Days ran together in Liam's sanctuary. There was no sun, no night—only the platforms, the low hum of the anchors, and the slow, sealed weight of the old fight in the walls beneath us. We slept when our bodies refused to go on, ate from the field rations Cecilia had forced into my pack before we left and the strange, clean water that ran in a channel along one wall, and went back to work.
My own training settled into a rhythm. I'd taken what the platforms gave me in the first day. After that it was a matter of grinding the new edges in until they stopped being new: portals that held their shape under load, time bubbles that sat at their ratio without being watched, gravity fields that took the noise out of everything inside them. Less waste every pass. That was all. It was enough.
What I hadn't done yet was test any of it with anyone else.
"I want to try something," I said, on what was probably the fourth day. "All three of us. Inside a tuning field."
