The waking world was louder than Sunny remembered.
Eight years in the Dream Realm had recalibrated his senses to Bastion's filtered silence, the hush of stone corridors and the muffled distance of the ash fields. The police station was an assault by comparison. Fluorescent lights hummed at a frequency that set his teeth on edge, radios crackled in adjacent rooms, and somewhere above him a ventilation system cycled air that tasted like it had been breathed by a thousand people before reaching his lungs.
Master Jet, the Ascended woman who had slapped him hard enough to blur his vision, drove him to the Academy in a personal transport vehicle. The city scrolled past the window in a blur of concrete and glass, advertising screens casting colored light across the wet pavement, and Sunny watched it with the detached attention of someone cataloging an environment for later use. He had been born in this city. He had spent the first eight years of his life in its outskirts, scavenging and stealing, sleeping in places that weren't designed for sleeping. But the city he remembered was a child's city, scaled to a child's perspective, and this version was something else entirely.
It was enormous. It was ugly. More than either of those things, it was real in a way that the Dream Realm had never been, because the Dream Realm was built by the Spell and the Spell had a logic to it, however cruel, while the waking world was built by humans and humans had no logic at all.
Jet glanced at him from the driver's seat.
"Since we both come from the outskirts, I'll give you three pieces of advice. Whether you listen to me or not is your business."
Sunny turned his head and waited. The Flaw pulsed faintly at the edges of his awareness, a constant low-grade pressure that he was still learning to manage. It didn't activate unless someone asked him a direct question, but the threat of it colored every interaction, turning each conversation into a potential minefield.
"First: once you're registered in the Academy, they'll offer you psychological counseling. There will also be a valuable reward for sharing your experiences in the Nightmare and the details of your Appraisal. You'll be able to receive a soul shard, maybe even several of them."
Sunny knew where this was going. Anvil's briefings had covered the Academy's intelligence-gathering protocols in detail. The counseling sessions were a screening tool designed to catalog Sleepers' Aspects and Flaws under the guise of therapeutic support. The data was supposed to be confidential, but confidentiality was a concept that existed only until someone with enough authority decided it didn't.
"I'm telling you to refuse," Jet said.
"I wasn't planning to accept."
She raised an eyebrow. Most outskirts kids wouldn't have the context to understand why refusing was smart. Sunny realized his response had been too quick, too knowing, and adjusted.
"I don't like doctors," he added, which was true in the specific sense that the only physician he'd ever interacted with was Bastion's field medic, who had reset his dislocated fingers without anesthetic and told him to stop flinching.
Jet seemed to accept this. "Second: the only course worth your time is Wilderness Survival."
"Not combat training?"
"You only know how to survive in the city. The Dream Realm is mostly wilderness. Do you know how to make a fire? Procure food? Find safe shelter?"
The Flaw activated before Sunny could prepare for it, a sharp pressure behind his eyes that built with each unanswered second. Direct questions, each one demanding a truthful response, and the truth was catastrophic because the truth was yes to all of them.
"Yes," he said.
The pressure released. Jet glanced at him, surprised.
"Really? Where did you learn that?"
Another direct question. The pain began building again, and Sunny let it climb for a beat while he searched for the version of truth that revealed the least.
"The outskirts," he said. The pain eased. It was true, in a sense. The outskirts had taught him to scavenge and find shelter and survive without infrastructure. That those skills had later been replaced by a far more comprehensive curriculum in Bastion was information the answer didn't require him to volunteer.
Jet studied him for a moment, then seemed to accept it. Outskirts kids did learn things that other children didn't, and fire-making wasn't an unreasonable skill for someone who'd spent years without reliable heating.
"Then you're ahead of most Sleepers already. Take the course anyway. What you know from the outskirts won't match what you'll face in the Dream Realm."
Sunny nodded. He would have taken the course regardless, because attending the same classes as the other Sleepers was part of maintaining his cover, and because Teacher Julius's course was the one Anvil's briefings had flagged as the most practically useful for someone who already had combat training.
The third piece of advice came at the Academy gates, after Jet had stopped the vehicle and stepped out into the falling snow.
"Remember: no one can survive in the Dream Realm alone. That's not an opinion, that's a fact. Try to get along with your peers, even if they don't treat you well. It might save your life."
She patted him on the shoulder with a casualness that suggested she did this for every Sleeper she processed, and it meant nothing specific. But Sunny's training flagged the contact anyway, because physical touch was a rapport-building technique, and Jet was good enough at her job to use it without thinking.
"You've done well to survive until now. Make sure to keep yourself alive in the future, too."
