Chapter 24: ch.24 [Watch Me, My Dear Student]

The tiebreak lasted eleven minutes.

Five on the clock. Three seconds a move.

Seth lost it on move twenty-two.

He saw the knight.

He saw the square.

He did not run the scan.

It was in a pocket somewhere, and his hands were in a different room, still shaking from the last game.

Blunder.

Dmitri’s rook came down and the position closed like a door.

Seth looked at it for four of his last nine seconds.

Then he laid his king on its side.

It made no sound.

Dmitri’s hand was already out.

Seth took it.

Fast. Dry. Over before it began.

"Good game." said Dmitri.

"Yes."

Neither of them said anything else.

? ? ?

The Federation refreshed the live list.

The screen above the dais flickered, scrolled, and settled.

PAWN, SETH unrated ▲ 1500

WREN, DMITRI 1450 ▲ 1600

Nobody read it aloud.

Marcus Hale, for once, let it sit.

[CHAT]

NextGM_2031: wait

BoardGremlin: he has no rating. he had NO rating

BoardGremlin: and he lost

TomatoTactician: a hundred points apart

TomatoTactician: ...only a hundred?

"The Federation has also added a game to this evening, right now fellas!" said Marcus, eventually, reading from a slip a man in a headset had put in his hand. "The World Champion. Against the Cataloguer. Ten minutes each. Table One."

"This is what we all were wearing for! I am told this is not a courtesy."

? ? ?

He found her at the edge of the floor, by the water station.

Alone for the length of one breath.

Ingrid had stepped away with a phone against her ear.

Astrid stood in white with her hands at her sides.

Seth stopped two meters short.

He looked at her shoes.

Black. Polished. The laces exact.

"I’m sorry," he said.

It came out smaller than he had planned.

"I didn’t win..."

The shoes did not move.

Then a hand came into the edge of his vision.

It did not hover.

It did not stop an inch short.

It landed on his hair, on the piece that had never once lain flat, and it ruffled him.

Once.

Soft.

Sure of its right to be there.

"You did amazing Seth," said Astrid.

"You won a game against him, so don’t worry about that."

He did not look up.

He was not certain he could have.

"Now," she said.

Her voice dropped.

It was amused, and entirely certain, and it carried no weight at all, which was how he knew it carried all of it.

"Watch me win a game against the so-called Theory Master."

"She tried to take something that’s mine."

She uttered to herself really quietly.

He nodded.

It was all he had.

She leaned in.

Her hair came forward, white against the edge of his glasses,

and her mouth stopped a breath from his ear.

"Good boy."

? ? ?

Everything went white.

Not bright. Blank.

The kind of white a screen shows between one picture and the next.

The floor tilted a degree and a half.

His ears were hot.

His hands were cold.

He could hear his own pulse in a place a pulse should not be.

He did not hear her step away.

When the room came back, it came back in pieces.

A water cooler.

A carpet.

A long table behind a rope of glass, and a red-haired man in a loose gray tie with one whole arm in the air.

"Seth!"

Arjun Voss was waving at him like a man hailing a ship.

"Come bro! Sit, Wei has brought snacks, and none of us can be trusted with them."

Seth looked behind him.

She had gone.

A white jacket, already forty feet off, crossing the floor toward the boards like a woman crossing a room to answer a letter.

She had not looked back.

He walked to the table.

They made space.

They made it the way people do when it is the most natural thing in the world, with no ceremony, a chair pulled out, two elbows moved,

a cup slid aside.

It was the chair beside hers.

Beside the Champion’s.

Her seat stood empty, her water glass on its coaster and her pen laid straight across the pad.

He sat down next to it.

Nobody remarked.

That was the part he would think about later.

Wei Cheng offered a steamed bun without a word.

Seth took it.

He did not eat it.

"Blitz is a cruel format," said élise, without lifting her eyes from her phone. "It rewards the people who stopped thinking years ago."

"Speak for yourself Eli." said Arjun.

"I was Mr.Arjun."

Arjun put a hand to his chest, wounded, and delighted.

Ethan Vale, arms folded, did not look at Seth.

"Sit up straight kid," he said. "You’re on camera."

Seth sat up straight.

A score sheet slid across the table.

It came from the far end, from a hand in a charcoal sleeve.

On it, in small and precise handwriting, were the moves of the last game, all twenty-two, with a single circle around the last one.

Kirill Volkov did not look up.

"Do not thank me."

"I wasn’t going to."

