"Oh my goodness, Claire! Have you heard? Please tell me you've heard," Alison demanded as soon as Claire arrived at the lunch table the first day back at school.

Unsure what it was she was supposed to have heard, Claire quickly glanced over the rest of the table. Surprisingly, only Orpheus was there, and he had his nose buried in a text book.

Claire almost guessed 'did Kayah go down in an unfortunate ship accident?' But she'd seen her cousin in passing, so she knew that couldn't be the case. Maybe Alison had finally dumped poor Lark? Rather than making a guess, Claire sat down across from Alison and shrugged. "What?"

"Of course you haven't heard." Alison rolled her eyes. "There was a bombing in Komore last week! Like, a big one, the Awakening did it, of course. I would bet it was you-know-who's parents if they weren't already in jail."

Claire followed Alison's line of sight to where Hadyn sat building a mashed potato snowman with Sylva on her dinner plate.

Alison raised a conspiratorial brow and dropped her voice to a whisper. "Gods, maybe she did it, you know?"

"She didn't," Claire answered a little too quickly. She frowned, surprised at herself.

Alison's other brow shot up to join the first.

"I mean she'd obviously be too stupid to pull off something like that," Claire said. "But m-maybe you're right. She's for sure crazy enough to try it."

Alison sniffed. "I'm pretty sure I'm right. I have a sense about this stuff, you know? Daddy says I should be some sort of criminal investigator when I graduate- if I'm not Chosen, of course. Pheephee, do you think I have what it takes to be a detective?"

"Hm?" Orpheus mumbled, looking up from his studies.

Alison tugged on his arm. "Do you think I could be a detective?"

Orpheus looked to be giving the thought serious consideration, then he nodded. "You'd be great. Nothing gets past you, Ali."

Alison's purple eyes glittered as she giggled and straightened up in her seat, fluffing her cloud-like black pigtails. "Oh, stop Pheephee, you flatter me too much!"

But Orpheus had already lost interest, and was now smiling over at Claire. The was not the first time for such an occurance, and Claire would later learn of Alison's displeasure for it. But at the moment, she only saw Orpheus's lovely dimples.

"I hope you had a good break," he said. "I um, I got you something while I was visiting my family. It's not much but... well, I forgot it in my room. I can give it to you when we prac-" his expression changed, remembering Alison's presence. "I can give it to you tomorrow, ok?"

Claire's stomach flipped and her cheeks heated. "Oh. O-okay."

Kayah and Lark arrived at the table together and took their usual seats on either side of Alison. Lark greeted Claire quietly, gave Alison a kiss on the cheek, then launched into conversation with Orpheus.

Kayah, wide-eyed, slammed her hands on the table. "Claire, oh my Gods, have you heard?"

"About the bombing?" Claire sighed. She'd heard. She'd seen. She still had a bit of a bump on the back of her skull.

Kayah nodded feverishly. "Supposedly there was some sort of play going on in Komore's amphitheater and Awakening members bombed the thing! No one died, but a ton of people got hospitalized. No one caught the people who did it, but they found a few creepy looking masks abandoned at the scene."

"See but I heard it wasn't a play," Alison cut in. "It was an Awakening rally!"

Kayah frowned. "But that wouldn't make sense. Why would the Awakening bomb themselves?"

"Oh. I didn't think about that." Alison frowned as well, but then shrugged it off and dug into her lunch. "Oh well, it probably was a play then."

Claire tried to eat, but she was too distracted by the events of last week, and the new questions now invading her thoughts. Why would the Awakening bomb themselves? And if they hadn't, who did? It was them who bombed things. They were the terrorists. So what happened?

She was still wondering over this same question when she arrived to her Intro To Water Manipulation classroom. All her classmates were lined up against the wall, hands behind their back and calm gazes locked on Professor Bakshi.

The professor stood beside the door with a clipboard. He made a scratch on the paper when Claire arrived and nodded towards the other students. "Line up along the wall with the rest. Prepare to take your mid-term examination."

Claire froze mid step. Ice closed around her heart and lungs. Squeezing. "No, that can't be right," she breathed. "The exam is supposed to be at the end of this week, we've only just returned from break."

Bakshi sighed, his cold blue eyes flicking down to her. "We had a class meeting at the start of the lunch period, Miss Sable. Your cousin said she informed you."

Claire shot a murderous look across the room at Kayah, who simply lifted a shoulder.

Bakshi returned his gaze to the clipboard, looking completely unbothered, if not for the smug upturn of his lips. "Worry not, this should be quite an easy examination for anyone with the skills to be accepted into the academy..."

