Black water.

  It fills her lungs and she is not drowning.

  This is the first wrong thing.

  Aria floats in darkness so complete it has weight, pressing against her skin from every direction, and she breathes the black water in and out like air. Her chest rises. Her chest falls. The rhythm continues without her permission, automatic as heartbeat, natural as something that should not be natural at all.

  The second wrong thing: she remembers dying.

  Penelope's face. The flash of brilliant light. The moment of pressure in her chest, then cold, then nothing.

  No… not nothing. This.

  Her thoughts scatter like startled birds, refusing to settle on any single perch. She tries to hold the memory of Penelope's eyes in that final instant and instead finds herself counting the particles of darkness that drift past her vision. Her mind catalogues them without meaning to, the way it always catalogues useless details when important things demand attention.

  Focus, Aria.

  Penelope's voice. From training sessions. From summers at House Vermilion when they were children and the world made sense.

  Penelope's hand entering her chest.

  Aria's thoughts skitter away again.

  She is floating. She is breathing water. She is dead but not dead and the black presses close and she cannot feel her torq against her throat anymore. The absence sits where the metal should be, a phantom pressure, a memory of cold iron that no longer exists.

  Others float nearby.

  She notices them gradually, the way she notices everything: in pieces, in fragments, in observations that arrive without order. A hand drifting at the edge of her vision. A shoulder. A face she almost recognizes, features slack and eyes closed, suspended in the same black water that fills her lungs.

  She counts them.

  The counting happens automatically, her scattered mind seizing on numbers as anchors. One body. Three. Seven. Twelve. More beyond those, shapes in the darkness that might be bodies or might be something else, shadows that hold weight and form without revealing detail.

  Twenty-three that she can see clearly.

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  Twenty-one of them are male.

  The observation settles into her awareness slowly, a stone sinking through deep water. She counts again to be certain. The faces she can see belong to boys. Young men. First-years from the Mere, some of them familiar in the vague way of people you pass in corridors without ever learning their names. That one with the sharp jaw came from the Scarlet Compass. The pale one with white-blond hair came from House Azure, she is almost certain.

  Twenty-one males.

  Herself.

  And one other.

  The girl floats perhaps thirty feet away, though distance means nothing in this space where up and down have surrendered their definitions. Dark hair drifts around her face in a halo of shadow. Her eyes are closed. Her lips are parted slightly, and Aria watches black water flow between them with each breath the girl should not be taking.

  Aria does not recognize her.

  This bothers her in ways she cannot articulate. She should know. She should remember. Female Optimates are rare enough that they notice each other, acknowledge each other across crowded training halls, share the unspoken understanding of women who chose a path most women refuse. Her mother chose it. Penelope chose it. Aria chose it.

  Why did I choose it?

  The thought surfaces and Aria cannot remember the answer. Something about passion. Something about proving that strength did not require brutality. The words feel like someone else's words now, borrowed philosophy from a girl who no longer exists.

  Penelope's eyes. Shock registering on Aria's own face. The cold precision of it.

  Her thoughts scatter.

  She tries to move toward the other girl and her body does not respond. Her limbs float weightless, suspended, refusing the commands she sends them. She is not paralyzed. She simply cannot convince her muscles that movement matters. The black water holds her in perfect stillness and she breathes it in and she breathes it out and time passes without passing.

  The third wrong thing announces itself as sound.

  Something beneath sound. A vibration that moves through the water and through her bones and through the spaces between her thoughts. Rhythmic. Mechanical. Alive.

  The bodies around her shift.

  The twenty-three shapes in the darkness reorganize themselves without any visible force acting upon them, drifting into new configurations like iron filings responding to a magnet's call. Aria watches the pale boy from House Azure float past her, close enough to touch if she could make her hands obey. His eyes remain closed. His face shows nothing.

  The dark-haired girl drifts closer.

  Aria can see her features now. Young. Perhaps her own age. A face that should be familiar and is not, arranged in the perfect stillness of sleep or death or whatever this state between them should be called. She wears nothing like the rest of them. Her torq is absent too.

  They are being sorted.

  The understanding arrives without evidence, without logic, simply present in her mind like a memory she did not know she possessed. The bodies are moving into patterns. The patterns have meaning. The males drift one direction. She and the dark-haired girl drift another.

  Something is coming.

  She feels it before she perceives it. A pressure change in the black water. A displacement. Mass moving through darkness toward the place where she and the other girl float, separated now from the twenty-one males by distance that continues to grow.

  Aria's heart should race. Her pulse should pound. Instead she floats and breathes water and watches the darkness gather itself into shape.

  Penelope, she thinks, and the name carries no anger. Only loss. Only the ache of something severed that cannot be repaired.

  The other girl's eyes open.

  They are amber. Like Aria's own. Like fire caught in glass.

  They are terrified.

  The darkness reaches for them both.

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  ? Nightbreak (Patreon-exclusive)

  ? Half A God

  ? Undying Prince

  ? Ablations