At the academy, drills are part of life—meant to instill order, calm, and discipline. Aeris moves through the routines with her friends, learning to balance trust, instinct, and the weight of expectations. What begins as another practice reminds her that safety is fragile, and that beneath the surface of habit, change is always waiting.
The warning lights began as a polite pulse—soft red, barely noticed against the early afternoon glare. Most students were still gathering their trays and voices, halfway between bites and boredom. Aeris’s line had just reached the hand-sanitizer station. She was already half out of the moment, mind drifting toward her unfinished sketch tucked in the back of her notebook.
The cafeteria smelled like broth, old steam, and lemon cleanser. Metal benches clinked. Somewhere a vent ticked in a tired rhythm. Aeris felt the familiar tug to finish the shading on Sera’s portrait—two strokes for the braid, one for the shadowed cheek—then let the thought drift. Routine always asked you to set small wants aside.
The second bell was supposed to be routine. The kind of practice that had drilled comfort out of anxiety, over years of repetition. Students moved in practiced lines, sleeves pulled tight, masks issued at the start of every month. No one ever joked about drills. Not here, not after what happened in the northern sectors.
Every corridor poster said the same things in different fonts: TRUST YOUR LINE. MASKS ON, NO EXCEPTIONS. REPORT ANOMALIES. The academy’s discipline was a net you never quite felt until it tightened. Aeris knew which tiles squeaked, which cameras made a faint static buzz, which proctors counted too fast. She also knew the story behind the story: drills were the habit that kept panic from blooming into stampede.
The alarm shifted, tone flattening. Not just a drill. This sound cut through the room like a cold blade.
Conversations snagged mid-sentence. Trays misjudged tabletops and clattered. That tone meant the system wasn’t faking the fear for practice; it was acknowledging a present-tense threat.
Instructor Idris’s voice, taut and urgent, echoed through the speakers:
“All students—mask up. Follow your line leaders. Do not panic. Repeat, do not panic.”
The voice carried a soldier’s cadence—counted breaths hidden inside each phrase. Idris never wasted syllables. He’d trained them to hear the difference between performance and order.
Aeris pulled her mask on, hands steady. The old reflex. She watched Sera fumble with her straps, brown eyes wide but trying to look calm.
Aeris pinched the nose bridge, checked the seal the way Jenna had taught her—press, breathe, feel for leaks. She nudged Sera’s fingers down to the lower strap. “Under the braid,” she mouthed. Sera nodded, swallowing hard.
Then came the hiss. A sharp, unnatural sound—glass against steel. Someone shouted. A tray clattered. Near the back of the cafeteria, a cloud of faint silver—wrong color, wrong place—bloomed outward, alive and shifting in the light.
It rose like frost exhaled in reverse, the way snow looks when it lifts from a field in wind—except this shimmered with a wrong sort of life. A bottle rolled in a half circle, tapped a chair leg, and stopped. Cracked label. No academy mark. The kind of vial you saw in whispered rumors about market tunnels and favors owed.
Time stuttered. The crowd moved in confused waves: some students pressing forward, some stumbling back. One of the kitchen doors slammed shut.
It wasn’t chaos yet—just the first ripples that precede it. Aeris saw how quickly ripples can add, how close they were to a crush if someone pushed wrong. Two line leaders lifted their palms, trying to split the flow. A kitchen worker dragged a foldable barrier across a service hatch with a scrape that made teeth hurt.
Aeris felt it before she saw it—something waking beneath her skin. Not fear. Not exactly. A kind of pressure, humming through her blood, the way her mother once described sensing a storm before it broke.
It wasn’t heat, and it wasn’t pain. It was the memory of standing on a balcony before thunder, that taut thread between air and skin. A whisper of attention. Her body didn’t brace; it listened.
Instructor Idris moved, quick and sure, but too far to help the cluster near the spore cloud. A boy in the back was already coughing, hands over his face. Sera reached for Aeris, panic flickering. Rowan froze—jaw clenched, scanning for exits.
Rowan’s eyes cut the room into options—ventilation hood there, emergency seal there, the distance to the nearest isolation curtain. Aeris could almost see the math in the set of her jaw. The boy’s cough turned ragged; the silver veil bent toward breath.
Someone yelled, “Seal it! Seal it off!”
The call ricocheted off steel and glass, picked up by three voices, then five. The nearest proctor slammed a palm against a panel; magnetic locks thumped into place along the window seams.
Aeris looked at the cloud and felt something tug—like an instinct uncoiling, too familiar to be foreign. She didn’t think. She moved.
She was not the fastest runner in drills. She was the one who saw the gap and took it, the one who stepped between instead of around. Her body found the line of least collision and threaded it.
She pushed past Rowan, past the nervous tangle of students, straight into the haze. Everything slowed. The world shrank to breath, heartbeat, the cold tingling at her fingertips. She heard her mother’s voice, soft and far away:
Trust your instincts. But also trust the routine.
Jenna’s additions echoed, too: count to four, make the choice that makes the next five choices possible. Aeris counted four and didn’t stop.
The spore cloud curled toward her, searching. She held her breath and reached for the boy, whose eyes were squeezed shut, hands trembling.
