CHAPTER 2: A GUIDED QUEST WITH NO GUIDE
The academy let me in. I still don't know which version of the admissions committee decided that a seventeen-year-old with a level of zero deserved a seat, but I like to imagine it was an accountant, not a general — someone who looked at the paperwork from the gate collapse, shrugged, and figured a cheap miracle was still a miracle worth writing down.
Whatever the reason, I moved into the Aster Academy dormitories with one suitcase, one aunt hugging me a beat too long at the gate, and one interface that only I could see, glowing quietly in the corner of my vision like a light left on in an empty room.
[QUEST: SURVIVE THREE DAYS.]
That was the whole quest. No further explanation. Survive three days — from what, exactly, it didn't say, and when I asked the interface directly, out loud, like an idiot, in an empty stairwell, it didn't answer. I decided it was a formatting error. I decided that right up until the first missing item report went up on the dormitory board: a stat charm, gone from a locked drawer. Then another. Then a whole box of crafting components that a first-year had been saving for a semester.
Lyra Voss cornered me about it before I'd even finished unpacking.
"You're training with my squad," she said. It wasn't a question, and it wasn't really a request either — more like a schedule that had already been printed with my name on it.
"I don't remember agreeing to that."
"You don't need to agree. I need someone with a working brain watching whatever that eye of yours does, and you need someone to make sure you don't get yourself killed before you're useful to anyone." She handed me a printed sheet. "Seventeen safety rules. Memorize them."
I read all seventeen. Then, mostly to see what she'd do, I added an eighteenth in the margin: Rule eighteen — don't let Lyra run into danger alone either.
She read it, looked at me the way you'd look at a smoke detector that had just started arguing with you, and told me I'd be running ten extra laps for insubordination. I ran the ten laps. It felt, oddly, like the first fair trade I'd made since my eye turned silver.
*
I met Milo Hart properly in the fabrication wing, in the specific way you meet someone when a crystal they're calibrating detonates four feet from your face.
"That's — okay, that's supposed to happen sometimes," Milo said, waving smoke out of his own hair while I checked myself for singed eyebrows. "Sometimes. Occasionally. There's a percentage."
"What percentage?"
"A percentage I'm choosing not to think about right now."
We got sent to the storage archive together as punishment, which felt less like a punishment and more like the universe doing me a favor, because Milo talked the entire time we were sweeping dust off forgotten crates, and talking, it turned out, was a very good way to not think about the twenty-three missing items now logged on the dormitory board.
That's where I found the box.
It sat on the lowest shelf, unlabeled, gray with age in a way none of the other crates were, like it had been aging on a different calendar than the rest of the room. The nameplate had worn down to almost nothing — almost, except for two words I could still make out if I tilted it toward the light.
Seren Rowan.
The academy's inventory display, when I scanned the crate with my student tablet, returned nothing. Not "unknown item." Not "access denied." Nothing, the way a search returns nothing when the thing you're looking for was never entered into the record at all.
My left eye didn't agree.
[ITEM ERASED FROM HISTORY.]
I didn't tell Milo what I'd seen. I told him it was empty, and he believed me, because he was busy complaining about a scorch mark on his sleeve, and because some part of me — a part I wasn't proud of — wanted to keep this one thing that was mine before I had to explain it to anyone.
*
The dark thing came for us that night, crawling out of the dormitory's beverage dispenser like it had always been waiting inside the machine for someone to leave the door open.
It didn't go for people. My eye showed me that almost immediately, a thin ribbon of insight sliding under the surface of the moment: it moved past three sleeping first-years without so much as a glance and went straight for a stat charm sitting on a nightstand, the same kind that had gone missing all week. It wasn't hunting flesh. It was hunting anything carrying the System's mark.
"It's not after us," I said, low, grabbing Milo's sleeve before he could bolt. "It's after gear."
"That's — okay, that's somehow worse," Milo whispered back, "because I have several pockets full of gear."
We built the trap out of exactly the kind of nothing I'd grown up around: a coil of loose wiring from a broken charger, one of Milo's overcharged calibration crystals, and a very simple lever principle my aunt had taught me the summer I turned twelve. Lyra came around the far hallway to cut off its retreat, spear finally answering to her hand again, and between the three of us we herded the thing into a dead end long enough for the wiring to do what wiring does when it's asked to carry more current than it wants to.
It didn't die dramatically. It just stopped, the way a screen goes dark when you finally pull the plug.
The moment it did, my interface flickered, and a short, clean line of text replaced a memory I hadn't given permission to lose.
[MEMORY DEDUCTED.]
It took me a full minute of standing in that hallway to realize I no longer remembered the passcode to my own dormitory room. Small. Almost funny, if you squinted. I filed it away under things I wasn't ready to think about at two in the morning.
*
We opened the crate together the next day — me, Lyra, Milo, huddled around it in an unused classroom like conspirators, which, I suppose, we were becoming. Inside was a single fragment of a map, half-burned at the edges, showing a stairwell that didn't appear on any floor plan the academy had ever issued. A new line of text unspooled across my vision the moment my fingers touched the paper.
[NEW QUEST: DO NOT LET THE ONE WHO WEARS THE WHITE BADGE LEARN THAT YOU FOUND THE MAP.]
I looked up from the map straight into the hallway outside the classroom door, where a boy stood alone, unhurried, wearing a crisp uniform and, pinned neatly to his collar, a badge the color of fresh snow.
Rowan Vale tilted his head slightly, like he was running a private calculation on the three of us and the map still open on the table.
"Do you still remember," he said, in the mild, unbothered tone of someone asking about the weather, "what your mother's face looked like?"
I didn't answer him. I didn't need to. The question had already found the exact hole in my memory it was aiming for, and both of us knew it.