By twelve, I could read ward patterns faster than I could read a page of history.
Marel didn't like that.
"The past doesn't shiver and crack," she'd say, dropping another book on my desk. "You still need to know who signed which treaty where."
Then the ward-line over the classroom door would twitch, and my head would snap up before anyone else noticed.
"Glorius."
"Sorry."
I wasn't.
The lines in the walls, the faint pressure under the skin when the network shifted, the way the sigils above doors drank and released light—that all made sense in a way letters never had in my first life.
Kendrick had understood systems on paper. Glorius felt this one in his bones.
The Line Office noticed.
They always did, eventually.
The first time they took me to see a flare site as a student, they told us it was a lesson.
"Containment aftermath survey," said the instructor, a broad-shouldered Warden named Tamis. His coat wasn't the clean white of parade days. It was scraped at the sleeves and stained at one elbow with something that had burned and refused to wash out.
We were a group of ten, all in the gray training tabards that marked us as Line-track students from the outer wards. Old enough to follow orders. Young enough that none of us had yet stood in a real circle.
"Your job today is to see," Tamis said as we walked, "not to talk. You'll get to ask questions when we're back under a ceiling. Out there, you watch and remember."
I walked near the front.
Not because I wanted to impress him. Because I wanted to see first.
We turned into a side street, then another. The closer we got, the more the air felt wrong. Not dangerous. But heavy, like a room that had been crying.
Tamis raised a hand. We stopped.
"Past this mark," he said, pointing with his boot at a chalk line drawn across the stones, "you step where I step. If the ground looks strange, assume it's worse than it looks."
We nodded. Some of my classmates were pale. One was trying very hard to look bored.
We stepped over.
The Scar sat in the middle of the street like someone had taken a bite out of the world and changed their mind halfway through.
Stone that should have been flat dipped inward around a center point the size of a small table. Walls on either side leaned subtly toward it. Colors were slightly wrong—bluer shadows, yellower light.
I'd seen one from a distance before, years ago.
This close, my teeth itched.
Anchor stones had been hammered into the ground at the edges—short pillars carved with dense sigils, connected by lines of dull metal. Warden marks. "Do not cross unless you know exactly what you're doing" marks.
Two Wardens and a line engineer were there before us. They were checking readings on a ring of glass and muttering to each other.
"Residual pull's dropping," one said. "Index this block down two points by end of week, if it keeps behaving."
"The crack in the ward above the fourth house is still running," the engineer said. "I flagged it twice. If they don't let us replace that entire section, I'm writing my name on the request and sending it to the Board myself."
Tamis cleared his throat. They glanced over.
"Training run," he said by way of explanation.
"Lucky them," the engineer said dryly.
We spread out along the permitted line. Close enough to see. Far enough not to slide.
"This was a Stage Two," Tamis said quietly behind us. "Half step from full Blaze. Warden circle cut it sideways before it snapped. We lost one building instead of four."
"What happened to the host?" one of the others asked.
Tamis gave him a long look.
"Contained," he said. "That's all you need to know for this lesson."
It wasn't, but it was all we were going to get.
I watched the Scar.
You could almost see where the flare had tried to erupt and been shoved sideways—like a river forced through a narrow channel, scraping the banks.
The ward-lines in the stones around it bore the scars. Sigils warped, strokes too long, angles wrong by a fraction. The system had held, but it had complained.
"What do you see, Glorius?" Tamis asked suddenly.
He did that sometimes. Picked people at random. Only it was never quite random; it was always when your eyes had been on something too long.
"Lines joined too tight," I said. "There, and there." I pointed at two points where the network met near the Scar. "Less draw near the drains. More near the houses."
"Meaning?"
"Meaning next time, it will pull harder under roofs than in the gutter," I said. "If they don't rebalance."
He grunted.
"Better than 'it looks scary,'" he said.
He turned to the others.
"You never look at a Scar and only see the hole," he told us. "You look at the stitching. The hole is old news. The stitching tells you how the next one will tear."
