Chapter 428: Two Names

Elena came in last and sat on the edge of the straw, and put her hand flat on Glitch’s flank, very gently, and left it there. Glitch’s tail moved once.

"You’re both going," she said. "You and Lucian. It’s real."

"It’s real."

"Somewhere none of us have ever been." She didn’t sound frightened, exactly. She sounded like someone holding two things at once. "I’m so proud of you that I want to shout. And I want to lock you in your room."

"The room’s nice."

"Don’t," she said, and laughed, and wiped her eyes.

They left at seven, because the transit back to Coldwell didn’t wait. Elsa hugged him again at the gate and said, into his shoulder, "I’m telling Captain-or-Pebble-or-Slate about this when I next visit," then hurried after her parents, still arguing with herself about which name suited a penguin best.

Jin found Lucian at nine, sitting on the floor outside Kite’s stall with his back against the wall. Kite was asleep inside with her bent primary taped.

Jin sat down next to him.

For a while, neither of them said anything. Somewhere down the corridor, a handler was singing quietly to something that didn’t want its dressing changed.

"Both of us," Lucian said eventually.

"Both of us."

"I keep waiting for someone to come round the corner and say there’s been a mistake."

"Ashdown said it into a microphone."

"That doesn’t mean anything. People say things into microphones all the time." Lucian tipped his head back against the wall. "The lane, though. That was real. I walked her there."

"She knew you were taking her toward the line," Jin said. "I thought she’d get back through."

"So did I. Kite gave me the chance." Lucian looked toward the stall. "She nearly caught Kite twice. I couldn’t keep asking for that pass."

He looked at Jin.

"What you did. With Glitch. The corner." He paused. "I saw how he was moving afterward. I was worried about him."

"So was I. I had to stop asking him to chase anything."

"You kept him behind the block. Made Maddox come round to you."

Jin nodded. "Glitch got us out. I couldn’t make him do the rest on his own."

"It’ll be harder in there," Lucian said. "There’ll be people who’ve beaten much stronger competition than us."

"I know."

"Good." Lucian closed his eyes. "Just so you don’t get comfortable."

"I’m never comfortable."

"You looked comfortable on the sand with the sword behind you."

"For about four seconds."

By Monday, everybody at Meridian seemed to know their names.

It was mostly Jin’s name, at first. He heard it in corridors and in the dining hall, and once from two first-years who stopped talking when he walked past. They called him the C-Rank kid.

They called Glitch the Grey Rock Lizard, and someone had found the old Highmarch footage again and was showing it round on a slate.

The battered lizard from Highmarch appeared beside a clip of Sunday’s drake breaking the monitor’s pressure and turning back to reach Jin.

"That’s not the same lizard," Jin heard someone say.

"It is. That’s the point."

But it wasn’t only Jin. In the yards, Lucian had people stopping him to ask about the lane, about how he’d stopped landing where people expected, and about Kite climbing clear. Teller found him on Tuesday, said, "You walked Morrow into a corner, Vale. Morrow," and shook his head and walked off, apparently satisfied.

Crowe said nothing to either of them in public. On Tuesday, he left a note on each of their lockers. Jin’s said: Bring Verrick’s recovery instructions to the briefing. Preparation starts with those.

He didn’t find out what Lucian’s said. Lucian put it in his pocket and wouldn’t show anyone.

Not everybody was impressed, and that was fine. Jin heard a fourth-year in the dining hall saying that a Rank-2 selection was a Rank-2 selection, and the Rank-3 students would have eaten the lot of them. He was probably right.

The briefing was on Thursday, in a small room off the staff corridor, with Crowe and a lean, grey-haired woman from the academy’s field office named Halloran.

Glitch had been out of the monitoring bay since Monday. He still moved stiffly and was allowed only short, easy walks. Flicker’s wing was healing. Jin’s arm had gone yellow.

Halloran put a single page on the table in front of each of them.

"What we know," she said, "which isn’t much. It’s a newly opened resource land. Entry is limited to Rank 2. We have preliminary measurements from the accessible margins, not a complete survey."

She tapped the page. "The energy levels they’ve measured are high, and the purity is unusual. Their assessment is that, for Rank-2 development, it’s worth at least what we’d call S-grade."

Lucian made a small sound.

"That’s a site assessment," Halloran said. "Not a promise. We don’t have a full map. We don’t know what’s deeper in. Nobody can tell you what you’ll find, and if anyone does, they’re guessing."

"When?" Jin asked.

"Not yet." She slid a second page across. "Before we talk dates, we talk about you."

It was a checklist. Current equipment, and what needed repair or replacing. Supplies. Whether each of them could care for their beasts alone, for weeks, without a clinic down the corridor. Travel readiness. And at the bottom, in plain type: Known weaknesses. Be honest.

"Go through it," Crowe said. "Properly. Come back next week, and we’ll go through it with you."

Jin looked down the list. Beside beast condition, he wrote: Glitch — recovering. Ask Verrick. Beside known weaknesses, he hesitated before writing: Keeping track of both beasts when someone gets close. Knowing where a turn ends. Judging when to stop. He nearly softened the last one, then left it.

That evening, he went down to the stall.

Glitch was lying in his usual place, awake. When Jin came in, he lifted his head, slowly, but further than he’d managed on Monday.

Flicker was on the rope perch with her wrapped wing tucked close, watching them both.

Jin sat on the feed crate with the checklist on his knee.

Somewhere none of us have ever been, his mother had said.

He looked at the page for a while, at the empty space where a date would go one day. Then he started on the first line.