Claire was fuming as she joined her classmates along the wall, but maybe that was a good thing. After all, Orpheus had said anger was the key to keeping hold of your element. Get angry, channel the anger into the water. Hateful thoughts. Fear, but not yours.

The students were called alphabetically, as always, and Claire had to watch twenty-seven other first years go before her. Including Kayah, who of course flew through every portion of the exam without breaking a sweat. By the time the docket rolled around to S, Claire's mouth had taken up impersonating a desert, and her legs had lost their bones.

"Sable, Clarity," Professor Bakshi called, his voice a cold monotone.

The anger had seeped out of her, as much as she'd tried to cling to it. Her eyes bounced from smirking Kayah to uncaring Bakshi to the throng of staring children. A sea of blue eyes waiting to see her fail.

Focus. Focus!

It was auditions all over again, or at least that's how it felt. The first task in the exam was to wade from one end of the pool to the other and emerge dry. Claire had done that at least twice while practicing with Orpheus, but she was too deep in her own head now-drowning in all the wrong thoughts.

She was disappointing Amma. She was disappointing Orpheus. She was disappointing Keenan, and Nathan.

She was only proving Kayah right.

A dead child is better than a shameful child.

Half way across the pool, Claire sucked in a sharp gasp as the cold water closed in on her and soaked her uniform. She came out dripping, her teeth clenched. She didn't dare look at her fellow students, but she could hear the quiet snickers just the same.

Bakshi said nothing, his lips pressed into a hard line. He made a mark on his clip board and gestured to a long table. Four glasses waited in a line, empty save for a single brass coin in each one. There was a glass of water at one end.

Claire had already watched at least twenty other children succeed; what's more, she'd practiced this same set up dozens of times in her dorm room (whenever she could get an uninterrupted moment.)

All she had to do was bounce the water from one end of the table to the other, stopping in each glass to pick up the coins. When practicing it became slightly more difficult with each coin, but it wasn't undoable.

Now though, her hands shook. Her breath came in panicked hisses. She only made it two glasses across before she could move the water no further. Anger. She had to get angrier. With the hand that wasn't manipulating the pinched her thigh as hard as she could. It hurt, but nothing changed. The water wobbled pathetically.

Failure. Failure, failure, failure.

Bash clapped once, loudly. Claire's attention fell away from the task at hand. "Thank you, that's quite enough Miss Sable."

Claire didn't even wait to hear what he had to say, and she didn't look at her cousin. She turned on her heel and ran from the classroom. Anyone she passed on her way back to the dorms would simply mistake her tears for pool water.

It was a small mercy that Sylva, and therefore Hadyn as they seemed to be a package deal, was not in the room. Claire got a full fifty minutes to change her uniform and languish on her bed in absolute despair before a knock at the door summoned her attention.

It was Orpheus. But he didn't meet her eyes. "Headmistress Trevesse wishes to speak with you. Please follow me."

When looking back, Claire can never remember if she said anything, or if he did. Did they really spend the entire distance from her dorm to the Headmistress's office in complete silence? As nothing more than polite strangers?

Regardless of what happened, regardless of what was said or unsaid, Orpheus left Claire at Calliope Trevesse's door with nothing more than a sharp nod of his head and a muttered "good luck."

She entered the Headmistress's office for only her second time, and her heart hammered its way up into her throat as she braced herself for whatever awaited.

"Have a seat, Miss Sable," Calliope said. She was standing at the far end of the room, pouring tea from a porcelain pot into two small cups. When she crossed back to take her usual seat at her desk-now free from the clutter of papers and files and boxes of white, black, and brown bands-Calliope set one cup in front of Claire and kept the other for herself.

Claire pressed the cup to her lips, but she didn't trust herself to drink. In the moment, she wasn't sure her throat would cooperate.

Calliope blew steam from her mug. "Miss Sable, you're familiar with livestock, are you not?"

With a confused frown, Claire nodded.

"What do you do with a lame animal, one too weak to keep up with the rest of the heard?" She took a sip. "Speak up now, this isn't a rhetorical question."

"W-we put it down." Claire set her mug down, she could hear it rattling in her hands.

The Headmistress's lip curved into the smallest smile, but it provided Claire no comfort. "That's right, you put the sorry thing out of it's misery. It's the correct thing to do. The merciful thing. You understand what I'm getting at, don't you Miss Sable?"

She felt like she was watching the scene from outside her body. Everything was distant and hazy. Words came to her slowly, as if through a heavy syrup. "I believe so, ma'am."

