Instructor Pell looked at Raka's Aether channel readings and then looked at Raka and then looked at the readings again with the expression of someone who has committed to professional composure and is finding it requires more effort than usual.

  'Six simultaneously,' she said.

  'Yes,' Raka said.

  'Including the Void-adjacent signature.'

  'Yes.'

  She set the diagnostic instrument down and sat in the chair across from his bed.

  'I need you to understand something,' she said, in the tone that meant she was going to say something he would prefer not to hear and she was going to say it clearly anyway. 'The multi-thread incident in the tournament — five signatures — altered your channels structurally. I documented that and told you the alterations would make subsequent multi-thread incidents more damaging because the accumulation would compound. Tonight you used six, including a Void-adjacent frequency, which operates on a fundamentally different register from the other five. The compounding is significant.'

  'How significant?' Raka asked.

  'You have lost approximately thirty percent of your channel capacity,' she said. 'Not temporarily. The channels that were most stressed tonight have narrowed, not expanded. They are not going to widen again. This is permanent structural change — not in the direction you want.'

  The medical wing was very quiet.

  'Thirty percent,' Raka said.

  'In the affected channels,' she said. 'You retain full capacity in the channels that weren't pushed beyond their limit tonight. But those channels correspond to specific ability types. The Void-adjacent channel — the one that carried Sena's frequency — is the most damaged.'

  'What does that mean practically?' he asked.

  'It means you should not carry Sena's frequency again,' she said. 'Not through full resonance. The channel will not survive another instance of that particular frequency at that volume.'

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  Raka looked at his hands.

  'But I can still use the others,' he said.

  'Yes,' she said. 'Within adjusted limits. And single-thread resonance is largely unaffected — the structural changes are concentrated in the multi-thread channels, not the primary single-thread architecture.'

  He thought about what that meant. What it didn't mean. What he could still do and what he had just permanently given away.

  'Was it worth it?' Pell asked. She asked it without judgment, with the genuine curiosity of a healer trying to understand the decision she was treating the consequences of.

  Raka thought about Sena in the west courtyard with a creature that had been directed specifically at her because she was the most dangerous thing on the field. He thought about what would have happened if he had arrived and used single-thread force, which would have been adequate for a combat-class Voidborn and inadequate for what actually came through.

  'Yes,' he said.

  'Then we work with what remains,' she said. 'Which is still considerable.'

  She gave him a recovery plan that was more detailed and more stringent than the previous one, and he accepted all of it, and they did not discuss what would happen if there was another wave in the next two weeks because both of them already knew the answer to that question.

  * * *

  The others came to see him. Not all at once — that was not their style, and Pell had limits on visiting — but in pairs and alone over the course of two days.

  Lenne came first, with food she had apparently argued her way past the medical wing's meal protocol to bring, and sat on the edge of his bed and looked at him with an assessment that was more careful than her usual directness.

  'Thirty percent,' she said. She had clearly already gotten the information from somewhere.

  'In the affected channels,' Raka said.

  'Which means you can't do the six-thread thing again.'

  'Not the Void-adjacent component.'

  She was quiet for a moment.

  'You came for Sena,' she said.

  'She needed — '

  'I know why,' Lenne said. 'I'm not questioning it. I'm noting it.' She looked at him with the directness she brought to everything, the quality that made her hard to be comfortable around in the early days and that he had come to understand was not abrasiveness but honesty without softening. 'You would do it for any of us.'

  'Yes,' he said.

  'That is going to keep costing you,' she said.

  'I know.'

  'We need to make sure,' she said, 'that we are worth the cost. That we're worth it enough to justify you spending yourself this way.'

  'You already are,' he said.

  She looked at him for a long moment. Then she put the food on his bedside table and stood.

  'Eat that,' she said. 'And sleep. We'll handle the next wave without you if we have to.'

  'You won't have to,' he said.

  'No,' she agreed. 'But we could. That's the point I'm making.'

  She left. He ate the food, which was better than the medical wing's standard offering, and thought about what she had said.

  We could.

  Six weeks ago they couldn't. Now they could.

  That was the point. That had always been the point.