1 — Node Calibration
The simulator woke like an eye.
A ring of cold light opened beneath Jax Hollow's boots, irising outward across the glass until the arena became a white horizon. He breathed once, slow and deliberate. The node inside his chest did not beat; it oscillated, a steady metronome that sent rhythm through the Rhythmic Conduit Network (RCN) woven under his skin. Where most students felt warmth rise with blood, Jax felt vibration—a tightening hum along aether threads that brightened faintly silver and black.
"Keep the oscillation sane," Coach Aroha called from the control deck. "If your Null climbs before your Flow anchors, you'll fray and we start the day with a re-weave."
"Understood," he said, rolling his shoulders until the threads settled.
Grids of Luminarch geometry blinked to life in the air; the simulator projected problem shapes, corridors where energy liked to fold and break. Blue mist hissed from floor vents—ionized air that carried resonance better than dry.
"Round one: Flow discipline only," Aroha said. "No Null. No Light. I want to see if you can fill before you erase."
He stepped forward, palms half-open. The node deepened. A quiet, clean Flow swelled through the conduits—emotion measured and honest, not flared. His hands traced arcs, threading the current into the simulator's fake storm. Pressure rose, met the arc, rolled off. The floor shivered and settled.
Aroha's voice softened. "Good. Again. Feel it without owning it."
The second wave came harder. He inhaled through the node, exhaled through the threads, gave the storm a path that was not his body. Static combed back his hair; light sharpened his outline. When it broke, the glass kept its integrity. Jax glanced down—no cracklines, no dark pulse-stain under the skin. Still clean.
"Round two," Aroha said. "Add Light mapping. Stub geometry only."
Silver lattices unfurled from his fingertips—barely there, the simplest Luminarch grids. He laid them like pathways through fog, allowing Flow to ride the angles instead of battering them. The storm's edge lost interest in tearing him and ran along the map to die at the walls. He almost smiled.
"Round three," Aroha said. "Introduce Null gently."
The mark under his collarbone warmed—the Comma a quiet curve of pale light. Jax inclined the silence one degree, the way you tilt a shield to let rain slide instead of pool. Pressure met absence and dissolved.
The simulator tried something cruel. A sideways gust hit his left flank while the floor tugged his right foot forward. He reacted too fast—tilted the Null field two degrees and starved the Flow beneath it. The conduits complained. Static flashed along his ribs as micro-threads frayed and knit back.
He hissed.
"Stop," Aroha said.
The storm cut. She was already on the stairs with a handheld tuner, scanning the pulse under his skin. Tiny clicks sounded as she coaxed misaligned strands back toward the node's rhythm.
"Over-angled," she said. "You silenced what was supposed to sing with you."
"Still responding," he said evenly.
"Because you're stubborn." She turned the tuner and the pulse-stain around his ribs mottled, then faded. "Stubborn breaks ribs you don't have."
He snorted. "I have ribs."
"You have lattice, Hollow," she said, trying not to smile. "Try again, and this time let Flow speak first."
He reset stance. The simulator breathed in. Jax breathed out. When the two breaths met, the floor didn't even shiver.
Aroha cut the power and left the lights dim. "Enough. You're training for control, not spectacle."
He nodded and should've left it there. But he felt the city above, faint through the vents—Wellington's morning moving like water in pipes, the undercity humming along. The Comma warmed a second time, as if agreeing.
He whispered, "I hear you," to no one and everyone, and the node steadied into a rhythm he could carry all day.
---
2 — The Lecture on Balance
Lecture Hall Six held enough glass to make even the confident feel transparent. Professor Kael Yun had scrawled three concentric rings across the wall before students filed in, each labeled in tight script: Flow, Light, Null.
"You are not water bags with lights inside," he began, dry as chalk. "You are resonant instruments. If your instrument is out of tune, your power is out of tune. And when power is out of tune, cities break."
Low laughter. Jax took the middle row, the place where the sound bounced cleanest. Kara slid into the seat beside him, hair still wet from an early spar, smelling of copper rain and lemon soap.
Kael tapped the inner ring. "Body Tier. Internal augmentation. You channel, you don't command. You move clean, you don't tear reality to make room for your ego."