He was heavier than he looked. She hooked fingers into the back of his jacket and pulled. A desk edge jabbed her hip, a sensation clean enough to anchor her attention where it belonged—on motion, not on fear.
As her hand touched his arm, a jolt went through her. For an instant, it felt as if her skin sparked—something flickering gold under the surface. The spores recoiled, thinning and drifting downward as if burned by invisible light.
It was quick. Subtle. If you blinked, you’d call it a trick of fluorescents or a drift in the airflow. But Aeris didn’t blink. The shimmer inched away from her like breath meeting cold glass.
Aeris pulled the boy clear. A few others followed—shocked, wide-eyed, stumbling. Rowan stared at her, unblinking. Sera’s mouth formed a silent question.
Rowan’s stare wasn’t accusation. It was a cataloging kind of attention: what did I just see, what did she just do, how does this change the map? Sera kept a hand on Aeris’s sleeve even after they were out of the haze, like a tether she wasn’t ready to reel in.
Someone slammed the quarantine doors. The room was sealed. A team in heavy suits rushed in, spraying decontaminant foam that stuck to everything—clothes, hair, even shoes.
The foam hit with a chemical snow smell, expanding in clean white sheets that clung and then crusted. The suited team moved like one organism, practiced angles and overlapping fields. A portable air scrubber spun up with a whine that cut through murmurs. A ceiling baffle dropped, corralling the upper air.
Instructor Idris’s voice again, rougher now:
“Remain calm. All exposed will be checked. Do not remove your masks.”
His eyes found Aeris across the room. He didn’t nod—no reward, no spotlight. Just a three-beat pause that read as acknowledgment. Then he was moving again, directing the team toward the source point with two fingers and a clipped phrase she couldn’t hear.
The boy Aeris saved looked at her in terror, then relief. Aeris felt the stares, the hush. Rowan’s eyes were like searchlights. Sera reached for her sleeve, squeezing tight.
The boy’s breath stuttered through the mask valve—two shivers, then a steadier pull. He tried to say something; the mask muffled it into a grateful shape. Aeris shook her head once: later. Sera’s squeeze said don’t you dare pretend I didn’t see that.
What did you just do? the world seemed to ask.
The question wasn’t spoken aloud, but it breathed from every angle—off the polished floor, out of the foam, along the line of proctors’ shoulders. Even the warning ticker on the wall seemed to hesitate between words.
Aeris didn’t answer. She just kept breathing. The pressure beneath her skin faded, replaced by exhaustion. She looked down at her hands, almost expecting them to shine.
No gleam. No mark. Just a faint tremble in the tendons, a ghost of ache along her forearms where effort had pooled. She flexed her fingers and watched the shake ease.
Nothing. Just skin. Just her.
The thought didn’t entirely convince, but it steadied. She loosened Sera’s grip and patted the back of her hand, once.
The lockdown continued, longer than usual. The medical team took swabs. Students were divided—“exposed” or “safe.” Aeris sat in a cold side room, watching the frost edge the window, her mind echoing with the memory of golden light.
They cataloged them by proximity and airflow vectors, not by fear. Cotton swabs, barcode stickers, a soft-spoken medic asking the same questions in the same order. Any breach in seal? Any taste of metal? Any dizziness? Aeris’s answers were easy, but her thoughts weren’t. She replayed the moment the shimmer flinched away from her, frame by frame, comparing it to lectures about aerosolized bloom behavior. None of the diagrams had included her.
When Jenna found her, her eyes were wet with worry, but her voice was steady. “You did the right thing,” she said quietly, brushing Aeris’s hair back with a gloved hand.
Jenna’s coat smelled faintly of cold and tea leaves; she’d come straight from the monitoring room, slate still tucked under her arm, graphs half-frozen on the screen. The glove stopped before Aeris’s cheekbone, careful of protocol, but the gesture still landed.
Aeris stared at her fingers. “I didn’t do anything special.”
The words tasted like defense, not truth. She didn’t want the room to change shape around her because of something she couldn’t name.
Jenna’s mouth tightened, as if she wanted to say more, but she just squeezed Aeris’s shoulder.
Jenna’s eyes carried a history Aeris had grown up inside—quiet losses, measured risks, the discipline of not saying too much too soon. Aeris recognized the effort it took for Jenna not to ask Did you feel it? and loved her more for the restraint.
Outside, the sun slipped lower, painting long blue shadows across the snow and steel.
The academy’s outer fences threw tidy bars across the drifted yard; the wind traced them into the shape of a staff of music. A distant hawser groaned where a supply ship had once moored, sound traveling as if through bone.
Inside, word had already begun to spread. Some called it luck. Some called it something else.
By dinner, the incident had five versions, each with a different hero and a different villain. In some, the vial had fallen from a careless tech’s pocket. In others, a student had carried it on a dare, for the black-market thrill of holding something forbidden. Most versions agreed on one detail: a girl had walked into the shimmer and brought someone out.
Aeris lay awake that night, the frost creeping down the window, feeling something new inside her—a question, a fear, a secret waiting to grow.
She counted the gaps in the heater’s cycle. She mapped the day backward until she returned to the half-finished sketch of Sera and the small, stubborn plant on her sill. When sleep finally came, it smelled of cleanser and cold metal, and somewhere inside the dream a thin strand of light folded itself small and waited.