The academy was quiet.
Not the kind of quiet that came from rest. The kind that came after something had already shifted — just enough that people could feel it, but not enough to name it.
Helius Prime was still running. The training blocks had ended for the night, and the corridors weren't empty, but they were slower now, the kind of slow that only came after a long day had finished burning itself out. Conversations had softened into the hush of tired voices. Footsteps carried gently along the polished floors instead of cracking against them. Even the Crucibles had eased into their maintenance cycles, their systems humming at a lower register, their sealed doors dim rather than lit.
On the surface, everything looked normal.
But if you stayed still long enough — if you let the sounds settle around you and paid attention to what sat beneath them — you could feel it. Something had already started moving. Quietly. The way big things always do, before anyone is ready to admit they're coming.
In the dim light of his room, Ryven Voss sat with one arm resting loosely across his knee, the other near the console as the comm-link stabilized in front of him. The soft blue glow of the incoming call threw a pale wash across his face, and across the room behind him, the outlines of his furniture blurred into a quiet, steady darkness. His uniform jacket had been hung neatly by the door. His boots sat side by side beneath it. Everything in the room was exactly where it was supposed to be.
He didn't rush the connection. Didn't fidget. Didn't look away from the slowly forming projection.
He waited.
Because moments like this — the ones that were going to matter — you didn't interrupt them. You let them arrive on their own terms.
The projection flickered once. Then resolved.
His parents appeared in front of him — Marcus Voss, sitting straight-backed in the way he always did, and Coraline beside him, her posture softer but no less observant. They didn't speak immediately. They looked at him for a long moment, the way parents look at children who have been away longer than any parent would like.
And he looked back.
Recognition came first. It always did. That small, quiet beat where you remembered, in the space of a single breath, exactly what these people meant to you.
"How's third year?" his mother asked finally.
Her tone was calm. Controlled. Not pressing — but never missing anything, either. His mother had never been the kind of woman who asked a question she didn't already have half the answer to.
"It's fine," Ryven said.
It wasn't. She knew that. She didn't call it out. She rarely did. That was part of why he loved her — the way she gave him the room to arrive at things in his own time, but kept watching the whole while to make sure he didn't lose his way in the arriving.
"And Ardent?"
There it was.
The pause. Small. Barely there. But real.
"…he's the same."
That wasn't true either.
Her gaze sharpened — just slightly. Not accusatory. Not teasing. Just clear.
"So you haven't proposed yet."
Ryven didn't react outwardly. But something in his stillness shifted, a quiet tension settling into the line of his shoulders that hadn't been there a moment before.
"…no."
"Slow."
A quiet breath left his father — something close to amusement, quickly buried. Ryven didn't respond to that. He wasn't here for that. He loved them for giving him this moment anyway. The lightness before what he had to say next. The small mercy of letting him be their son for another thirty seconds before he had to be anything else.
"Mom…" he said.
A pause.
"…are you busy?"
That didn't belong in a casual conversation. And the moment it landed — the whole shape of the call changed.
Marcus leaned forward slightly. Not as a father. As command.
"How bad?"
Ryven met his eyes. "Some are very."
No hesitation. No padding. No dramatics. That was how he'd been raised to deliver difficult things — cleanly, so the person receiving them could act on them without first having to dig through noise to find the truth.
"What kind?" his mother asked, quieter now.
Ryven didn't look away.
"Bone fractures," he said. "Healed wrong."
A breath passed between his parents.
"Some never aligned."
The room on their side didn't move. But it tightened. He could see it in the way his mother's hands had gone still on the arm of her chair. In the way his father had stopped breathing for half a beat before remembering to start again.
"Burn scarring," Ryven continued. "Shoulder to fingers. Repeated."
His mother's fingers shifted — just slightly. A small, involuntary adjustment that said more than her expression did.
"Multiple lacerations. Old. Reopened. Healed again."
Now the silence wasn't empty. It had weight. It was the particular silence of two parents absorbing, in real time, the knowledge that children — children, the kind their son lived alongside every day — had been allowed to carry these things into a place that was supposed to protect them.
"Malnutrition," he added. "Extended."
That one landed differently. His mother closed her eyes for a second. Just one. Then opened them again, steady.
"Vision impairment," Ryven finished. "At least three confirmed."
No one spoke. Because nothing needed to be said to make it worse.
"How did the system miss this?" his mother asked finally.
Quiet. Controlled. But not soft.
Ryven didn't answer. Because he couldn't. Because he already knew the truth underneath her question — the system hadn't missed it. Not really. Missing implied attention that had failed. What had happened here was older than that, and colder.
Marcus exhaled once. A long, slow breath that seemed to settle something inside him into the shape it needed to take.
"We'll be there tomorrow."
That was it. No discussion. No back-and-forth. No question of whether they should. Ryven nodded once. That was enough.
The call ended, and the room went dim around him again, and for a long moment he just sat there with his hand still resting near the console, letting the quiet fill back in where his parents' voices had been.
Across the hall, in a room he couldn't see but could always somehow feel the shape of, Kael Ardent was pacing.