Then she got back into her vehicle and drove away, and Sunny stood alone in the snow in front of the massive red gates of the Awakened Academy and felt, for the first time since stepping through the Gateway, the full weight of his situation settle onto his shoulders.
He was here. The place Anvil had been pointing him toward for eight years, the staging ground for the mission, the environment he'd been trained to navigate and manipulate from the inside.
And the primary tool that made all of that possible had been removed by the Spell during the Nightmare.
The gates began to open. The enormous sheet of reinforced metal descended slowly, forming a bridge across the moat, and the sound of it was deep and mechanical, the sound of a threshold being crossed.
There was only one other person waiting.
She was tall and slender, around his age, with clear grey eyes and silver-white hair cut short and parted to the side. She wore the same police-issued tracksuit as Sunny, which meant she'd come from the same pipeline: no family to send her off, nothing packed or prepared. Old-fashioned headphones sat on her head, and she was listening to music with the calm detachment of someone who had decided that the world around her was not worth engaging with until it proved otherwise.
Sunny's body went still.
He didn't recognize her face, because Anvil had never shown him a photograph. The omission had been deliberate. A name creates a connection, and a face creates a stronger one, and Anvil had wanted to keep the target abstract for as long as possible. But parts of the description matched. Grey eyes. The bearing of someone raised in a world larger than the one she currently occupied. Arrived alone in government-issued clothing with no family to see her off. The last daughter of the Immortal Flame.
The hair was wrong. Anvil's briefing had specified black. The silver-white was new, probably a consequence of the First Nightmare's transformation, the Spell rewriting her body the same way it had rewritten Sunny's. That single discrepancy kept him from being certain for a few seconds longer than he should have been, and in those seconds he studied her with an attention that was no longer casual.
The rest of the profile held. She didn't look like a threat. She looked like a lonely girl listening to music in the snow.
Anvil's voice, from a training room conversation that felt like it belonged to a different life: The most dangerous threats are the ones that don't look like threats.
Sunny didn't stare or approach. He stood at a careful distance and studied her in his peripheral vision the way Lira had taught him to study surveillance targets: without ever looking directly at them, building a composite from glances so brief that the target's subconscious never registered being watched.
Her posture was relaxed but not slack, the posture of someone whose body had been trained. Her weight distribution favored her left side slightly, which could indicate a dominant hand or an old injury or simply a habit. Her breathing was even and unhurried. She showed no signs of anxiety, which was unusual for a Sleeper standing at the gates of the Academy for the first time, unless she had already decided that anxiety was a waste of energy. That suggested either extraordinary composure or extraordinary arrogance.
Or both. Anvil had said her mother was the most stubborn person he'd ever known.
The bridge settled into its grooves with a series of heavy clicks. The girl pulled her headphones down around her neck and walked forward without hesitation, as though the Academy had been waiting for her rather than the other way around.
Sunny followed.
He kept his steps slightly uneven, his posture fractionally too loose, his gaze fractionally too wide. It was the body language of someone unfamiliar with structured environments, the kind of unconscious physical vocabulary that marked outskirts kids as different from everyone else. He'd practiced this in Bastion's corridors during the tempering phase, learning to suppress the trained efficiency of his movement and replace it with something that looked natural for a boy who'd never been taught to walk in straight lines.
The performance was automatic now. His body did it without requiring his attention, which freed his mind to process everything else.
The Sleeper compound was a low, modern building surrounded by training fields and parks. Inside, the main hall was already full. Roughly a hundred young men and women stood in loose clusters, arranged by an instinctive social gravity that sorted them by background and status without anyone having to say a word. Sunny read the room the way Anvil had taught him to read rooms: from the edges inward, mapping the power dynamics before he entered them.
The Legacies were closest to the stage, arranged in small calm groups that radiated the particular kind of ease that came from knowing exactly what you were and what you were worth. Caster was among them. Sunny identified him immediately, because Anvil's briefing had included a physical description, and because Caster carried himself with the specific blend of charm and competence that marked a Clan Valor operative in social camouflage.
Caster caught his eye across the hall. The recognition was mutual and instantaneous, a flicker of acknowledgment so brief that no one else in the room could have caught it. Then they both looked away.
Next came the wealthy, then the middle class, then the small anxious cluster of outskirts kids and scholarship students who had drifted to the back of the hall because the back was where people who expected to be overlooked naturally gathered.
Sunny walked to the back.
He found a bench near the wall where a girl sat alone, surrounded by an invisible radius of discomfort that kept the other Sleepers at a distance. She had pale blonde hair and blue eyes that didn't track movement the way eyes should, fixing on nothing in particular while her head tilted slightly to compensate, orienting by sound instead of sight. Her face held the particular kind of stillness that came not from composure but from having already accepted something terrible. Sunny watched her for a moment and understood. Her Flaw had taken her sight. The Spell had given her a power and then removed the sense she needed most, and now she was sitting in a room full of people who looked at her and saw a corpse that hadn't finished dying yet.
