The auxiliary building had proven inadequate within twelve hours. By the second day it was clear the situation was unsustainable, which was the word the Academy's administration kept using in conversations that Sylas overheard, as though naming the situation accurately was the first step toward resolving it rather than a substitute for doing so.

  Dean Thorne's solution was to convert the gymnasium into temporary housing. Not ideal, he had announced to the assembled student body, but necessary until repairs were completed. Students would need to make do.

  Making do turned out to mean sleeping on thin mats spread across the gymnasium floor, eighty students in a space designed for athletic training and equipped accordingly — high ceilings, stone floors, no insulation, minimal heating that had never been designed to maintain habitable temperature because athletes were expected to generate their own warmth through movement. The mats were repurposed training equipment, barely thicker than the wool they'd wrapped over them, doing very little against the cold that came up from the stone beneath.

  Sylas had spent the first night cataloguing the discomforts with the automatic thoroughness of someone who catalogued things. The floor's irregularities through the thin mat. The cold spot where moisture had collected under the northeast corner, spreading by the hour. The way sound moved in the echoing space — eighty people's worth of breathing and shifting and coughing amplified and reflected, no pocket of quiet anywhere.

  And the noise. There was no point at which the gymnasium was properly quiet. Someone was always coughing, shifting, crying, murmuring to someone adjacent. Sleep arrived in fragments when it arrived at all, interrupted and insufficient, leaving everyone more depleted each morning than the night before.

  Two days until the examination. Sylas lay on his mat and felt the cold working through the blanket and thought about the thirty-four percent target and the five minutes of cultivating with deliberate inefficiency and the carefully engineered mana projection, and tried to calculate whether any of it would be impacted by accumulated sleep deprivation and cold and the particular exhaustion of being in conditions that were actively wearing people down.

  Next to him, Arthur shifted under his blanket, trying to find a configuration that worked on the hard floor. He had been quiet all evening, which was not Arthur's default state.

  "You okay?" Sylas asked, keeping his voice low.

  "Cold," Arthur said. The word came out rough and slightly congested, the quality of someone who had been sleeping in damp conditions for two days. "Just cold. I'm fine."

  He was not fine. Sylas could hear it in the wet quality of his breathing — not a chest cold that had been accumulating for a few hours but something that had established itself and was settling in. Could see it in how Arthur's shivering did not stop even when he pulled the blanket tighter, the shivering of a body trying to manage a fever rather than just trying to get warm.

  "Get some sleep," Sylas said. "Study group in the morning."

  "Yeah." Then, after a pause in which Arthur seemed to be deciding whether to say something: "Sylas. Thank you. For being a good friend through all of this."

  The gratitude made something twist in Sylas's chest that he had learned to identify over the past few weeks as the specific discomfort of receiving something genuine under false pretences. Arthur thought he was being a good friend. Arthur thought Sylas's quiet presence and steady support and patient attendance at study sessions was friendship freely given. He didn't know about the correct answers that Sylas had been holding back, the structural knowledge sitting in Sylas's notebook in small text that would never be shared, the competence that was being carefully concealed from everyone including the person offering gratitude for it.

  "Get some sleep," Sylas said again, because he did not have an honest response and would not give a dishonest one.

  Morning came in the way mornings came in the gymnasium — the bell, the collective reluctant sound of eighty people being forced to consciousness before their bodies wanted it, condensation on the walls and breath visible in the air and the cold having asserted itself through the night as thoroughly as it had promised to.

  Arthur did not get up.

  When Sylas looked over, his friend was curled on his mat with a quality of stillness that was different from sleep — the careful stillness of someone trying not to move because movement cost something. Shivering, but under a sheen of sweat despite the cold. Both at once, which was the body's fever response, the thermostat broken and trying to correct in two directions simultaneously.

  "Arthur."

  "Give me a minute," Arthur said. His voice was worse — thicker, the congestion having deepened overnight, the strain of producing the words audible. "Just need a minute."

  Sylas put his hand on Arthur's forehead. Hot in the specific way of a fever that had been running for hours, the skin clammy with the sweat of a body working hard to manage it. The blue tinge at his lips was faint but present. His breathing had the rattling quality of someone with fluid developing in the lower lungs, the sound of a respiratory system beginning to lose the capacity it needed.

  "You're fevered. You need the healer."

  "Can't," Arthur said. The word was resigned in the specific way of someone who had already thought through the options and arrived at the same conclusion multiple times. "Medical treatment goes on the debt. I'm already running a scholarship deficit. Adding healer fees on top—" He didn't finish. He didn't need to. More debt was more time bound to the Academy, more examinations to survive, more opportunities for the system to process him.

