The south yard of Wildroot Academy was a field of pale sand the size of a sports field, with a low wall around it and nothing on it at all.
Mav reached it at dawn with a hole in his shirt and a new pink scar under it. He had slept for three hours. About 40 first-years stood along the wall in green scarves, yawning, and Ronald had kept him a place. Most academies took between 200 and 400 new Awakened every year, but Wildroot is so small that they only have one first-year class.
"You look worse than yesterday," Ronald said. "I didn’t think that was possible."
"I had a busy night."
Instructor Quill walked out onto the sand, and the yawning stopped.
"You’ve each spent a month alone with your Subjects," she said. She didn’t raise her voice, because she didn’t need to. "Today, you will learn the only way to take them anywhere else. It’s called a Manifestation. Without it, you’re a strong boy or a strong girl with nothing behind you. With it, you carry your World on your back."
She turned her head toward the empty sand, and it stopped being empty.
It happened without a flash or a sound. One moment, there was a yard. The next, a block of gray rock as wide as a house stood on it, shaped by the wind, with dry grass growing from its cracks. On top of the rock sat six thin, sand-colored cats the size of ponies, blinking in the sun.
Whispers ran along the wall, and Mav felt the hair on his arms rise.
"That ground is a copy," Quill said. "The Genesis builds it from my World and takes it away when I let go. The cats aren’t a copy. They’re mine, they’re really here, and if one of them dies on this sand, she’s dead. Remember that. It’s the most important thing I’ll say today."
The rules came quickly after that, and Mav stored each one in his mind.
A Manifestation grew with its owner’s rank. At rank E, it was about 50 meters across. It stayed where it was cast. Its owner chose which of his Subjects came with it, and they went home when he let it go. It was allowed in the arenas, in the training yards and on any World. Anywhere else in the Nexus, the Arbiter would crush it before it finished forming.
"One more thing," Quill said. "A beast can step out of its Manifestation. When it does, it keeps a little of its World wrapped around its body. A skin of its own air, its own heat or its own cold. That skin is thin. It can be knocked away, and a beast without it is in trouble. Now, who wants to go first?"
-----
Ronald went third.
He walked onto the sand, frowned as hard as he could, and a hillside fell out of the air.
It was a slope of dark rock and tough yellow grass, with a ditch dug across it and a wall of piled stones behind the ditch. Mav recognized his friend’s work in that wall. It was thick, ugly and very hard to knock down. Behind it stood 14 boars.
Mav had never seen a stone boar. He had imagined pigs.
They weren’t pigs. Each one came up to Ronald’s chest. Their skin was gray and cracked like an old road, their tusks were as long as his forearm, and when they moved, their plates rubbed together with a sound like stone on stone.
"Fourteen?" Mav asked, when Ronald came back, pink with pride.
"Two of the females had young. They breed like rabbits when they’re fed." Ronald scratched his neck. "How many have you got?"
"More than I started with."
It was true, and it sounded better than a number. A boy with boars could breed boars. A boy with drakes could breed drakes. Each of them had one species that fought and one that built, and at this rank, that was all they would ever have.
’Mine can be anything I can catch. I should stop forgetting that.’
"Silkborn," Quill called.
He walked out onto the sand, and the whispers started behind him. They had all seen the Ladder.
Mav had no idea how to do it, so he did the only thing he knew. He closed his eyes and reached for his World the way he reached for a Subject. It was there, huge, cold and patient, at the back of his skull. He chose his points. Seven. Two. The six needlefish that could fight. Six stayed at home, where Sela needed him.
Then he pushed.
The silence was what he noticed first. The yard had been noisy, and now he was standing inside a great, soft quiet. He opened his eyes on black rock and dark blue water. His lungs were full again, and One was breathing for him.
He was inside a dome of sea.
It rose from the sand like a glass turned upside down, 50 meters wide and half as tall, with nothing to hold it but the will of the Genesis. Through its curved wall, he could see the yard, bent and unsteady, and 40 faces staring in. Two swam past him with the needlefish behind him in a silver line. Above them all, Seven stretched out her five meters of pale body and turned her blind head toward the light.
