The day broke over the Capitol without Emma having really slept.
She'd spent the night lying awake in the dark. Like every other night, her mind kept looping back through the trauma of her Awakening and the terror of her paralysis. But that night, new shadows had grafted themselves onto the old ones: the sensation of that invisible pressure against the small of her back, that thought which hadn't quite been her own, and that word, consumed, which she had never quite managed to erase from her mind since her very first conversation with Agatha.
When the sun, or at least the pale glow filtering through that ash colored sky and making the blue snow ripple faintly, finally lit the edges of her window, she got up without waiting for anyone to come fetch her.
Someone approached her door. Just from the sound of the heavy, confident footsteps, she knew it wasn't Andrew.
A woman Emma had never seen before appeared on the threshold, mere minutes after sunrise, without knocking or announcing herself, as though she considered politeness a waste of time. Tall, her head shaved almost entirely except for a thin strip of gray hair down the center, she wore an angular face utterly devoid of anything resembling warmth.
"Emma. Correct?" The question was purely rhetorical. "I'm Selene. Lady Agatha has placed your instruction in my hands. Follow me. Don't ask questions yet, you'll have plenty of time for those later, and I don't intend to repeat myself."
Without waiting for a response, she turned and walked off.
Emma followed her in a silence that carried none of Andrew's awkward warmth, none of Agatha's careful calculation. Selene moved at a steady, almost mechanical pace, like someone who'd made this exact walk hundreds of times and no longer found the slightest interest in it.
They stopped at an unmarked door, in a wing of the Capitol Emma had never explored, and Selene led her into a bare room, nearly empty except for two chairs placed facing each other at its center.
"Sit."
Emma obeyed, feeling in that single instruction a pressure of icy authority.
Selene took the other chair, her hands resting flat on her knees, her dull gray eyes fixed on Emma with a clinical intensity that echoed the one Agatha reserved for the Shard, minus the wonder.
"Lady Agatha informed me your first Distortion has awakened. Is that correct?" she asked, her tone leaving no room for hesitation.
"I... I think so."
"You think so." Selene made no effort to hide her mild irritation. "You're going to have to do a great deal better than thinking, Emma, if you intend to survive what this new world of yours is about to demand of you."
She leaned forward slightly.
"Here is the first lesson, and the most important one of all, a Distortion is not a muscle you flex. And it is certainly not some magic gift. It is a refusal. The world imposes limits on you, and your Qualia is the raw will to trample over them."
"What do you mean?"
"Right now," Selene continued, her voice flat, "my mind is closed. That is the natural law of Existence. You are you, I am I, and an impenetrable wall separates us. To use your power, you must not try to look through that wall. You must regard its very existence as an insult. You must demand that it collapse."
She pointed a thin finger at her own temple.
"I am holding a specific emotion right now. I am declaring that you have no right to access it. Prove it wrong. Steal it from me."
Emma hesitated, thrown off balance by the brutality of the request. She closed her eyes for a moment and tried to recapture that same dizzying sensation she'd felt the day before with Andrew, that coin spinning, suspended. She opened her eyes again, fixing Selene with an almost painful concentration, trying to break through her defenses.
Nothing came.
"You're being polite," Selene observed, unmoved. "Politeness is the acceptance of someone else's rules. Stop accepting. I am refusing you access to my thoughts. Rebel against that refusal. Force the door."
Emma tried again, and again, her frustration mounting with every failed attempt. Time stretched, heavy and silent. Selene showed no sign of impatience, but her words grew sharper with every passing minute.
"You're waiting for permission, Emma. Reality never gives permission."
By the seventh attempt, exhaustion gave way to a low, simmering anger. Emma had suddenly had enough, enough of this empty room, enough of Selene's smug tone, enough of being a plaything in a world she didn't understand. She stopped trying to "see" and, for one single second, she demanded to know. She hurled that raw irritation straight at the mind of the woman sitting across from her.
It happened in an instant. A crack in the air. An impression that forced itself onto her, not as a voice, but as a cold weight sliding down her own spine.
Weariness. An old, crushing weariness, worn smooth from use.
It was almost nothing. A plain background emotion, no formed thought. But the psychological violation was real all the same, she had just torn from Selene something the woman had refused to give.
"I felt something," Emma murmured, almost frightened by her own audacity. "Weariness. From you."
For the first time since the session began, something that resembled satisfaction, from a great distance, crossed Selene's face. It lasted less than a second.
"Good," she said simply. "It isn't much. But it isn't nothing."
She rose, signaling the end of the session, then paused, reconsidering the young woman in front of her.
"Sit back down. There's something you need to understand before you leave this room. Something that will matter far more than anything we briefly practiced today."
Emma sat back down slowly. Selene began pacing, at a measured rhythm, her hands clasped behind her back.
"Every Awakened who has ever lived falls somewhere on the same scale, Emma. Not a scale of talent. A scale measuring how much of yourself you impose on the world, and how hard the world is forced to notice it."
She held up one finger.
"At the bottom, there's the Hollow. Every person born into this world starts there. A Qualia that exists inside every living thing, but has never touched anything, never broken anything. A spark with no oxygen. Most people, even once Awakened, live and die without ever knowing they carried that weight inside them."
A second finger.
"Above that, the Pulse. What you just did in this room. A Distortion that reaches, even briefly, beyond the walls of your own skull and forces reality to bend, just enough under the mark of your will, to leave a mark of its own. It fades the instant you let go of your will. It costs you energy. But it's real."
A third finger.
"Then comes the Reach. This is the moment a Distortion stops being an act and becomes a state. Your mere presence starts pressing on the world around you, all the time, whether you want it to or not. At this stage, your will deforms reality simply through your will to exist on your own terms."
Selene lowered her hand.
"And finally, at the very top, there is the Absolute."
The word landed differently than the others, heavy, almost toxic in her mouth.
"An Absolute no longer touches the world. It replaces it. Whatever it believes to be true becomes the truth within whatever space it chooses to claim. The laws of matter, of time, the very concepts of cause and consequence, all of it becomes negotiable the instant an Absolute decides that reality is wrong and it is right."
"Have you ever seen one?" Emma asked, her voice suddenly fragile.
Selene didn't blink. Her gaze stayed exactly as clinical and cold as it had been the moment she walked into the room.
"No," she answered, in a tone of pure fact. "To my knowledge, no Awakened has ever reached that stage. It's a theoretical breaking point. And if someone ever did cross that threshold, I doubt the world would survive long enough for the rest of us to bear witness to it."
She turned toward the door.
"You've awakened your first Distortion, Emma. Your mind has just torn itself free of the Hollow, but the road ahead is still long. What you just did here, for the first time, was force that door open on your own terms, instead of letting yourself be crushed by urgency. That's what matters. That's what most people never manage to do."
She paused at the threshold, without turning around.
"What you felt from me just now, that weariness, was not a secret I wished to share. You tore it from me. That's what you are now, Emma. A violator. Learn to live with that fact, because it will never leave you again."
She left the room without waiting for a reply. Emma stayed behind, alone with her very first victory, which already, strangely, felt like a conviction.