He tapped the second ring. "City Tier. Environmental resonance. Most of you will never do this safely. The ones who think they can without training die interesting and educational deaths."
A few heads dipped.
He tapped the outer ring and didn't smile. "Continental Tier. This is where we stop pretending today."
He turned, marked the board with neat symbols:
Rank S: Faculty, licensed containment
Rank 1—10: Students, division-based
Multi-Users: rare; subject to additional protocols
"Thirty percent of our population can hold two channels for under ten seconds. Three channels are reserved for theory, idiots, and ghosts." Kael's gaze slid across the room and stuck, unkindly amused, on Jax. "Do not be any of those."
Snickers. Kara kicked Jax's boot under the desk. He didn't react.
"And because you're gossip engines," Kael continued, "I'll address it before you invent five worse versions. Yes, Ryen Tassel returns from the Northern Circuit today. Yes, he remains Rank 1. Yes, he is a multi-user—Flow and Light both—and no, you are not to ask him to open your jars."
More laughter, quicker this time, threaded with something sharp. Ryen had a history longer than the board: undefeated in intra-division exhibitions; rumored to have held a dual channel for twenty-six seconds at City Tier without collapse; rumored to have broken a man's conduit with a touch.
Kael's voice softened. "Balance is not a mood. It is discipline measured in breath. That is the only reason any of you will live to become interesting old people."
He capped his marker and looked directly at Jax, not unkind now. "And if your instrument is built different," he added, "you still tune."
Jax felt the Comma answer under the tape—one small, patient pulse.
---
3 — The Evaluation Duel
Word traveled before the summons arrived. By the time Jax reached Arena 04, the upper tiers were lined three rows deep. The arena's glass was set to witness mode—clear, resonant, ready to throw back the force it was built to contain.
Aroha met him at the gate. "You decline," she said flatly.
The Notice of Evaluation in her hand glittered with administrative malice. Voluntary. It wasn't. Ryen Tassel stood across the ring with hands in his pockets, jacket open over a Flow sash, Luminarch bracers catching the light. He was taller than the rumors and very relaxed.
"I accept," Jax said.
"No," Aroha said.
"Yes," Ryen said cheerfully from fifty feet away. His voice carried clean and bright. "Let the Nullborn breathe. I'm curious what silence looks like when it runs out of room."
Murmurs. Kara swore and pushed to the railing with Rei and Lenn and Mira at her shoulders. Kael appeared on the observation deck, face that carefully unread version of concern he wore for problems that could become lawsuits.
Aroha took Jax's shoulder, fingers tense. "Hollow. He's Rank 1 and a multi-user, and you're still fixing micro-frays from this morning."
"I know how to lose correctly," Jax said. "But if I don't step in now, he'll find me later. Worse place. Fewer rules."
Aroha's jaw worked. "One condition. No tri-anything. No flirting with collapse. If your node spikes weird, you submit."
He nodded. She didn't let go until he'd stepped through the gate and the glass hissed shut between them.
Ryen strolled to center ring, an easy, theatrical smile aimed at the crowd and then at Jax. "Hollow, is it? They say you've got no blood and all backbone."
"They say a lot of things," Jax said.
Ryen's irises brightened; his aura feathered the air without heat. Flow rose around him, not as a roar but as a choir—layered, precise. Then silver lines stitched through the space at his knees, elbows, throat: Light mapping distances Jax hadn't chosen yet.
"Body Tier only," Kael announced. "No constructs. Stop at ring-out or clean tap. Violate, and your next match is with the Board."
Ryen tilted his head. "I always obey the rules I'm making fun of."
"Begin."
They didn't rush. Ryen moved first—two casual steps that tested footing and met Jax's Silent Guard. The flow of him felt like rope being played off a cleat: nothing, nothing, everything. Jax leaned the Null slope two degrees and let the rope slide by. Air curled in his wake.
"Nice," Ryen murmured. His right hand flicked and a coil of Flow whipped for Jax's shoulder. Jax didn't block; he wasn't there. A clean Hollow Step erased the obligation to be struck and replaced him a meter left. The crowd made that sound people make when they realize they've underestimated an equation.