That made sense in the simple way good lessons do.
I kept watching.
The Scar pulsed faintly. Not enough to move dust. Enough to make a part of me lean toward it.
Kendrick's memory of folding at the bar lurked behind my ribs.
I wasn't thinking about heroism. Or sacrifice. Or any of the things that look good in books.
I was thinking: if I'd been here, if I'd seen the way the lines were crossed before this… could I have said something?
On the walk back, Tamis stopped me.
"You're leaning," he said.
"I was standing," I replied.
"Your thoughts are leaning," he said. "Scar like that? You're wondering what you could have done."
I didn't answer.
"Good instinct," he said. "Bad timing."
I got my chance to act two weeks later.
It didn't come in a lesson, or an exercise, or a supervised circle.
It came in the market.
Our practice sessions took place in the mornings, so Line-track students could still be useful in the afternoons. Daren had a route that day; Leria had sent me to run baskets between her shop and two clients.
"Straight there, straight back," she said. "No stopping to stare at Street Five's new sigils."
"They're crooked anyway," I muttered.
"Glorius."
"Straight there," I said. "Straight back."
The baskets weren't heavy. Cloth and small metal parts. My shoulders had carried worse.
The market by the south gate wasn't as crowded as the festival, but there were enough people: stalls set up in messy rows, warders with temporary sigils keeping the main lines clear, children weaving between legs.
I'd just handed off the second basket when the air changed.
You notice it first in your breathing. Or I do.
One second the air is an easy thing. The next it feels thicker, like walking into a room where someone's been crying and hasn't opened a window yet.
Another second, and the ward-lines overhead hum wrong. Not louder. Just… less smooth.
Around me, nobody reacted yet.
My skin crawled.
I looked up.
A line of sigils running along the eave of a spice stall shuddered. The ink tightened, then stretched, as if the strokes wanted to pull toward something that wasn't there.
"Flare," I whispered.
My feet moved before my mouth caught up.
There are rules for this.
Shout. Get to clear ground. Call a Warden.
I did one of them.
"Flare!" I yelled, pointing down the row. "Move away from the blue-marked stalls!"
A few heads turned.
"Kid, what—"
Then the ward above the third stall cracked, and everybody stopped asking questions.
The man under it dropped his box and clutched his chest.
His aura—if that's what you want to call it—puffed out like a breath in cold air. The lines he touched flared too bright, then guttered.
We were half a breath from Stage One turning to Two. Maybe less.
People panicked the way people always do: wrong direction, too loud, all at once.
The main exit from the market—wide, clear, pointed toward the gate—jammed in seconds as everyone rushed it. Bodies clogged the path, too many people trying to fit through a space designed for half their number.
This is where Kendrick should have shut up, maybe.
Instead, his habits woke up.
Too many people at the main gate. Narrower side passage there. Open space with no overhead lines by the broken well. Host standing under a cracked sigil that would pull Blaze through the whole row if it snapped.
I moved.
"This way!" I shouted at the people nearest me, shoving a crate aside to open a gap. "Don't go to the gate, it's jammed—come out by the well, there's no lines above!"
A woman grabbed her child and followed without thinking. Two more saw movement and copied. A handful of bodies peeled away from the main stream and surged toward the space I'd pointed at.
It was, as far as I could calculate in three seconds, the right choice.
Open area, fewer overhead sigils, room for Wardens to work when they arrived.
What I didn't see from where I was standing:
The old man sitting by the broken well, who couldn't get to his feet quickly.
The loose board just in front of him where the stones had been patched and not yet set.
The way a running body, tripping there, would hit him.
I saw it when it happened.
The woman who'd followed me first stumbled on that board. She pinwheeled, clutched for balance, caught the old man's sleeve, and dragged him to the ground with her. The people behind them collided.
A small pile of bodies formed at the worst possible moment in the worst possible place—right under one of the few anchor pegs holding a temporary ward in place.
