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In wartime, a month felt eternal. A month could be camping in the same rotting field where the only thing that seemed more permanent than the scars the tents had carved into the earth were the constant screams of thralls over the hills as century after century held them back from their ceaseless advance.

There was a point where you simply stopped counting the days, where it was no longer worth it to know the difference between twenty-three and twenty-four.

Kat expected the road project to be the same kind of monotony, just differently flavored.

Days that bled together, but at least none of those days were life-threatening.

Instead, the first month of road work had felt like a blink.

Blink and the Augustine Road had crossed the four-hundred-mile mark.

Blink and every decade was laying thirty meters on average.

Blink and one morning, Adrien sauntered past Kat’s exercises with Mira while sucking down his black coffee, paused mid-sip, and said, “Tomorrow, you should train with me and my friends.”

Then he continued on his merry way.

“Was that an order?” Kat asked under her breath once he’d gotten out of earshot.

“Do you want it to be?” Mira replied.

Kat wasn’t sure, but she knew her status quo badly needed the shake.

Though her skill with her token had progressed significantly over the course of her training, she couldn’t say the same for any other aspect of her life.

It had been two weeks since the Goal game that had driven an undeniable wedge between her and the rest of the decade—and nowhere was that wedge more painful than in the distance that had grown between her and Emory.

They’d already gone back to sleeping in the same tent as if nothing ever happened that night at the tavern, as if they hadn’t been on the verge of sneaking out into the back alley and fraternizing to their hearts’ content, but now that Kat was focusing on cultivating her token, Emory seemed bent on keeping himself out of the picture.

If she asked, she was sure she’d get some line about how he didn’t want to distract her, how it was probably better for everyone this way.

She didn’t ask.

He’d thrown himself into Giselle’s training instead, spending every spare minute he wasn’t digging roads putting his pupil through her paces.

The two of them were enlisted through and through, clearly not taking Adrien’s offer of release, and it occurred to Kat one morning watching them drill together that Emory wasn’t just training Giselle up to keep her alive.

If Kat was taking her release, he would need a new battle partner—a new hinge spear to hold his line together.

Kat tried not to let it sting, tried to appreciate that even if they couldn’t spend time together, he was on the training field alongside her and Mira every step of the way.

Then again, he couldn’t have chosen two worse babysitters to keep them honest: their centurion and one of the most judgmental teenagers Kat had ever met in her life.

She snuck a glance over her shoulder to where Emory and Giselle were in the midst of a warm-up lap around the field.

They were too far away to have heard Adrien, but they had to have seen him and seen that he said something.

They’d know who to blame when Kat disappeared tomorrow morning—if they weren’t already set on blaming Kat for choosing the Aureans over the infantry.

Giselle, she wouldn’t put it past. Emory, though—

Maybe this distance was for the best. To practice, to prepare, like she’d thought before, for the moment they’d have to separate for good.

“I suppose it couldn’t hurt to get some perspective,” Kat said.

Mira gave her a wary look. “Just be careful about what perspectives you’re offering. Remember what I told you. Any one of them has space in their array for your shine, and so far all you can do is blaze it in their eyes a bit if they try to take it.”

The only good outcome of the Goal game had been proof that blazing her token’s power in someone’s eyes was, in fact, an effective deterrent. “Yes, centurion,” Kat said with a flippant salute and was already running before Mira fired back with a flat, exhausted, “ Laps. ”

Adrien had given no instructions on where to meet him and his companions, but instructions weren’t necessary—all Kat had to do was follow her ears.

Even from a distance, the sound of the five most decorated Aureans in history putting themselves through their paces was unmistakable.

Kat set off into the woods at the edge of the camp, following the shattering booms for what she estimated to be about two miles of uphill scramble.

She was used to marching with her gear on her back and felt strangely naked fording undeveloped land unencumbered save for the token hanging around her neck.

As she got closer and closer, she spotted the distant shiver of the treetops that accompanied each noise, feeling it more and more in her throat with every step.

