Raizen's eyes drifted to the wall while Kori was still mid-sentence about the couch's broken folding mechanism.
A narrow shelf ran across it, lined with small frames. Most were newer — bright, clean, a little crooked. One near the middle didn't match. Sun-faded at the edges, the plastic gone cloudy, the corners worn soft the way things get when they've been picked up a hundred times and set back down.
Seven people stood shoulder to shoulder in it.
The background was a training ground, but an older one — bare concrete under the same cloudy sky, something that might have been the Academy before all the glass and the money. No uniforms. Just gear that fit each of them like it had grown there. Kori was in it, younger, hair a little shorter, the same grin already in place, tape on her knuckles even then.