  He tried to sit up. The coughing came before he was fully upright — harsh and wet and deep, the kind that bent him forward over his knees and kept him there, unable to stop, each attempted breath triggering the next one. It went on for close to a minute. When it subsided he was shaking, eyes watering, the colour having left his face entirely.

  Around the gymnasium, other students were showing similar signs. Sylas counted without meaning to — at least a dozen clearly ill, more showing early symptoms, the wet conditions of the flooded dormitory followed by two nights in the cold gymnasium having provided everything respiratory illness needed to establish itself and spread. It was the kind of calculation that his mind ran automatically: infection rate, conditions for propagation, time to peak illness, duration.

  He helped Arthur to his feet. Arthur leaned on him with a trust that was uncomplicated and that Sylas accepted with the specific discomfort it had come to produce.

  Morning assembly. Dean Thorne with the forced confidence of someone who had decided that projecting normalcy was more important than acknowledging the gap between the projection and the reality.

  "Repairs are progressing well. We anticipate dormitory access within the week. Please continue to bear with the temporary arrangements." A pause. "Additionally: the examination proceeds as scheduled in two days. Illness does not constitute grounds for postponement. Students unable to attend will be recorded as absent and subject to standard academic consequences."

  Standard academic consequences meant Reclamation. Attend sick or face removal. There was no third option in the Dean's announcement because the Academy's administration had not constructed one.

  Sylas looked at the sick students standing in the assembly line and did the calculation he had been trying not to do: a week of gymnasium conditions with an illness spreading at its current rate would have approximately forty percent of the student body impaired. Some severely. Some dangerously, given the combination of respiratory illness, cold, inadequate nutrition, and the physical demands of cultivation practice on compromised bodies. He had seen this pattern before, at Celestial Logistics, when the server room fire had disrupted the ventilation systems and twelve workers had developed respiratory complications before anyone had organised proper medical response.

  This story is posted elsewhere by the author. Help them out by reading the authentic version.

  The study group met in the library — one of the few heated spaces, the warmth of it landing like something physical after the gymnasium's sustained cold. Mae, Jin, Kara, Devon, Arthur, Sylas. All of them showing the same general quality: depleted, carrying the weight of two bad nights and a deteriorating situation on top of an examination that would not be postponed.

  Mae tried to open a review of circulation pathways. Her voice faded before she'd finished the first sentence. She looked at her notes and then at the group and then back at her notes, and the confidence that had been her consistent contribution to these sessions was simply not present. The notes were still organised. The knowledge was still there. But the energy required to deploy it in the service of the group had been consumed by the gymnasium and the cold and the watching of people she cared about getting sick in front of her.

  Devon's notes were water-damaged from the dormitory flooding and he had not found the energy to recreate them. He kept apologising — for the state of his notes, for not having better information, for the inadequacy of what he had to offer. Each apology was unnecessary. Each one was offered anyway, because Devon's coping mechanism for inadequacy was to acknowledge it comprehensively.

  Jin had the appearance of someone who had not slept properly in days, which was accurate, and whose body was now operating on the reserves that sleep deprivation left when it had been going on long enough. His hands shook when he turned pages. He had lost the thread of the previous conversation twice and been gently redirected both times.

  Arthur lasted twenty minutes before the coughing forced him to excuse himself. He came back five minutes later looking paler than when he'd left.

  "This is impossible," Kara said. She had not become ill yet, which was perhaps the reason she retained the capacity to name the situation clearly. Her voice was at the edge of tears — the edge it had been at since the collapse, maintained by the sustained effort of someone who had decided not to cry in front of people and was finding that decision increasingly costly to maintain. "How are we supposed to prepare for an examination in two days when we can't sleep, can't focus, everyone is getting sick and the exam is going to happen regardless—"

  Her voice broke. She put her face in her hands.

  "We'll manage," Mae said, reaching for Kara's shoulder. The gesture was correct — warm, present, the right response. But the words lacked the conviction that had made Mae's encouragement useful in earlier sessions. She was saying what the situation required to be said rather than what she believed.

  "Do we have to?" Jin said. His voice was flat in the way that came after a certain point of exhaustion — not resigned, exactly, but having shed the performance of optimism because the energy for it was simply gone. "Some of us aren't going to pass. Not like this. Maybe it's better to just—"

  "Don't," Mae said, with a sharpness that was the last resource she had. "We are all passing. All six of us." A pause. "All six of us."

  She said it twice because once had not sounded like she believed it.

  Sylas excused himself early. Claimed cultivation practice. No one questioned it — they were all too far into their own situations to spend attention on his.

  He walked through the Academy grounds without a specific destination, which was not his usual mode. He walked because movement helped his mind work and because the gymnasium's noise and cold and collective suffering had become difficult to sit inside.

