Two days of downtime turned into two days of actually getting to know the people I was going to die next to, eventually, if the last few months had taught me anything about how this world worked.
Ralph found me in the mess hall the first morning, sliding into the seat across from me with a tray stacked embarrassingly high — eggs, some kind of reconstituted potato hash, two rolls he'd clearly stolen from whoever was behind him in line.
"You're the only one on this squad who eats slower than me," he said, already halfway through his first roll. "Everyone else inhales their food like it's going to get taken away."
"Old habit," I admitted, turning my fork over without much interest in the eggs underneath it. "First few weeks after everything started, food was the one thing you couldn't count on. Ivan used to time us — see who could make a ration bar last the longest. I got good at eating slow. Guess some habits don't unlearn easy."
"Yeah." He didn't push, just nodded like he understood exactly what I meant without needing the details, and for a second I remembered he'd told us he hadn't seen his family in two months, that photo folded into plastic in his jacket pocket. "Fire's the same for me. First time I used it I burned my own arm. Didn't even feel it till after — just smelled something and looked down and there it was, skin gone red and blistering, and I hadn't felt a thing. Adrenaline's a hell of a drug."
"You've gotten a lot more precise since then. I watched you burn through that zombie pack on the road without singeing a single one of us."
"Practice." He grinned, all easy confidence again, the moment of quiet gone as fast as it had come, and stabbed a piece of potato hash like it had personally offended him. "Speaking of practice — you up for a spar after breakfast? I want to see if the rumors about you are true."
"What rumors?"
"That you're impossible to hit clean. Ian won't shut up about it. Says he sparred you once back at your old base and couldn't land a single hit that counted, even when he could see exactly where you were standing." He leaned forward, genuinely curious now instead of just making conversation. "That true, or is Ian exaggerating for dramatic effect?"
"Rumors get exaggerated," I said, which wasn't a lie so much as a very careful kind of true. What Ian had actually seen was half a second of frozen time and a body that had simply stopped being where his fist expected it to be. Nobody needed to know that.
"We'll see," Ralph said, already standing, tray balanced with the easy confidence of someone who'd never once dropped one.
We didn't get to test it. Alex commandeered the gym the second we finished eating, insisting — loudly, and with a level of theatrical outrage usually reserved for much bigger grievances — that the whole squad needed to run drills together instead of splitting into pairs.
"One-on-one sparring teaches you how to fight one person," he announced, pacing in front of us like a drill sergeant auditioning for the part. "We're not going to be fighting one person. We're going to be fighting fifteen zombies at once while Ian yells contradictory orders at us. We need to practice that specifically."
"I don't yell contradictory orders," Ian said.
"You told me to flank left and hold center in the same sentence during the convoy ambush."
"Those aren't contradictory, they're sequential."
"They came out of your mouth at the same time, Ian."
For once, nobody argued with him past that, and we spent the next three hours running coordinated combat patterns across the gym floor — Ian calling formations, the rest of us adjusting on the fly, learning who moved left instinctively and who moved right, whose ability needed space to charge and whose needed close range to matter. Alex liked to work the edges, darting in and out with his darkness-wreathed blade before an enemy could set its feet. Ralph needed room to breathe, a few yards of open space to build his fire into something that could actually hurt instead of just singe. I found myself sliding naturally into the gaps between them, covering whatever seam opened up, never quite explaining to myself — or to anyone else — exactly how I always seemed to be exactly where the gap was a half-second before it mattered.
Dustin's gravity work impressed me more the longer I watched it. He wasn't flashy — no dramatic beams of light, no visible effect most of the time — but he could make a six-foot man feel like he was wading through mud with a flick of two fingers, dialing the pull up and down with a precision that made the rest of our abilities look loud and clumsy by comparison. Ian ran a drill where Dustin had to hold three "attackers" — really just Ralph, Alex, and me, none of us going easy — at bay for a full minute using nothing but localized gravity fields, and he did it without breaking a sweat, adjusting the pull on each of us independently like he was conducting an orchestra instead of fighting three people at once.
"You're quiet," I said, during a water break, when it was just the two of us near the wall, the others still bickering across the gym.
"So are you," Dustin said. "About the important stuff, anyway."
I froze for half a second before I caught myself, forcing my shoulders to stay loose. "What's that supposed to mean?"
"Nothing sinister." He took a slow sip from his bottle, unbothered, eyes tracking Alex and Ralph across the room instead of me, which somehow made the moment feel less like an interrogation and more like an actual observation. "Just an observation. You talk plenty. You just don't say much. There's a difference. Ask you a question about the mission, you'll talk for five minutes. Ask you a question about yourself, you give me two sentences and change the subject."
