1st TF poll results 1/2.

The gold framing around Evelyn Cross’s panel brightened.

The other two cards dimmed first, their amber borders sinking to a muted decorative glow. Then Ice Queen remained alone in full radiance, its title sharpening until the letters looked etched into frost-lit metal.

A soft chime rang through the intake hall.

Verena’s voice cut cleanly through it. “The audience has rendered its judgment. Ice Queen performed strongly from the opening of the poll and never meaningfully surrendered its lead. Figure Skater inspired substantial interest early, but appears not to have made a strong enough impact. Partner in Crime, though admired for utility, was judged less essential than raw durability.”

Her eyes settled on Evelyn. “Ms. Cross. The winning transformation is Ice Queen.”

Ice Queen (Path Hidden)

Evelyn's powerful mind reinforces her body. She gains supernatural resilience that makes her much harder to harm. (Hidden Effect: This resilience increases her sensitivity to the Master's touch.)

For a single beat, Evelyn did not move at all. Then the panel flashed.

Cold white light burst outward without heat, pouring around her in a ring of crystalline brilliance. The air snapped sharp. Frost bloomed across the marble at her feet in branching silver patterns, racing outward in delicate starbursts before stopping in a perfect circle around her shoes. A hush fell over the room as the temperature seemed to drop by several degrees.

Claire inhaled sharply. Katherine narrowed her eyes.

The light rose, not like flame, but like a storm of diamond dust lifting in reverse. It climbed Evelyn’s body in spiraling currents, tracing the line of her legs, waist, shoulders, and throat in pale glimmering ribbons. For a moment she vanished inside a column of translucent white, her silhouette visible only in fractured glimpses through layers of refracted light. Then came the sound—not a crack, not quite thunder, but the high, singing note of lake ice under winter pressure.

Evelyn’s hands tensed once at her sides. The light tightened and sank inward. A last ring of frost flared around her and shattered into harmless glitter.

She stood exactly where she had been, posture straight, expression composed, as if the transformation had only interrupted her rather than rewritten part of her body. Yet there was a new stillness to her, something denser under the skin. Her frame had not visibly thickened or armored, but she looked more physically definite than before, as though every line of her had been quietly reinforced.

Verena studied her with open approval. “Very good.”

Fiona gave a short, skeptical laugh. “That’s it? She gets turned into an ad for Disney on Ice and we’re supposed to clap?”

“Would you prefer convulsions?” Verena asked pleasantly.

Evelyn flexed her fingers once, then rolled one shoulder with measured care. “No pain,” she said. Her voice remained steady. Perhaps a touch cooler than before, though that might have been the room. She pressed one hand lightly against her opposite forearm, testing. “There is resistance,” she said after a moment. “Not numbness. Just… density.”

Van did not look at Verena. “Do you feel different, or just stronger?”

Evelyn considered that. “Contained,” she said. “As though my body has decided it is less willing to be injured than it was ten seconds ago.”

Verena smiled faintly. “As promised. Her mind now reinforces her body. A very elegant result.”

Fiona muttered, “Shocking. The telepath is observant.”

Claire shot her a warning look. Fiona ignored it.

Verena took one measured step closer. “A demonstration will be required.”

Evelyn answered before the pressure in the room could build any further. “What sort of demonstration?”

Verena lifted one hand. A narrow shard of faceted ice appeared above her palm, hovering in the air like a sculpted piece of winter glass. It was not large—perhaps the length of a finger—but its point was unmistakably sharp.

Several of the girls stiffened. Van’s voice flattened. “Verena.”

“She will not be harmed in any lasting way.”

“That is not reassuring.”

“But it is relevant.”

Evelyn watched the hovering shard without stepping back. “Proceed.”

Verena inclined her head once, almost respectful. The shard flicked forward. It struck Evelyn high on the outer arm with enough **** to make Claire flinch. The sound was wrong—not flesh being pierced, not even a blunt impact. It rang out in a brittle, crystalline click, as though the shard had struck dense glass hidden beneath skin. The ice splintered and fell away in glittering fragments. Evelyn’s arm jerked half an inch from the impact, nothing more.

Silence spread through the chamber. Fiona’s expression lost some of its reflexive contempt and sharpened into wary attention. Katherine exhaled slowly through her nose.

Claire whispered, “Okay.”

