Felicity claimed the seat to my right. Camille sat across the room, deliberately, still avoiding eye contact in the specific way that meant she was processing something and had decided I didn’t get to watch her do it. Petra descended to her top-row throne with her leather planner and the posture of someone who considered attendance a favor she was granting the institution.

Steele slammed the door open at 8:58, coffee in one hand, and for the first time since I’d met her, she looked genuinely pleased.

"Class 1-B." She set the coffee down on the podium with a soft click. "You survived this morning. Barely."

Camille’s jaw tightened. She didn’t argue.

"You’re broken and you’re tired and you smell terrible," Steele continued, pink eyes moving across all of us with something that was almost affection buried under the usual menace. "Which means you’re finally starting to look like people who might survive this profession. Good."

She let that sit. Then she leaned against the podium, crossed her arms, and asked the question that flipped the whole room.

"What is the most important job of a Hero?"

Silence. The kind that came right before twenty teenagers all decided they knew the answer.

Theo raised his hand first. "Stopping threats. Protecting people from the people who’d hurt them."

"Close. Sit down." Steele’s gaze swept the room. "Anyone else."

Eden practically vibrated out of his seat. "Beating villains! You’ve gotta punch the bad guy so hard he stops being a problem!"

"That’s the answer of a man who has watched too many highlight reels, Wilkinson."

Camille didn’t raise her hand. She just spoke. "Neutralizing high-level threats before they escalate. Everything else is downstream of that."

"Compelling. Wrong."

Hiro straightened, and there was something almost personal in the way he answered, like the question had been aimed at his entire worldview. "Punishing evil. A Hero is the answer to the people who think they can hurt others without consequence. We exist to make sure they’re wrong."

I watched Steele’s expression do something complicated. She almost looked disappointed, which was saying something, because Hiro Sato genuinely believed every word of what he’d just said with the kind of conviction most people reserved for religion.

"Sato," she said. "You’ve built an entire personality around a wrong answer. That’s almost impressive."

Hiro’s Corona flickered under his skin. He didn’t respond, but his jaw locked in a way I recognized from four evenings of getting hit in the face by that same jaw.

Answers kept coming. Marco said something about crowd control that Steele shot down. Finn offered "not dying," which earned a snort but no points. Nyx said "maintaining the illusion of order," which was the most Nyx answer imaginable and also wrong.

And then, from the top row, in a voice like she was correcting a misprint in a document beneath her attention, Petra spoke.

"It’s to save lives."

The room went quiet in a new way.

"Everything else," Petra continued, not bothering to stand, her emerald eyes fixed on the middle distance, "the threats, the villains, the punishment, all of it exists as a mechanism to accomplish the actual goal. A Hero who beats a villain but lets civilians die has failed. A Hero who resolves nothing but keeps everyone breathing has succeeded. The metric was never the fight. It was always the number of people who go home."

Steele smiled. Actually smiled, the full version, the one that made the gold in her jacket look brighter.

"Lang gets it."

Petra didn’t gloat. That was the unsettling part. She simply closed her planner one degree, acknowledged the correctness of her own answer as an obvious fact of the universe, and went back to ignoring all of us.

Beside me, Felicity leaned in. "Okay, that was hot in a terrifying way. Don’t tell her I said that."

"I’m telling everyone you said that."

"You wouldn’t dare."

I would absolutely dare, but Steele was already moving on, pushing off the podium and pacing the front of the room with the coffee back in her hand.

"Save lives," she said. "That’s the job. That’s the only job. Every skill I’ve beaten into you, every tactical concept Dravid’s carved into your skulls, every hour of media training with Hale, all of it serves that single objective. You are not weapons. You are not brands, whatever Crane tells you. You are the person who runs toward the collapsing building when everyone else runs away, and the measure of whether you’re any good is whether the people inside that building are alive when you’re done."

She stopped in the center of the room.

"Which brings me to why I’m actually happy this morning instead of merely tolerant of your existence."

Percy’s pen went still. That was a tell. His brain had processed something before the rest of us and decided it was worth abandoning documentation for.

"In two weeks," Steele said, "Class 1-B is going to conduct a joint field exercise with Class 1-A."

Reaction rippled through the room. Caden’s head came up off his desk. Theo sat forward. Camille’s attention sharpened to a point. Even Petra’s composure cracked one microscopic degree, which for Petra was the equivalent of falling out of her chair.

Sloane was in 1-A. My chest did something stupid at the thought before I stomped it flat.

"The exercise," Steele continued, "will take place at the Verano Crisis Response Facility on the eastern edge of campus. Some of you have seen it from the ridge. Most of you assumed it was abandoned. It’s not. It’s decommissioned, which is different, and the academy has spent considerable money turning a real emergency response complex into a multi-environment training site."

She pulled up a schematic on the smart board. A sprawling gray compound stretched across the display, a nightmare of interconnected structures. Collapsed overpasses. A partial subway station. A hospital wing. Flooded lower levels. Industrial storage. It looked less like a training facility and more like a city that had experienced four separate disasters and given up on recovery.

"Internally," Steele said, "we call it the Crucible."