Chapter 348: The Creed of Nothing (5).

Nobody wanted to speak about the trials directly. Nero had noticed this and found it understandable. Speaking about them at length involved the acknowledgment of concrete odds, and the concrete odds were not numbers that invited optimism — two hundred candidates, twenty survivors at the upper estimate, and the shape of the mathematics in between was not a thing most people found improved by repeated examination. Better to train, eat, sleep, and keep moving, which was the only advice that remained valid regardless of the calculation.

Sergeant Vane’s sessions had sharpened in the final week — not in the sense of becoming harder, exactly, since hard had been the baseline from the beginning, but in the sense of becoming more specific, more focused on detail over volume; less time on drilling patterns that Nero already held in muscle memory and more time on the difficult particular problems that arose in the space between patterns, in the transition moments, in the choices made when the shape of a situation changed faster than a prepared response could account for.

“You drop your elbow when you step left,” Vane told him, on the second morning of the final three days, during a session that had begun before the full light was in the sky and showed no particular inclination toward ending. He did not demonstrate it as a correction — he stepped to Nero’s left and used the dropped elbow as the entry point for a movement that put Nero on the ground with a flat impact that drove the morning air out of his lungs.

Nero lay there for a moment, staring at the grey sky above the courtyard walls, and then got up.

“When you drop it,” Vane continued, as though Nero had not just been put in the dirt, “you give away the shoulder. A man with a shorter weapon than yours will be inside your guard before you can recover.” He watched Nero take his stance again, his expression carrying its customary flatness. “You’ve been doing it since the third day. I was letting it develop to see if it would correct itself.”

“It didn’t,” Nero observed.

“No,” Vane agreed. “It didn’t.”

They worked on it until it stopped happening, which took the better part of an hour and a half, during which time two of the other candidates arrived for their own scheduled session and stood at the yard’s edge in the particular patient stillness of people who understood that interrupting was not a viable option.

Nero did not look at them.

When Vane finally stepped back and signaled the end of the session with the small gesture he used — a single lowering of the right hand — Nero realized that his left shoulder was aching with the deep bone-seated quality that lived below the level Vineheart typically addressed, and that the morning had become early afternoon while he wasn’t paying attention to anything except the elbow.

He retrieved his water from the yard’s edge and drank it standing, watching the other candidates take the space that had been his, and allowed himself the particular quiet of a man who had nothing left to prepare for.

The honest truth of it was that he was not ready. This was not the same thing as being unprepared — those two conditions looked identical from certain angles and were essentially opposite in character. He had done what could be done in the time that had been available. He had absorbed everything Vane had seen fit to give him, had applied it with the consistency of someone whose alternatives to succeeding were considerably worse than the trials themselves, and had arrived at this point with a body that was more functional than it had been and a working understanding of his own capabilities and limits that had not existed at the start.

But ready implied a threshold — some specific point at which a person could look at what lay ahead and say that the gap between themselves and it had been sufficiently closed, and Nero had never been able to identify such a threshold with any confidence, which meant he had stopped looking for it some months ago and simply continued working in its absence.

He found Doctor Lyon in the medical wing that evening, as he sometimes did, occupying the small side room that Lyon had made a habit of using for whatever administrative work the day had generated. Lyon looked up when Nero came in, noted him with the expression of a man who had been expecting this and had simply not known when, and set down the document he was reviewing.

“Sit,” Lyon said.

Nero sat.

There was a small silence, not uncomfortable, that had the shape of something about to be said rather than the emptiness of two people with nothing to discuss. Outside, through the narrow high window, the last of the evening light was going out of the sky, leaving the quality of blue that sat between day and night.

“The elbow,” Lyon said, which told Nero that the medical wing and the training yard maintained a closer line of communication than their physical separation might suggest.

“Vane corrected it,” Nero said.

“Good.” Lyon folded his hands on the desk and considered Nero for a moment with those calm, measuring eyes that had been measuring him since the first day. “Three days.”

“Three days,” Nero confirmed.

“You will face people who have trained their entire lives under the best instruction their families could purchase,” Lyon said, “with equipment that costs more than your life is worth by the reckoning of everyone who will be evaluating you, and with the particular confidence of individuals who have never had a serious reason to doubt their own adequacy.” He paused. “This is not news to you.”

“No,” Nero agreed.

“What is also not news to you,” Lyon continued, and his voice had shifted only slightly, toward something that was not quite warmth but occupied the same general region, “is that confidence built entirely on the absence of failure is brittle in specific ways. You are aware of what your body can survive. Most of them have never needed to find out.” He considered Nero for another moment, and then looked back at his papers, which was Lyon’s version of indicating that a conversation had reached its natural end. “Sleep early. Eat in the morning before you come to me.”

Nero stood.

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