The door was barely open before Noah understood what he was looking at.

Lucas stood at the far end of the training room with his arms loose at his sides, the kind of loose that wasn’t relaxed at all, that was the specific stillness of someone who had already decided what the next three seconds looked like. Electricity ran from his knuckles to his elbows in thin arcs, not building, just present, the way breathing was present.

Across from him Jayden had his weight on his back foot. His left arm had frost crawling up from the wrist, blue white and climbing slow. His right arm ran the opposite direction, heat distortion rising from the skin, the air above his forearm visibly warping. Both at once, neither canceling the other out, the twin energies sitting in the same body like they had always lived there.

Sophie stopped beside Noah in the doorway.

Neither of them said anything.

Behind them, without anyone announcing it, people had started gathering. Eclipse members, task force personnel, a handful of Ares crew who had been passing the corridor and stopped when they felt the temperature differential bleeding under the door. Within two minutes there were thirty people in the doorway and pressed against the viewport window. Nobody spoke above a murmur.

Lucas moved first.

Not a charge. Not a telegraphed build-up. He was just standing still and then his right foot was already past where his left foot had been and the frost on Jayden’s arm flared bright because Jayden had seen the weight shift a quarter second before it registered as movement.

Jayden’s arm came up.

Lucas’s fist hit the forearm block and the frost between them shattered outward in a ring, small crystals catching the room’s warm light on the way to the floor.

They separated.

The exchange had taken less than a second and nothing about it had been simple.

’He baited the block,’ Noah thought, watching Lucas reset his footing. ’Came in at the angle that forced Jayden to raise the frost arm, which put his fire arm out of position for the counter. Lucas got the information he wanted. Now he knows which side Jayden defaults to under pressure.’

"Still leading with the right," Lucas said. Conversational. Like they were discussing something mild.

"Still broadcasting the shoulder dip before you commit," Jayden said back. His frost arm was already rebuilding, the cold creeping back up from the wrist. "Three years and you still do it."

"Three years," Lucas said. The electricity on his arms brightened slightly. "What have you been doing with yours, Smoake? Genuinely curious."

Jayden’s jaw moved.

"Teaching," Lucas continued, and the word landed with precision that had nothing to do with volume. "Academy 12 of all places."

"Combat training," Jayden said. "Against extraterrestrial threats. Someone has to prepare the next generation since the ones before them were too busy getting cuddled into special programs."

Lucas tilted his head slightly. "Cuddled."

"Vanguard Force." Jayden took two steps left and Lucas tracked him without moving his feet. "Hand selected. Fast tracked. Taken off the standard deployment roster so they could go play hero in space while real soldiers were getting deployed to actual fronts." He stopped moving. "Classic EDF favoritism dressed up as opportunity."

"The same EDF you refused to leave," Lucas said. "When we invoked Article 47 and walked away from all that favoritism."

"I didn’t quit because I had a disagreement," Jayden said. "Some of us believe in the institution even when the institution disappoints us."

"Some people," Lucas said, "watch everyone on their team die to a three horn and couldn’t get back up after."

The room went very quiet.

Jayden’s fire arm stopped warping.

For three seconds nothing moved.

Then Jayden came forward and the frost hit the floor first, a sheet of it spreading from his front foot as he crossed the distance, and Lucas dropped under the ice spike that came up from it before it finished forming because he had seen the foot placement that preceded it and was already moving before the ice existed.

BOOM.

Lucas’s shoulder hit Jayden center mass and drove him back four steps. Jayden’s elbow came down on Lucas’s spine with enough force that the sound bounced off every wall in the room simultaneously.

Lucas didn’t go down.

He pushed off Jayden’s chest and put space between them and his back was going to bruise badly and he was already rotating his shoulder to check the joint and none of that showed on his face.

Jayden’s sternum was going to bruise badly too and none of that showed on his face either.

Sophie said quietly, "Who’s winning."

Noah watched Lucas’s footwork. Watched the way Jayden’s fire arm was slightly lower than it had been thirty seconds ago, compensating for the sternum hit without acknowledging it. "Ask me in a minute."

They went again.

This time Jayden led with the fire side, a short burst of superheated air that wasn’t aimed at Lucas, it was aimed at the floor in front of Lucas, and when Lucas stepped around it his foot landed on a patch of frost that Jayden had put there twenty seconds ago when nobody was watching the floor.

Lucas’s foot went sideways.

Jayden’s fist came around.

Lucas took it on the cheekbone and his head snapped right and he used the rotation, turned it into a full body spin, and his elbow caught Jayden across the ear on the way back around.

Both of them stepped back.

Lucas touched his cheekbone. Felt it. Moved on.

Jayden shook his head once, clearing it, and the frost on his arm climbed a little higher.

"That floor thing," Lucas said. "You set that up before we started."

"I set it up when you were watching the doorway," Jayden said. "Before you knew I saw you looking."

In the doorway, an Eclipse member said to nobody in particular, "I cannot tell who is winning."

"Neither can I," Noah said. And he meant it.

’Jayden is smarter than I expected,’ he thought. ’Not just the floor trap. The way he’s been managing both arms, keeping Lucas from establishing which side to respect more. Lucas knows heat is the right arm and cold is the left but Jayden has been crossing them, using cold to set up the fire, using fire to draw the eye while cold does the actual work. Lucas is fast enough to deal with it but he’s spending resources reading the pattern instead of dictating it.’

’But Lucas knows that too,’ Noah thought. ’He’s been letting Jayden dictate. Getting information. Waiting for something.’

They traded again, shorter exchanges now, the distance between them tighter. Jayden threw a combination that had no right being as fast as it was, three strikes in a sequence that compressed the space between them to nothing, and the third one got through because the first two were real and Lucas could only do so much with real.