Ryen's grin widened, delighted. Silver geometry tightened around his wrists; angles fixed without touching skin. He lunged—Flow in the legs, Light framing the joint, the kind of motion that writes itself into a body and asks bones to agree.
Jax met it with economy. Silent Guard at a slant, Null absorbing angle and starving the part of Flow that wanted to stick. His counter was a palm that didn't land so much as arrive near the notion of Ryen's ribs and change the policy of impact. Ryen's breath caught. The ring spat faint mist.
"Again," Ryen said happily.
They tested each other. Ryen's Flow came in variations—joy, contempt, hunger, sorrow—each an emotional vector wearing muscle. The Luminarch grids kept it honest, shaving off waste, turning every inch into a threat. Jax's answers were shorter: tilt, let pass, return. His aether threads glowed without heat; his node held steady, austere.
Ryen escalated. He braided Light into Flow, turned the ring into a moving diagram. Every step ahead of Jax read like a page he hadn't opened. The pressure climbed. The crowd leaned forward as one organism.
"You're good at saying no," Ryen said, conversational under the noise. "Let's see if you know what yes is."
He snapped his fingers. Light lattices slammed down around Jax's knees and elbows—soft cages, tastefully built, rules written into shape. Flow surged to fill the cages like water in a form. Jax could've broken them with brute Null and cratered the floor. He didn't. He flicked Light—his, not Ryen's—just enough to rewrite the corner of a corner. The cage doors opened an inch. He stepped through.
Ryen blinked, pleased. "Multi potential."
"No," Jax said, and meant it. He wasn't chasing a second channel; he was refusing to be choreographed.
Ryen's face softened into something worse than arrogance: interest. "I could make you."
He took the brakes off.
The arena answered with a low groan that wasn't structural—it was the air realizing it had a boss. Flow boiled around Ryen's shoulders in tight spirals; silver lines snapped from the floor to the ceiling. The pressure was clean and the intent was clear: submit.
Jax's Comma warmed, not as a warning—more like a mentor putting a hand on a student's shoulder and saying, remember the thing I taught you because you're about to need it. His Silent Guard angled one degree and a half, the precise slope Aroha had drilled into bone.
Ryen's first serious strike landed.
It didn't touch Jax. It touched the policy of touching. Light's intent hit Null's slope and skated along it, split into harmless attention, and died a foot to the right as a neat gust of cool air. The crowd sighed.
Ryen laughed. "Beautiful. You're a cliff. Let's see what the ocean thinks."
He went City Tier in the body. He wasn't supposed to—Kael's look said so—but Ryen lived where rules were doors you opened to feel alive. Flow saturated the ring. The glass hummed. Lines formed in the air like the suggestion of rain.
Aroha shouted somewhere—Jax didn't parse it. The node in his chest tightened. His threads lit in red and silver and black like the aurora had chosen a human shape for the morning.
Ryen moved. Jax answered. The ring became math and music.
He let Ryen write a stanza. The stanza had a clever rhyme and a smug meter. Jax cut the rhyme with Hollow Step, rearranged the meter by taking away the beat that expected to be there. Ryen altered the stanza to account for the theft and turned the missing beat into an accent. Jax declined to be accented.
If there had been blood, it would have sung in people's ears. There wasn't. So the sound was glass and breath and the high, clean whistle of Flow finding immaculate angles to die on.
Ryen frowned slightly. "Okay," he said without heat. "Now we stop playing."
He rolled both channels forward, and the arena buckled around a point that had not existed before. Light wrote a rule into the floor: gravity, but sideways. Flow pounded that rule until the floor believed it. The audience grabbed rails as the tilt hit. Jax's foot slid two inches; only the Comma's warming kept him from drifting into a new future where forward was slightly left.
Jax made a choice.
He put Light down first—his, small, a single square of intention beneath his feet—and then let Flow fill it from his node. Not flared; not afraid; enough. He tilted Null a fraction. The sideways gravity wrote itself around his little decision and the floor let Jax keep being a person.
Ryen's mouth tightened. "You are a problem."
"Many people say so," Jax said.
The next strike wasn't clever. It was large. Flow rose from Ryen's legs like a tide with opinions; Light marked a corridor through which the tide would refuse to spread. The corridor ran through Jax.