The peg snapped.
The line above us sagged.
The host under the blue-marked stall hit Stage Two.
I've never liked the word "exploded" for what Blaze does.
It's too clean.
What the man did was unravel.
His body stretched in every direction at once, pulled along the lines it had been touching. For a second, you could see the pattern of the ward through him, imprinted on skin and bone.
Then light shoved out of him in a ring.
I only caught the edge of it.
It felt like being punched by numbers. All the air left my lungs at once. My eyes flashed white.
When my vision cleared, I was on my back.
People were screaming.
Someone's cart was half inside the ground. A stall front had folded inward like paper. The anchor peg near the well was gone. The old man lay twisted under two others who were groaning.
And the worst part: the Scar hadn't formed yet.
The space around the stall was trying to decide whether to commit.
Lines writhed in the stone, pulling toward a center that hadn't chosen its final shape.
The host was gone.
The gap where he'd been was still eating.
If the Scar locked here, it would take three stalls, part of the walkway, and the corner of a house.
"Everyone back!" someone shouted.
A Warden in white—no parade coat, a working coat—shoved through the crowd that was still trying to escape and planted himself between the forming Scar and the rest of the market. Another appeared on the far side, boots skidding on warped stone.
Hands up. Circles traced in the air. Anchors thrown.
The demonstration from Blaze Day, only ugly.
No speeches, no drums.
The lines on the ground lit in jerks. The Warden closest to me flinched as a thread of light bit into his palm.
They cut the flare sideways.
You could feel it when it caught: the moment the pull that had been trying to chew a hole under the stalls got persuaded to run along a different path, into the cold stones they'd thrown down.
Stone doesn't like swallowing that much Blaze. It shook.
Then it was done.
The warping in the air eased. The stones under the blue stall settled, now with a wrongness that would never entirely leave.
A Scar, but smaller.
One house saved, maybe two.
The cart was still half-submerged. The old man by the well still wasn't moving.
My throat burned.
I tried to sit up.
A hand pressed me back down.
"Stay," someone said.
I turned my head.
Tamis.
He must have been nearby. Or maybe Wardens simply appear where they're needed; by then, it was starting to feel that way.
"I was just—" I started.
"I know exactly what you were just," he said.
His eyes weren't angry. That was almost worse.
"They were all running for the main gate," I said. My voice sounded thin. "They would have crushed each other."
"Maybe," he said.
"I opened space," I insisted. "There's no lines over the well, the Wardens needed—"
"A better position," he finished. "You're not wrong." He looked toward the tangle of bodies by the broken board. "You're not completely right, either."
He didn't raise his voice.
"You moved the problem," he said. "You didn't have time to see everything it moved through."
The old man by the well coughed then, a horrible wet sound. Someone shouted for a healer.
I knew it wasn't all my fault. The cracked ward, the host, the market layout, the broken peg—all of that had been there before I arrived with my baskets and my terrible sense of responsibility.
Knowing that didn't make my stomach any less tight.
"You think too fast," Tamis said quietly. "That'll save people. It'll hurt them, too."
He let me sit up.
My hands were shaking.
They smelled like spice, smoke, and burned stone.
Back at the Office infirmary, they checked me for residual Blaze, made me drink something that tasted like chalk, and told me to lie still until my head stopped ringing.
Through the thin curtain, I could hear voices.
"Four minor injuries, one bad," someone reported. "The old one by the well. Leg and ribs, maybe internal. No pull on him, though. Index low."
"And the boy?" another voice asked.
"Glorius?" Tamis said. "He's fine. Physically."
"I meant his chart," the other replied.
Pause.
"Hm," they said.
I didn't like that sound.
"He was the one who split the crowd," Tamis added. "If he hadn't, we'd be counting bodies at the gate."
"And if he'd sent them toward the lane instead of the well?" the other said. "Half a dozen shops would be filing damage claims."
"He's twelve," Tamis said. "And he moved. Most freeze."
Another pause.
