Three days.
Three days was how long the academy gave you before it expected you to return to the schedule. Three days of excused absence, meals delivered to your room, the institutional equivalent of a hand on your shoulder that lasted exactly seventy-two hours and then became a gentle suggestion that life was continuing and you were expected to continue with it.
Nami did not eat the delivered meals. She sat in her room and looked at the wall and did the thing she did when she was processing something she could not yet categorize — she went very still and let it arrive in pieces and did not try to arrange the pieces before she had all of them.
Piece one: Kurou Vash was ranked first in their year and had fought his way through a tournament while managing a Fracture that was consuming him and had died, stopping it from hurting the people around him.
Piece two: she had known something was wrong and had been learning about it and had not been fast enough or close enough or useful enough to prevent it.
Piece three: she had told him he couldn't hold everything alone.
She had been right about that. She was thinking about how much she wished she had been wrong.
She went to the training ground at five on the fourth morning.
She went because the body went to familiar places when it did not know where else to go, and this was a familiar place, and the fact that the person she had spent a week watching run drills in the far corner was no longer going to be there was a piece she had not finished processing.
She sat on the low wall. The training ground was empty. The early morning light came in at the angle that turned everything amber and patient.
She sat there for forty minutes and said nothing and felt the specific weight of a space that had recently held something it no longer held.
"You come here every morning."
She did not startle. She turned.
Soren Malk stood at the training ground's entrance with his coat straight and his hands at his sides and the fracture-light at his palms doing the thing it did when he was near something his Fracture recognized — except there was nothing for it to recognize anymore and it was still glowing, faintly, the way things glowed when they were responding to an absence rather than a presence.
She looked at him. He looked at her.
"So do you," she said.
He was quiet for a moment. He walked into the training ground, stood on the far side of it, and looked at the corner where Kurou had run his drills. He stood very still.
They did not speak for a long time.
Then the ground shook.
It was subtle at first — a low subsonic tremor that Nami felt in her feet before she felt it in the air, the kind of vibration that came from below rather than above. Then three training hall windows shattered simultaneously — not the windows of the building they were in but the windows of the main hall across the courtyard, all three of them going at once with the flat, precise sound of glass that had been asked to hold something it could not hold.
A student ran through the training ground entrance. Breathing hard. Face doing what faces did when they had seen something they did not have a category for yet.
"Something's in the lower academy," the student said. "Something that—" She stopped. "It looks like him. It looks like Kur,o u, but it's wrong, and it's breaking everything it touches, and it's—"
Nami was already moving.
Soren was already moving.
They looked at each other once, mid-stride, in the way of two people who had not yet worked out how to be around each other and had just been informed that working it out was now urgent.
"Together," Nami said.
Soren said nothing. He kept pace with her.
It was enough.
The lower academy's eastern corridor looked like something had moved through it at speed and with complete indifference to the corridor's continued structural integrity. Wall panels displaced. Two doors were taken entirely off their hinges. A section of the ceiling that had decided the situation called for new positioning. At the corridor's end, the security door to the sublevel practice space had been pressed inward — not broken, pressed, as if something had leaned against it with the specific force of a thing that did not understand that doors were a boundary rather than a suggestion.
Standing in the middle of all of it, surrounded by the displaced geometry of a corridor that had recently had opinions about its own arrangement: the Second State.
It had Kurou's face. It had Kurou's height and his coat and the specific way he stood when he was assessing something. But the eyes were wrong — flat and cold and without the warmth that had been the most consistent thing about Kurou Vash in the three weeks Nami had known him.
It looked at her.
It assessed her. She felt the assessment — the specific quality of attention that had no interest in her as a person, only in her as a variable.
"Second State," she said. She kept her voice even. "Can you hear me?"
It tilted its head. Exactly the way Kurou tilted his head. The gesture without the person behind it.
"Kurou," she said.
Nothing.
"I know you're not him," she said. "But you were part of him. You're made of what he absorbed. Three years of his management and his drills, and every morning in the training ground." She kept her voice steady. "That means something. Even without him."
The Second State looked at her for a long moment.
Then it turned and walked through the security door — through it, not opening it, the metal giving way with the sound of something that had been asked to be more than it was — and it was gone.
Nami stood in the ruined corridor.
Soren stood beside her.
"It heard you," he said.
"I don't know if it heard me," she said. "I know it didn't attack me."
Soren was quiet for a moment. "That's nothing."
"No," she said. "It's not."
She looked at the pressed-in security door. She looked at the trail of displaced architecture. She thought about a thing made of three years of Kurou Vash's absorbed self, loose in the world without the person who had been managing it.
"We need help," she said.
"Yes," Soren said.
They looked at each other in the ruined corridor — two people who had not worked out how to be around each other, standing in the wreckage of something that had made working it out non-optional.
"Jiro Tan," Nami said.
"The lightning boy," Soren said. The words had no contempt in them. They were flat and factual in the way Soren's words were flat and factual, but she heard the layer underneath: he had been watching, the same way Kurou had been watching, and had filed the same assessment.
"He's more than that," she said. "And he knows something about Zan Rhoe."
Soren's eyes sharpened. "How much?"
"Enough," she said. "Come on."
She walked. He followed.
It was, she thought, the beginning of something. Not resolved — nothing was resolved, and the corridor was wrecked, and Kurou was gone, and the Second State was loose in the lower academy, and Zan Rhoe was moving through the student body with his hand on everyone's shoulder.
But it was a beginning.
She would take it.