"Good."

A pause.

"Twenty-two was the error," said Kirill, to his own hands.

"Eighteen was the cause."

It was the longest thing he had said to Seth in a month.

Seth looked at the circle.

Then at move eighteen.

He saw it.

It had been sitting there the whole time, a small loose pawn he had checked and then stopped checking.

He folded the sheet and put it in his left pocket, next to the five words.

"Big brother!"

He had not seen him come.

A slender boy in a jacket slightly too large at the shoulders stood at his elbow, soft dark hair, enormous dark eyes, holding a juice box in both hands.

Mateo Rivas.

Seventeen.

Two thousand seven hundred and eighty-four.

"That was awesome!" said Mateo.

He said it without irony, in the bright clear voice of a boy who had only just remembered he was allowed to say things like that.

"The bishop thing. The free pawn thing. I watched it three times on my phone!"

The table laughed.

It was an easy sound, warm and slightly ragged, the way a room laughs when it has been tense for hours and someone finally gives it permission.

Seth’s mouth did something.

It was almost a laugh.

It was almost a goose.

"I lost..." he said.

"Yeah," said Mateo, perfectly cheerful. "But you lost awesomely! "

Down the table, someone was already setting out the next board.

? ? ?

[CHAT]

AstridSimp99: WHAT DID SHE SAY TO HIM

IceQueenStan: she LEANED. she leaned DOWN

NorthernLightsNerd: i have the footage. frame by frame. she touched his hair all i feel is envy

NorthernLightsNerd: and then he forgot how to be a person

OsloOrBust: he looks like someone unplugged him

TomatoTactician: he is sitting next to the empty chair. do you see where he is sitting

SnowfallSimp: protect that chair.

"I am told," said Marcus Hale, "that the Champion has said something to her student."

"I am told it was one sentence."

"I am told the student has not finished hearing it."

? ? ?

She had not run it.

That was what Astrid thought, three steps from the boards,

with her back to the whole room.

Good boy.

It had not come from a book.

It had not come from the voice she used for facts.

It had come from a lower place, some drawer in her she had not known was there, and it had come out whole.

She had not planned it.

She had not weighed it.

She had only seen a young man with his eyes on her shoes and his hands in the wrong place and a number on a screen he did not understand, and her mouth had said it before she had decided anything.

He is my employee.

It was a cold thought and it arrived on time.

He lives in my apartment.

I signed the contract.

I set the schedule.

I put my mouth next to his ear in a hall full of cameras and I called him a name.

Her stride did not change.

Her face did not change.

But her left hand, at her side, closed and opened.

Closed and opened.

Counting nothing.

He did not step back.

She held on to that.

He had not stepped back, and he had not looked up, and she could not tell which of those she was relieved by.

She put it down.

She would pick it up tonight, in the basement, at six, when he held out his wrist.

Now there was a board.

? ? ?

The chatter died before she sat.

Nobody decided it.

It simply went, one conversation after another, the way the lights go in a theatre when the curtain starts to move.

Astrid took her seat.

She laid her hands on her knees.

She did not look at the gallery.

She did not look at the camera swinging in to catch her.

She did not look toward the long table, where a boy sat very still beside a chair that was not his.

Her shoulders set.

Her spine lengthened by a centimeter, her chin came down by a centimeter, and her eyes went to the board and locked.

Sixty-four squares.

Nothing else existed.

There was no smile in her.

There was no warmth anywhere in that tall white figure.

It had all been put somewhere safe, and the door shut.

What remained was something Seth had only seen once,

on a screen, from a carpet, when he was eight.

Calm as a frozen lake.

Under it, he knew now, something swam.

"God..." said Mateo, very softly, over his juice box.

Wei Cheng’s bun stopped halfway.

Across the board, Lina von Schach slid her pen into her golden curls and sat down, unhurried, elegant, with the faint apologetic air of a woman who has prepared for nine years and does not intend to be sorry about it.

"Astrid," she said.

"Lina."

That was all.

The arbiter lifted his hand.

Lina’s fingers rose toward a pawn.

They stopped.

An inch above the wood.

The room held its breath with her.

Astrid did not move.

She did not blink.

The brass clock stood between them with its small flag up, and for one long moment nothing in the building was alive except the thing in those red eyes.

Tick.

It was a single sound, and it did not end.

Seth did not know which of them it had been for.

He knew only that whatever happened on that board would rewrite the ranking.

And that he was not at all sure it would stop there.