Chapter 76: Word on the street

The outdoor training grounds for Basic Combat were all crushed grey gravel, fenced in by high steel netting. The wind came straight across the yard and rattled the netting against its posts. Forty first-years stood in loose rows between the wooden striking posts and iron dummy frames, feet planted shoulder-width apart, while Instructor Tenski walked the lines with his boots crunching on the stones.

Abby was back in her usual spot at the front left, her coat folded on the bench by the gate, her eyes fixed straight ahead. Rain stood two rows behind her with his hands up near his chin and his elbows tight against his ribs.

"Stance!" Tenski barked. He stopped beside Vane, who was working alone near the observation platform. "Hold the line! Your center shifts, your core goes cold!"

Vane closed his eyes and pulled. A faint blue shimmer ran along his right forearm and faded. Tenski nodded once, tapped something into his slate, and moved off down the third row.

Rain let his weight sink into his heels. Tenski’s manual said to brace through the shoulders. Rain ignored it and went back to what Abby had told him on the train.

He turned his right hip in a couple of inches and let the movement start from his heel.

Nothing. He reset and tried again. Nothing again. On the third try, a warm thread came loose under his sternum and dropped, heavy and real, a few inches past where it had stopped yesterday on the practice field. Then it scattered somewhere around his ribs.

It still hadn’t reached his arm. It had gone further, though.

Gravel crunched in front of him, and a shadow fell across his boots.

Rain opened his eyes. Tenski stood three feet away, his scarred arms folded over his leather vest. His pale blue eyes went down to Rain’s hips, then back up to his face, and narrowed.

"Again," Tenski said.

Rain reset, breathed out, and drove the rotation up from his heel.

The thread came loose again and slid down past his upper back before it broke apart.

Tenski kept watching for a long second. Then he tapped the side of his slate once and grunted.

"Keep the heel grounded."

He walked on down the row.

At the front, Abby glanced back over her shoulder. She held her stance. One corner of her mouth went up, and she raised her eyebrows at him.

Rain gave her the smallest shrug he could manage without breaking form.

---

The brass bell above the gate rang at the end of the hour. Abby was waiting just outside the netting with her coat over her arm when Rain came through, and she fell into step with him as they crossed toward the courtyard.

"He stopped," she said. "Tenski doesn’t stop for anyone."

"He saw something." Rain rolled his right shoulder. "It still won’t make it to my arm. It gets halfway down my back and just falls apart."

"Give it a few days." She stepped around a cluster of second-years. "Your body’s strong enough. Once the line clears, it’ll catch all at once."

"You said that like you’ve watched it happen."

"I have. Twice." She stopped near the edge of the courtyard where the path split toward the library, and her voice dropped as a pair of cadets walked past. "I saw the clerk yesterday."

Rain kept his hands in his hoodie pocket. "And?"

"And she gave me the terms. In writing." Abby pulled her phone out and turned it over in her hand without unlocking it. "First thing, no observer. Nobody from the guild goes in with us. If one of them sets foot in that rift, it stops being unassisted and my review fails."

"Good," Rain said. "Fewer people watching."

She gave him an odd look and kept going. "Second, Red Dragon picks the gate. We don’t get a say. They pull a B-rank from whatever they’ve got open and hand us coordinates."

"We take what they give us."

"Third, it has to be done before the spring auctions."

"How long’s that?"

"Not long." Her jaw tightened. "Long enough if we don’t waste any of it."

Rain nodded. Four independents, two of them F-rank, and a B-rank cadet, against a clock.

"And the last one?"

Abby tucked the phone away and fiddled with the collar of her coat. "Everybody gets tested. Rank and bound skill, at a guild testing facility. The results go on the manifest before she files it. She said she’d book the slots within a few days of getting our names."

Rain stayed exactly where he was. His face stayed easy. His hands stayed in his pocket.

Inside, his stomach dropped.

’Tested.’

