Control wasn't enough.
Marcus discovered this on day seventeen, when Thess handed him an egg.
"Hold it," she said.
He stared at the small white oval in her palm. Fragile. Breakable. Everything he'd spent years avoiding.
"Why?"
"Because control without gentleness is just a different kind of violence. You've learned to hit precisely. Now learn to touch softly."
Marcus took the egg.
It cracked immediately. Yolk dripped between his fingers.
"Again," Thess said, producing another egg from somewhere.
Crack.
"Again."
Crack.
"Again."
By the tenth egg, Marcus's hands were covered in yolk and his jaw was clenched so tight it ached.
"This is pointless. I can punch a training post without breaking it. Why can't I hold a damn egg?"
"Because punching uses force in one direction. Holding requires constant adjustment. Continuous awareness." Thess wiped yolk from her fingers. "You learned to be powerful. Now learn to be present."
Yuna watched from across the training ground.
She could feel Marcus's frustration through the CHORD. Sharp and hot, building toward something dangerous. Not anger at others. Anger at himself.
The worst kind.
She walked over as Thess handed Marcus another egg.
"Can I try something?"
Thess raised an eyebrow. "Your CHORD approach?"
"Something like it."
Marcus held the egg. His massive hand engulfed it completely, hiding the white shell in a cage of scarred fingers.
Yuna placed her hand over his. Gently. Not guiding. Just present.
"Close your eyes," she said.
"Why?"
"Because you're looking at the egg like it's an enemy. You need to feel it instead."
Marcus closed his eyes.
"Now. Don't think about your strength. Think about the egg. Its weight. Its warmth. The texture of the shell against your palm."
"I can feel it."
"Good. Now think about what the egg needs. Not what you need to do to it. What it needs from you."
Marcus was quiet for a moment.
"It needs... to not be crushed."
"More specific."
"It needs me to hold it firmly enough that it doesn't fall. But gently enough that it doesn't break. It needs... balance."
"The egg doesn't care about your strength. It doesn't know you killed your brother. It doesn't judge you or fear you. It's just an egg, and it needs someone to hold it safely."
Marcus's hand trembled slightly. But differently than before. Not fear-trembling. Concentration.
"Now open your eyes."
He did.
The egg sat whole in his palm.
"Ten seconds," Thess observed. "Longer than any previous attempt."
"It felt different." Marcus stared at the egg like it was a miracle. "When I stopped thinking about my strength and started thinking about what it needed... the pressure just adjusted itself."
"That's gentleness. Not the absence of power. The application of awareness."
"How do I hold it longer?"
Thess smiled slightly. "Practice. Hours of it. Days. Until holding without breaking becomes as natural as breathing."
She walked away, leaving Marcus with the egg.
He stood there, perfectly still, hand cupped around the fragile shell. Yuna could feel his concentration through the CHORD. Intense focus, but not strain. Something softer.
Care.
Fifteen seconds. Twenty. Thirty.
The egg cracked.
Marcus sighed. But not with frustration. Something closer to acceptance.
"Again," he said to himself.
He reached for another egg from the basket Thess had left behind.
Yuna stayed with him for an hour.
Not helping. Just present. Reading a book she'd borrowed from the library while Marcus worked through egg after egg.
His record climbed. Thirty seconds. Forty-five. A minute.
Each failure, he simply reached for another. No anger. No despair. Just determination transformed into patience.
"You're different," Yuna said eventually.
"Different how?"
"A week ago, you would have crushed that basket after the fifth broken egg. Now you're on your thirtieth and you're calmer than when you started."
Marcus considered this. His hand held the current egg steady. Sixty seconds and counting.
"I think I understand now. What you said about Dylan."
"What part?"
"That my strength isn't the problem. My relationship with it was." The egg survived past seventy seconds. "I spent six years treating my power like an enemy. Something to suppress, contain, fear. But it's just... part of me. Like my hands. Like my heart."
"And now?"
"Now I'm learning to live with it instead of against it."
The egg cracked at eighty-two seconds. Marcus set the pieces aside and reached for another without hesitation.
"Dylan used to collect bird eggs," he said quietly. "When we were kids. He'd find abandoned nests and bring the eggs home, try to keep them warm, hope they'd hatch."
"Did they ever?"
"Once. A sparrow. It lived for three days before..." Marcus's voice trailed off. "He was devastated. Cried for a week. But the next spring, he was out looking for eggs again."
"He kept trying."
"Always. No matter how many times things broke, he kept trying."
Marcus looked at the egg in his hand. Ninety seconds now. Still whole.
"I think that's what I lost when he died. Not just him. The part of me that kept trying. I gave up after one failure because the failure was too big to survive."
"But you're trying now."
"Because of you. The team. Everyone showing me that broken doesn't mean finished."
One hundred seconds. The egg held.
"Dylan would be proud," Yuna said.
Marcus's eyes glistened. "Yeah. I think he would."
That evening, dinner became something else.
It started normally. Seven summons around a table, eating food that appeared by magic, talking about training and progress and the countdown that hung over everything.
One hundred twelve days remaining.
Then Lyric produced a deck of cards from nowhere.
"Game night, darlings. I refuse to spend another evening discussing combat formations and survival statistics."
"Games are a waste of training time," Chen Wei said.
"Games are team building. Aria, back me up."
