I watch Blackstone dragging the body from the room, hating how I can already feel myself normalizing all the death. Maybe that’s the most horrifying part of life at Confluence. I can look at a corpse and feel sadness, but not shock. I can feel the selfish relief of knowing I’m not one of the dead. Neither are my friends. Four of us lived when Malakai wanted us dead. It’s harder than it should be to feel the appropriate emotions for the ones who didn’t live.

But if I gave every death here its proper respect, I’d never come up for air. That’s what this place is doing to us. It’s teaching us to keep moving forward, no matter what surrounds us. No matter what hells we’ve just passed through.

The dead girl will join the pile of corpses in the back of my mind—the ones that drift into my thoughts every night and linger like haunting ghosts, a grim backdrop to the recurring nightmares of being trapped in the water with the thing that hunts me.

Davrin and Malakai's other soldiers join together in a small group, several of them glaring occasionally in my direction.

Mireen looks at Malakai’s people and then back at me as she gives me a shoulder to lean on. "You know this means trouble, right? Malakai is probably going to dream of playing jump rope with your intestines tonight.”

I shoot her a look.

She smirks, then lowers her eyes. “Sorry. But you know I’m right. In spirit at least.”

All I can do is nod my head, because she is right. I've just painted an even bigger target on my back. And now the bull's-eye is bright red.

"That was quite the display," a familiar voice comments.

Bastian stands nearby, observing the training session with arms casually folded across his chest. His legacy uniform is immaculate as always, making our sweat-stained training clothes look even more pitiful by comparison.

"What are you doing here?" I ask, immediately suspicious. Other than the instructors, he's the only non-offering in the whole room.

"Observing," he replies smoothly. "As I told you. It's one of my assignments here."

His eyes drop briefly to my left hand, then back to my face. "I see you've been doing your reading. That's good."

With that cryptic note, he walks away.

"Okay," Mireen says, tilting her head. "What was that about?"

I shrug, aiming for nonchalance and probably missing by a mile. "Legacy business, I guess?"

The rest of the training session passes in a blur of sparring matches and drills. With the challenge matches over, the immediate threat of death is gone.

Still, I can feel Malakai's attention never wavering, his gaze a constant pressure between my shoulder blades. More than once, I catch Serena watching from the fire affinities, her fire-marked hands clenching and unclenching like she's imagining them around my throat.