It caught him in the ribs.

Lucas’s breath left him in a rush and Jayden was already following up, frost coming down Lucas’s arm from where his hand had closed around Lucas’s wrist mid-exchange.

Lucas broke the grip by rotating his wrist through rather than against, which should have been the wrong direction but put his elbow in Jayden’s nose on the way.

They separated again, further this time.

Jayden’s nose was bleeding. He touched it, looked at his fingers, and said nothing.

"You’re better than the last time," Lucas said. He wasn’t being generous. He was stating a fact.

"You’re better too," Jayden said. "Which is annoying."

"What happened," Lucas said. Not cruelly. Just directly. "After the three horn."

Jayden looked at him.

"You don’t have to answer," Lucas said.

"Sixteen people," Jayden said. "Seventeen including myself. Category four response that escalated on contact. Three horn was behind the fours, using them as a screen." He looked at the floor briefly. "I was the only S ranked. I kept myself alive. I couldn’t do the same for them." He looked back up. "It took me eight months before I could walk into an engagement without running probability on everyone around me. Calculating who I could save and who I couldn’t. Who was likely to be the first to—" He stopped. "Teaching was the only thing I could do where nobody was depending on me to keep them alive in the field."

The room was very quiet.

"I know what that feels like," Lucas said. "The probability calculation."

"I know you do," Jayden said. "I watched the footage from the eastern sector."

Something passed between them that wasn’t quite understanding but was adjacent to it.

Then Jayden rolled his neck and reset his stance and said, "That doesn’t mean I’m letting you win."

"I wasn’t going to," Lucas said.

They moved at the same time.

What happened next took approximately four seconds and Noah caught all of it in real time.

Lucas feinted left, the shoulder dip that Jayden had already identified as a tell, and Jayden responded to it the way someone responded to something they had read correctly, committing his weight forward to punish the committed movement.

Lucas hadn’t committed.

The feint was real but it wasn’t the attack. Lucas let Jayden’s momentum carry him through the space where Lucas had appeared to be going and in the quarter second that Jayden’s weight was fully committed forward and couldn’t be recalled, Lucas was somewhere else.

Where exactly, Jayden couldn’t track.

He felt it before he understood it.

A presence behind him. Close. The specific warmth of someone standing inside his personal space who hadn’t been there a blink ago.

Then electricity. Not painful. Not a strike. Just a current, finding the path through his chest from back to front, controlled and precise, lighting up every nerve ending it passed without damaging any of them. A demonstration delivered at the cellular level.

Lucas could have stopped his heart.

He had chosen not to.

Jayden stood very still.

The electricity was still there. Not a jolt, not a warning shot. A current, thin and deliberate, threaded through his chest like a needle finding the exact path between his heart’s chambers without touching the walls. He could feel it moving. Could feel it choosing. Every nerve ending it passed lit up and settled and lit up again in a rhythm that matched his heartbeat precisely because Lucas was matching it precisely, the current riding the pulse rather than disrupting it, finding the gaps between contractions with a control that had no business existing in a human body.

’He could stop it,’ Jayden thought. The thought arrived completely calm, the way thoughts arrived when the situation had moved past the point where panic was useful. ’Right now. One adjustment to the frequency and my heart just.’ He didn’t finish the thought. ’He’s not adjusting it. He’s holding it exactly where it is. Threading electricity through a human chest and keeping everything running because he knows exactly where everything is.’

He felt Lucas two feet behind him without turning around. Felt the warmth of him, the particular density of someone standing that close, the absence of any tension in it. Lucas wasn’t ready to follow up. He didn’t need to be. The follow up had already happened and this was what came after.

’Two years,’ Jayden thought. ’I watched every stream. Every contract call. Every time Eclipse went somewhere and came back changed. I watched the eastern sector footage. I told myself the gap was closing because I was getting better too and I was. I am.’

The current shifted, just slightly, adjusting to a new rhythm as his heartbeat picked up without his permission.

Lucas adjusted with it. Instantly. Without effort.

’But he went somewhere I didn’t,’ Jayden thought. ’He went somewhere I couldn’t follow and whatever happened in that time, whatever that did to him, whatever these last two years did to him.’ He exhaled slowly. ’The gap isn’t closed. It’s not even close to closed.’

He reached up and pressed two fingers against his own sternum, feeling the current running through him like a river that had found its channel and had no intention of leaving it until it was told to.

’He’s holding my heartbeat in his hands,’ Jayden thought. ’And his hands aren’t even shaking.’

The current stopped.

Clean. No trailing discharge, no fade, just gone, the way you turned off a light.

Behind him Lucas said, quietly, "I got faster."

Jayden stood there for one more second. Feeling the absence of it. Feeling his heart beating on its own again, same rhythm, undisturbed, like nothing had passed through it at all.

He exhaled.

He turned around.

Lucas was standing two feet back, arms loose at his sides again, the electricity gone, the fight over in the same moment it had been decided.

Jayden looked at him for a long moment. The frost on his arm melted. The heat distortion off the right arm settled.

He put his hand out.

Lucas took it.

They shook, and Jayden’s grip was firm in the way of someone who meant what they were doing, not performing it.

"I needed that," Jayden said. "More than I can explain right now."

"I know," Lucas said.

In the doorway, the gathered crowd let out a collective breath that nobody had realized they were holding. Someone started to say something and thought better of it.

Sophie leaned close to Noah. "Lucas."

"Yeah," Noah said.

She looked at his face. "You knew."

"I suspected," he said. "Lucas has been somewhere Jayden hasn’t. That gap doesn’t close in a training room."

Noah’s system buzzed.

[Bond Complete]

[Item Ready For Manifestation]

He looked at the notification.

Kelvin’s name.