  The dormitory was ahead of him before he had consciously intended to go there. He stopped and looked at it. Workers had gone for the day. The temporary supports were in place. Water had mostly stopped running from the damaged section. The building sat in the early evening light looking like a building that had had a significant amount of visible work done to it, which was not the same as looking like a building that was safe.

  He traced the failed rune network with his analytical sight, the way he had been doing every time he looked at the building. The same points of failure. The same cascade risk. The same invisible argument for why declaring the building habitable without addressing the rune infrastructure was a decision that was going to produce a second collapse, potentially worse than the first, at a time and in conditions that could not be predicted.

  He thought about Arthur's lungs. The rattle that had gotten worse through the day. The blue tinge at his lips that was the body's oxygen-management system showing its strain. The fever that was not breaking because the conditions for breaking it — warmth, rest, dry air — were not available in the gymnasium and would not be available until the dormitory was accessible again.

  He thought about the study group. Kara at the edge of tears for the third straight day. Devon apologising for water-damaged notes. Jin losing the thread of conversations. Mae saying things she didn't believe because someone had to say them.

  He thought about the full rune network — everything that needed to be repaired, the weeks of work, the resources required, the impossibility of doing it without being noticed. And then he thought about the smaller version of that problem.

  Not the entire network. Just one rune. The primary support beam's reinforcement formation — the one whose failure had initiated the collapse, the one whose restoration would allow the beam to be properly installed and the visible structural crisis to be resolved. One rune, at night, when the workers were gone and the students were in the gymnasium and no one was watching the building.

  He could make it look old. Partially worn. Like the formation had been degraded but had never fully failed — some evidence of historical function rather than fresh carving. The workers would install the new beam, the rune would provide reinforcement, the building's structural situation would be materially improved. Not resolved — the rest of the network was still failed, the underlying issues still present — but improved enough to make re-occupation defensible, to get students out of the gymnasium, to give Arthur somewhere warm to recover.

  Nobody would examine the rune closely. The workers hadn't noticed it was there. The instructors hadn't checked the maintenance formations in decades. A partial improvement in the beam's load-bearing performance would be attributed to the quality of the replacement timber, or the stability of the temporary supports, or simple good fortune.

  One small fix. A compromise between the competing demands of his situation — not the clean solution, not the full repair, not the disclosure that would address the problem properly and expose him completely, but something in the middle. The kind of middle ground that his previous life had taught him was usually unsatisfying but was sometimes the only available option.

  He stood there as the last light left the sky and acknowledged what he was going to do.

  Tonight, after the gymnasium was quiet, he would come back to this building. He would find the collapsed beam. He would carve a maintenance rune — carefully, partially, with the appearance of age rather than freshness — and he would do the first competent thing he had done in this world that anyone would be able to see evidence of.

  The rationalisation that it was small enough to go unnoticed felt, as he examined it honestly, like the rationalisations he had made at Celestial Logistics. The ones that had felt comfortable and had been wrong. But the alternative — staying invisible while Arthur's lungs filled, while the gymnasium wore the study group down, while the building waited for its second failure — was also wrong, and wrong in the direction he had already been once and had not come back from.

  He stood there for a moment longer in the cooling air, holding both sides of the decision at once — the risk of acting, the cost of not acting — and then let it settle. The decision was made. It had been made sometime in the past hour without a clean moment he could point to, which was how decisions that came from something other than pure calculation usually arrived.

  He started walking back toward the gymnasium.

  "There you are." Arthur's voice, from a bench near the path. He had apparently come outside for air. He looked better for having been out of the gymnasium's noise, but still feverish, still careful about his breathing. "Thought you'd gotten lost."

  "Just thinking," Sylas said.

  "About the exam?"

  "Among other things."

  Arthur nodded slowly. He looked at the damaged dormitory across the courtyard, his expression carrying the particular quality of someone looking at something they depended on and were not sure would be there when they needed it.

  "I hate this," Arthur said simply. "The cold, the noise, not being able to sleep, worrying that everyone's going to be too sick to sit the examination. I hate all of it."

  "I know," Sylas said.

  "But I'm still going to pass," Arthur said, with the specific quiet stubbornness of someone who has decided something as a matter of character rather than confidence. "We both are. We've worked too hard not to."

  Sylas looked at him — the fever, the careful breathing, the determined set of his jaw — and felt the shape of the decision he had already made settle into something firmer.

  "Yes," he said. "We are."

  They went back inside. After an hour, when the gymnasium's collective noise had subsided into the fitful almost-quiet of people attempting sleep, Sylas got up.

  He picked up his satchel. He walked quietly through the sleeping room and out into the cold night air. He crossed the courtyard toward the dormitory.

  One rune. Just one. What could possibly go wrong.

  He did not answer the question honestly, because the honest answer was a list, and lists of things that could go wrong were most useful before decisions rather than after them, and the decision was already made.