Aria looked up from her tablet. Calculated. "Recreational bonding activities have been shown to improve group cohesion by eighteen percent. I'll allow it."
"You'll allow it." Lyric rolled their eyes. "How generous."
David perked up. "What kind of game?"
"Something simple. Something that doesn't require me to pretend I'm worse at things than I am." Lyric shuffled the cards with theatrical flair. "Poker?"
"I don't know how to play poker," Yuna admitted.
"Perfect. I'll teach you. That way when I inevitably win, no one can claim I cheated."
They cleared the table. Lyric dealt cards. Silence watched with intense concentration, her temporal sight probably showing her every possible hand.
"That's cheating," Lyric said, pointing at her. "No looking at futures."
Silence's lips curved into something that might have been a smile. She closed her eyes demonstratively.
"Better."
The game was chaos.
David had beginner's luck and won three hands in a row. Chen Wei played like she was planning a military campaign, every bet calculated. Aria counted cards openly and without shame. Marcus bet conservatively, still learning to trust his judgment.
And Yuna?
Yuna could feel everyone's emotions through the CHORD. Every bluff, every confidence, every uncertainty.
"That's also cheating," Lyric announced after Yuna won her fifth hand.
"I'm not trying to! I can't turn it off!"
"Then we need a handicap. Every time you win, you have to tell an embarrassing story."
"That's not fair."
"Life isn't fair, darling. That's why we play games."
Yuna won the next hand. The team stared at her expectantly.
"Fine." She sighed. "When I was fourteen, I tried to manifest wings for the first time. I'd read about Resonance techniques online, convinced myself I could do it if I just believed hard enough."
"What happened?" David asked.
"I climbed onto my school's roof, spread my arms, and jumped."
Silence gasped silently. Marcus winced.
"I broke my ankle and had to explain to the hospital that I wasn't suicidal, just stupid. My mother grounded me for a month and made me write 'I am not a bird' one thousand times."
The table erupted in laughter. Even Chen Wei cracked a smile.
"Your mother sounds amazing," Lyric said.
"She was." Yuna's voice softened. "She was the best."
A moment of quiet. The team feeling the weight of what was missing.
Then Marcus spoke.
"Dylan once tried to lift our family car. He was eight. Convinced that if I could be strong, he could too."
"What happened?"
"He got stuck under the bumper for twenty minutes until I found him. Had to lift the car myself to get him out. He called me his hero for months afterward."
The memory hurt, but differently now. Warmth mixed with the grief.
"My sister," Silence wrote in her notebook, then held it up. She hesitated, then added more: SHE USED TO SING ME TO SLEEP. BADLY. ON PURPOSE. TO MAKE ME LAUGH.
"My family," Chen Wei said quietly, "never laughed. Everything was discipline and honor and perfection." She paused. "I don't miss them. But sometimes I wonder what laughing at dinner would have felt like."
"It feels like this," Lyric said, gesturing around the table. "In case you were wondering."
Aria cleared her throat. "My analysis indicates this qualifies as a significant bonding moment. Emotional vulnerability shared, reciprocal disclosure achieved, group cohesion increasing."
"Aria."
"Yes?"
"Shut up and play cards."
Aria almost smiled. "Fair enough."
The game went late.
By midnight, David had won the overall tournament, to everyone's surprise including his own. Lyric demanded a rematch. Chen Wei was already planning strategy for next time. Silence had fallen asleep against Yuna's shoulder, peaceful for once.
Marcus sat quietly, looking at his hands.
"You haven't broken anything all evening," Yuna observed.
"I noticed."
He'd been holding cards, passing dishes, touching table edges. Normal actions that used to terrify him.
"The egg practice helped?"
"The egg practice, the cards, the..." Marcus gestured at the sleeping Silence, the arguing Lyric, the team. "All of it. I spent so long being careful around people that I forgot how to just be with them."
"And now?"
"Now I remember why gentleness matters. It's not about protecting them from me. It's about being present with them. Fully. Without holding back."
Yuna smiled. "That sounds like something Dylan would say."
"Maybe. He was smarter than me about people." Marcus's voice was soft but not sad. "I'm starting to think that's okay. Being different from him. Honoring him my way instead of trying to be him."
"Protector's hands."
"Teaching hands." Marcus looked at David, who was doing a victory dance while Lyric pretended to be offended. "Maybe I can show others what he showed me. How to keep trying even when things break."
Silence stirred against Yuna's shoulder. Her lips moved: Safe.
Just that one word, silent but clear.
Safe.
With a man whose hands could crush stone. A girl who could barely speak. A team of broken people learning to be whole.
Safe.
"Yeah," Marcus said quietly. "We are."
They cleaned up together.
Cards gathered, dishes cleared, table wiped down. Normal tasks done by abnormal people in an impossible place.
One hundred twelve days remaining.
But tonight, for a few hours, the countdown had stopped mattering. They'd just been people. Friends. Family.
Insufficient alone.
Something else together.
Yuna was the last to leave the dining hall. She paused at the door, looking back at the empty table.
Her mother would have loved this. The chaos, the laughter, the found family forming in the spaces between tragedy.
"I found them," Yuna whispered to no one. To everyone. To the woman who'd told her she was enough. "I found people who make it easier to believe."
The violet sky outside the windows was lightening toward dawn.
A new day was coming.
And for the first time in longer than she could remember, Yuna was looking forward to it.
[END CHAPTER 17]