"Why didn't you judge me?" Lucas asked. "When I said I was from Oakridge."
The boy — sitting with his forearms draped over his knees like he owned the ground he sat on — shrugged. "I don't judge people on their past. Everyone's got baggage. It's what they do with it that counts."
"Yeah," Lucas said slowly, turning that over.
"Exactly." He leaned forward. "It's about who you choose to be now. Not what came before."
Lucas studied him a moment. "So who are you, anyway?"
"Name's Drew." A grin split his face. "My people were travelers — settled in Soquawon, little town not far from here." Pride crept into his voice on the last part, like there was a whole history behind it he'd tell if given the room.
Before Lucas could ask, an old man shuffled toward them, weight braced on a gnarled stick. Deep-set wrinkles, eyes too sharp for the rest of him. Drew rose first, straightening out of habit; Lucas followed a half-second behind, unsure why until the old man was close enough that it became obvious he expected it.
The stick came up and pressed lightly against Drew's chest.
"This one's an anomaly," the old man said, and there was nothing playful in how he said it.
He turned to Lucas next. His eyes narrowed, like he was reading something written under Lucas's skin. "Three elements in you. Well spread out." A pause. "Thin chance you're one too."
"What does that mean?" Lucas's heart was going faster than he wanted to admit — half fear, half something that felt embarrassingly close to hope.
"Most people carry more than one element," the old man said. "But they can only ever master one — or, if they're lucky, a blend of two. You—" the stick tapped Lucas's chest once, "—have three, evenly split. If you manage to master all of them together, boy, then yes. You'd be an anomaly."
Lucas felt the word land somewhere under his ribs and stay there, warm and unfamiliar. An orphan from Oakridge, three elements deep, standing where he never thought he'd be allowed to stand. For one dizzy second the whole world felt bigger than it had that morning.
"What does *that* mean for him?" Drew cut in, eyes wide, grinning like Lucas had already won something.
"It means," the old man said, already turning to leave, "that he'd be very hard to kill." He didn't explain further. He simply shuffled off into the crowd, cane tapping stone, leaving the promise hanging unfinished behind him.
Drew clapped a hand on Lucas's shoulder, delighted. "Hard to kill. I like the sound of that." Lucas laughed — a short, surprised sound, like it had escaped before he'd decided to let it.
He hadn't caught his breath from that before an examiner reached them — clipped and businesslike, a folded paper in hand.
"Lucas." The name cut through whatever daze he was in. "Time for your evaluation." He held the paper out like it weighed more than it looked. "Drew continues his trial."
No argument offered, none invited. Lucas glanced at Drew, who only nodded once — *go* — and then the examiner was already walking, and Lucas had no choice but to follow.
They went into a low, dim room. Torches guttered along the walls, throwing more shadow than light. In the center, on a bare table, sat a single sphere — smooth, faintly glowing, like something had been poured into glass and told to keep breathing.
"What is this?" Lucas asked.
"Your trial," the examiner said. "Touch it, and it tells us what's inside you."
Lucas reached out before he could think better of it. The moment his fingers met the surface, something surged up through his arm — hot, then cold, then both at once, a jolt that emptied his lungs. He yanked his hand back, breathing hard.
The examiner didn't look surprised. If anything, he looked satisfied. "Thought so. Your elements are well distributed."
"So what happens now?" Lucas asked, flexing the hand like it might still be burning.
"You go back to today's trials." The examiner was already making a note on his paper. "You'll be handicapped — the Hall of Uncertainty doesn't get its own schedule, so you're rejoining a trial already in progress. But your scoring will account for that. You won't be judged the same as someone who started on time."
That was all the explanation Lucas got. The examiner turned and was gone before Lucas could ask anything else, swallowed by the dark at the edge of the torchlight.
Lucas didn't wait around to process it. He ran.
He found Drew waiting near the mouth of a torch-lit corridor, arms crossed, looking entirely too relaxed for someone who was supposedly mid-trial.
"Why are you just standing here?" Lucas skidded to a stop in front of him. "We're behind — we'll be at a disadvantage!"
"Not on my watch." Drew was already moving, closing the distance, hands closing around Lucas's arm before Lucas fully registered what was happening. "Hang on."
"Wait — what are you—"
Drew spun him once, hard, and let go.
The world tilted sideways — a blur of torchlight and stone — and Lucas had half a second of pure, dumb panic before Drew was under him again, catching him across his back like it was nothing. Lucas barked out a startled laugh despite himself, the fear tipping over into something closer to delight.
"What are you doing?" he shouted, half-laughing, fists knotted in Drew's shirt as the corridor blurred past.
"We're not missing this," Drew called back, grinning like it was a game — like the two of them against a whole trial's worth of odds was the best joke he'd heard all week. "Hang on. You've got this!"
Lucas held on, wind in his face, heart hammering with something that wasn't just fear anymore. Whatever this friendship was — a day old, forged over a shared joke about baggage and pasts — it already felt like the kind worth running headlong into the dark for. He tore through the corridor at a pace that left his stomach somewhere behind him, laughing even as his lungs burned, and for a moment nothing else in the world existed but Drew's back under him and the light growing ahead. And then, rounding a bend, the corridor opened into something worse than either of them expected.
Bodies. A dozen or more candidates down on the stone, some curled around themselves, others simply still. No one was screaming. That was almost worse.
"Drew—" Lucas's voice caught in his throat.
Drew didn't slow down, but his grip on Lucas's legs tightened. "Don't look. We can't stop for it." His jaw was set hard enough that Lucas understood the order was as much for Drew as it was for him.
They ran through it. Lucas kept his eyes forward and his breath even and tried not to think about what he'd just seen, and mostly failed.
Ahead, a seam of light split the dark — a portal, its edges rippling like disturbed water before settling into a steady blue glow. Drew didn't hesitate. He carried them both straight through it.
On the other side: noise. A crowd. Dozens of faces turning toward them at once.
"Did we just—" Lucas started.
"Told you." Drew set him down, grinning, already straightening up like he expected applause. "They're finally seeing what we can do."
The applause didn't come.
What came instead was a wall of sound — shouting, disbelief, outrage rolling toward them in a wave. One voice cut above the rest, raw with fury:
"ARE YOU KIDDING ME? MOST OF US AREN'T EVEN HALFWAY THROUGH, AND THEY'VE ALREADY FINISHED?"
Lucas felt the glares land on him like weight. Every face in the crowd seemed to be doing the same math and arriving at the same resentment. He looked at Drew and caught, just for a second, a flicker of the same doubt he felt himself.
The examiners standing at the edge of the arena didn't so much as shift their weight.
"Not our concern if you can't keep pace with stronger candidates," one of them said, flat and final, and turned away before anyone could answer him.
Drew's hands curled into fists at his sides. "Don't let it get to you," he muttered — though the tightness in his voice said he was working just as hard to convince himself as he was Lucas.
Lucas glanced sideways at him — at the jaw still set with the same stubborn cheer that had carried them both through the dark a few minutes ago — and felt something steady in his chest despite the glares. Whatever came next, he wasn't facing it alone anymore. That, at least, was worth the hundred angry faces staring them down.
They'd cleared the trial. That much was done.
What waited on the other side of it was going to be harder. But for the first time since Oakridge, Lucas thought he might actually be ready for it.