Finally, she broke into a massive clearing—and didn’t dare take another step forward.

In the center of the open field stood Daya Imonde, and suspended over her was a boulder the size of the command tent. It rotated slowly above her head, and she held one palm outstretched and tilted skyward, unwaveringly still.

Daya flipped her hand, and Kat shrank back as the boulder rocketed skyward.

Her breath stalled in her lungs, but Daya only tipped her head back, watching its progress, then neatly stepped to the side a second before it slammed into the ground with a crash that rivaled a shock knight smashing through a century’s fore and put a shudder in Kat’s knees.

Daya lifted her hand again, pulling the boulder up with one clean gesture and setting it back into position over her head.

“She thinks she’s so impressive,” Adrien said, and Kat nearly elbowed him in the head where he’d snuck up to her side.

“That’s an ordinary Hand of Angels token at work—her very first token, in fact.

Stolen from her family’s vault completely uncultivated, so all that ability is nothing but Daya’s raw talent.

Which would be incredibly useful if she attuned the rest of her array, ” he hollered across the clearing.

Daya gave him a cheeky grin and a wave. The boulder didn’t move an inch.

“Well, I think it’s impressive,” Kat offered, mainly to worsen the vinegar in her prince’s expression.

Impressive wasn’t the right word for it.

Terrifying, maybe. Infuriating, if she thought too hard about how Daya probably could have put that boulder clean through a pack of thralls and crushed the demon shepherding them in the process.

No wonder the Demon Lord had been so keen on alchemizing antigold.

“She has ninety-five tokens. Do you have any idea what kind of power she’s leaving on the table by using just one to get very good at throwing rocks around? Actively reinforcing alignment in a single token makes it more difficult to chain its power to the rest of her array.”

Kat supposed Adrien couldn’t help seeing it that way. His entire existence was centered around the goal of achieving the most powerful token set the world had ever seen. He looked at Daya and all he saw was wasted potential.

Kat looked at Daya and wondered what the war would have been like if more people on the front lines had the opportunity to cultivate a token.

Not an array, like so many of their officers—just one, pushed to the outside edge of its power.

How many tokens sat in the Augustine family vaults, waiting for a far-off moment in the sun that would only come when the time was right to compound their power?

“How’s it coming with the rest of you?” Adrien asked, and Kat realized that the other three companions were settled on a blanket that had been laid out at the edge of the clearing.

“Halfway,” Faye replied with forced cheer. She knelt with her eyes closed and her head bowed, and she flinched visibly as the boulder dropped like a thunderclap once more. Next to her, Bodhi sat cross-legged, a beatific smile on his face.

At his side, Celia appeared to be asleep flat on her back.

“Lady Vai,” Adrien said with the assistance of his Voice of Angels token, drawing another flinch out of Faye.

“Had a late night,” the young countess grumbled, cracking one eye open. “And it’s not like I’m going to get anywhere trying to attune while that’s going on,” she added, flicking her fingers at Daya.

“I think it’s wonderful practice,” Faye said. “We can’t always be expected to attune in perfect conditions. True readiness hopes for the best but prepares for the worst.”

“Thought we left all those philosopher platitudes back in High Training,” Celia groaned, letting her head fall back onto the blanket.

“Was it always like this?” Kat muttered as Adrien turned back to her. “Training together during the war?”

“This is mild,” he said, shaking his head. “Imagine six years of this, day in, day out, locked in a freezing monastery up in Sprill, all of us trying to grow our arrays faster than each other with no one but a bunch of crusty monks for company.”

Kat could see the downsides, but watching Daya, she couldn’t help but feel a prickle of envy.

Kat had scant few hours to practice in the morning before her digging rotation, during which she’d been able to cultivate to the point that the light came consistently when she called it.

To get to Daya’s level at Daya’s age—to be a teenager capable of heaving that much mass around with nothing but angelic power—took years, years in which Daya did nothing but train her gold, with all her other needs taken care of to allow forit.