He woke up the way he always woke up.
Hands checking throat first — still attached. Then abdomen, still whole. Then the ceiling, familiar, the same water stain in the upper left corner that the Academy's maintenance systems had been ignoring for three years. The light coming through the window was the artificial kind, calibrated to mimic dawn at six forty-two with a precision that almost disguised the fact that it wasn't real.
Almost.
He lay there while his lungs remembered how to work. They were greedy about it — pulling air in long, unsteady draws, as if they'd been denied it for the last few hours. Which they had. Which they always had. The nausea came next, familiar as the ceiling, and he rode it out the way he'd learned: palms flat against the mattress, breathing counted out in sets of three, eyes open and fixed on the water stain until the room stopped tilting.
The dream had been the same dream.
The sword. The figure in black, moving through the dark with the particular economy of someone who had performed this specific act so many times that all the feeling had been replaced by technique. The blade that looked like ivory and killed like certainty. The voice — neither masculine nor feminine, both, something that existed in the space where those categories dissolved — saying the same things it always said. You deserve worse. As if the repetition might eventually mean something different.
He had stopped arguing with it around the two hundredth iteration. He had stopped counting iterations around the four hundredth.
He sat up.
Make money. Retire early. Get out.
The plan. Such as it was — less a plan than a direction, less a direction than a habit of pointing himself somewhere with enough conviction that the body followed. The Academy gave people like him a track: graduate, license, institutional placement, a life shaped like a life by people who had decided what lives were supposed to look like. He had been building something parallel to that track for three years. Quietly. In the margins of curriculum, in the gaps between what was monitored and what wasn't.
He opened the interface.
[IO]: Good morning, Kai. Graduation schedule confirmed. Ceremony begins at nine. Your name is listed fourth in the presentation order.
[IO]: Happy birthday.
[IO]: May humanity's light guide you forward.
He stared at the last line for a moment longer than he meant to.
Humanity's light.
He closed the interface.
The journal lived under a loose board beneath his bed, which was the kind of hiding place that only works if no one is looking — and in the Academy, someone was always looking. He'd kept it there anyway. Some decisions don't come from strategy.
He kept it open on his lap while the morning assembled itself around him: the sounds of other students in the corridor, footsteps and lowered voices and the particular energy of a day that everyone had been promised would mean something.
The journal was old. He didn't remember starting it. That was the point of it — a record against the forgetting, which happened slowly and without announcement, the way erosion happens, and you only notice the shape of what's gone after enough of it is missing.
Things I've Forgotten.
The list had forty-three items. He knew the number without counting. He had read it enough times that the number had become part of the reading.
Most items were specific. A face. A sound. The particular weight of an object he could no longer picture. Item eighteen: the name of the person who taught me to do that thing with my hands when I'm nervous. He still did the thing with his hands. He had no idea where it came from.
Item seven was different.
What I promised.
He hadn't written that one. He was certain of this the way you're certain of things you can't prove — the ink was wrong, slightly fresher than the lines around it, and his handwriting had a specific pressure pattern he'd been told was unusual, and this wasn't it. Someone else had written it. Or he had written it in a state that hadn't transferred to the version of him who woke up this morning.
He closed the journal.
Beneath it, where he'd placed it the night before without knowing why he was placing it there: a flower. Metal, silver, petals made of something that was almost but not quite tin, the kind of craft that comes from hands that are learning rather than hands that know. On the stem, in ink so faint it required the right angle of light to read, in the handwriting of a child who had not yet learned to account for the space letters take up:
Big brother — you promised you would remember.
He held it for a moment. Set it down.
Went to make coffee.
The Academy had a quality he had spent three years trying to name and failed. Not wrong, exactly — everything functioned. The food was adequate. The curriculum was rigorous. The environmental systems maintained temperature and light and the chemical composition of the air with the diligence of systems that had been doing it for a long time and saw no reason to stop.
But underneath all that: something slightly off-key. A note played correctly in the wrong register. The wrongness wasn't in any single thing — it was in the relationship between things, in the gaps where the performance of normalcy was thinnest.
He walked through it on the way to the auditorium. Past the cafeteria, where the smell of synthetic bread and burnt coffee was so consistent it had stopped being a smell and become a condition, the way background noise becomes silence. Past the gardens, bioluminescent trees swaying in artificial wind with the regularity of something on a timer, which they were. Past the library, where the books were real but the reading was monitored and had been for longer than any student had been alive.
Students moved in their graduation robes — crying, laughing, occupying the emotional register that the occasion called for. He watched them with the attentiveness he brought to everything and felt the specific absence of whatever they were feeling.
He had tried to feel it once. The occasion. The threshold, the becoming, the beginning. He had stood in front of his mirror on the first graduation he remembered and attempted the exercise of meaning it. The mirror had given him back a face that looked exactly like someone performing that exercise.
He had stopped trying after that.
The auditorium doors stood open. Gold light from inside, the particular gold of artificial sunlight calibrated to feel like ceremony. He walked through.
De Vellandorian was already speaking.
She stood at the center of the stage the way things stand when they've been placed there carefully — every angle considered, every variable of light and positioning accounted for. Silver hair catching the stage lights with a rhythm that suggested the lights had learned her preferences. Her voice carried the weight of someone who understood that weight was a tool and had spent years learning to calibrate it.
"...and so we stand at the threshold. Not as children, but as pioneers..."
He found his seat. Middle of the auditorium — the position he'd occupied for three years in every room where visibility was simultaneously asset and liability. He opened the journal to a blank page without deciding to.
He listened to the room instead of the speech.
Around him, the faces he should know but couldn't quite hold. Three years of shared meals and shared silences and the particular intimacy of people who survive the same place together, and their faces still slipped from him between one moment and the next. After every death, something went. He had learned to track the rate of loss the way you track a structural problem in a building you can't afford to vacate.
The rate was manageable.
The trajectory was not.
"...let us build something worthy of our sacrifices..."
De Vellandorian's voice stopped.
Not at the end of a sentence. Not in a pause calculated for effect. It stopped the way a recording stops when the power cuts — mid-phrase, mid-breath, mid-everything. The absence of it was louder than the voice had been.
He looked up.
The shadows on the marble floor — cast by hundreds of students, by stage lights, by the artificial sun angled through stained glass — were pointing in the wrong direction. Not away from the light sources. Not according to any geometry the room's architecture should have permitted.
Toward him.
Every shadow in the auditorium bending in his direction with the patient certainty of iron filings finding a magnet.
He knew this.
Not from the three years in the Academy. From before — from the parts of his memory the loops hadn't reached yet, from whatever existed on the other side of the forgetting. A time when light moved because he wanted it to. When the geometry of a room rearranged itself around his presence as a matter of course.
He pressed his hands flat against his thighs. Clenched.
The shadows snapped back.
He opened the journal. Looked at the list. Item seven — What I promised — in handwriting that wasn't his, in ink that was slightly too fresh.
Across the auditorium, De Vellandorian stood at the edge of her stage with her composure slightly disarranged, the way a precisely placed object looks after it's been touched. She hadn't noticed him. She was looking at the room, reading something in it that hadn't been there a moment ago.
She looked up.
Her eyes found him across the distance with the directness of someone who had been waiting to find him and had simply been patient about it.
He closed the journal.
In the corner of the auditorium, her usual table was empty — the one she claimed every morning, where she marked papers and drank the imported tea she wasn't supposed to have, where he had sat across from her in his first year when she was still the person he thought she was.
Empty... Reserved. A space held open by the specific absence of the person who belonged in it.
Almost, he thought.
And then the air changed.