The summons came the next morning, delivered not by voice but by the bracelet itself.
Zion was still half-asleep when the metal at his wrist grew warm. He sat up fast, heart hammering, half-convinced something was wrong — and then a thin rectangle of soft blue light unfolded above his wrist, hovering in the air on its own, text scrolling across it in neat, formal script.
*All confirmed candidates report to the western courtyard by midday. Departure briefing to follow.*
He stared at it for a long moment, not quite processing that a piece of jewelry had just projected words into the air in front of him.
Kellan's voice carried through the thin dormitory wall a second later. "Zion. Zion, tell me your bracelet just did the floating light thing."
"It did."
"Okay. Okay, good. I thought I broke it. I may have hit it against the doorframe."
"Why would you hit it against a doorframe?"
"I was excited!"
Zion pressed his palm to his face and got up.
---
The western courtyard was already crowded by the time the three of them arrived, a hundred candidates gathered in the hall with bright light shining as if there is a sun in here, bracelets catching the light in unison as more projections blinked awake across the crowd, murmurs rising every time one activated for the first time. At the head of the courtyard stood a raised dais, and on it, a broad-shouldered man Zion didn't recognize — not an official in silver robes, but dressed in something closer to a traveler's coat, heavy and scorched at the cuffs, like it had seen rougher work than paperwork.
Mira leaned toward Zion. "That's not an examiner."
"No," Zion agreed. "Someone new."
The man waited for the murmuring to settle before speaking, his voice rough but carrying easily across the courtyard.
"My name is Corin. I'm not an official, and I'm not here to test you." He let that land a moment. "I'm here because two days from now, all of you are leaving this Tower. Permanently. You'll be briefed properly once you're inside the Academy itself — I'm not the one who explains the details, and I'd rather not get it wrong and have you all show up already confused."
That drew a ripple of uneasy laughter from the crowd.
"What I *can* tell you," Corin continued, "is that where you're going isn't within walking distance. It isn't within flying distance either. You'll be boarding a vessel, and the crossing takes three days. Beyond that — ask again once you've arrived. I promise the people waiting for you there explain it better than I could."
Kellan raised a hand. "Question."
Corin's eyes flicked to him. "Go on."
"Is there food on this vessel?"
A short, surprised laugh rippled through the nearest candidates. Corin's mouth twitched, the closest thing to amusement he'd shown so far. "There's food."
"Then I have no further questions."
Mira pressed a palm to her face. "Both of you are like this. I don't know how I ended up surrounded by it."
"Both of us?" Kellan repeated, mock-offended. "I resent being lumped in with him. I eat like a normal person. He eats like the food owes him money."
"I don't know what that means," Zion said.
"Neither do I. But it felt true when I said it."
Zion allowed himself a small, tired smile and didn't argue the point, mostly because there wasn't much to argue. He'd noticed it himself, if he was honest — the way a full plate never quite felt like enough, the way hunger crept back faster than it reasonably should have after a meal that would have left most people uncomfortably full. He'd never thought much of it beyond a joke at his own expense. Kellan liked food. Zion, apparently, needed it in a way that went slightly past liking.
Neither of them dwelled on it. There wasn't time to, with Corin still finishing his announcements — the vessel would leave from a separate courtyard, hidden behind a gate none of them had noticed on the walk in; nothing needed to be packed, since the bracelets apparently handled storage; departure itself was set for two days out, giving everyone time to properly recover first.
Then he stepped down from the dais without further ceremony, and the crowd began to break apart into smaller, buzzing groups.
---
"Two days," Mira said, once they'd drifted back toward the plaza, away from the thinning crowd. "What are we supposed to do with two entire days?"
"Sleep," Kellan said immediately. "Eat. Sleep again."
"I was thinking of something more productive."
"Productive is a strong word for a person who just survived a gravity formation designed to crush her."
Zion, half-listening, had gone quiet, something turning over in his mind. "We should find Captain Roran."
Both of them looked at him.
"The one who brought us from Blue Star Village," Zion said. "He'd still be here somewhere, wouldn't he? He came with the whole group."
Kellan's expression shifted, some of the joking falling away. "I hadn't even thought about him since we got here."
"I have," Mira admitted quietly. "A few times. Wondered if he even knew how any of us did."
"Then let's find him," Zion said. "We have two days. We might as well spend some of it on someone who actually got us here."
---
It took the better part of an hour asking around the Tower's lower halls before a dockmaster pointed them toward the visiting quarters — a modest wing near the outer courtyards, set aside for the adults who'd escorted candidates from their home villages and were now, evidently, waiting out the same two-day gap before their own journeys home.
They found Captain Roran on a low balcony overlooking the training grounds, a cup of something steaming in his weathered hands, looking exactly as Zion remembered him — broad through the shoulders, gray threading through a beard that had never quite been tamed, eyes that missed very little. He looked up as the three of them approached, and something in his face changed immediately, breaking into an expression none of them had ever actually seen on him before.
He looked, unmistakably, proud.
"Well," Roran said, setting his cup down and rising to his feet. "Look what the Academy decided not to chew up and spit out."
"Captain," Kellan said, grinning as he closed the distance first, clasping the older man's offered forearm. "You look exactly the same. Somehow more tired, though."
"That's what happens when you spend two days not knowing whether the children you personally vouched for are alive or dead," Roran said, though there was no real edge in it. His gaze moved past Kellan to Mira, then settled on Zion last, lingering there a beat longer than the others. "All three of you made it through. I heard the rankings this morning."
"You heard already?" Mira asked, surprised.