"His Index will tick for this," the other voice said. "Stress events always do that. Keep him. Talk to him. Make sure the next time he thinks that fast, he sees the whole board."
"And if there isn't time?" Tamis asked.
"Then that's our problem," the other said. "We're the ones who told him to join the game."
Footsteps. Curtain shifting.
Tamis's face appeared in the gap.
"You listened," he said.
"You were loud," I answered.
He snorted.
"Good," he said. "Then I don't have to repeat myself."
He sat on the stool by the bed.
"Do you know why I don't want to shout at you?" he asked.
"Because it wouldn't change anything," I said. "I'll still see gaps."
"It would change something," he said. "It would make you slower. Afraid to move at all. That's no use to anyone."
He folded his hands.
"You did three things right," he said. "You felt the flare early. You warned people. You remembered overhead lines."
"And one thing wrong," I said.
"Only one?" he asked.
That got a weak sound out of me. It might have been a laugh.
"You forgot that the ground is as dangerous as the sky," he said. "You thought like a Line engineer. Not like someone whose body can break. That will change."
I stared at the underside of the curtain.
"People got hurt because of me," I said.
"People got hurt because Blaze doesn't care where you stand," he said. "You nudged where the hurt landed." He shrugged slightly. "Welcome to the work."
I didn't want that to be the answer.
It was.
They let me go home before dark.
Leria met me halfway down the lane, hair hastily tied back, apron still on. Someone must have run ahead and told her.
She grabbed my face with both hands, turned it left, right, up, down, as if checking for missing pieces.
"I'm fine," I said.
"People were saying market, flare, Wardens," she said. Her voice shook. "They weren't saying names."
"Glorius moved half the market the right way and half the wrong way," Tamis said from behind me. "He's in one piece. So is most of the market."
"That's not funny," she snapped.
"Wasn't meant to be," he said. "He thinks fast. You knew that when you signed his track form."
She glared at him, then at me, then back at him.
"Come inside," she said. "Both of you."
Daren was already at the table, still in his route vest, eyes dark.
He listened as Tamis gave the short version. No embellishments. No praise.
When he finished, Daren rubbed his face with one hand.
"You tried to solve a problem you hadn't finished seeing," he said to me.
"Yes," I said.
"Did you mean to hurt anyone?"
"No."
"Did you keep more people from being hurt at the gate?"
"Yes," I said, though it felt wrong to say it out loud.
He nodded once.
"Then you did what people like us do," he said. "Half-right, half-wrong, never fast enough, never with full information."
Leria made a small, furious sound.
"That's not acceptable," she said.
"It isn't," he agreed. "But it's real."
She looked between us. I could see the choice in her eyes: drag me out of this path now, or accept that the city had already got its hooks in.
"We could still send you to a forge," she said. "Hammers don't explode. Cloth doesn't try to eat streets."
Daren didn't argue.
Neither did Tamis.
They both looked at me.
My ribs still hurt. My hands smelled like burned spice. The image of the old man falling wouldn't leave.
"I don't want to stand by the gate," I said quietly. "Not if I can help it."
Leria shut her eyes.
When she opened them, the fear was still there. So was something else. Resignation, maybe. Or a kind of stubborn pride.
"Then you learn properly," she said. "Not from the street. From people who know where the stones crack."
She jabbed a finger at Tamis.
"If he dies on your watch," she said, "I'll break your nose."
"That's a fair bargain," he said.
She signed a new set of papers that night. Temporary placement: Wardens' junior program. Observation, drills, line study, no solo routes.
"You remember this too," she said while the ink was still wet. "I didn't throw you to them. I put witnesses on you."
I went to bed that night feeling like I'd swallowed a stone.
The wards did not hum comfortingly. They sounded like a net I'd stuck my head through on purpose.
Nobody wrote a vow for me.
No "next time".
Just the memory of shouting the wrong direction, and the knowledge that from now on, when Blaze twisted the air, somebody was going to expect me to move anyway.