The years between six and fourteen were not a blur.
Blurs were what happened to people who weren't paying attention, and Engan had been paying attention to everything since before he had words for it. They were more like a current — something you were inside of, moving through, where the individual days were distinct but the overall direction was what mattered.
Some days were the forest path before sunrise, Shiro somewhere behind him at his unvarying pace, the trees still dark on either side, his breath visible in the cold and his legs carrying the cumulative debt of months of this without complaint because complaint produced nothing. Some days were the orphanage yard — the bench, the scope disassembled on the cloth, Oruzar's hands moving through components while he asked questions that had answers and questions that didn't and you were expected to know the difference. Some days were Astrael, the market, the specific social geometry of a place where everyone knew everyone and Engan moved through it like someone fluent in a second language who still dreams in their first.
He and Vetrov were inseparable in the way that requires no decision — not a choice, just the shape things had taken. They trained together, ate together, argued about techniques and angles and the correct application of force in ways that could last an hour and end with both of them arriving at a third position neither had started with. Vetrov was faster than Engan. Engan was more precise. Each of them knew this about the other and it made them better at both things, which Oruzar had probably anticipated when he had Vetrov drag a third chair to the table.
One evening in the summer Engan was eleven, they were on the orphanage roof after a training session that had gone wrong in a specific way — a coordination drill that had revealed, without ambiguity, that they did not yet know how to move as a unit. Not because they didn't know each other. Because knowing someone and moving with them as a unit were different skills.
Vetrov was on his back. Engan was sitting. The sky was going from blue to something deeper.
They didn't talk for a while. The failed session sat between them like a third thing on the roof.
"The problem," Vetrov said eventually, "is that I know what you're going to do."
"That's not the problem. That should be the advantage."
"It is. But I know what you're going to do because you're thinking about what you're going to do. And if I know you're thinking, I know there's a gap."
Engan looked at his hands. He had been thinking about what he was going to do. Vetrov was right.
"So you have the same problem," he said.
"I know. I'm telling you so we can fix it together instead of separately."
Below them, Oruzar had come back out into the yard — his footsteps on the gravel, then the sound of him settling onto the step. Just present. Not asking anything.
"We need to train until we stop thinking," Vetrov said. "Not until we think faster. Until we stop."
"Shiro says the same thing differently," Engan said. "Intention without tension."
"Same thing," Vetrov agreed.
They lay there for a while longer. Star's Path appeared low in the east. Neither of them pointed it out. They'd spent enough time on this roof that certain stars had become furniture.
Below them Oruzar's step creaked. The village moved through its nighttime patterns. The sky held everything above them without comment.
They stayed on the roof until Pali called them down for the late meal, and they came down, and ate, and went to their separate beds, and the session sat between them the way the session always sat — occupying its space, waiting to be solved.