Verena turned just enough to address the room. “Durability increased substantially. Penetrative **** resisted. Impact transfer reduced. An excellent survival-oriented adaptation.”

Evelyn touched the place where the shard had hit. “I felt it.”

Van took half a step, then visibly stopped himself from making it look like too much. “How much?”

She met his eyes. “Enough to notice. Not enough to fear.”

That reassured him far less than she likely intended. He couldn’t place the protectiveness he was feeling. He felt somehow responsible for all of this.

Verena noticed that too. “You see, Master Van. Not all gifts are cruelties.”

Fiona barked a disbelieving laugh.

Evelyn lowered her hand and squared her shoulders. “Whatever language she dresses it in,” she said, “the result is still real.”

“Indeed,” was the only reply Verena gave.

Evelyn gave her glowing panel one final look, then turned back to the room and resumed the composed stance she seemed determined to keep no matter what was done to her. If the transformation had unsettled her, she offered the others no easy sign of it. She stood straighter, not because she felt safe, but because someone had to.

Verena’s attention moved on.

“Let us continue.”

Claire Mercer’s panel brightened next.

Again the other two cards dimmed away first, leaving Crowning Glory alone in full radiance. The letters sharpened until they looked cut from polished gold glass. The same soft chime sounded through the intake hall, but now everyone heard it differently. They knew what followed.

“The audience has rendered its judgment,” Verena said. “Crowning Glory maintained a clear lead throughout the vote. Best in Class performed respectably enough to merit continuation into the next round. Gold Star, despite its ambitions, failed to secure meaningful support and will be removed to the shop for later purchase.”

Claire’s mouth tightened. The thought of one of her discarded futures being shelved for sale did not appear to comfort her.

Verena turned to her. “Ms. Mercer. The winning transformation is Crowning Glory.”

Crowning Glory (Path Hidden)

Claire’s telekinesis is powerful, but not subtle. This allows her telekinetic senses to gain precision and extended reach, enabling telekinetic area mapping and movement detection. The new telekinetic field causes light objects to float if too near her body. (Hidden: When she is feeling strong emotions of admiration or desire, her hair floats with subtle animation, coiling toward the target of her affections, its hypersensitive strands becoming an erogenous zone.)

The panel flashed.

Golden **** erupted from Claire in a rush of semitranslucent planes, thin as glass and angled against one another in a hundred shifting layers. They did not expand evenly. They surged, banked, overlapped, wheeled. Each plane caught the light along its edges until the effect resembled a flock of luminous shapes streaming away from her body. The shining layers multiplied, then swept outward in every direction, passing through open air but halting cleanly at walls, pillars, floor, table edges, bodies.

For an instant the chamber became a map of interrupted space, every surface revealed by the way the golden field folded around it.

Claire vanished inside it—not hidden by opacity, but by motion, as though she stood at the center of some vast telekinetic migration.

Then the flock turned. Every plane, every sliver of gold, every angled sheet of **** swept back toward her at once. They flew into her, not striking but entering. The room gave a collective start as the last wave vanished into her body and the light collapsed inward all at once.

Silence followed, then Claire swayed. Her eyes were open but unfocused for a moment. Her lips parted on a quick breath. Then her expression changed—not with fear or pain, but wonder. Around her shoulders, a few strands of red hair drifted upward and failed to settle completely back into place.

“You may speak,” Verena said.

Claire blinked hard. “I—” She stopped, recalibrated, and tried again. “There’s… space.” The words sounded ridiculous and she knew it, but she pushed through anyway.

“I can feel where things stop. Not sight. Not hearing.” One hand lifted uncertainly. “It’s like the air has shape. Like the empty parts aren’t empty anymore.”

Katherine’s eyes narrowed immediately.

Claire turned slightly toward one side of the room without quite looking at it. “The table edge is there,” she said. “And the column behind it. And—” She cut herself off, brow furrowing. “No. Not behind it. I can’t reach behind it. It’s blocked.”

Verena inclined her head. “Correct.”

Claire looked down at her own hand as if she had just been issued an upgraded machine and was still reading the manual from the inside. “It’s mapping surfaces. Physical boundaries. Motion.” Her voice picked up speed despite herself. “If something moves in range, I should be able to catch it faster than before. I won’t need line of sight. In close quarters—”

She looked up sharply, excitement flashing through her before she could hide it. “In close quarters this would be incredible.”

