Chapter 7: The Limit of Seven Days

Chapter 7: The Limit of Seven Days

The laboratory report arrived through the secure channel the next morning.

Silas was halfway through breakfast when the terminal chimed. He left the spoon in the bowl and opened the message with one hand, already aware of the sealed case on the cabinet shelf behind him. Talia’s boundary still ran around it in a quiet circuit.

He scrolled past the laboratory’s handling notes to the findings.

Sample A — sealed vial, House Rooke supplement, batch mark intact.

Six ingredients followed. Every one was legal, medicinal, and present in the correct proportion for an expensive restorative. The seal showed no sign of tampering. The laboratory had found no prohibited additive, foreign mana signature, or known poison.

Sample B — residual matter from damaged vial.

Too degraded for comparison. It had once contained a similar restorative. Nothing more could be confirmed.

The findings from his blood had not changed. Months of repeated contamination. Damage to his organs and mana channels. No identifiable cause.

Physician Kerr had added a note at the bottom.

The examination findings stand. These samples do not explain them. Continue treatment and report any change in symptoms. I have no further tests to offer on the submitted material. — A. Kerr

Silas read the findings a second time.

"Wonderful."

He scrolled back to the sealed sample. Correct proportions. No sign of tampering.

He had wanted a name he could put beside the damage Kerr had shown him. The laboratory had found what it expected to find in a restorative. It still had no explanation for his condition.

Maybe the substance changed when mixed with water. Maybe only some of the vials had been altered. Maybe the poison was not something the academy knew to test for. He could invent possibilities all morning and still know nothing.

The message offered a field for follow-up questions. Silas typed half a sentence asking whether his family should provide another sample, then deleted it.

No. I’m not reminding anyone I’m here.

He would finish Kerr’s treatment and leave the supplements in the cabinet. He had somewhere to recover, food arriving every day, and no need to write home to use either.

He saved a private copy, closed the report, and returned to his cold porridge.

Boundary Ward had a little over a day remaining.

Silas spent most of his remaining practice time on the floor beside the cabinet.

Through Territorial Awareness, Talia’s three marks were as distinct as objects beneath his fingers. Mana moved from the case lid to the shelf, continued toward the cabinet door, and returned to the first mark. The flow strengthened near his hand whenever he reached toward the case.

His own attempts had treated the marks as separate instructions. Talia’s worked as one construction.

That discovery took him from six percent to eleven.

[Assimilation: 11%.]

He drew four marks around a corner of the room and tried to reproduce the same circulation. The line held across the plaster and failed where it met painted wood. After two more attempts, he scraped away a patch of paint and found that the next boundary lasted longer.

It still collapsed when he rolled a cup through it.

Silas changed the spacing, supplied mana again, and watched the line fail somewhere else.

"Very educational."

He took his medicine with lunch and slept for an hour because his hands had begun trembling. When he woke, the room had repaired the shallow scorch left by his last attempt. It had also drained enough mana to leave his head thick and sore.

By evening, he had a boundary that could identify the direction of a crossing from three sides. The fourth side remained useless. He moved the marks twice, changed the flow, and finally discovered that part of his awareness had been following a water pipe inside the wall instead of his own construction.

[Assimilation: 17%.]

Silas lay on the rug and laughed until it became a cough.

He slept properly that night, mostly because his body gave him no choice.

The final day went badly.

He could establish a complete circuit now. He could assign it a direction and make it react to an object passing through. The moment he asked it to resist that object, the flow broke apart. Sometimes it failed at the first mark. Sometimes it reached the last and snapped back hard enough to leave his fingers numb.

Talia’s seal still surrounded the case. Even while Silas watched it, the flow barely fluctuated. He couldn’t yet maintain anything that steady.

Silas ate beside the cabinet and studied it between mouthfuls. He tried thinner lines, then wider spacing, then an extra mark on the inside of the practice boundary. The extra mark made the whole thing worse.

After breakfast, one attempt pushed a rolling cup sideways by half the width of his hand before collapsing.

[Assimilation: 22%.]

That was the last increase.

He kept working past the point when he normally stopped. The timer had less than an hour left, and he wanted one attempt that held against resistance. He dragged the stool over so he could work sitting down. He placed two fresh marks near the window and was feeding mana into the first when the temporary record expired.

The response vanished halfway through the line.

[Boundary Ward — Temporary Record Expired.]

[Final Assimilation: 22%.]

[No permanent Talent acquired.]

[Temporary Talent Slot: 0/1 — empty.]

Silas remained on the stool with the chalk between his fingers.

He finished the second mark. The proportions were correct. So was the spacing. He remembered why Talia had placed hers where she had, how the mana had moved, and what his own failed circuits had done.

Nothing answered when he tried to activate it.

He tried again. Then once more, harder, as though the Talent might have stayed behind and needed convincing.

The chalk snapped.

Silas threw the cup instead.

It struck the wall and broke into three large pieces. For a second, that helped. Then he had a headache, a snapped piece of chalk, and one less cup.

"Brilliant."

He left the pieces where they fell and sat on the bed. Across the room, Talia’s seal went on working.

The active record was gone. He couldn’t find anything that told him whether the twenty-two percent would return with another copy. For now, he could draw every mark correctly and still produce nothing.

I’ll need her in here again.

He disliked how much that depended on Talia having a reason to visit. Asking the prefect to come around for tea would raise more questions than he wanted to answer.

Silas cleaned up the cup before he cut his foot on it. The next day, with no temporary Talent to practice, he slept late and answered Kerr’s scheduled follow-up through the terminal. His fever had eased, the nausea was manageable, and he could move around the studio without help. She left the exemption’s end date unchanged and sent his restrictions to the assessment staff.

He checked the route to the yard, laid out his uniform, and spent the afternoon resting. The terminal chimed that evening.

Medical exemption concluded.

Baseline practical — Cohort 17, west practice yard, first bell.

Attendance compulsory.

Silas set the alarm. First bell was nine hours away.

He ate what remained of his dinner and checked the door lock before getting into bed.

Tomorrow, he would have to unlock it.