Jax moved to step out of the corridor and found no place to step; Ryen had bracketed every option with a future. For a half breath, Jax studied the bracketed space and saw what Vire would have called Seam. He took Hollow Step into the place where the sentence didn't have a verb and arrived at Ryen's shoulder.
He could have ended the match. A knuckle to the jaw, a palm to the sternum with the slope of Null behind it—professional, kind, humiliating. He did not. He set his hand against Ryen's back like a friend steadying a friend who'd leaned too far.
"Stop," he said.
Ryen looked at him from the corner of his eye and grinned, fierce. "No."
He threw it.
Dual-stacked Flow and Light, body tier rising into city posture, all of it braided and sent into Jax's chest from a range that meant it would either be a spectacular lesson or an obituary. The air made a sound like a flag tearing in a hurricane.
Jax's conduits lit white. The lattice in his torso scorched at the edges as threads over-tensioned to keep the node from snapping. There was no blood—only light leaking along micro-fractures, the RCN trying to re-weave faster than the strike could un-knit it.
For a blink, nothing existed except pressure and the shape of "no."
The Comma flared.
Not a shield. Not a weapon. A policy change.
Ryen's braided force hit the curve and found itself rephrased. Not reflected—reworded. The corridor he had created to ferry power into Jax became a corridor out. The strike remained a strike. The subject and object traded places.
Ryen went silent as a picture and left his feet, sailing backward in a clean line that ended with his shoulders kissing glass. The arena's dampers caught most of it; the rest splashed as harmless wind against the high tiers. Ryen slumped and slid and did not get up.
Jax didn't cheer. He didn't smile. He stood very still because standing was now a project. His conduits crackled. The pulse-stain across his chest darkened to a galaxy-shaped blotch. The node oscillated hard enough to blur his breath.
Aroha was in the ring with the med team before Kael finished saying "match." She didn't touch him—Null hates to be touched when it is busy not tearing. She held the tuner an inch from his sternum and spoke low enough that it was just the sound of a person who refused to bury a student.
"Stay," she said.
He did, because he would have if she hadn't asked.
Ryen coughed and laughed once, hoarse, eyes bright and unfocused. "You're—" He swallowed. "—fun."
"Medical," Kael snapped from somewhere, already triaging lawsuits in his mind.
The crowd's noise returned all at once, a tide delayed by awe.
---
4 — The Cost of Winning
They put him in a quiet room. The walls hummed at a low, precise frequency that told the RCN how to calm itself. The node's oscillation reduced, not to rest, exactly, but to work his body knew how to do.
Aroha paced. Kael didn't sit. Kara held still because the chair would not have survived being moved.
"Were you trying to die?" Aroha asked finally, no heat, all iron.
"No," Jax said. His voice came out softer than he meant. "He was going to hurt someone else with that if he didn't learn how it feels to miss."
Kael's eyebrows met. "You decided to be a pedagogical instrument."
Jax considered. "Yes."
Kara pressed the heel of her hand to her brow. "You absolute plank."
"Accurate," he said.
Aroha stopped at the foot of the cot. "Listen carefully. You are not a wall we throw people against to see what bounces. Your conduits are not rated for charity."
"Understood," he said, and meant it, and knew he would make a similar decision again and hated that about himself.
The door clicked. Daimen Vire stood there, less shadow than rumor, eyes as calm as the inside of a bell. He didn't enter until Aroha nodded once.
He didn't greet Jax. He set a small case on the counter, opened it, and removed a compact resonance tuner—older than Auralis by the look. Its faceplate had Latin letters that had forgotten their names.
"Hold still," Vire said mildly.
He tuned in silence, turning a dial until the pulse-stain lost its edges. He tugged at a filament in the air, and Jax felt a thread under his skin obey like a student hearing his name spoken exactly right.
"Your Comma did more than redirect," Vire murmured, not for the room. "It interpreted."
Kael's eyes flicked to him. "Meaning?"
"Meaning," Vire said, "it translated an attack into a return policy without adding power or taking it. That implies comprehension."
Kara made a small noise she tried to hide as a cough. "His mark is… what, alive?"