The room heard it. Claire heard it too. Shame arrived a heartbeat later. Color rose in her face. Her shoulders drew in by a fraction. “I mean,” she said, trying to recover some dignity, “it’s useful.”

Verena’s expression barely changed, but a trace of satisfaction touched it. “Yes,” she said. “It is.”

Van watched Claire instead of Verena. “But, how do you feel?”

“I think….” Then, more honestly: “It’s strange.”

She took another breath and seemed to test the room again without meaning to. “Everything is just… bigger.”

Her hair still hovered softly around her shoulders, light enough to pass for a side effect of power if no one stared too long.

Verena raised one hand. “The demonstration.”

Claire tensed. “What kind of demonstration?”

A small golden orb appeared above Verena’s palm, no larger than a plum, perfectly smooth and humming faintly with restrained ****.

“The orb will select a target at random and make a direct rush.”

Several of the girls stiffened at once.

Van’s voice darkened again. “Verena, why?” He was frustrated and tired of hiding it. If he was going to be at the center of this thing, he wanted to find some kind of purchase, some footing to stand on.

“She has just described an expanded spatial sense,” Verena said. “This is the least ambiguous way to test it.”

“That doesn’t make it decent.”

“Decency,” Verena replied, “is not the metric presently in use.”

Claire’s jaw tightened. Then, quietly, “Do it. If this is real, I need to know how real. But attack me, not one of them.”

That filled the room with uncomfortable ****. Evelyn watched her closely. Lizzy looked worried. Naomi’s expression hardened into old reflexive caution.

Verena inclined her head once, “No.”

Then the lights went out.

The intake hall dropped into total darkness so complete that several people inhaled sharply at once. Claire’s breath caught. For one instant the old human panic looked ready to seize her—the blind animal terror of losing sight of everything at once.

Then the new sense bloomed. The darkness was not empty, it was filled with her new senses. Walls. Floor. Bodies. Table edge. Verena’s perfect stillness. Van half-turned toward her. The taut shifting tension of the others standing rigid in place. Space became a negative structure all around her, deep and immediate wherever nothing blocked it.

And then movement. Small and fast, the orb lunged. Claire did not think, her hand snapped up.

A hard golden pulse cracked through the dark. Something hit her telekinesis and stopped dead with the sound of a swallowed bell. The room remained black for half a heartbeat longer.

Then the lights returned. Claire stood at the center of the hall with one arm raised, her telekinetic **** wrapped visibly around the orb in layered translucent planes edged in gold.

It hovered less than three feet from Naomi’s throat. Naomi jerked back on instinct.

Claire’s eyes widened. “Oh God.” She pulled it away at once, breathing hard. The orb dropped harmlessly into stillness under Verena’s control.

Verena looked at Naomi. “A random result, as promised.”

Naomi glared at her. “That was supposed to reassure me?”

“No,” said Verena. “It was meant to verify Ms. Mercer’s adaptation.”

Claire was still staring at the orb. “I didn’t even see it,” she said. Then, softer, more startled by herself than by anything else, “I didn’t need to.”

She turned slowly, feeling the room again as if she could not stop herself. “If something came through smoke,” she said, mostly to herself, “or in a blackout, or around a corner—”

“You would have a significant advantage,” Verena said.

Claire lowered her arm. Her face had gone bright with thought, with possibility, with the sudden horrifying realization that this could save lives. Then she remembered who had given it to her.

Her expression tightened. “That doesn’t make this okay.”

Verena met her eyes. “No. It merely makes it useful.”

Van stepped in before the line could settle too deep. “You can hate the system and still admit the power works.”

Claire looked at him. Something in her posture eased—not because she approved of any of this, but because he had named the contradiction for her before she had to.

“I know,” she said. “I just don’t like that part of me is glad.” No one mocked her for that. Even Fiona stayed quiet.

Verena spoke into the pause. “A sensible discomfort. Many of the most effective arrangements are initially resented.”

Claire made a face. Some of her old spirit flickered back through the embarrassment. “That sounded rehearsed.”

“It was.”

A small startled laugh escaped Claire before she could stop it. That embarrassed her too. She looked away at once, red-haired and breathing hard, her hair still floating in faint restless motion around her shoulders as though the room had not yet quite convinced it to settle.

