[LEVEL 6 EVOLUTION AVAILABLE]

  [CONFIRM: YES]

  She pressed yes and braced herself, shoulders pulling in and fingers pressing into the dirt, jaw tightening on its own the way it always did before the pain arrived.

  Here it comes.

  She waited. Eyes closed, teeth together, every muscle already tensed.

  Nothing happened.

  She opened one eye. Then the other. She stayed braced anyway because the last thing she needed was to relax and have it hit her like a wall, but after a few more seconds she slowly uncurled her fingers from the dirt and sat up slightly.

  Something was happening. She could feel it, just not where she expected. It moved across her face, slow and diffuse, like a temperature change happening just beneath the skin, and she frowned and reached up and pressed her fingers against her cheek trying to locate it.

  Normal. She moved her fingertips to her temple and pressed there. Normal. She ran her hand along her jaw, her forehead, the bridge of her nose.

  Where is it. What is this.

  Her eyes started itching.

  She rubbed them with the back of her hand. Didn't help. She pressed her fingers harder against her eyelids, digging in, trying to reach whatever was happening somewhere behind them, and when that didn't work either she dropped her hands and blinked hard.

  Come on.

  Her eyes watered immediately, tears running down her face, and she wiped them roughly with her sleeve and made a face.

  Great, now I'm crying.

  Then dry, so dry that each blink scraped against them like there was nothing left to protect them, and she blinked faster and faster trying to fix it, blinking until her eyes felt raw and useless.

  What is happening to my eyes.

  She brought both hands up to cover her eyes. It didn't matter. The black came anyway, swallowing everything at once, and she blinked behind her palms just to check, blinked again, and couldn't tell the difference.

  She turned her face slightly away from Reth and kept her voice low enough that only the dirt could hear it. "Tera. I can't see."

  No pain at all?

  "No. Just the dark and something I don't know how to describe."

  Tell me what you feel. I'm here.

  She heard Reth shift his weight a few meters away and held up one hand toward the sound without looking. He went still and didn't push.

  She whispered again. "Completely dark, can't see my hands, can't see anything. No pain. Just this feeling like my eyes are adjusting to something."

  She waited, hands still covering her face.

  Then something appeared in the black. Small, silver, a circle catching light that wasn't there, and she went completely still and stared at it. It hovered in the center of her vision, clean and metallic, and something about its geometry pulled at her recognition immediately.

  I know that shape.

  The rings on her palms. The same three circles nested inside each other, smallest at the center, and as she watched two more formed around it, one outside the other, each ring rotating at a slightly different speed, segments breaking into glowing arcs that slid smoothly around the center in a slow mechanism that looked like it had been waiting a long time to be unlocked.

  She whispered. "Three rings, silver, rotating. They look like the ones in my palms and everything else is still black."

  The possibility of physical mutations during evolution is real. We saw it with Prince Borin when his arm changed.

  She kept her eyes on the rings and whispered. "I hope there's a limit to how far this goes."

  We keep observing.

  The rings turned slow and then the dark began lifting around them. Edges first, shapes before color, the outline of trees emerging from nothing, bark resolving into texture, the ground under her knees coming back. She blinked, kept blinking, and the world returned all at once.

  She sat back and let out a slow breath.

  No pain. Not even close to pain, just that strange discomfort and now it's over.

  Reth was standing a few meters away with his back half-turned to her, eyes on the tree line. She touched her morral and felt Napoleon's weight inside it, both halves wrapped carefully in cloth, and the ache that moved through her at the contact wasn't the kind evolution could fix.

  She kept her voice low. "Tera, I don't feel anything different. No change in my thinking, nothing in my body. Could this be another internal evolution like before?"

  We keep observing.

  She pushed herself to her feet and looked at Reth. "Done."

  He walked over and crouched in front of her, studying her face for a moment before speaking. "The pain?"

  Unauthorized duplication: this narrative has been taken without consent. Report sightings.

  "None this time." She watched his expression shift, that slight change around his eyes that meant he'd noticed something.

  "What?”

  "Your eyes," he said.

  "What about them."

  "They've always been green."

  Past tense?

  "What do you mean they've always been green, just describe what you see, I have no mirrors out here."

  He looked at her carefully. "They're still green," he said, "but there are three rings inside them, silver, and they're rotating. Three segmented rings of light, each one larger than the last, broken into arcs that keep moving around the center."

  She stared at him.

  Three rotating rings inside my pupils, sitting there in my eyes where anyone can see them, where Reth can see them right now, brilliant.

  "And what are they doing," she said, and then stopped herself because she already knew exactly why that was a pointless question.

  Reth looked at her with precisely the expression of someone who had absolutely no idea.

  "Never mind," she said.

  I'll figure it out when there's time, which is not now.

  She got to her feet and brushed the dirt from her knees.

  Reth picked up his pack, took a last sip from the water skin, and looked at her. "We can't wait any longer. The fire gave us a window and we're losing it."

  He was right and she knew it. She adjusted her pack, and followed him into the trees.

  They moved low and slow, using the trunks for cover, stopping every few minutes to press against bark and listen. The smoke from the church camp drifted through the canopy above them, a dark column going east, and around them the zone had that particular quiet it got when something had just happened and hadn't settled yet. She kept her hand close to the nano thread wrapped around her wrist and her eyes moving through the gaps between the trees.

  The flying machines. That's what we need.

