiced stagger so flow didn't stop. They drank like people who liked themselves enough not to get sloppy—steady pulls, measured, not so much that bellies sloshed. Sweat salted their upper lips; tongues learned again the cold, clean taste of filtered river, the faint ghost of leaves that had brushed the stream the night before. A dragonfly tried to argue with Ethan's bottle, decided it was not a flower, and veered off with wounded dignity.
They dropped down the far side of the saddle in a controlled slide through switchbacks where the clay turned slick under a scuff of leaf. Lianas slung themselves across the path with the bored entitlement of cats on sofas. Leona ducked one, lifted another for Lilia with a gallant flourish that earned her a small, real smile. Nox took the obstacle as if it hadn't been there. His mind had gone quiet in that hot, clarifying way it did after he'd asked his body for something unreasonable and it had said yes. The whisper in his head did not vanish, but it dulled, the way heat haze dulls edges without erasing them.
"Ethan," Leona said, softer now that trees thickened and sound didn't carry as far. "You good?"
"Good is a church word," Ethan said, but the joke was low-energy, affectionate, offered to keep her from worrying. "I'm fine. The tug took a little more grip than I gave it. I'll need to ice later." His thumb pressed into the meat between his forefinger and palm, testing, approving, adjusting his grip like a craftsman checking a tool.
"You pulled clean," Lilia said. "You didn't yank. Machines like honesty."
Ethan threw her a sideways smile. "You flirting with the device, Lilia?"
"I like things that do what they say they do," she said, deadpan. "That includes people."
"Savage," Leona murmured, grinning.
They came out of the trees into a small meadow stitched with swordgrass, the blades clacking faintly where the wind got its fingers between them. Sparrows—the local island variety, chunkier and more opinionated than city cousins—popped up and scolded until they decided the students were beneath notice. The grass waved in a complicated calligraphy that meant many things if you were the sort of person who listened to grass. Mills of butterflies rose from clumps of lantana and wandered like bits of confetti that hadn't learned falling.
To the west, the sky had started its low, slow slide toward color. Fat clouds stacked in layers, their bellies gray as sharkskin, their crowns conveniently theatrical. Sunlight, better at dramatics than honesty, climbed their edges in gold. It spilled in bands through holes between cloud plates and painted the more distant forest with ladders of pale fire. The sea soaked it up and gave it back in strands.
The courtball ground sat beyond the meadow, a rough rectangle porch of packed earth drawn with chalk lines that had decided to be art when they aged and broke. Two hoops faced each other, not nets but glowing rings of mana anchored to poles. The device that oversaw it had less brute presence than the tug machine—sleek, narrower, with multiple antennas like a centipede's feelers measuring enthusiasm. A board displayed current queue: EMPTY.
"Perfect," Ethan said. "No wait. Let's—"
Leona's hand found his wrist, not tight, just there. "Listen," she said.
They did. The forest leaned in with them. Beneath the wind, beneath the near hiss of grass, beneath the oscillating creak of a palm's fronds complaining, a sound braided itself: footfalls that weren't theirs, three sets, fast, approaching on the far path at a clip that said competition more than danger.
"Queue will not be empty for long," Lilia said, serene. "We go first. If they arrive mid-match, they wait." She tipped her chin at the device. "Register."
They ran the drill the way teams run drills when they have practiced being together longer than they have practiced anything else. Leona took the slate, connected, tapped names. Ethan checked the rings' calibration—height standard, throughput standard; they would punish sloppy arcs and reward clean lines. Lilia shrugged off her pack and stretched wrists, fingers, shoulders in small, exact circles. Nox stood, feet parallel, eyes on the far ring with an intent like weather forming.
Branches shivered; the other team hit the meadow at a run and then slowed—policy required—and walked the last ten meters in with the swagger of people who thought swagger grew points. Three third-years, all broad through chest and full of the loose arrogance of having survived long enough to forget vulnerability. They were not unkind; they were bored, and boredom in a place like Atlas made people look for friction.
"Just in time to watch," Ethan said pleasantly, and Leona shot him a "do not poke" glance that he translated and obeyed. Lilia pressed start. The device chirped approval. Mana rings brightened. The meadow leaned closer.
They played. And for five minutes—six, nine—the narrative belonged to motion and breath and the satisfying sting of palm on ball. They rotated without speaking. Leona cut and pivoted and shot with a body sense that matched sky to arc. Ethan ran lanes, stole a pass clean as a magician palming a coin, fed Nox once with a no-look that made the third-years swear under their breath. Lilia set screens with the calm of a door deciding when to open. Nox, whose eyes had gone distant again as if he were reading a script only he could see, took one step back from the three-line and sent the ball through the far ring in a line that did not wobble, the sound of success—clean, pure, a bell struck by intention—rolling back across the ground.
They finished two points over the threshold for top bracket. The device released a cascade of polite chimes; their watches answered with the small victorious buzz that made Leona think of bees. Points climbed. The third-years shuffled forward, more alert now, a little impressed in the way predators are impressed by other predators. One of them—the tallest—offered her chin a notch. Leona offered him the space with a graceful step to the side. No need to make this a story.