Verena turned to the next panel.

Mara Ellison’s frame brightened in a wash of gold.

The other two cards dimmed away, leaving Dream Girl alone in full radiance. Its title sharpened until the letters looked painted in luminous gold across glass.

“The audience has rendered its judgment,” Verena said. “Dream Girl held a firm lead from the beginning and did not falter. White Witch showed strong support and will return during the next voting round. World Traveler failed to attract meaningful interest and will be moved to the shop.”

Mara looked up without moving. Her expression shifted by only a degree, but the emotion was clear enough. Not surprised but displeased.

“Ms. Ellison,” Verena said. “The winning transformation is Dream Girl.”

Dream Girl (Path Hidden)

Mara relies on her powers to keep her and her friends safe in battle. This will sharpen her illusions for more convincing deceptions, providing cover and distractions in battle. (Hidden: When sleepy or daydreaming, translucent visions of her most romantic or sexual fantasies play out nearby.)

The panel flashed. Light spilled around Mara in watercolor motion.

At first it was soft, almost delicate—drifting ribbons of rose, gold, pale blue, muted green curling up from the floor and around her body like pigment unfurling in clear water. Shapes moved inside it, unfinished at first, as though someone were sketching with a wet brush directly into the air.

Figures turned around her. A woman in profile. The suggestion of antlers. Lantern light on rain. The curve of a boat sail. Birds with wings only half-defined. The room went still, the images did not.

They circled Mara, their edges sharpened. Blurred edges became clean lines. Lines became form. The drifting watercolor thickened into something clearer, more certain, every image gaining weight and fidelity as though her imagination had stopped dreaming and started declaring.

Then the whole mass broke outward.

A fox bolted past Claire’s knees so real she flinched. A narrow boat sailed through the open air above Naomi’s shoulder, rocking on invisible water. A rush of city pedestrians crossed the marble floor in overlapping motion, gone before anyone could fully process them. Golden lamps blazed into life overhead where none existed, then swept away again. Birds exploded toward the high ceiling. A horse reared at the edge of the room in a spray of phantom rain.

By the end the illusions were so sharply realized that several of the girls recoiled on instinct before the visions tore free from the room and vanished all at once like a dream collapsing at waking. Only silence followed.

Mara stood at the center of it, breathing a little faster, surrounded by faint lingering fragments of mirage—a drift of light near one hand, the tail end of a reflection at her shoulder, the ghost of painted color dissolving near her hips.

Lizzy stared openly. “That was beautiful.”

Katherine’s eyes stayed narrower. “And useful.”

Mara heard both, but her attention seemed caught somewhere farther away, as though she were still feeling the last of the power settling into place.

“You may speak,” Verena said.

Mara blinked once, then looked down at her own hands. “It’s clearer,” she said softly. Her voice had the strange tone of someone answering a question she was still in the middle of discovering.“I don’t have to **** the details anymore.”

She lifted one hand slightly, not quite intending to cast again, and a tiny shimmer of light trailed the motion before fading.

“I only have to think of something and it…” She searched for the word. “It arrives.”

She looked up, eyes wider now with uneasy realization.

“My illusions always had soft edges. A little dreamlike. Even when I wanted them sharp. Now they aren’t fighting me anymore, they’re almost straining for release.”

Mara turned slowly, testing the thought against the room itself. “I can make them more exact. Faster. More convincing.” Her voice tightened on the last word. “Too convincing.”

That changed the mood at once. The note in her voice was not awe or delight. It was quiet alarm.

Van had been watching her from the moment the visions burst loose. “Are you all right?”

Mara looked at him, then away again. “Yes,” she said, with enough uncertainty to make the word honest. “I think so.”

Her gaze drifted to the empty air where one of the phantom streets had been. “It feels like… my imagination was already there and someone just took the brakes off.”

“An apt description,” Verena said.

Mara’s mouth tightened. That was not reassurance. She looked down again at the last dissolving remnants of mirage around her and, in the same instant, plainly grasped the tactical value. Better cover, decoys, lies, panic. She hated that she knew it so quickly.

Verena did not let the moment soften. “For the sake of clarity, a demonstration is appropriate.”

Mara looked between them. “What kind of demonstration?”

