a year went by and jules turned eight, the house had learned new rhythm.
Ruby's days were measured in hours. Jules were measured in what he was no longer allowed to touch.
The training ground was the first to be upgraded.
Metal took the place of stone. Lines were drawn into the ground circles, grids, angles that meant nothing to Jules but we're everything to his mother. Ruby moved inside them like she had been born there, steps were exact, breathing controlled. The air around her always seemed heavier now, like it remembered her.
Jules watched from the edge.
"Again," their mother said in an emotionless tone, and Ruby obeyed.
Jules flinched out of habit.
He trained anyway.
Earlier. Later. Alone.
He ran until his lungs burned and his legs trembled, then kept running. He practiced strikes against the air, imagining resistance where there was none. When his hands split open, he bandaged them and went back out. Pain was still a familiar feeling. Pain was still something he understood sometimes the only thing he understood.
Power was not.
Sometimes, when he pushed himself far enough past dizziness, past sense something strange happened.
The world felt wrong.
Not dangerous. Not loud.
Just off.
Shadows seemed to lean in the wrong direction. Sounds dulled, like they were traveling through water. Once, mid-sprint, the ground beneath his feet cracked not enough to trip him, not enough for anyone else to notice.
But Jules noticed.
He stopped running and stared at the line in the stone, heart hammering.
Nothing followed.
No warmth. No strength. No awakening.
Just silence.
He told no one.
Ruby's training grew more crowded.
People with badges came now. People with instruments. They spoke in numbers and probabilities, in risks and projections. Jules didn't understand the words, but he understood the tone.
Expectation.
They asked Ruby questions. They tested her limits. They smiled in approval some even offered praise when she exceeded them.
They never tested Jules.
Once, he caught his mother watching him instead of Ruby.
For half a second, her expression cracked not with disappointment, but something closer to fear.
Then Ruby shifted, the air thickened, and his mother's attention snapped back where it belonged.
That night, Jules dreamed of falling.
Not from a height from attention.
He was standing in a room full of people, calling his name, and one by one they turned away, drawn toward a brighter light behind him. When he tried to follow, the floor dissolved into darkness.
He woke gasping, sheets twisted around his legs.
Something in the room felt wrong.
The air was cold it was far too cold. Frost crept along the edge of the window, crawling inward like veins. Jules sat up, heart pounding.
Then his mother was there.
She knelt beside the bed, hand hovering just above his chest not touching.
Her eyes were wide.
"Do you feel anything?" she asked.
Jules swallowed. "Nothing."
She searched his face, like she was reading a language he didn't know he was writing.
After a long moment, she nodded.
"Good that's fine," she said as she turn around and left his room, though it didn't sound like relief.
The frost melted by morning.
No one mentioned it.
The visitors stopped looking at Jules entirely after that.
Even the polite confusion faded.
He became background. A variable that no longer mattered.
Except sometimes, late at night, Jules would catch his mother shadow standing in the hallway outside his room again, breathing slowly.
As though she was waiting.
Or listening.
And Jules started to understand something he didn't yet hav
e words for
Power wasn't the thing that changed people.
It was what they did with what didn't change.