Sunny sat on the opposite end of the bench. The blind girl turned her head slightly in his direction, tracking the sound of his movement, but said nothing.
The induction ceremony began. An Awakened instructor named Rock took the stage and delivered a speech that Sunny had already heard in Anvil's preparatory briefings, almost word for word. The Dream Realm was dangerous. Sleepers would die. The Academy would prepare them as best it could, but survival was ultimately their own responsibility. Nightmare Creatures were not the only threat. Human Citadels were the safest option, and Gateways were the way home.
Sunny listened with the attentive expression of someone hearing this for the first time while his mind worked on something else entirely.
The girl with the silver hair was standing near the front of the hall, apart from both the Legacies and the general crowd, occupying a space that was neither privileged nor marginal but simply her own. She listened to the speech with an expression that Sunny couldn't read from this distance, which was unusual, because he could read most expressions from most distances.
He would need to get closer. Not today, but eventually. He needed a reason to approach her, and the reason would have to be genuine because his mouth would betray any fabrication the moment someone asked the wrong question.
The Flaw had broken his entire methodology. Every technique Anvil had taught him for building relationships and earning trust was predicated on controlling the information other people received about him. Without that control, every conversation became a liability and every question a potential exposure.
He needed a new methodology, one built on truth rather than fabrication, or at least on the parts of truth that didn't reveal what he was. And before the debrief with the Valor agent, he needed to understand the Flaw's parameters, which meant every interaction between now and then was a calibration opportunity.
The speech ended. The Sleepers were directed to their dormitories.
Sunny found his room on one of the lower levels: a private space with a bed, a desk, and a dresser. The materials were new and the air was clean, and the outer wall had a screen that imitated a window with a view of a snowy park.
By outskirts standards, it was palatial. By Bastion standards, it was roughly equivalent to a storage closet in the east wing. Sunny split the difference and decided it was adequate.
He changed into Academy-issued clothes, studied himself in the mirror, and noted the changes the Spell's transformation had made. His body was leaner and harder than before the Nightmare, the malnourished frame finally matching the training that had been imposed on it for eight years. He looked like what he was supposed to look like: an outskirts kid who had survived his First Nightmare and come out the other side slightly improved.
He didn't look like what he actually was. That was the one advantage he still had.
His shadow lay flat on the floor behind him in the mirror, ordinary and still. Whatever the Spell had done to it, whatever Shadow Consumption meant in practice, the shadow showed no outward sign. It behaved exactly as a shadow should, following his movements, darkening when the light shifted, disappearing when he stepped away from the lamp. If something had changed at a level too deep to see, Sunny couldn't detect it yet.
He would need to test the Ability soon, but not here and not now. The Academy's rooms were monitored, and any visible manifestation of an Aspect Ability would be flagged by the administrative staff. Testing would have to wait for the Dream Realm, where the only observers would be creatures that wanted to kill him and allies he hadn't yet decided to trust.
He left his room and went to the cafeteria.
The food was extraordinary. Not in the way Bastion's food had been extraordinary, which was the extraordinary of professional kitchen operations producing nutritionally optimized meals for combat personnel, but in the way of a place that wanted its residents to feel valued. There was variety and abundance and no restrictions on quantity, and Sunny ate until his stomach protested because the outskirts boy inside him, the one who remembered hunger as a constant companion, refused to leave food on a plate when more might not come.
The interview came after supper. A friendly administrative worker in a small office asked questions about his Aspect with the practiced gentleness of someone trained to extract information from reluctant teenagers.
Sunny refused the counseling, as Jet had advised. The interview questions were carefully worded: "would you like to tell me," "if you're willing to share." The preambles gave him room to deflect without triggering the Flaw, because they weren't direct enough to compel an answer.
He shared just enough to create the impression of a weak, harmless Aspect with utility applications. Nothing combat-oriented, nothing remarkable, nothing that would place him anywhere other than the bottom of the rankings, which was exactly where an outskirts orphan with no Legacy connections was expected to land.
He returned to his room, undressed, and lay in bed. The ceiling was white and featureless. The simulated window showed a park that didn't exist. Somewhere in this building, in another room on another floor, the daughter of the Immortal Flame was lying in her own bed, and she didn't know his name, and he didn't know hers, and both of those facts were, for entirely different reasons, the most important secrets in the Academy.
Sunny closed his eyes and began planning the debrief.