"Don't be dramatic," Vire said gently. "It's listening."
He finished with a twist that felt like a knot unlacing. Jax's node exhaled. The room brightened by some measure no one could name.
Aroha braced her hands on her hips and glared at Vire like a competent person confronted with an unsolvable equation wearing good shoes. "He doesn't fight Rank 1 again until I say he does."
"That's easy," Vire said. "Rank 1 won't be available for a while."
"Is he—?" Kara began.
"He'll live," Vire said. "He'll be sore where his pride lives." He turned back to Jax. "You're not allowed to be interesting again today."
"I'll try to be boring," Jax said.
"Don't try," Vire said. "Succeed."
He left without the case, which meant he trusted Aroha to use it and Kael to pretend not to memorize how.
After he was gone, Kael exhaled through his nose and sat like a man who'd been standing since the old world. "Hollow, for the record, that was illegal."
"Yes," Jax said.
Kael rubbed his brow. "And instructive."
Aroha cut him a look. "Don't encourage him."
"I'm not," Kael said. "I'm acknowledging reality in case it decides to
— continued —
"…in case it decides to sue me," Kael finished dryly.
Aroha snorted despite herself. "You'll lose. Reality has better lawyers."
Kara hovered a palm above Jax's, close enough to count as contact if he needed it, not quite touching the Null that still didn't like to be handled. "You scared me," she said, voice small and honest.
"I scared me," he admitted. "My threads tried to leave without me."
"Next time," Kara said, "let someone else be brave for five minutes."
He nodded—because it cost nothing, promised nothing, and she knew both. The node in his chest eased one more notch, the pulse-stain along his ribs fading to a faint dusk.
"Bed," Aroha ordered. "Now. If you so much as think about stairs, I'll staple you to the mattress with Light geometry."
"Understood," Jax said.
Kael stood, smoothing his coat. "For the record, Hollow: illegal, reckless, and the best demonstration of policy control I've ever seen from a student. Don't do it again."
"Which part?" Jax asked.
"Yes," Kael said, and left.
Vire paused at the door. "Balance isn't peace," he said softly. "It's capacity. Grow yours." Then he was gone too.
Aroha checked the tuner one last time, grunted, and killed the room's hum. "Sleep," she repeated, gentler now. "We start over in the morning."
Jax closed his eyes. The Comma answered with a single, steady pulse, like a teacher tapping a desk to set the beat.
---
5 — Reflection
They released him at dusk with a threat of bed rest and a list of frequencies to hum if the conduits started singing wrong. He ignored the bed and climbed anyway—slow, careful—to the dormitory roof, where Wellington's lights filtered through the vented ceiling like a city hidden behind gauze.
He sat with his back to a warm pipe and listened.
He heard buses above, a mechanical prayer. Water in distant mains. A gull arguing with the wind at the harbor mouth. Two first-years practicing Flow in a stairwell and laughing when it fizzled. Aroha and Kael trading low, tired sentences about lineages, risk, and whether courage was a talent or a habit. Infirmary monitors chiming as Ryen said "again" to a nurse who told him "no." The academy, alive and noisy in all the ways that meant nothing had shattered—not today.
The RCN under Jax's skin glowed faintly where the pipe's light kissed his wrists. The lattice felt taut, intact—re-woven. He checked the place where the dual-stack had hit and found only warmth, no ache. If he'd had blood, it would have pounded. Instead, his node oscillated with the calm of a metronome that had decided to trust the musician.
The Comma pulsed once, the exact tempo of the city's distant nightlife: traffic, footsteps, rain starting somewhere he couldn't see. Not a command. A question.
He breathed in. Let the breath reach the node. Let the node thread the breath through the aether lines until his whole frame answered back.
"Quiet," he told himself, and maybe the mark, and maybe the academy beneath his feet. "We practice quiet."
The pulse agreed.
Far underfoot, behind walls that had once been built for war instead of school, something old shifted an inch closer to waking—dragged by the echo of a boy who had learned, for one dangerous afternoon, to rephrase force without hating it.
Jax opened his eyes to the soft beginning of rain.
No blood.
No excuses.
Just rhythm—and the work of carrying it.
End of Chapter 2 — Conduits & Consequences