Verena answered without pause. “Create a convincing phantom of the Master.”

Mara went still.

Van blinked once, caught off guard enough that the reaction showed before he could hide it. “That’s unnecessary.”

“It is precise,” Verena replied. “A familiar human target will best reveal the quality of the adaptation.”

Mara had already colored.

Claire looked at her with immediate sympathy. Naomi’s expression sharpened, bracing for something too personal. Evelyn watched in complete silence, missing nothing.

Verena’s gaze settled on Mara. “Proceed.”

Mara did not move.

Van looked at her, apology already in his face before he spoke. “Mara.”

She glanced at him.

“I’m sorry,” he said quietly. “I know I argued for it even though it wasn’t what you wanted.”

That softened something in her almost immediately, despite the humiliation of the moment. She gave the smallest shake of her head. “You were ****,” she said. “You aren’t the audience.” The words were gentle. Tired, too. Then she exhaled once and lifted her hand. The illusion formed instantly.

One moment the space beside her was empty. The next, Van stood there—or something so close to Van that the room reacted before thought caught up. The phantom was flawless in detail. His height. His build. The lines of his face. The shape of his hands. The fall of his clothes.

But the expression was wrong in a way that revealed more than inaccuracy ever could. This Van was smiling. His smile was boyish and charming, he seemed perfectly at ease.

His posture lacked the real Van’s guarded tension. His shoulders were unarmored. His face was unclouded. He looked like a version of himself untouched by the system, by anger, by the pressure of being made into something he had not chosen.

For half a second even Van himself looked startled by it. Then his attention snapped to Mara. He wondered if this was how she saw people, as their best selves.

She saw it too. She saw the room seeing it. The exposure hit all at once. The phantom vanished instantly. Mara lowered her hand and looked away, cheeks flushed with a shame that had nothing to do with failure. She felt childish in that moment as though being optimistic was a kind of crime.

Verena, of course, understood more than most. “Excellent fidelity.”

Mara’s jaw tightened. “Please don’t.” A small silence followed.

Verena did not press the point. “Your control has improved substantially. Speed of formation, detail, emotional coherence, and stability all exceed your prior baseline.”

Katherine, still studying the empty air, said, “A battlefield full of those would be a nightmare.”

Lizzy glanced at Mara and answered softly, “Or a miracle.”

Mara closed her eyes for just a moment, as though both statements hurt for different reasons.

Van stepped in before Verena could completely reclaim the rhythm of the room. “You don’t have to apologize for what the power did.”

Mara looked at him again. The embarrassment did not disappear, but some of its sting shifted. “I know,” she said. Then, after the smallest pause: “That may be part of the problem.”

He understood enough not to ask her to explain that in front of everyone.

Verena spoke into the hush. “Illusions of this quality can alter morale, protect allies, misdirect enemies, and create openings where none existed.”

“I know,” Mara said. The answer came quiet, but very clear.

Verena waited. Mara’s gaze drifted once more to the place where the **** version of Van had stood. Then she looked back at her own hand.

“I just hate,” she said, “how quickly something lovely can become a weapon.”

That settled over the room in a different way than anything else had. No one mocked it.

Verena regarded her for a long moment, unreadable as ever. “And yet,” she said at last, “you now possess the choice.”

Mara did not look convinced that choice had been the gift Verena meant it as.

The final mirage fragments thinned to nothing. She stood there still beautiful, still composed, but with a new and dangerous precision hidden beneath the softness of her power. Whatever else Dream Girl had made of her, it had not made her simple.

Verena turned to the next waiting panel.

“Let us continue.”

Naomi Hale’s panel brightened.

The two unchosen cards dimmed away first, leaving Power Valve alone in full radiance, its title sharpening until the letters looked poured in dark red gold across polished glass. A soft chime rang again.

Naomi looked up immediately, suspicion already in her face.

“The audience has rendered its judgment,” Verena said. “Power Valve secured a clear lead early and did not lose ground. Banked Reserves drew moderate interest and will return during the next voting cycle. Bandit Honor failed to attract enough support to continue and will be moved to the shop.”

There was no triumph in Naomi’s face, only tension. Hope did not yet have enough room to show itself.

Verena turned to her. “Ms. Hale. The winning transformation is Power Valve.”

