Chapter 42: One Connection

Chapter 42: One Connection

The little lamp refused to go out.

Silas sat in front of it with his sleeves pushed back, looking at a circuit simple enough to have been included in an introductory teaching kit. Two conductive strips met across an exposed junction. A small supply cell fed the line, and the lamp glowed at the other end.

He could separate the strips with Remote Grasp in an instant.

Severance, apparently, required more than being deeply annoyed by them.

His first attempts had spread across the entire arrangement. On the next morning, he had tried narrowing his attention until he gave himself a headache. Now, two days after Celia’s visit, he could recognize the unfamiliar sensation of the copied Talent without mistaking it for ordinary mana control.

He still could not make it do anything useful.

Silas withdrew his mana and rubbed the bridge of his nose. The timer remained visible at the edge of his attention until he dismissed it.

There was no reward for staring at it.

A message from Bram arrived while he was drinking water.

Does your case fit under the transport seat?

Silas looked at the case beside his wardrobe. He had packed medicine, spare clothes, toiletries, and a folded blanket, along with the things on the academy’s required list. It looked perfectly reasonable from where he was sitting.

He checked the dimensions.

Then he removed the blanket.

It does now, he typed.

Bram sent back the transport’s storage limits and a reminder that anything they carried would have to be moved by them at Greybank.

Silas had been considering a second, smaller bag for a better pillow. He closed the packing screen before that became a negotiation.

The practice board waited on the desk.

Instead of trying again immediately, he switched off the supply and used Remote Grasp to separate the contacts. He examined their edges, set them together again, and restored the power. Then he eased the contacts apart and watched the lamp go dark. It lit when he joined them. He repeated that ordinary movement slowly, keeping his attention on where the strips met.

Celia’s sketch lay beside the board.

What crosses it.

He had been picturing Severance as an invisible blade. That was easy to imagine and entirely unhelpful so far. He could already break a cheap teaching board with half a dozen ordinary objects in the room. Destroying it would tell him nothing.

Silas touched the low-output circuit with a careful thread of mana, following the exercise in the manual. At the join, he encountered a slight difference in the flow. It was faint enough that his first instinct was to press harder.

He eased back instead.

The distinction became harder to notice, then settled into something he could follow without forcing it. His shoulders gradually relaxed. For a few breaths, he held his attention on that small meeting point and tried to direct Severance there.

The lamp flickered.

Silas sat forward too quickly. His concentration slipped, and the light steadied again.

He stared at it, then checked that the contacts had not moved.

They had not.

A grin began before he could prevent it.

"Well," he said to the empty room. "You could have done that yesterday."

The next attempt failed. So did the one after it.

He stopped while he was still pleased.

Over the remaining days, the board occupied the gaps between everything else he needed to do. He completed the written work waiting on his device, checked his medicine against the treatment instructions, and practiced with the upgraded weapon fittings without convincing himself that better equipment had cured his body.

Garrick’s work held smoothly under changes of direction. Silas liked the clean response enough to repeat a short sequence several times, then put the pieces away when his control began to feel less comfortable.

The remaining adamantite stayed secured in his room. Eight hundred grams were not coming to Greybank merely because he disliked leaving valuable things behind.

His clearance came with the familiar restrictions. He checked the permitted duties, confirmed his medicine schedule, and sent the required acknowledgment.

By the evening before departure, the room looked irritatingly ready for his absence.

The washed cup was put away. His packed case stood beside the door. Tomorrow’s clothes were laid out, and the required documents were already on his device.

Silas ate dinner in the comfortable chair, then returned to the practice board for one last short session.

For once, he did not begin by looking at the lamp.

He found the junction. The flow remained uneven there, a small interruption in how the circuit carried its supply. He let himself feel the difference, then directed Severance at the link he had spent days trying to distinguish.

Something gave beneath his attention.

The lamp went out.

Silas kept still. Neither strip had moved, and there was no crack in the board. He withdrew from the Talent, waited, and carefully reset the circuit. The light returned.

[Severance — Assimilation: 4%]

He let out a breath that became a quiet laugh.

Four percent. After all that effort, he had managed to turn off a lamp that already possessed a switch.

He was delighted.

The second attempt produced a brief dimming. On the third, he lost the connection before he could properly catch hold of it. He wrote down what had felt different during the successful attempt and left the board alone.

Next time, I’m starting from here.

The desire to keep going lingered while he washed and changed. He could have another hour. Perhaps two. The room would help him recover, and he was close enough now that one more attempt felt reasonable.

Silas switched off the desk light.

He set his alarm and got into bed. After a minute, he reached for the notebook to add one more detail, caught himself, and left it on the desk.

You can remember it tomorrow.

Morning brought the annoyance of carrying his own luggage through a building full of people who seemed to have chosen that exact hour to stand in doorways.

Bram was waiting beside the transport with a compact bag and the expression of someone who had been ready for a while. Alden stood nearby, checking the fastening on his equipment. Mira had claimed a seat inside and was refusing somebody’s suggestion that she move farther back.

"Under there," Bram told Silas, pointing at the luggage space.

"Move your bag a little," Silas said.

Bram nudged it over with his boot. Silas slid his case into place with Remote Grasp and boarded. Mira moved her foot before he could ask.

"If you step on my ankle, I’m getting off," she said.

"Then leave me somewhere to put mine," Silas said.

He took the seat opposite her. Alden and Bram climbed in after him, and the staff member at the front began checking names.

Silas glanced at the temporary-copy timer.

A little over two days remained. Severance would expire on their final morning away, whether he spent the journey regretting it or not.

He dismissed the display as the doors closed.

Outside, the academy buildings began sliding past the window. He watched until the older dormitory wing disappeared behind another building, then settled against the seat.

For the next two nights, there would be no stepping back over his threshold when he had done enough.