The frost on the floor didn't last.
Two hours after Kara left, a maintenance crew cleared the doorway with portable thermal rods. They didn't speak to James or Drake. They wore heavy canvas utility coats, worked in complete silence, and left a small, metal space heater humming by the foot of the bed. It smelled faintly of hot wire and dust. It was ugly, loud, and entirely ordinary.
Drake left shortly after. He had to go to the dispensary to get the fluid drained from his shoulder pins.
"Don't pull the blanket off," Drake had said, his voice flat and blunt as he kicked his boots clean of the melting frost. "The room loses heat if you move too much."
Plain. Direct. Ballast.
James stayed on the edge of the mattress, his bare feet hovering an inch above the concrete. He was trying to practice what Chawng had called holding his structure, but the heater was making it difficult. The coil inside the little metal box didn't just radiate warmth; it clicked every sixteen seconds as the thermostat cycled.
Click. A tiny wave of dry heat.
Click. A drop in the local current.
It was a small, annoying piece of reality. It didn't feel like an equation. It just felt like a cheap heater.
The magnetic lock on the door didn't thud this time; it slid back with a smooth, functional click. Earlier that morning, James had overheard two logicians outside the ward debating whether "the Mirell line's biological asset" should still be permitted near containment patients. They hadn't called her Luna. They had used her family's name like a product safety rating.
But when the door opened, it was just Luna.
She wasn't wearing her academy uniform or field gear. She was in a simple white linen smock, her sleeves rolled up to her elbows, her hair tied back with a piece of dark twine. She looked thin—pale enough that the blue veins under her jaw were visible—but she didn't carry the unnatural, freezing vacuum that Kara had brought with her. She just looked tired.
She was carrying a small ceramic bowl filled with lukewarm water and a coarse grey rag.
"The guards wouldn't let me bring the ointment," Luna said. Her voice was quiet, entirely human, lacking the strange, overlapping resonance that usually characterized her empathic work. "They said anything with a chemical base might interfere with the ward's sensors. I just brought this."
She walked to the side of the bed and set the bowl down on the plastic overbed table. She didn't look at his stony grey eye. She looked at his left hand, where the discolored, necrotic black lines ran across his knuckles like spilled ink.
"Does it hurt?" she asked.
"No," James said. "It doesn't feel like anything. It just feels cold."
Luna dipped the rag into the water, wrung it out with a wet, twisting sound that James's mind automatically parsed as three separate fluid vectors, and then stopped. She held the damp cloth an inch above his knuckles.
"James," she whispered. "Look at me."
He turned his left eye toward her. His right remained fixed on the corner of the ceiling grate, staring blindly through the white LED glare.
Luna reached out with her left hand, her palm open, intending to rest her fingertips against his temple—her standard diagnostic anchor, the shortcut she used to trace a teammate's biological rhythm, separate fear from exhaustion, and map their pulse.
Her fingers touched his skin.
She didn't flinch, but her breath caught in her throat. She didn't drop her hand; she pressed harder, her thumb digging into the bone behind his ear, her eyes widening as she tried to force a connection.
"There's nothing there," she whispered. Her voice trembled, a sudden, raw break in her clinical composure. "James... I can't find your heart."
"It's beating," James said plainly. "I can hear it in the floor."
"No," Luna said, her hand beginning to shake against his cheek. "That's not what I mean. When I touch Drake, I can feel the density in his muscles. When I touch Kara, it feels like a furnace that's running out of wood. But you... it's just static, James. It's like trying to listen to a whisper through an iron plate."
She pulled her hand back, staring at her own fingertips as if they had been numbed by frost.
"Your frequency didn't just change," she said, her voice dropping into a terrified, hollow register. "It rewrote the tissue. When I try to tune my own logic to your pulse, the room... the room pushes back at me. It feels like trying to hold onto a wet rope while a machine is pulling the other end."
James looked down at the ceramic bowl. The water inside was perfectly still, reflecting the square outline of the ceiling light.
"They're talking about us in the main hall," Luna said softly, using the wet cloth to wipe the dry salt from his left wrist. Her movements were mechanical now, a survival reflex to keep her hands moving. "The lower-tier students won't enter the wing. I had to pass the dining commons to get here. They're calling us 'The Firebrand Remnants.' They think the Core mutated us. They think we're contagious."
"Are we?"
"Xander is," she said, a small, grim smile touching her lips, though it didn't reach her eyes. "He tried to explain the logistical failure to a sophomore who was bringing food to the ward. The boy dropped the tray and ran. They think we're monsters, James. Or weapons that haven't been cleared for deployment by the senior lines."
She rinsed the cloth again. The water in the bowl turned slightly grey.
"The Boardroom brought four more containment units down from the upper tower," she murmured, her eyes fixed on the gray rag. "They aren't for the Core. I saw the manifests on the orderly's desk. One is labeled for the Calder profile. One for the Serris data. They're building a secondary wall inside the hospital wing."
James didn't look at the walls. He didn't look at the lead-mesh window. He reached out with his left hand—the one with the black, ruined veins—and took the damp cloth from her fingers. His touch was clumsy; his depth perception was off by two inches, his hand bumping against the rim of the bowl before he found the fabric.
"Luna," he said.
She looked up, her green eyes bright with an unshed, human wetness that had nothing to do with resonance logic.
"I can still see you," James said. His voice was plain, lacking any profound philosophical weight. "You're still here."
"I know," she whispered, her shoulders dropping by a fraction of an inch as she leaned against the metal rail of the bed. "But I don't know if you are."
The space heater by the floor clicked again. Sixteen seconds had passed. The dry warmth hit his ankles, cheap, inefficient, and real.
Outside, sixty feet down the corridor, the silence of the Academy remained heavy, but inside the small square room, the grey rag was simply cold.