He hadn't waited for the connection to fully stabilize before he started talking.
"…I'm telling you, it's not isolated," Kael said, turning sharply mid-step, one hand gesturing as if to physically hold the weight of what he was describing. "Same injuries. Same patterns. It's across all of them."
The projection snapped into place. Krysta was already moving, her younger face lit by the glow of multiple screens at once, her hair pulled back in a way that told Kael she'd been working long before he called.
"I have the files open."
Kael stopped mid-step. "…already?"
"The Sprouts," she said, scrolling with the fast, efficient motion of someone who had long ago stopped being impressed by her own competence. "And the rest of the intake."
Her expression shifted — fast. The kind of shift that happened when someone who was used to seeing bad things realized this one was worse than she'd braced for.
"…this is bad."
Kael didn't ask how bad. He already knew what she was seeing. He'd been the one who'd sent her the patterns to look for.
"Dad," Kael said, looking up toward where Jules had appeared in the frame. "Do we have spare starter units in the hangar?"
Jules blinked once. "…a few."
"Can you spare them?"
There was no hesitation. That was the first thing Kael loved about his father. The man never made Kael negotiate for what he actually needed.
Serena spoke first, her voice cutting gently across the projection. "I'll send a fleet."
Kael paused.
"…you're serious?"
"They need proper fitting," Serena said. "Recalibration."
A small pause.
"For their condition."
Kael nodded slowly, something settling in his chest that he hadn't known was unsettled until it stilled. "…yeah."
That matched what he had already decided.
Krysta didn't stop moving. "So."
Kael narrowed his eyes. "…what."
"How's Ryven?"
Kael froze.
"…he's fine."
"That's not what I asked."
Serena turned slightly, her mouth already pressing into the expression of a mother who knew exactly what was coming and had long since stopped trying to prevent it. Jules looked away, pretending to study something just out of frame.
"You're technically married now," Krysta added, her tone light in a way that made it worse, not better.
Kael blinked. "…what do you mean—"
"You're a unit, aren't you?"
Kael opened his mouth — then stopped. Because she wasn't wrong. That was the worst part. She wasn't wrong, and she knew it, and she had been waiting for this moment probably since the last time they'd spoken.
"…that's not—"
"Why are you so slow?!" she snapped.
Kael stared at her.
Krysta leaned forward, planting her elbows on whatever surface was in front of her with the energy of a general about to deliver a battle plan.
"So here's what you're going to do."
Kael already didn't like this. "…no."
"Yes," she said immediately. "Mock tournament's coming up, right?"
"…no."
"Yes."
"…what."
"Dare him."
Kael squinted. "…what."
"Dare him to take you out on a date if you win."
A beat.
"And if you lose — you take him out."
Kael just stared.
"That's not—"
"It's a win-win."
He looked at Serena. Then Jules.
Serena sighed, the long-suffering sigh of a woman who had raised one perfectly reasonable child and one who was apparently running the house now. "She did not get that from me."
Jules raised a hand, still not quite meeting Kael's eyes. "Not from me either."
Krysta ignored both of them.
Kael exhaled slowly. "…I'm hanging up."
"You won't."
"…I will."
"You won't."
Kael paused. "…I won't."
Krysta smiled. Victory.
Kael cut the call anyway, because pride demanded it, and stood there for a moment in the quiet afterward with his hand still on the console. The small ache at the corner of his mouth — the one that wanted to pull into a smile — told him exactly how much he'd needed that conversation. How much he'd needed the sound of his little sister being ridiculous in his ear. How much he'd needed, for just a moment, to be someone's big brother instead of someone's tactical anchor.
Then he reached back to the console.
"Mom."
Serena didn't disconnect. Of course she hadn't. She never did, not when she could feel there was more.
"I need something else."
Her attention sharpened.
"A live arena," Kael said.
A pause.
"Not simulation."
Silence.
"Real mechs," he added. "Real feedback. Real failure."
Jules glanced at Serena. Serena didn't look away from Kael. She studied her son through the projection for a long moment, the kind of look that contained an entire conversation they had never needed to have out loud — the one about what it meant to ask for something like this, and what it said about what he'd seen.
"…we'll build it."
Simple. Direct. Done.
The call ended, and Kael leaned back against the wall and ran a hand through his hair, exhaling slowly toward the ceiling.
"…yeah," he muttered under his breath. Then pushed off.
Across the hall, in his own quiet room, Ryven hadn't moved much. But his gaze shifted — toward the wall. Toward where Kael was. He didn't say anything. Didn't need to. It was enough to know.
In his room, Kael stood for a moment longer, shoulders gradually releasing the tension they'd carried all evening.
Neither of them knew the exact timing. Neither of them had planned it together. But both of them, within minutes of each other, had already moved.
Two hours later, Helius Prime stopped being quiet.
Not loudly. Not dramatically. But underneath everything — systems shifted. Docking lanes began adjusting. Priority channels opened. Command codes registered.
Not requested. Approved.
By the time anyone noticed, it had already happened.
Helius Prime wasn't preparing anymore. It was receiving. And the ones who had set it in motion were already asleep.
Or pretending to be.