Chapter 67: Who Do You Trust

The announcement from the day before was all anyone talked about. Every Advanced Training student had to choose three people they trusted for the preliminary Lunar Trial exercise, and the instructor had added a rule that made it harder than it sounded. No one could choose every member of their usual team, because the academy wanted to see whether students could build a group around ability and trust instead of friendship or status.

Liam heard the rule at breakfast and immediately assumed the worst. He announced to the whole table that Roxanne would obviously pick all four Moonstones, and that the academy had made the rules unfair on purpose. Roxanne swallowed her toast and pointed out that she was only allowed three names. Liam opened his mouth, closed it again, and went back to his eggs. Jace, sitting beside him, said he wouldn’t mind being chosen himself, and Liam shoved a roll at his head without even looking.

Instead of deciding right away, she spent the morning watching everyone. She watched Elias during tracking work, noticing how he checked the ground twice before committing to a direction, and Tessa during combat, where she fought with a cheerful kind of ferocity. Isla was sharp during strategy exercises, catching a gap in the plan that the instructor himself had missed, and Serena stayed calm when a group drill fell apart around her and quietly put it back together. Jace kept pace through an endurance run without complaining once, and the Moonstones trained on the far field the way they always did. Everyone had different strengths, but Roxanne realized that strength wasn’t the real question. What mattered was who she would trust when something went wrong.

Tessa found her at midday and asked whom she was choosing. Roxanne refused to say, and Tessa laughed, tossed her a pair of wrist wraps, and challenged her to a quick spar behind the equipment shed. Halfway through, Tessa switched her attack without warning, dropping a low sweep where a strike should have come. Roxanne adjusted mid-motion and caught her wrist, and Tessa hit the grass laughing. She stayed there for a moment with her arms spread wide, grinning up at the sky before she looked at Roxanne. "That’s why I like training with you," she said. Roxanne knew Tessa wouldn’t panic if a plan fell apart, but she still wasn’t ready to decide.

That evening Isla sat beside her on the library steps and asked whether she expected to choose a Moonstone. Roxanne admitted she didn’t know. "You don’t have to choose someone because they’re important to you," Isla said, and Roxanne looked at her and answered, "I know." Isla nudged her shoulder. "Then choose someone you’d trust when you’re scared." Roxanne thought about the last few weeks, the maze and the platform and the dark woods, and tried to remember whose voice she had wanted beside her in each of them. The words stayed with her long after they had walked back to the dormitories.

At lunch the next day Liam tried to guess whom she would pick, listing names and watching her face for a reaction. Lucien told him to stop, and Roshan added that the assignment was meant to test Roxanne’s judgment, so the answer wasn’t anyone else’s to guess. Kai shrugged, unbothered, and kept eating like the matter was already settled. "Choose whoever you want," he said.

Roxanne studied him across the table. "You won’t be offended?"

"No," Kai said, and she believed him. The brothers weren’t trying to secure a place beside her, and she realized they were genuinely letting her decide.

The instructor started the preliminary exercise without warning, before anyone had turned in a list. He divided the students into random temporary groups, and Roxanne’s group struggled almost immediately. One boy refused to listen to anyone, and a girl froze when the route changed halfway through the course. Roxanne felt the pull to take charge and bark orders, but she remembered Lucien’s lessons about leadership and did something different. She asked each of them what they did best and built the plan around the answers, sending the stubborn boy ahead to scout because he was fast and the anxious girl to track because her nose was excellent. She took the rear herself, where she could see everyone at once and call corrections quietly, and by the second checkpoint the boy had stopped arguing and started asking her where she wanted him next.

She drew on everything she had absorbed over the past months, Roshan’s habit of watching before acting, Liam’s ability to improvise, Kai’s combat training. She hadn’t noticed how much she had learned from all four of them until she needed it, and the group finished the course with time to spare. When the instructor checked his stopwatch, he glanced at her for a second longer than the others, then wrote something down without a word.

At the end of the day, she finally wrote her list and handed it to the instructor’s assistant. Isla Crown. Tessa Nile. Elias Mercer. She had not written a single Moonstone name, and it had nothing to do with trust. The exercise asked her to build something outside her usual circle, and she wanted to see whether she could.

The brothers found out when the lists were posted on the board. Liam stared at it and turned to her with a look of pure betrayal. "You didn’t choose me?"

Roxanne smiled. "You survive everything. You’ll be fine."

Jace burst out laughing. "She got you," he said, and Liam shoved him hard enough to make him stumble. Kai read the list, and he didn’t look upset in the slightest. He nodded once. "Good choice," he said.

Before the courtyard could empty, the instructor gathered everyone and revealed the catch. The people each student had selected would not necessarily be their teammates. Tomorrow’s exercise would test whether they could work with the people they had chosen while the academy actively tried to pull them apart.

Roxanne looked down at her three names and felt her stomach tighten. "Trust isn’t proven when everyone stays together," the instructor said. He looked across the class, letting his gaze rest on each face. "It’s proven when circumstances give you a reason to doubt each other."

She glanced toward Isla, Tessa, and Elias, who were each standing a few feet apart in the crowd, and Elias caught her eye with a look that said he was already thinking the same thing. Then she looked across the courtyard at the four Moonstones. She had thought choosing three people would be simple, and now she wasn’t sure what the academy was planning to make them choose between.