The days that followed the demotion were, paradoxically, the most productive of Sunny's time at the Academy.
The restructuring had stripped away the paralysis of waiting for orders. He no longer needed to maintain distance from the target, because his new mandate was proximity. Build trust. Be genuine. Let the honesty that his Flaw enforced become the foundation of a relationship that Caster would later exploit.
The cruelty of the arrangement was its efficiency. Sunny couldn't pretend to be someone he wasn't, so Anvil was using that limitation as a feature instead of a defect. Any connection Sunny built with Nephis would be real, because his Flaw wouldn't permit anything else, and real connections were harder to see through and harder to break. Sunny would befriend the target, and the friendship would be honest, and when Caster eventually moved to complete the mission, Nephis would never see it coming because the boy she trusted had never lied to her.
He was the bait, and the bait had to be genuine, and the only way to be genuine was to stop treating the interactions as performances and start treating them as what they actually were.
This was harder than it sounded.
The secret meeting with Caster happened on a training field at the edge of the compound, during a window when the field was unscheduled and the nearest surveillance camera had a known blind spot that Sunny had identified during his first week of physical reconnaissance.
Caster arrived with the easy confidence of a man who had been given authority and was settling into it comfortably. He leaned against the equipment rack and crossed his arms, and the posture was casual in a way that communicated control rather than relaxation.
"Here's how this works," Caster said. "I handle the operational side. Timing, method, exit strategy. You handle access. Get close to her, learn her patterns, her weaknesses, anything I can use when the time comes."
Sunny listened. The field was cold, and their breath fogged in the air, and the distant sounds of Sleepers training on adjacent fields provided enough ambient noise to cover a quiet conversation.
"She's not easy to approach," Sunny said. "She doesn't engage socially. She sits alone or with the blind girl. Most of the Sleepers are intimidated by her."
"Then don't be intimidated."
"I'm not. The problem is that approaching her without a reason looks suspicious, and approaching with a fabricated reason is something I can no longer do."
Caster studied him. The smugness from the hallway was still present in his bearing, but it had been tempered by the practical reality that his mission depended on the cooperation of someone he'd just humiliated.
"So find a real reason," he said. "You're resourceful. That's why the patriarch trained you."
The word "trained" landed with a specificity that Sunny registered but didn't respond to. Caster knew about Sunny's background in broad strokes, but the details of eight years in Bastion, the scope of what Anvil had built, that was above Caster's clearance. To Caster, Sunny was a talented but broken tool that had been reassigned to his command. The idea that the tool might have capabilities Caster didn't know about was not something the Legacy operative seemed to consider.
"I'll find a reason," Sunny said.
"Good. Report back when you have something. And keep it clean. If she suspects anything, this whole operation collapses."
He pushed off the rack and walked away across the frozen field.
Sunny stood in the cold and thought about the irony. Caster had told him to find a real reason to approach Nephis, and the Flaw meant that any reason Sunny found would have to be genuine. Which meant that whatever connection he built with the target wouldn't be entirely a tool of the mission. It would be, at least in part, something Sunny actually wanted.
And that was dangerous in a way that neither Caster nor Anvil had accounted for.
The reason, when it came, was simpler than he expected.
Wilderness Survival.
Teacher Julius's class remained nearly empty, and the old man's frustration with the Sleepers' preference for combat training was a recurring theme of his lectures. Sunny had been his most dedicated student for weeks, and Julius's growing fondness for him was genuine and unconcealed, expressed through increasingly lengthy tangents about mycology and bonus tips that extended their sessions well past the scheduled time.
Nephis attended combat training exclusively. Her curriculum was focused on fighting because fighting was what she was good at, and the Academy's advisory system had placed her in advanced sparring sessions where she continued to dismantle everyone who stepped into the ring with her.
What she didn't have was wilderness training. The girl who could defeat every Sleeper in the dojo didn't know how to build a shelter or purify water or identify which Dream Realm plants would kill you and which would keep you alive. Her background, whatever it was, had produced an extraordinary fighter and a complete novice at everything else.
This was the gap. The real, genuine gap that Sunny could exploit without his Flaw objecting, because the exploitation also happened to be true. Nephis needed wilderness knowledge. Sunny had it. The exchange was logical, practical, and mutually beneficial, the kind of arrangement that two people heading into the same dangerous territory would naturally form.
He didn't approach her directly. Instead, he let the approach happen through proximity and shared space, sitting closer to her table in the cafeteria, being present in the same corridors, allowing the social distance between them to narrow incrementally over days rather than closing it in a single suspicious leap.
It was the kind of work Anvil had trained him for, except that every interaction was constrained by the fact that Sunny couldn't control what came out of his mouth if someone asked him the wrong question.
He managed it by not speaking unless spoken to, which was a strategy that the outskirts boy inside him recognized from a different context. In the outskirts, silence was armor. At the Academy, it served the same function, and the added benefit was that silent people were perceived as mysterious rather than threatening, and mysterious was a trait that Nephis, who was herself perceived as mysterious, might find less alienating than the eager friendliness of the other Sleepers.
The strategy worked. Not quickly, but it worked.
The last day arrived on a morning that felt like every other morning except that it wasn't, because by nightfall the Spell would pull them into the Dream Realm and everything that happened at the Academy would become irrelevant.
The cafeteria was quieter than usual. Sleepers sat in clusters, speaking in low voices or not speaking at all. The excitement of the first week had been replaced by something heavier, and even the Legacies, who had maintained their composure throughout the month, seemed subdued.