"I just spoke to Professor Bakshi. With the failure of your Elemei midterm, you rank in the bottom thirty percent of your class, and will likely remain there even with a perfect score on all your academic exams."

Claire's heart thudded. Under the desk, she crossed and uncrossed her ankles.

"You demanded to be made a white band. You insisted you could live up to that honor. You've done a poor show of it so far, even with my son's aid. When end of the year rankings go up, if you don't score in the top 50%, you will be expelled. That is mercy. Do you understand?"

It took two tries for the yes to come out of Claire's mouth. She was dismissed then. Or she simply got up and ran. The details are fuzzy, but somehow she found herself back at her dorm. There was no mercy this time. Both Sylva and that one were in the room when Claire burst through the door.

"Whoa there princess, where's the fire?" Hadyn asked, chuckling at her own joke as she lounged on Sylva's bed.

Claire shook her head, eyes burning, and tugged her suitcase out from under the bed. It was hopeless, all of it. She should have accepted her failure months ago with auditions. Kayah was right. Professor Bakshi was right. Maybe Professor Donserli was as foolish as everyone liked to imply.

Hadyn's smile vanished. "Claire-"

"Shut up." Claire hissed. She didn't even look up from her hasty packing. "You especially just-Don't look at me. Don't talk to me."

Sylva came in from the balcony, eyes wide. Claire only half registered the entire flock of starlings she had pitched up and down her arms. "Are you two fighting againnwaait Claire what are you doing?"

Claire shook her head, loaded the last of her belongings into her trunk, snapped it shut, and was out the door. She was part way to the airship docks when in started pouring down rain. There were no ships at the dock. Given the time, there likely wouldn't be for several minutes. No mercy indeed.

Any respectful water Elemei could simply deflect the droplets and stay dry. But Claire wasn't a respectful water Elemei. She may as well have not been an Elemei at all. She was a failure.

Shameful.

In a half-thinking daze, she stepped onto the docks, right up to the edge, were she could see Shuru's grassy top dissolve into sheer rock and fall away into nothing but open sky, all the way down to the Mist undulating far far below.

Maybe Keenan had had the right idea. Why was she even bothering to go home when all she'd meet there was ridicule? Staying was pointless, she could never get to the top 50% of the class. Going home was pointless, Amma would kill her as soon as she stepped through the door. Or worse, confess that she never expected much from Claire anyway.

She could jump.

The rain became ten times louder but a hundred times less wet. Claire glanced up at the bright red umbrella that domed over her head.

"I gotta ask, is it fun for you? Being this melodramatic, I mean," Hadyn drawled. Her expression was the strangest mixture of annoyance and amusement. Rain dripped from the ends of her hair, flattening its natural waves.

Claire only stared.

"You know if you run out now, then Syl won't have a roommate. She gets nightmares if she sleeps alone, and I could always take your place, but that would mean sleeping in your bed, which I'd rather not do," Hadyn continued when it became apparent Claire had lost the ability to form words. "Plus if you're not here, who am I gonna strive to make miserable every waking hour? It'd completely kill my motivation to get to the top of the class, y'know?"

An extended silence passed, made loud only by the endless percussion of the rain beating down.

"I can't stay here," Claire finally said.

Hadyn raised an eyebrow. "Did you get expelled?"

"Not yet, but-"

"Then you're actually kinda required to stay here. You signed the paperwork same as everyone else."

"I can't use my element," Claire admitted. The words felt strange on her tongue.

"But your eyes are so-"

Claire shook her head. "I've tried to do it right since I was a a toddler, but the most I can do is make a couple ripples or sometimes lift a bubble. Any time I do something big, something real, its an accident."

"Nothing is ever an accident. Even meeting you, as unbearable as you are, probably happened for a reason." Hadyn shrugged. "And you having those criminally blue eyes is definitely no accident. You might just need different learning methods."

The rain slowed, became a drizzle, ended.

An airship rose up and docked.

"Stay." Hadyn said. She lowered the umbrella and crossed her arms. "And let me have a shot at teaching you."

The ship blew its final boarding whistle.

"Fine," Claire agreed. "Just stop being nice to me. Its gross."

"Done. Now step away from the edge before I change my mind and push you."

___________

Late late late update and I apologize for that. There was a bit in the middle I decided I hated and cut out, but then the word count was too small for it to be an acceptable chapter so I had to expand lol. Regardless, this was one of my favorite chapters when I outlined the book and I'm so glad it finally exists. Thank you for your patience, thank you for reading, and I swear one of these days I'll actually post on a wednesday.

Up Next: Claire and Hadyn manage to not kill each other long enough to get in some decent instruction. Then something explodes.