"Next?" Ethan asked, wiping his wet hair back with the heel of his hand.
"Not here," Lilia said, eyes on the sky where the sun had dipped low enough to make decisions. "Light is changing. Stealth course will be kinder with long shadows. We can move through the ironwood stand before full dusk, then follow the rivulet. Nox?"
Nox blinked once, like someone waking from a short, efficient sleep. "Fine."
They reclaimed packs, water, the ordinary detritus of moving humans. The third-years took the rectangle like inheriting a throne. The forest, satisfied with the exchange, opened a path.
As they crossed back into the trees, the day finally exhaled its last bright breath. The western sky went full theater: a horizon bar of fierce copper, above it an opera of purples and bruised oranges, high clouds rimmed molten. The wind came steadier now, riding the temperature difference between hot ground and cooling sea; it lifted hair, licked sweat off the back of necks, space between shirts and skin filled with relief. Humidity loosened by a degree that felt like mercy.
Noise changed with light. Cicadas throttled back; tree frogs tuned up with their rubber-glove squeaks. Somewhere, water fell in a small, careful hurry—maybe a spillway in the rivulet where a log had shifted—and the air near it went a dozen degrees kinder. Hermit crabs began their sideways negotiations on the path. A gecko made its clock-tick of a call, chik-chik, punctuating the wordless sentences of leaves. Overhead, a fruit bat the size of a briefcase launched like a nocturnal kite, leathery wings writing slow cursive against the gloaming.
They hiked, and the world rewarded attention. Leaves brushed arms with damp sleeves. The soil underfoot changed texture every twenty steps—powder where the path climbed, mud ribboned with roots where it dipped. The smell shifted from resin to green tea to faint floral sugar, then back to salt as the wind turned a page. The trill of a warbler stitched itself in the middle distance; closer, some beetle practiced percussion against a log, a hollow tok tok tok as precise as a metronome.
Leona's breath found a cadence that matched the sway of her pack. Ethan loosened his chest strap a hole and sighed at the exact right moment to look satisfied instead of tired. Lilia counted steps when the trail steepened, a private ritual: forty for this grade, sip at twenty, ignore the small stone in her boot until the next flat. Nox moved like a shadow with weight, his attention bright as a blade but turned inward. The troubling pull in him had quieted under exertion; it waited. He could feel it, but it could not feel him, not while he chose to be more than it.
When they reached the ironwood stand, the world dimmed all at once. The trees there knit their branches like fingers clasped. The hum of distant surf felt louder in the hush. Needles underfoot made a soft carpet that whispered shh under every step. Between trunks the last light stacked in narrow coins, silver dropped on the forest floor by a careless god. A snail with a golden shell crossed their path at its imperial speed and Lilia bent—still moving—to nudge it gently with a twig so nobody's boot found it by accident.
The rivulet announced itself with a change in temperature first, then sound, then the feel of damp climbing their shins as fog. They followed it downstream, the path here more idea than trail, stepping from stone to stone as if they'd been designed for feet. The water ran clear over a bottom the color of pennies, leaf skeletons trapped in its shallow falls like stained glass. Small fish darted: silver parentheses.
By the time the stealth course's perimeter sigils glowed dully among the roots—low lights that promised rules and tests—the sky had let go of its last color and taken on the serious business of night. The first stars jabbed holes in it. The moon hoisted itself just enough to give shape to ideas. Mist drifted below the level of their knees; air tasted wet and friendly.
Leona stopped, chin lifted, senses spread out like a net. "We can take it," she said. "Wind has turned. Leaves will mask our noise. The frogs are louder than mistakes."
Ethan cracked his knuckles softly. "I always wanted to be out-whispered by an amphibian."
Lilia's mouth made its smallest smile. "They have better lungs."
Nox said nothing, but his eyes were very clear in the low light, pale as a sandbar at noon. He looked toward the dark where tasks lived, then back at his sister's outline. He lifted his chin, brief, a promise he did not name. She returned it in the same language.
Behind them, the path they'd come by had already edited itself, leaves falling back into place, the fabric of Atlas closing around their passage. Ahead, the island waited, a thousand little tests braided together into one long lesson: about bodies and breath, about heat and water, about what to carry and what to put down. The four of them stepped forward together, boots biting softly, points and pride and friendship braided as neatly as the tug rope had been.
Above the ironwoods, beyond the rivulet, past the meadow, the western sky finished its performance and went quiet, leaving behind a faint memory of oranges on the undersides of the highest clouds. The sea took that memory and folded it away. Wind moved from urgent to companionable. A cricket tuned itself and found the note it wanted. The night settled its weight lightly across the island's shoulders.
Somewhere, not here, Rena turned in sleep and the fire near her sighed. Somewhere, farther, Sarafina's path cut cool and precise. Here, now, four friends moved under trees, carrying their scores, their worries, their jokes, the complicated silences that come of being human. The forest listened, as forests do, and kept its own counsel, sharing only the sound of leaves making their careful deals with air.
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Heat Thank you very much for reading