  They walked for close to thirty minutes, slow enough to stay silent, slow enough that when she heard the first sound she had time to react. Footsteps, not close but not distant, and the particular sound of something heavy being moved over uneven ground, wheels catching on roots, the creak of weight and rope. She touched Reth's arm and he stopped instantly.

  She was still moving when it happened.

  The color left the world.

  She stopped mid-step and grabbed the nearest trunk with both hands because for a second she genuinely thought something had gone wrong with her eyes again, thought the blindness was coming back, but this was different. This wasn't dark. Everything was still there, every shape and depth and shadow, just stripped. The trees were grey. The soil was grey. Her own hands when she looked down at them were grey, like she was looking at a photograph of her hands instead of her actual hands.

  What is this…

  She blinked hard. The grey stayed. She pressed her fingers against her eyes and opened them again and the grey world was still there, and she stood there gripping the trunk and trying to understand what her own eyes were doing to her.

  Is this the ability. Is this what the rings do.

  Then she saw the red.

  Through the trees, five men in Vorminian armor were moving in a loose line, two of them pushing a cart built from stripped branches and lashed rope, and on that cart, vivid and blazing against the colorless world around it, something was red. A deep, specific, unmistakable red

  She knew that red.

  No.

  A quarter of her ship. Scarlet metal with no seams anywhere on the surface, just a fragment now, sitting on a cart built by people who had no idea what they were carrying, and it was alive. She could see it, something moving inside the metal like veins beneath skin, a faint pulse of light shifting deep inside the fragment as the cart rolled over uneven ground

  It's still running. Something inside it is still running.

  Her grip on the trunk went white.

  I never even looked for it. I just assumed it was gone.

  A second cart followed behind the first, four more men, and on it were pieces she also recognized, panels and sections of interior wall. She looked at them expecting the same red pulse.

  Nothing. Grey and flat and still, the same colorless tone as everything else around them.

  Dead. Those parts are dead.

  She held completely still until both carts had moved through and the sound of them faded into the trees. The grey world faded with them, color seeping back into everything around her slowly, and she stood there with her hand still on the trunk.

  Reth glanced at her. She shook her head slightly and they kept moving.

  When the camp sounds had faded completely and they were deep enough in the trees that she felt safe stopping, she touched his arm again. He turned.

  "Two minutes," she said quietly. "I need to test something."

  He scanned the trees around them, then positioned himself where he could watch both directions without a word.

  She opened her pack carefully and lifted Napoleon out, both halves wrapped in cloth, and set them on the ground in front of her. Reth saw him and his expression shifted.

  "I'm sorry," he said quietly.

  "I'm going to fix him," she said, and meant every word of it.

  She looked at Napoleon's pieces and thought about the ship fragment. Her other abilities had become part of her over time, as natural as breathing, and she wanted this one to be the same. She concentrated, the same way she'd learned to call the blue filaments or activate the forge, and this time the ability responded.

  The world went grey around her again.

  Napoleon was grey too, both halves of him, the broken casing and the folded legs and the dark lenses of his eyes, all of it flat and colorless and still.

  Of course. He's off. He has been off since I shut him down.

  She didn't want to turn him on to test the theory, not here, not now. She put him carefully back in the cloth and reached for the nano thread wrapped around her wrist instead. She unwound it slowly and held it stretched between both hands.

  She activated the vision.

  The thread went orange.

  Not grey, not even close to grey, a deep warm orange that ran the full length of it, and along that length she could see movement, something microscopic shifting from one end to the other in a slow continuous flow, something she knew existed but had never once been able to perceive before. Not what was moving, exactly, just the fact of movement, the faint warm pulse of something alive inside the material that never stopped.

  She held it for a moment longer, watching it, then let the vision fade and rewound the thread around her wrist as the color came back to the world around her.

  Cybernetics. Machinery. Anything with energy moving through it.

  She put her pack back on and stood. "We can keep moving."

  Reth fell into step beside her without asking anything.

  He trusted me first.

  She glanced sideways at him moving quiet and steady through the trees.

  He deserves the same.

  She stopped walking.

  "Reth." He stopped and looked at her. "Before we get to the camp there's something I need to show you. It's relevant to the plan and I should have said something earlier."

  She opened her jacket and unclipped the hammer from the weapon support at her hip, took it in both hands, and held it out toward him. She could feel the slight tension in her own arms, the particular anxiety of showing someone something you've been hiding and not knowing which way it goes.

  "This," she said. "This is what I need you to see."

  Several seconds passed. Reth looked at the hammer, then at her, then back at the hammer, and his expression moved through something she couldn't quite read.

  "That's a hammer," he said. "Why are you showing me a hammer."

  That's it? That's his reaction? Just... a hammer?

  "Do you know what kind of hammer it is."

  He looked at it again with the expression of someone trying very hard to be respectful. "A hammer. I'm now concerned about the plan."

  Of course.

  She looked at the hammer, then back at him.

  For him it's just a hammer.

  She looked at him with complete seriousness. "Reth. This hammer is a First Alloy."

  For the first time since she'd met him, the serious and controlled and utterly composed man standing in front of her laughed. Not a small sound, not a polite exhale, but a real laugh, sudden and genuine, the kind that surprised even him.

  She blinked.

  I've never heard him laugh.

  She looked at him, really looked, and for just a moment saw something completely different underneath the warrior she'd been traveling with.

  She stood there holding the hammer and stared at him.

  A First Alloy. And he thinks it's a regular hammer.

  She waited for him to finish.