"Word travels fast among the escorts. Especially when it's good news." Roran gestured for them to sit, settling back into his own chair with a grunt that suggested his knees remembered every one of his own younger years more than he'd like. "Rank twelve. Rank nineteen. Rank forty-one." He looked at Kellan when he said the last number, and something warm crossed his face. "Not bad for a boy who once fell out of a tree trying to impress a girl who wasn't even watching."
Kellan went red. "That story does not need to follow me across dimensions."
"I'll tell it as many times as I please. I earned the right the day I had to explain to your mother why you came home with a broken arm."
Mira laughed, and even Zion's mouth twitched.
Roran's expression settled into something quieter as the laughter faded, his eyes moving between the three of them with the particular weight of someone who'd spent two anxious days imagining every possible version of this moment, including several that didn't end this well.
"You should know," he said, "you three are the entire reason Blue Star Village's name means something outside its own borders now."
Zion frowned slightly. "What do you mean?"
"I mean I brought three candidates to this Academy from a village most people on this Tower have never heard of," Roran said. "Three. Not seven, not ten — three. And all three of you didn't just survive. You passed the first stage. You passed the Pressure Test. You ranked twelve, nineteen, and forty-one out of two hundred and six." He shook his head slowly, something like disbelief still lingering beneath the pride. "I've escorted candidates to this Academy for eleven years. Most years, I bring one or two hopefuls and count myself lucky if either of them makes it past the first day. I've never once brought a group this small and watched every single one of them walk out the other side ranked. Not once."
The weight of that settled over all three of them differently. Mira looked down at her hands. Kellan, for once, didn't have a joke ready. Zion simply sat with it, turning the number over — three for three, out of a village most of the Tower had never heard of — and feeling something unfamiliar and quiet settle into his chest.
"Rank twelve especially," Roran continued, his gaze sharpening as it settled on Zion. "Out of two hundred and six candidates who entered that Pressure Test. That's not luck. That's not even just talent. That's a young man who understands how to think when everyone else around him has stopped being able to."
Zion didn't quite know how to respond to that, so he said nothing.
"I mean it as a warning as much as a compliment," Roran continued, more serious now, leaning forward slightly in his chair. "Wherever this Academy is taking you next, it's not going to get easier because you're clever, or because you have good instincts, or because you've got two people beside you who'd walk into fire for you." His eyes moved briefly to Kellan and Mira before returning to Zion. "It's going to get harder specifically *because* you're capable of more than most. The Academy doesn't waste its worst challenges on candidates who can't survive them. It saves those for the ones who can."
Kellan shifted uncomfortably. "That's a genuinely terrifying way to say congratulations."
"I'm not in the business of comforting lies, boy. I never have been." Roran's expression softened again, some of the weight easing. "But I am proud of you. All three of you. Whatever comes next, you've already proven something most candidates never get the chance to prove at all — you can be tested past what feels survivable, and still choose to be decent about it." His eyes lingered on Kellan a moment. "I heard about the boy in the maze. And the woman you caught before she fell. That doesn't go unnoticed, not by me and apparently not by the Academy either."
Kellan looked down at his hands, uncharacteristically quiet.
"Where will you go from here, Captain?" Mira asked, gently steering the conversation somewhere less heavy.
"Home, eventually. Not for another two days — same as you, waiting on my own transport back to Blue Star." He smiled faintly. "It's a good life, when it's not being interrupted by worrying myself half to death over some reckless teenagers."
"We're not that reckless," Kellan protested.
"You fell out of a tree."
"That was *years* ago."
"You'll always have fallen out of that tree, Kellan. That's simply a fact of your existence now."
Mira laughed again, and this time even Zion joined her, quiet but genuine.
They stayed with Roran well into the afternoon, the conversation drifting easily between the three of them and the old captain — stories from the village, questions about what waited beyond the crossing that Roran couldn't fully answer either, small quiet moments where nobody said much of anything and simply sat together, grateful in a way none of them quite had words for. At one point Roran produced a small pouch of dried fruit from Blue Star Village itself, insisting Zion take most of it "since apparently you need it more than the rest of them combined," which made Kellan laugh so hard he nearly choked, and even Zion couldn't argue the point.
By the time they finally rose to leave, the sky beginning to shift toward evening, Roran walked them partway back toward the dormitory wing, his pace slower than it once might have been, though none of them mentioned it.
At the corridor's edge, he stopped, and something in his expression turned serious once more.
"Whatever's waiting for you out there," he said, "remember where you came from. Blue Star Village isn't much to look at. Never has been. But it raised three people who walked into an Academy built to break geniuses, and came out the other side still willing to carry someone else's weight when it mattered." He looked between them one last time. "That's worth more than any rank on that board."
"We'll remember," Mira said quietly.
Kellan nodded, uncharacteristically without a joke to soften it.
Zion simply said, "Thank you, Captain. For bringing us here. For everything before that too."
Roran's weathered face creased into something that might have been the beginning of tears, quickly and gruffly suppressed. "Go on, get out of here before you make an old man embarrass himself in a hallway." He waved a hand at them, already turning back the way they'd come. "Two days. Eat something. Sleep. And Zion—"
Zion paused, looking back.
"Eat *more* than something," Roran said, the corner of his mouth twitching. "I mean it."
Kellan burst out laughing, and even Zion managed a real smile as the three of them made their way back through the enormous corridors of the Origin Tower, the weight of the last two days feeling, for the first time, a little lighter than before.
---
**A/N:** A little detour before the real journey begins — figured Zion, Kellan, and Mira deserved a proper goodbye with the man who got them here in the first place. Three from Blue Star Village is nothing to sneeze at! 👀 Two days left before they leave the planet for good. Thanks for reading, see you next chapter!
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