The walk up to the platform felt longer than it had any right to be, the whole hall gone quiet enough that Ren could hear his own boots against the metal floor, hundreds of eyes tracking him the entire way, and he kept his expression carefully blank because falling apart in front of an audience felt like the one thing worse than whatever was about to happen once he actually got up there.
The diagnostic array sat at the center of the platform, a raised ring of pale light etched into the floor with a tall glass column rising from its middle, dormant and colorless until someone stepped inside the ring and activated whatever they had. The officer running the assessment gestured him forward without looking up from his data pad, already bored, already expecting nothing, and Ren stepped into the ring and felt the air around him shift slightly, some kind of scanning field settling over his skin like a light pressure.
"Summon your ability on command," the officer said, still not looking up. "Whenever you’re ready."
Ren lifted his arm the way he had on that moon, expecting the same instinct to take over, expecting the light to just happen the way it had happened before, and nothing came. Not a spark. Not a flicker. Just his own hand hanging in the air looking painfully, embarrassingly ordinary while the silence in the hall stretched out and started curdling into something worse.
’Come on,’ he thought, staring at his own palm like he could will it into cooperating through sheer force of humiliation. ’Come on, you worked fine when a six-legged nightmare was trying to eat a child, you can work now, please, I am begging you, do not do this to me in front of an entire hall of people who already think I’m a joke.’
Somewhere behind him a few people started murmuring, low and unkind, the sound of an audience deciding the story was already over before it began. Ren caught a fragment of it, something about false alarms, something about wasted time, and felt heat crawl up the back of his neck that had nothing to do with the room’s climate control.
He glanced toward the tiered seating without meaning to, found Yegard’s face immediately in the crowd, still perfectly unreadable, and something about that specific blankness made Ren’s jaw tighten harder than the murmuring ever could have.
He closed his eyes instead. Stopped thinking about the audience, stopped thinking about the officer’s bored data pad, stopped thinking about the woman he already knew was somewhere in that crowd waiting to enjoy this. He thought instead about the moon.
About the sound that creature had made right before it lunged, about the exact half-second where his body had simply known what to do before his mind caught up, that same buried, blood-deep certainty Rafayal’s borrowed instincts had handed him without asking permission. He reached for that feeling instead of the memory of failing five seconds ago, and this time when he lifted his arm, something answered.
The light came fast, faster than it had on the moon, a blade of silver-white energy snapping into existence around his forearm with a sound like a struck bell, and the diagnostic column beside him flared to life so violently that several people in the front row actually flinched back in their seats. Numbers began climbing up the glass in rapid, glowing sequence, and the officer running the assessment finally looked up from his data pad with an expression that had gone from bored to alarmed in under a second.
F. E. D.
The murmuring in the hall died instantly, replaced by a silence so total Ren could hear the column itself humming.
C. B. A.
Someone in the tiered seating actually stood up. Ren didn’t dare look to see who.
S.
The light around his arm surged brighter, and the pressure of the scanning field pressing against his skin sharpened into something that felt almost physical, almost painful, and still the numbers kept climbing, blowing straight past every threshold the hall had clearly ever seen a diagnostic column reach, past every rank Ren had watched displayed above someone’s head over the last hour, climbing and climbing with no sign of slowing, until the glass itself began flickering erratically and a harsh mechanical tone cut through the silence.
[SYSTEM ERROR. RECALIBRATION REQUIRED.]
The column went dark all at once, the blade of light around Ren’s arm flickering out a half second later, and he stood there in the sudden quiet breathing hard, arm still raised, staring at a dead diagnostic array that had apparently just given up trying to measure him.
Nobody said anything. Nobody moved. Ren was fairly sure, for one very long, very uncomfortable stretch of silence, that several hundred people had simultaneously forgotten how to breathe.
’So what now,’ he thought, lowering his arm slowly, doing his absolute best to look like a man who had planned that exact outcome all along instead of someone who’d genuinely had no idea what was about to happen. ’That’s, uh. That’s a lot of letters. That’s more letters than I think this system was built to handle. Cool. Perfect. Totally normal amount of letters for a person to produce.’
The officer running the assessment was staring at his data pad like it had personally betrayed him, tapping at it frantically, muttering something about recalibration and error logs that nobody in the hall seemed to be listening to, because every single person in that room was still staring at Ren instead, and the quality of the stares had shifted entirely from the amused, dismissive kind he’d walked in with to something closer to disbelief, maybe even something bordering on fear.
He looked toward the tiered seating out of pure reflex, and found Yegard exactly where he’d been the whole time, seated at the front with that same carved-still expression, giving absolutely nothing away, no shock, no satisfaction, nothing Ren could read at all even after watching a diagnostic system break trying to measure him. ’Ha,’ Ren thought, equal parts irritated and, if he was being honest with himself, a little disappointed in a way he refused to examine. ’Of course the one time something happens that would actually justify a reaction, he gives me nothing. Perfect. On brand. Exactly what I expected.’
That was when the woman reappeared. She came gliding up the aisle toward the front row with the exact same confidence she’d had on the landing pad, sliding into the seat beside Yegard and looping her arm through his with a proprietary little squeeze, leaning in close enough to say something directly against his ear that Ren couldn’t hear from the platform but could absolutely guess the shape of from the smug little glance she threw his way immediately afterward. It was such an obvious move, such a transparent little performance clearly aimed at making Ren feel something, that he almost laughed out loud right there in front of the entire hall.
’Oh, absolutely devastating,’ he thought, watching her settle in against Yegard’s shoulder like she was staking a claim on live broadcast. ’Truly, I am wounded to my core. Watching you hang off a man who hasn’t smiled once since I met him is exactly the gut-punch you think it is. Please, continue, this is riveting, I’m sure everyone in this hall is deeply invested in whatever point you think you’re making right now.’
If anything he felt nothing at all watching the two of them, just a distant, mild contempt that barely registered next to the far more pressing problem currently blinking dead on the platform beside him, because whatever number that column had been trying and failing to display, Ren had a sinking feeling it was going to matter a lot more than one insecure woman’s arm draped over her not-quite-boyfriend for an audience.
He didn’t have time for either of them, honestly. Somewhere underneath the ringing in his ears and the fresh wave of whispers already rebuilding around him, sharper now, edged with something closer to awe than mockery, Ren’s mind had already moved past the platform entirely, circling back to the one thought that actually mattered. A dormant, unranked civilian didn’t blow out a military-grade diagnostic array on his first proper attempt. Whatever this rank actually was, whatever ceiling it eventually settled at once the system got itself recalibrated, it wasn’t just high.
It was the kind of number that made people notice you. The kind of number that showed up in stories for a reason.
’Well,’ Ren thought, stepping down off the platform on legs that felt slightly less steady than he wanted them to be, ignoring the officer still frantically tapping at his broken data pad, ignoring the woman’s satisfied little smile still aimed his way, ignoring even Yegard’s unreadable stare tracking him the entire way back to the waiting area. ’That’s exactly what I wanted. To be memorable. To be the kind of Sentinel people write Chapters about.’ He thought about the villain’s ending, the quiet, brutal execution scene he’d read on a train back on Earth in another life, and felt something cold settle low in his stomach that had nothing to do with the still-recovering ache in his arm.
Being powerful hadn’t saved the original Rafayal. If anything, in a story like this one, it had probably been part of what got him killed.