SARAH POV
I watched Jeremy through the reflection in the ward's darkened window. He looked like a stranger. The boy I'd grown up with in the academies—the one who could manipulate the Blue Impulse into elegant, crystalline blades—was gone. In his place was a shell of a human, hunched over and radiating a bitterness so thick it felt like a secondary resonance.
But it wasn't just the loss of power that was rotting him. It was the memory.
"She didn't even have a spark, Sarah," Jeremy whispered. He wasn't looking at me. He was staring at the IV stand he'd just knocked over. "Not a single ounce of Impulse. She was a zero. A literal mouse."
I pulled the thin hospital blanket tighter around my shoulders. I knew who he was talking about. The girl in the teal hoodie. The one with the messy bun and the cheap sneakers.
"She stood there," Jeremy continued, his voice cracking with a jagged, hysterical edge. "While we were pinned to those rafters... while we were screaming and praying for a quick death... that girl ran toward the monster. She didn't have a shield. She didn't have a blade. She just had... her."
"Jeremy, don't," I said, my voice trembling. "She was probably just in shock. She didn't know what she was facing."
"No!" Jeremy spun around, his eyes bloodshot and wide. "She knew. I saw her face, Sarah. She was terrified. Her knees were knocking, and she was crying, but she stayed. She lunged for her friend while we, the 'Elite Seven,' the 'Nobles of the North,' sat there and waited to be eaten. We were the ones with the training. We were the ones with the bloodlines. And we cowed."
He slammed his fist into the wall. Because his Impulse was gone, the stone didn't shatter. His knuckles just split, blood blooming across the white paint. He didn't even flinch. The physical pain was clearly a relief compared to the humiliation.
"Elder Valerius is right," he spat, a single tear of pure rage tracking through the grime on his cheek. "We're background noise. But that girl... she made us look like cowards. If the Council finds out that a civilian with zero energy showed more grit than the Elite squad, we won't just be reassigned to Sector 9. We'll be erased from the history books entirely."
I looked down at my own hands. I remembered the feeling of the Nun's vines—the way they didn't just drain my energy, but my will. I had given up. I had closed my eyes and waited for the end. I hadn't even thought about fighting back. I had just been a battery.
"What do you want to do?" I asked, a cold dread settling in my stomach.
"We have to fix the narrative," Jeremy said, leaning over my bed. He looked like a ghost, his skin waxy in the fluorescent light. "If that girl exists, the truth exists. The truth that the Blue Impulse is a lie. That we are a lie."
"You want to kill her?" I whispered, the word feeling like ash in my mouth. "She's just a girl, Jeremy. She's the reason we're even breathing. If the twins hadn't come for her—"
"They didn't come for her!" he roared. "They came because they're Masterpieces! They came to show us how small we are! And she's the witness to our disgrace. If we find her... if we silence her... then we were just overwhelmed by a Grade-A. We fought until the end. We were the heroes who fell, not the cowards who watched a 'mouse' do our job."
It was a desperate, flailing act of ego. He was trying to bury his shame under a mountain of new sins. He couldn't handle the fact that his "noble" blood didn't make him brave. He couldn't handle the fact that courage didn't require an ounce of Impulse energy.
"Sarah," he said, his voice dropping to a terrifyingly calm whisper as he grabbed my hand. His grip was weak—the grip of a human, not a prodigy—but his eyes were full of a dark, singular purpose. "Help me. We know the Sector she's in. We saw the car. We saw the girl. We find her, we scrub the witness, and we get our lives back. We can't go to Sector 9. We can't be humans."
I looked at him and saw the reflection of my own fear. I didn't want to go to the scrap heap either. I didn't want to be a nobody.
"Okay," I whispered, my heart feeling like it was turning to lead. "We find the girl."
Jeremy nodded, a sickly, triumphant smile touching his lips. He started pulling on his discarded, salt-stained uniform, ignoring the blood dripping from his knuckles.
We weren't the Elite Seven anymore. We were hunters, stripped of our light, driven by the most dangerous thing in the world: the desperation of a fallen noble who had been outshone by a mouse.