He had no idea how a guild test worked, and that was most of the problem. He knew a regular scan read rank. If a guild scan could read bound skills too, it could read Flash Step. Rank SSS, sitting inside a kid whose file said F-rank, whose issued disk should have given him a basic kinetic push.

’And that’s if all it reads is the skill.’

The System had pulled two disks into him in that alley behind Block C and fused them later, in the infirmary. One was his own. The other belonged to Sen.

Sen, whose name was on his own manifest. Sen, who’d shoved his case into Rain’s hands, said he was going to check out of this hellhole, and run through the gates. Nobody had seen him since.

1a

’What if they can tell it’s two disks? What if they can tell whose?’

1

He pictured someone at a desk pulling Sen’s file and finding a registered disk that had never been used, and a missing kid, and an F-rank with an SSS skill that came from somewhere. He could see the questions lining up one after another, and he had no answer for any of them that didn’t start with the System.

"Rain?"

Abby was frowning at him, her head tilted.

"Did you hear me? Everybody has to be tested."

He made himself breathe. He kept his face exactly the way it had been when Corwin’s crew had him on the ground in that alley, and when the man with the gold pin stood over his bench in Sector Two.

’Keep it together. There’s a way around this. A waiver. Something.’

"Tested," he said. "Right. Guild rules."

"It’s just paperwork." Abby’s shoulders came down a little. "They need to know we’re not walking in with a party that’s going to get itself killed in the first hour. Once I give her the names, she’ll send times for the testing annex in Sector Three."

Sector Three. Gideon’s part of the city. Where they’d sold the Husk Regent’s core.

"Send the names," Rain said, and his voice came out level. "We’ll go when the times come through."

Abby smiled at him, wide and bright, the first real one he’d seen from her since before the panel. "Tomorrow morning. Get your gear in order. Once testing clears, we get a date."

She gave him a little wave and headed off toward the north academic hall, her coat swinging against her shins.

Rain stood on the path for a long time after she was gone.

He’d built a party from nothing. He’d sold a boss core, made the varsity roster, and had a real shot at getting Peter out from under Corwin. He’d walked out of a C-rank rift and come back up out of that drainage rift with the Husk Regent dead behind him. And all of it was about to run into a guild technician with a scanner.

He started walking with no particular destination, gravel crunching under his boots.

’Can you fake a scan?’ He had no idea. ’Can you skip one?’ Probably not, if it was on the manifest.

Nyra might know. She knew Gideon, and she knew people who knew how guild paperwork bent when it had to. But he couldn’t tell her why. He couldn’t tell her about Sen, or the System, or what was actually sitting in Slot 1. He couldn’t tell anyone.

"Rain!"

The shout came from beside the library annex.

He looked up. Ten or twelve first-years were bunched together at the corner of the brick wall, all talking over each other. In the middle of them, backed against the bricks with his bag clutched to his chest, was Peter. His face was pale and shiny with sweat.

"Is it true?" a stocky kid in a blue jersey was saying, leaning right into Peter’s space. "You’re running a B-rank? With a Red Dragon cadet?"

"I don’t know what you’re talking about," Peter said, eyes darting toward the courtyard. "I’m a carrier. I carry bags. Please let me..."

The stocky kid spotted Rain over Peter’s shoulder. His eyes went wide, and he pointed.

"That’s him! That’s the F-Rank Phenomenon!"

The whole group turned at once. Then they came across the grass at him in a rush, all of them talking at the same time.

"Can we join your party?"

"I’ll hold the flank, I’m good on the flank..."

"Is it true you’re running with Abby Ratchford?"

"Put us down as reserves, just reserves, we’ll do anything..."

Somebody shoved a cadet ID at his face. Somebody else was already offering him gear. Rain stood still in the middle of it and let the noise wash over him.

Past the crowd, at the corner of the wall, Peter hadn’t moved. He was looking straight back at Rain with his bag still clutched to his chest, his mouth opening and closing as if he were trying to find the start of an apology.

Rain stared at him.

’You...’