The mana-tram shuddered as it pulled away from Boroughs Central, and Jace Miller pressed his forehead against the window and watched his mother disappear.

  She stood on the platform in her recycling plant coveralls - the grey ones with the faded Harkwell Industries patch on the shoulder - and she didn't wave. She just stood there with her arms crossed over her chest and her chin up, the way she always stood when she was trying not to look afraid. The tram lurched. She shrank. Then the platform curved away behind the bulk of a coolant tower and she was gone, and Jace was alone with forty minutes of track and the tight, airless knot in his stomach.

  He sat back. The seat was hard polymer, cracked along the edges where the mana-reinforcement runes had faded to illegibility. Someone had scratched *Kroll Sux* into the armrest with a knife. The car smelled like engine grease and ozone and the sour tang of too many bodies pressed into too small a space for too many years. Home smells. He was going to miss them, which was a stupid thing to think, because he wasn't leaving. He was just going to school for a few years.

  But that wasn't quite true either, and they both knew it.

  Sophomore year at Ironhold Academy was the Awakening year. Today, every second-year student would step up to the Attunement Stone and receive their class - the System's judgment on who they were and what they'd become. After today, Jace would be someone different. Maybe someone who still rode this tram. Maybe someone who didn't need to.

  *Maybe someone who can't.*

  He pushed the thought down and dug his thumbnail into the scratched armrest. Outside, the Rust Boroughs scrolled past in their familiar procession: squat hab-blocks stacked six high, their concrete faces streaked with rust-colored runoff from the mana-conduit pipes on the roofs. Recycling yards where cranes lifted the skeletal remains of pre-Unveiling vehicles into smelters that glowed white-hot with bound fire. A pack of kids - ten, eleven years old - playing kickball in the street with a ball that left faint blue contrails because someone had enchanted it to bounce higher than physics alone would allow. Clotheslines strung between buildings, laundry drying in the weak autumn sunlight. A woman hosing down the sidewalk outside a noodle stand.

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  His world. Small and hard and known.

  His mother had gotten up two hours early to walk him to the tram. She hadn't needed to. He'd been riding it alone since freshman year, and before that he'd ridden the crosstown line to primary school since he was twelve. He knew every stop, every shudder point where the track supports were warped, every stretch where you could see the Spire District gleaming on the horizon like a promise that wasn't meant for you. But this morning she'd been waiting at the kitchen table when he came out, already dressed, two mugs of chicory root coffee steaming between her hands.

  "Figured I'd walk with you," she'd said, like it was nothing.

  They'd walked in the grey predawn and she'd told him practical things. Pack a lunch because the academy mess was expensive. Don't let the rich kids see him flinch. Remember that his father had been the steadiest man she'd ever known and that steadiness was worth more than talent, and anyone who told him different was selling something.

  At the platform, she'd cupped his face in her hands. Her palms were rough - chemical-scarred from the recycling vats - and they smelled like the citrus solvent she used to strip residual mana from dead batteries.

  "You come home tonight," she'd said. Not a request. An anchor. "Whatever they tell you that stone says about you, you come home tonight and we'll figure out the rest."

  He'd nodded. She'd let go. And then the tram had come and he'd stepped on and now she was behind him and the Boroughs were behind him and the world was opening up ahead like a mouth.

  Jace closed his eyes and tried to feel what everyone said you were supposed to feel on Awakening Day. Excitement. Potential. That buzzing hum in the center of your chest where the System's unassigned energy pooled, waiting to be shaped. He could feel it - had been feeling it for weeks, stronger every day. A vibration just behind his sternum, like a second heartbeat made of static. Not unpleasant. Not comfortable either. Just *there*, insistent, patient, a pressure that wanted to become something but didn't yet know what.

  *What are you going to make me?*

  He didn't know who he was asking. The System didn't answer questions. It sorted. It measured. It decided.