For a moment, nobody outside moved.
None of them could have guessed what they were really looking at. Everyone knew that his species was seaweed, so they took the green thread around each fish for one of his Subjects, a weed riding on a wild fish. Nobody imagined that the weed was the one in charge.
Then someone laughed.
"It’s a fish tank!"
It went along the wall like fire through dry grass. Mav could hear it even through the water, thin and far away. One boy was bent over with laughter. A girl was wiping her eyes.
His face burned. He had brought a monster that had ruled a sea, and seven hunters who had torn apart the strongest beast in his World. But these people were looking at them the way people look at a tank in a fish shop.
’They’ve never seen her hunt. That’s all it is.’
It didn’t help much.
-----
"Let’s do practice duels," Quill said. "Holloway, you’re against him. I’ll stop it before anyone dies."
Brann Holloway was a broad, red-haired boy with a wolf’s tooth on a cord around his neck. He cast his Manifestation on the far half of the yard, and a group of black pine trees appeared, with snow between their roots. Sixteen gray wolves came running out of it.
They crossed the sand in a loose line, each one wrapped in a thin layer of cold air. Ten meters from the dome, they stopped and sat down.
Mav waited. So did they.
He understood quickly, and he hated it. The wolves had no reason to come in. Inside the water, they would be slow and blind, and Seven would kill them all with a single flash. Outside, they only had to wait. If he stayed inside, he would lose.
"Come out, fish boy!" Holloway shouted, grinning. "We haven’t got all day!"
’Two. Take them out. Carefully.’
It was the first time he had asked this of them, and he felt their doubt. But Two didn’t hesitate. He shot through the wall of the dome, and the six others went after him.
Quill had told the truth. Each of them kept a sleeve of water around its body, a clear, shaking skin no thicker than Mav’s hand. They hung in the dry air of the yard like fish set in glass, and for one moment, it was the most beautiful thing he had ever seen.
Then they tried to swim.
They were slow. In the sea, a needlefish was a thrown knife. Out here, with only that thin skin of water to push against, they moved like men walking through deep mud. Two reached the first wolf and drove his jaws at its throat, but the wolf simply stepped aside.
A paw swung. It didn’t even hit him hard. It knocked the water off him like rain off a leaf, and Two fell onto the sand with nothing around him, fighting to breathe.
Mav felt it in his own chest, and for a second, he couldn’t breathe either.
’Two!’
Another went down, and then another. The wolves had understood the game in a heartbeat. They didn’t bite. They slapped. Before Mav could call them back, five of his seven best fighters were lying helpless on the dry sand, and the pack was closing on the last two.
Mav ran. He came out of the dome with his harpoon in his hand and the cold river already rising in him. He had decided to show these people one skill and no more, so he let Discharge go at the nearest wolves. Three of them dropped, shaking.
It wasn’t enough. There were 13 left. Something heavy hit him in the back, and the sand came up to meet his face.
"Enough."
Quill’s voice cut across the yard like a knife. The wolves froze. Six sand-colored cats were suddenly standing over his fallen needlefish, pushing them gently back toward the water with their noses.
Mav lay with his cheek on the sand and reached for his points until he had found all eight. Only then did he let himself feel the rest.
He felt ashamed, mostly. Under the shame, there was fear, because he had just seen how easily Two could die in this place. But behind both of those feelings, he was already thinking about how to fix it.
Along the wall, they were still laughing.
Ronald pulled him to his feet. He wasn’t laughing. Neither was Quill, who had come to stand beside them with her arms folded.
"Your fish are worth 10 of his wolves in the water," she said quietly. "Out of it, they’re worth very little. Every fighter in the Nexus will see that in the first minute, and none of them will ever set foot in your tank." She looked at him. "The next rank asks for 100 Subjects at rank D-. You won’t get there by losing. So tell me what you need, Silkborn."
Mav spat out sand. He thought of the stalker in the forest, standing on its six legs.
"Legs," he said.
’I need hosts that can walk.’