"You planning on becoming a philosopher after the apocalypse, or is this a hobby?"
"Older brother," he said, like that explained it, capping the bottle and turning it over once in his hands. "He used to say the same thing about me before he died. Guess it stuck. He was the one with gravity first, actually — I just inherited it. Some cores pass down through blood, apparently, if the person carrying it dies close enough to family. Nobody at the research stations can explain why. I didn't ask too many questions. I just took what he left me and tried not to waste it."
That was the most he'd said about himself since I'd met him, and he said it so flatly I almost missed how much weight was underneath it — a whole grief compressed down into three sentences and a shrug.
"Sorry," I said, because it was the only honest thing I had.
"Everyone's sorry about something these days." He capped the bottle for real this time, pushed off the wall. "Doesn't change much. C'mon, Alex is about to lose his mind if we don't get back — he's been trying to get Ian to agree to a 'style points' system for twenty minutes."
"There is no style points system," Ian's voice carried across the gym.
"There could be," Alex called back. "I'm just saying, if there were, I'd be winning."
We finished the drills a little after noon, sweat-soaked and sore in the specific way that meant tomorrow would hurt worse than today. Alex, predictably, made a whole production of announcing that he'd "won" the informal sparring rankings we'd never actually agreed to keep, based entirely on his own scoring system that somehow always favored him.
"You gave yourself extra points for style," Ralph pointed out, toweling sweat off the back of his neck.
"Style is a legitimate combat metric."
"It is not."
"Tell that to the zombie I killed with a spinning strike yesterday."
"You killed it with a regular strike. The spin was after it was already dead."
"The spin was for the ambiance."
"Nobody's grading your ambiance, Alex."
"They should be. I'm very good at it."
Ian let them argue the rest of the way back to the barracks, a faint smile on his face the whole time, and I found myself smiling too, despite everything — despite the weight of my footlocker sitting a hundred yards away with a crystal in it I still hadn't figured out what to do with, despite the memory of the tier four in the warehouse basement that never quite left me alone at night. It had been a long time since I'd been part of a group that felt like this — not the desperate, clinging closeness of the first few days with Ivan and Danny, huddled behind a dumpster listening to the world end, and not the professional distance of my first squad before Angela and Daniela died, where I'd been careful not to get too close because closeness had a body count attached to it. This felt almost normal. Almost like the kind of friend group I might have had if none of this had ever happened — if I'd just been a chubby sixteen-year-old worrying about exams instead of mana cores, and these four had been kids from some other school I'd met at a tournament somewhere.
I let myself enjoy it, because I'd learned the hard way that you never knew how long normal was going to last.
That evening, a runner found us in the barracks with new orders from Colonel Reyes: report to the eastern perimeter outpost at first light. Increased zombie activity, possible coordination, request for immediate high-threat response.
"Coordination," Ralph repeated, reading over the runner's shoulder before the kid had even finished handing the paper to Ian. "Like the convoy pack?"
"Command didn't specify," the runner said, clearly eager to be anywhere else. "Just said it's escalated fast. Two patrols reported contact in three days. One didn't check in on schedule."
The barracks went quiet in a way that hadn't happened after any of Alex's jokes all day.
"Vanguard Squad's second real deployment," Ian said finally, folding the orders and tucking them into his jacket. "Get some sleep. All of you. I mean it — Alex, that includes you sneaking off to that supply closet you think nobody knows about."
"That's a training space."
"It has snack wrappers in it."
I went back to my room and checked my deagles one more time before I slept, running a thumb along the faint red seam in each barrel, feeling the crystal answer with that low, patient hum it always gave when I paid it any attention. Then I sat on the floor the way I had every night for months, legs crossed, palms open, and let my mind settle into the familiar work of pulling mana inward.
It came slower than it used to, and faster than it had six months ago — the strange, contradictory math of a core that kept getting deeper even as the effort to fill it stayed roughly the same. I could feel the color of it behind my closed eyes if I concentrated hard enough, an ember-orange warmth that had long since stopped being the dull brick red it started as. Amber, the instructors back at the training camp had called cores like mine, back before I'd outpaced every framework they'd built to measure kids like me. Late-stage, one of them had said once, studying a readout I hadn't been allowed to see the numbers on. Getting close to something new. I hadn't asked what "something new" meant. I'd learned not to ask questions that made people look at me longer than they already did.
I tried not to think too hard about what "coordination" meant coming from something that was supposed to be mindless. I mostly failed, and eventually gave up trying, and let the meditation carry me down into something close enough to sleep that it would have to do.