The training regimen had existed in one form or another since he could remember being aware of existing.
At two it had been motor coordination — the kind of structured movement they gave very young children in facilities like this, designed to establish precise neurological baselines and to determine early which subjects would be tractable and which would resist. Ren had been tractable. Not from temperament — the word temperament implied a state of mind he was not certain he had possessed at two — but because tractability was the most efficient response to an environment he could not alter.
By five it was combat fundamentals: footwork, body mechanics, the specific geometry of striking and its counter. The instructor at the time was a woman named Thessa who had a military background and who treated the subjects with the professional neutrality of someone who had decided the most ethical approach was to do the technical work well and not look at anything else. Ren had learned the fundamentals in the time it took the other subjects to learn the first principles.
By eight it had expanded: weapons handling, tactical movement, the applied physics of force distribution, the specific mathematics of angles and vectors and what the human body could and could not sustain. At eight Ren had also been introduced to the bloodline activation training — structured exercises designed to build controlled expression, to prevent the uncontrolled flaring that happened to subjects early in their development and which the researchers documented as adverse events.
He had not had adverse events. He had not told them this was because he had been controlling his bloodlines since age six, long before the structured training. The specific memory of deciding to control them was not clear. He thought it had been related to an incident involving another subject and a researcher and a hallway, the details of which were present in his memory but which he had classified as not requiring further analysis at age nine and had not accessed since.
The other subject's name had been Dav. He had been seven years old. Ren did not access the memory.
Now, at fifteen, the training was the most complex element of his daily structure. Three hours in the morning for physical conditioning and combat work. Two hours in the afternoon for operational theory and tactical analysis. One hour for bloodline expression practice, which since the synchronization had become something the instructors managed with visible unease.
The unease was productive. He trained harder when they were uneasy. He had not examined why.
That morning's combat session was with Instructor Pellin, who was thirty-four, had a controlled Remnant at Descent II, and was the best fighter in the facility by a margin that everyone was aware of and which had been, for a period, relevant to how Ren's training sessions went. That period had ended approximately eight months ago.
Pellin ran the warm-up drills with crisp efficiency and did not waste words. What Ren respected about him — insofar as respect was the right category — was that Pellin treated the training as a technical problem rather than a relational one. He was not kind. He was not unkind. He was precise.
"Full contact today," Pellin said. "The new configuration means we need to see how your reflexes integrate."
"The Conductor changes the response latency," Ren said. "The systems talk to each other now. I may produce responses I'm not consciously directing."
"That's what I want to see." Pellin rolled his shoulders and dropped into a ready stance. "Don't tell me when you're going to start."
Ren looked at him for exactly the time it took to run a structural assessment through the Gaze — weight distribution right-heavy, dominant hand left, the small indicator in his stance that he telegraphed right-to-left feints with a pre-shift in his right shoulder. This had been Pellin's tell since Ren had first begun assessing him. Pellin knew Ren had identified it. They had been training around the fact of Ren knowing for four months.
He moved.
The session lasted forty minutes. At the end of it, Pellin was breathing evenly in the deliberate way of someone managing cardiovascular recovery, and there was a mark on his left forearm that had come from an exchange in the twenty-third minute that Ren had not consciously directed. The Shadow's Line had responded to a threat-stimulus without him commanding it. The strike had been faster than his controlled expression should have allowed, and cold — the temperature in the room had dropped four degrees in the span of two seconds, a torch in the wall sconce guttering and nearly dying — and Pellin had stepped back from it with an expression that was brief and quickly managed.
Ren was not breathing hard. He was aware that this was a data point he should not advertise, and so he adjusted his breathing to a level that was plausibly elevated.
Pellin looked at the mark on his arm. He looked at Ren. "How long has it been doing that."
"The autonomous response?" Ren considered giving a partial answer and decided against it. "Six months. It's been increasing since the synchronization."
"You didn't report it."
"No."
Pellin did not ask why. He looked at Ren with the look that was different from the researcher look — not looking for a person, exactly, but looking at a problem he respected. "What does it feel like," he said.
"It doesn't feel like anything," Ren said. "It simply occurs. The choice-to-action gap is compressed. I am aware of what it did after it does it."
"And if it decides something I'm not a threat."
"Then it doesn't act. The autonomic response appears to be threat-gated." Ren paused. "I have been thinking about whether the gate is entirely under my calibration or partly under the bloodline's."
Pellin absorbed this with the stillness of someone reorganizing information. "Mostly yours," he said.
"Yes," Ren agreed. "Mostly."
The mostly sat in the room with them.
Pellin dismissed him at the end of the session without the standard debrief. Ren walked back to the corridor and noted that Pellin stood for a long time at the center of the training floor before moving, looking at the mark on his arm with an expression Ren catalogued as: re-examining a conclusion I had settled.
Ren went to the afternoon theory session. He sat in the third row and listened to an analysis of operational asset management with the same even attention he applied to everything. The Conductor hummed quietly at the base of his configuration, holding four things together, and he thought about the word mostly and what it would mean across the years of training ahead, and whether the years were actually ahead in the way the word implied.