The Spire District was visible now, its towers catching the morning sun and throwing it back in shards of gold and white. Mana-steel and reinforced glass, runed from foundation to crown, each building a monument to what humanity had rebuilt from the ashes of the Unveiling. The Adventurers Guild headquarters dominated the skyline - a massive structure that looked like it had been grown rather than built, its walls curving organically, covered in living vines that pulsed with soft green light. Somewhere in those towers, the people who decided the future of New Chicago were already at work.

  The tram didn't stop in the Spire District. The line curved north, skirting the district's edge, and Jace watched it slide past like a painting in a museum - beautiful, visible, separated from him by invisible glass.

  Then the third checkpoint. This one was staffed - actual guards in Iron Legion grey, checking IDs, scanning mana-signatures. Jace held up his academy pass and felt the ward-scanner read him deep, probing for concealed weapons, hostile enchantments, anything that didn't belong. It found nothing. He was a sixteen-year-old kid from the Boroughs with below-average aptitude scores and a secondhand uniform that his mother had pressed twice so the creases would hold.

  The guards waved the tram through and the final stretch of track climbed a gentle rise, and there it was.

  Ironhold Academy.

  The campus sprawled across a hill that had once held a pre-Unveiling university - Jace had seen the name in recovered texts, though it meant nothing now. The old-world bones were still visible: concrete and steel frames, geometric and severe, rising out of the new-world construction that had grown around them like vines around a ruin. Mana-infused stone and hardlight buttresses reinforced ancient load-bearing walls. Glowing conduit pipes traced the rooflines like luminous veins. Training fields spread across the eastern slope, their surfaces shimmering faintly with the contained energy of bound elementals that powered the simulation arrays.

  At the center of the campus, visible from the tram platform, the Grand Auditorium rose like a cathedral. Its doors were open.

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  Jace's stomach dropped.

  He stood with the other passengers - a handful of students in Ironhold uniforms, all quiet, all wearing the same expression of controlled terror that probably matched his own. They filed off the tram and onto the platform and then they were walking, a loose procession of young people moving toward the building that would define the rest of their lives.

  The morning air smelled like ozone and old stone and the sharp, almost minty scent of fresh mana - the academy's wards were running at full strength for the ceremony, saturating the grounds with ambient energy. Jace breathed it in and felt the unassigned potential in his chest respond, buzzing harder, pressing against his ribs like a bird trying to break through a cage.

  *Easy. Not yet. Let me at least get through the door.*

  He fell in step with the crowd and tried not to think about his mother on the platform or his father in the tunnel or the woman on the tram whose mere presence had made his body confess its own smallness. He tried to think about nothing at all.

  It didn't work. The thoughts came anyway, as they always did - sideways, slippery, dodging the nets he threw over them.

  *What if it gives me something useless? What if it gives me nothing? What if I walk up to that Stone and it looks at everything I am and decides it isn't enough?*

  The Grand Auditorium swallowed them. Students funneled through its massive doors into a space that was part cathedral, part arena, part surgical theater. Rows of tiered seating curved around a central floor, and at the center of that floor, bathed in a column of pale blue light that poured from a skylight far above, sat the Attunement Stone.

  It was smaller than he'd expected. A rough-cut crystal roughly the size of a man's torso, deep blue shot through with veins of white that pulsed like slow breathing. It sat on a simple stone pedestal. No ornamentation. No ceremony to the object itself. It didn't need any. Every person in this room could feel it - a gravitational pull, a hum at the frequency of possibility, the promise and the threat of being *known*.

  Jace found his assigned seat. He sat. He put his hands on his knees to stop them from shaking.