Floor Fourteen opened onto a wide stone plaza beneath a sky bruised the color of a healing wound, and Ren felt the shift in atmosphere before he'd fully registered why.
The floor wasn't empty. Across the plaza, through a translucent observation seam identical to the one that had shown him Mirabella's effortless conduct on Floor Nine, he caught a fragment he hadn't expected.
One of the Established Eleven — a broad-shouldered girl Ren recognized from the confrontation outside the academy gates, arrogant even in memory — stood at the center of his own trial, facing a challenger built of shifting sand that reformed itself endlessly no matter how many limbs she severed. The girl's confidence, so absolute the night they'd all arrived, had visibly cracked; she was breathing hard, bleeding from a shallow cut along her brow, her earlier certainty replaced with something closer to genuine, humbling panic.