Sunny took his usual seat near Cassia. They had shared this corner of the cafeteria for weeks without exchanging a single word, two outcasts occupying adjacent space because neither had anywhere better to be. It had become routine, and routines were comforting even when they were empty.
He was drinking coffee. He'd discovered the drink at the Academy and found he quite enjoyed it, especially with sugar and milk, which the cafeteria offered in unlimited quantities that still felt miraculous to someone who had grown up rationing everything. He was mid-sip when Cassia turned her head and fixed him with her blind blue eyes.
Sunny looked around, checking whether someone else had drawn her attention. There was no one behind him.
"What?" he said.
She hesitated. Then:
"Happy birthday."
For several seconds his mind produced nothing, which was unusual because his mind always produced something.
Then he remembered. She was right. He'd been so consumed by the mission and the demotion and the Flaw and the slow, careful work of narrowing the distance to Nephis that he had completely forgotten.
He was seventeen today.
"How did you know that?" he asked.
Cassia seemed uncertain whether to answer. Then she shrugged slightly, a gesture that looked strange on someone whose eyes didn't move.
"I just... knew."
Sunny didn't press. However she'd known, whether it was her Aspect or something else entirely, the mechanism mattered less than the fact that she'd chosen to say it. No one had wished Sunny a happy birthday since his mother died. Anvil didn't acknowledge birthdays. Lira had never mentioned hers or his. The instructors at Bastion treated dates as scheduling data rather than personal milestones. The concept of someone marking the day he was born as worth noting, someone who had no reason to care about him and no obligation to speak, produced a sensation in his chest that he couldn't immediately classify.
"Thank you," he said.
Cassia nodded and turned away, apparently satisfied that the exchange was complete.
Sunny sat with his coffee and let the sensation settle. It was warm, similar in quality to the Solemn Oath's warmth against his wrist but located deeper, in the place where the empty room had been since Theron's corridor. The room was still there. But for the first time, something had been placed inside it. Something small and fragile and entirely unrelated to the mission.
He finished his coffee and left.
There were no classes on the last day. Sunny visited Teacher Julius to say goodbye, and the old man got emotional, delivering a string of final tips that went on long enough to constitute a supplementary lecture. He promised to apply for a research assistant position after Sunny returned as an Awakened, and the sincerity of the offer was so apparent that Sunny had to manage his Flaw carefully to avoid saying something that revealed how unlikely his return actually was.
"Thank you, Teacher Julius," he said. "For everything."
It was true. Julius had taught him things Anvil's curriculum hadn't covered, and more importantly, he'd treated Sunny like a student rather than an operative, which was an experience Sunny hadn't known he needed until it happened.
When the sun neared the horizon, Instructor Rock gathered the Sleepers and led them outside.
The Academy's medical center was built like a shrine. Advanced technology and the best Healers among the Awakened worked together to sustain Sleepers' bodies while their spirits entered the Dream Realm. The pods were designed to keep them alive for weeks or months, however long the crossing took.
Rock did not take them directly to the pods. Instead, he led them to a floor that was quieter than the rest of the building, and opened the doors to a gallery bathed in the crimson light of the setting sun.
Rows of wheelchairs filled the space. In each one sat a person with a blank, peaceful expression and eyes that saw nothing. They were motionless and silent, unresponsive to the Sleepers' arrival.
"These are the Hollow," Rock said. His voice was flat in a way that carried more weight than any dramatic delivery could have. "Each one was once a Sleeper or an Awakened. Some were weak and some were strong, and a few were powerful beyond what most of you will ever achieve. All of them perished in the Dream Realm."
Sunny looked at the rows of empty faces and felt something he hadn't expected: recognition. Not of the people, but of the condition. He'd seen this before, in a different form, in Bastion. Soldiers who came back from the ash fields with their bodies intact and their eyes vacant, still breathing and eating and walking but absent in every way that mattered. Anvil called them "spent." The Spell called them Hollow. The result was the same.
A body without a soul. A mechanism with no mainspring.
Rock glanced toward the front of the group, where Caster and Nephis stood, and added:
"So don't die out there."
Half an hour later, Sunny stood alone in a small room, looking at the pod that would hold his body while the Spell took his spirit.
Through the walls, muffled by the medical center's construction, the sounds of other Sleepers preparing for the crossing filtered in. Somewhere nearby, Cassia was trying to orient herself in an unfamiliar room, and the faint sound of her hands touching the walls carried through the thin partition. Somewhere else, Caster was silent.
Sunny looked at his shadow on the floor. It lay flat and still, the way it always did now, giving no indication of the power coiled inside it. He flexed the shadow sense briefly and felt the room's darkness respond, every shadow sharpening into focus like a second set of eyes opening.
He thought about what waited on the other side. The Dream Realm, the Forgotten Shore, the target who would be stranded there alongside him. Caster would be looking for his opportunity. Cassia had wished him a happy birthday and seen something in his future that she'd chosen not to share. And somewhere beyond all of it, Anvil stood at the Gateway in his memory, grey eyes holding something that an eight-year-old had missed and a sixteen-year-old could not unsee.
The Solemn Oath was warm on his wrist, tied to a purpose he hadn't wavered from yet.
Yet.
Sunny stepped forward and climbed into the pod.
In the vast echoing darkness, he heard:
[Welcome to the Dream Realm, Sunless.]