Power Valve (Path Hidden)

Naomi has been too long denied the free use of her power. Now she begins down the path to set this right. She gains a degree of control but will take some time to master it fully. (Hidden: Her draining touch is easier to control the more skin she has exposed. Over time, she can fully master it no matter how she is dressed.)

For one beat Naomi did not move, then the panel flashed.

Wine-dark power gathered around her. Not light, exactly, though it glowed. Something thicker that moved slowly, like **** honey. It coalesced in slow viscous motion, a burgundy current folding out of empty space until it surrounded her in dense shifting layers. It moved with a terrible intimate smoothness, washing over her body from every side until she seemed caught inside it.

The effect was not violent. It looked almost sensual, the dark flow clinging and sliding over her like liquid velvet, close enough and slow enough that the room had too much time to watch it happen. Naomi’s outline remained visible inside it, blurred and half-submerged, like a girl trapped inside something thick enough to drown in without ever thrashing.

The silence in the intake hall turned strained. Lizzy had stopped breathing. Cassie looked sick. Even Fiona, who usually met spectacle with contempt, had gone still.

Naomi’s hands pressed weakly against the burgundy mass for one moment—not fighting exactly, but not welcoming it either. Then the power began to sink into her

It absorbed through her skin everywhere at once. Dark threads crawled across her exposed flesh in branching lines, wine-colored veins racing over her hands, up her throat, along the visible edges of her arms. For an instant it looked as though her body were trying to hold too much of the wrong kind of life.

Then the last of it drew inward. The room went quiet again.

Naomi stood where she had been, breathing hard, staring at her own hands. The wine-dark lines still moved faintly beneath her skin for a few seconds more, then began to fade as her breathing steadied.

She opened and closed her fingers. Her expression changed to disbelief. She flexed them again, more slowly now, turned one hand over, then back, as if the hunger she had lived with for years ought to be there in the same shape and simply… wasn’t.

“Ms. Hale?,” Verena prompted.

Naomi did not answer right away. She was still looking at her hand.

“It’s quieter,” she said at last. “Present but distant.” The words came so softly that several people leaned in without meaning to.

“It’s still there.” Her hand closed again, testing. “Still hungry. But it’s not…” Her face tightened, searching for language for something that had ruled her too long to describe easily.

“It’s not lunging.”

Now she looked down at both hands, flexing them again, almost afraid the feeling would vanish if she stopped checking.

“It’s like there’s finally something between me and it,” she said. “Not enough. Not all the way. But—” She cut herself off.

Hope had crept into her voice. If she heard it, so did everyone else. Her expression hardened immediately in embarrassment, but the moment had already happened.

“As expected,” Verena said. “The audience identified your most urgent need with reasonable accuracy.”

Cassie made a sharp disgusted sound at the phrasing, but Naomi barely seemed to hear it. She was still staring at her own body like it had briefly become habitable.

Van had been watching her the whole time with careful, guarded concern. “Naomi,” he said quietly. “Your power, will you be ok?”

She looked up at him.That was when the meaning truly landed. Not because she wanted him, but because of what he represented. A future. A possibility she had never once let herself believe in. Her face changed again.

Verena saw it at once. “For any doubters,” she said, “let us have the demonstration. Master Van, step forward.”

Van turned to her immediately. “No.”

“It is the safest available live test. The Master is unpowered. There will be no interference from other supernatural systems. The variables are simple.”

Naomi’s head snapped toward her. “Absolutely not.”

“You require proof.”

“I am not using him for that.”

“If you do not,” Verena said evenly, “I will produce the example by ****. I recommend you consider which version is likely to be handled more carefully.”

That froze the room.

Cassie was the first to find her voice. “You are really going to target someone’s trauma just to make a point?”

Verena did not look away from Naomi. “I am going to establish whether the transformation functions.”

“That’s not different,” Cassie was insistent.

“No,” Verena said. “It is more precise.”

Naomi looked like she might bolt, rage, or break. Possibly all three.

Van stepped in before any of those choices could harden, “Naomi.”

She looked at him, horrified already.

“You don’t have to do anything fast.” His voice stayed low and steady. “Look at me.”

She did.

“I trust you,” he said. “I know you won’t hurt me for real. It’ll just make me tired if it’s short, right? You’ll stop before it gets bad.”

