The plan is for Valentine to work on developing his own core and to give up the augmentations as a loss. It’s a risky move but it’s the best one he’s got. Morgan can’t give him an exact timeline but he says they should know fairly quickly if it’ll work or not.

Morgan’s got a theory that the reason the procedures fail so spectacularly with people like Valentine is because they have a strong natural talent for magic that reacts violently to the presence of the pseudo cores. It’s something that can’t really be tested—all other candidates that have had similar reactions to the augmentations have died.

There’s also no reliable way to test for magical abilities which means they can’t pre-screen candidates. Valentine asks how spiritualists even find apprentices then. Morgan explains that magical ability tends to run in families and that accounts for most apprentices. The rest usually fall into one of two groups: people that are interested in magic and seek out practitioners, and the occasional person that is so strongly gifted weird shit just tends to constantly happen in their vicinity. There’s entire sects of spiritualists that specialize in keeping an eye out for the second group as they need to receive at least a basic magical education so they don’t end up hurting themselves or others.

As it turns out the pseudo cores were the real sticking point when it came to spiritualists wanting nothing to do with DEXO. Their stance was that forcibly converting people’s bodies to channel magic was not only interfering with the natural order of things but the process of installing the cores was barbaric, especially given the failure rates.

The people running DEXO on the other hand thought that the spiritualists just needed to get with the times. Why should magic usage be arbitrarily restricted by natural ability? The loss rate was unfortunate but it was something that could be ironed out once the evacuation phase of the Ark Project was completed.

Despite DEXO’s mad science project there’s still not enough spiritualists to meet demand, and there is also a growing concern that magic will effectively be dead as a cohesive practice in a few hundred years. Spiritualist sects are getting split up into different settlements, which will make it difficult if not impossible for them to find and train up enough replacements to keep their numbers from declining. Not to mention their reluctance to train or even associate with members of DEXO.

There will still be the odd wild talent cropping up, and magic won’t cease to exist but centuries of knowledge of how to manipulate it will slowly die out. Mentorship will become a thing of the past. Sacred objects will lose their power, rituals will lose their meaning. Practitioners will no longer be able to base their power upon that of those that came before them, and will be the most meagre of talents compared to what they could have been.

Valentine doesn’t really see what any of this has to do with him. It’s unfortunate for sure but he’s not particularly invested in culture or traditions of magic, and by the time it’s a real concern he’ll probably be long dead, even factoring in his projected extended lifetime.

Morgan seems hellbent on making him care.

He says that real practitioners should be stewards, doing what they can to preserve knowledge and traditions. That’s why Morgan gave up everything, got kicked out of his own sect to go work at DEXO, to wield what little influence he could over the direction of the program.

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Valentine gets it in theory but he’s still having a hard time wrapping his brain around the idea that magic is so much more than just a tool.

He wants to tell Gee about cores. It’s right up his alley after all, just another way that DEXO’s managed to screw them over. Not to mention it’d be nice to have someone other than Morgan to talk to about all this. But he worries that sharing what he’s learned would destroy Gee’s newly positive mindset and he just can’t burst that balloon yet. Or maybe ever. He needs Gee to stay hopeful for the future. Gee might seriously lose it if he learns that they’ve all been given the ability to use magic but purposefully denied the knowledge of how it actually works.

The whole core thing, Valentine worries, makes him even more of a freak and an outsider. He’s going to have both pseudo cores and an actual core and no one else (to Morgan’s knowledge at least) is like that. All the failed augmentations and the damage they did make it obvious that he’s not your average kid and while most spiritualists can pass as regular people he really can’t. His scarring is too extensive.

But he’s not going to be able to fake it as a real spiritualist either because there’s the pseudo cores and being associated with DEXO. It’s unlikely that there’s any sects or even lone spiritualists that will willingly associate with him, let alone share proprietary knowledge.

So the trick Morgan says, is to teach Valentine how to develop and maintain a core. He’s got to get to the point where he can safely and reliably channel enough magic to meet the minimum requirements to get assigned to a ship but for the long term he’s going to have to keep working on developing his core. There’s no real cutoff and no reason to stop really, Morgan explains. More power is always going to be better than less, especially considering the unknown challenges he’ll have to deal with out in space. It’s also best practice and how the real spiritualists do it.

The initial lessons are surprisingly disappointing. They’re also boring as fuck. Valentine knows how to meditate, it’s hardly rocket science but Morgan is insistent so they spend all of what Valentine considers to be his extremely valuable free time perfecting his meditation technique. Morgan goes on and on how Valentine’s supposed to feel the magic, the currents of it and the way they move, the internal versus the external. He doesn’t feel anything, other than bored.

It takes a while for Gee to even notice the change in Valentine’s schedule since he himself has been so busy as of late, with his course load picking up. He’s in the last stages of the program now and his teachers are determined to cram as much knowledge into his flight group as possible before they’re sent out.

They’re as closed off from the rest of the world as they ever are but there’s still this palpable sense of urgency. Between the planet rising up against them and groups like Karma that are determined to work against DEXO, one way or another there’s not many flights left that will be making it out.

But Gee, once he does realize that Valentine’s found something to occupy all his free time, teases him relentlessly. He says that Valentine must’ve got himself a girlfriend and that’s why he’s so busy. Valentine wishes he had the time for something so mundane but even if he did he’d be spending it with Gee, not some girl. He tells Gee as much.

Gee just gives him an odd, searching look. Then he laughs awkwardly and says if he honestly had the time and the right lady came along he’d drop Valentine in a heartbeat, no offense. Valentine takes every offense. They’re supposed to be friends.

And Gee says that they are friends, absolutely but he’s not dead, geez. And Valentine doesn’t even know how to begin to untangle that.