She looked away from him and back at her own hand, as though she hated that trust even more than she hated Verena’s order. Or perhaps because it made the order possible.

Verena waited. The silence stretched. “Ms. Hale,” she said.

Naomi closed her eyes for one second, then opened them again and gave the tiniest nod.

Van did not step toward her immediately. Slowly, carefully, he extended one hand between them, palm turned slightly outward so she could choose the distance and angle herself.

Naomi stared at it like it was the edge of a cliff.

The whole room watched.

Her hand rose by degrees. Trembling. Not weak—she was not a weak woman—but visibly held under strain before contact had even happened. The hunger in her power was quieter now, but not tame enough to trust without effort.

She brought one fingertip toward the back of his hand, then stopped half an inch away. Her breathing hitched.

Van did not move. “It’s all right.”

Naomi made a tiny broken sound that might have been a laugh in another life. Then she touched him, just one fingertip.

The effect was immediate.

A wine-dark pulse flickered under her skin. Van inhaled sharply as the power trembled and fought against the confines of her body. Her hand buzzed like she held a trapped wasp.

Naomi’s entire body locked. Every muscle in her looked engaged at once, as though she were bracing a door against floodwater with nothing but her spine and will. The contact lasted one second. Two.

The room had gone so silent the faint sound of Naomi’s breathing became unbearable. Her jaw tightened harder, her shoulders shook.

The drain wanted more. That much was obvious even to those who could not feel it. Whatever Power Valve had given her, it was not easy. Not yet. It was leverage. A hand on the lead of an animal still stronger than she was.

Then she pulled her finger back. Van swayed half a step and caught himself. Naomi stared at her own hand. Nothing catastrophic had happened. No collapse, no uncontrolled escalation.

She had stopped. For a moment she looked like she did not understand the evidence in front of her. Then her face crumpled.

The tears came before she could stop them. She turned away sharply, one hand flying to her mouth, the other closing into a fist so tight the knuckles blanched. She was crying almost in anger, shoulders tight with the effort of not falling apart in front of everyone and failing anyway.

“Oh my God,” Lizzy blurted, soft and breathless with hope. “That’s— that’s incredible.”

She flushed immediately after speaking, but no one disagreed.

Evelyn’s voice came next, calm and measured in the way she used when she was being kind without advertising it. “The restraint cost is still extremely high,” she said, watching Naomi with analytical precision. “But it is restraint. With training, that should improve.”

That was as close to comfort as Evelyn offered most people.

Naomi laughed once through tears, angry and wrecked at the same time. “Great,” she said thickly. “Wonderful. So now I get to train for the privilege of maybe touching someone like a normal person.”

There was venom in it, but not enough to hide the grief underneath.

Verena remained perfectly composed. “A crude phrasing, but not an inaccurate one.”

Cassie looked ready to throw something at her.

Van kept his eyes on Naomi. “You did it,” he said simply.

Naomi dragged the heel of her hand across her face, wiping tears away with visible anger. “Don’t,” she snapped.

“I’m not patronizing you.”

“I know that.” Another furious wipe at her face. “That’s not helping.”

But she did not say he was wrong.

Verena spoke again, calm as ever. “Mastery may take time. At present, substantial restraint is still required. But the valve exists now. It can be opened and closed with practice.”

Naomi looked at her with red-rimmed eyes, nearly shaking with the **** of emotions moving through her too quickly to sort. Hope. Relief. Shame. Anger. Want.

She hated all of it.

Most of all she hated that for a few terrible seconds, in the middle of this room with everyone watching, she had believed the system might actually be worth what it was doing to them.

Her mouth twisted. “I still hate this place.”

Verena inclined her head. “Many useful truths arrive in unpleasant packaging.”

“Please stop talking like that,” Naomi muttered.

That drew the smallest breath of humor from the room—not because anything was funny, but because the line was human enough to break the pressure for half a second.

Naomi wiped at her eyes one more time, harder now, as though she could scrub hope off her skin by ****. When she lowered her hand, she looked angrier than before, but also more fragile.

Her gaze dropped once more to her own fingers.

Then she looked away from them quickly, as though wanting more from this transformation was already a kind of surrender.

Verena let the silence settle.

When she finally turned toward the next waiting panel, the room turned with her.

Four girls remained. And after what the ceremony had already drawn out of them, no one could pretend the rest would be easier.