Chapter 115: The Most Efficient Possible Way to Care About People

I woke up with a promise on me.

This is the worst way to wake up.

Worse than pain.

Worse than noise.

Worse than Penelope.

Pain fades and noise stops and Penelope eventually goes to class.

A promise simply sits there, fully formed, waiting.

I had told Elizabeth Aurelius I would check on all five of them.

Today.

I had said it out loud, in a courtyard, voluntarily, while nobody was holding anything sharp.

’Was I unwell.’

[You were embarrassed.]

’I don’t get embarrassed.’

[You said the word "quest" to the First Princess of the royal family and then spent nine seconds attempting to convert it into "question."]

’That was a linguistic accident.’

[It was the least convincing thing you have done in five years, and I include the time you told your father you had been meditating.]

I pulled Dream Haven over my face.

It did not help, but it did reduce the amount of world available, which is most of what I ask from anything.

***

Here is the thing about five people.

Five is not a large number.

I want to establish that I understand this.

Five is fewer than six.

It is barely more than four.

But five people live in four different buildings, and the residential courtyard is arranged in a circle, and Brightvale and Vanguard are on opposite sides of it, which means visiting both requires either crossing the middle in full view of everyone or walking the long way around like a man with a purpose.

I did the arithmetic while lying down.

Four hundred and ten paces, minimum, assuming nobody stopped me.

Everybody was going to stop me.

I had become, in the space of a week, a thing people stopped.

’There has to be a better way to do this.’

[There is a worse way. You will find it first.]

***

Attempt one was a questionnaire.

I am aware of how this sounds. I would like to defend it anyway.

If the objective is to determine whether five people are experiencing lingering effects from a skill, then the information required is identical in all five cases, and the most efficient method of acquiring identical information from multiple sources is a standardized instrument.

That is not laziness.

That is methodology.

I wrote eleven questions.

I gave the first copy to Lena.

"This is wonderful," Lena said.

That was not the reaction I had prepared for.

"It’s a questionnaire."

"I know. I’ve made three." She was already reading it, pen out, correcting something. "Question four is badly worded. You’re asking whether they feel different, which everyone will say no to, because people always say no to that. You want to ask what they’ve stopped noticing."

"...What?"

"Lingering effects don’t feel like effects. They feel like normal." She handed the paper back with two things crossed out and a third written in the margin. "If you ask someone whether anything’s changed, they’ll check for changes. If you ask them what they’ve stopped complaining about, you get the truth."

I looked at the corrections.

They were better than my version.

"How long have you been thinking about this?"

"Since the training hall." Lena turned to her shelf, took down a notebook, and put it in front of me without ceremony. "This is mine. Days one through six. I measured my own recovery rate every morning because I assumed you’d eventually want the data and I didn’t trust you to ask for it in a timely manner."

"That’s..."

"Slightly insulting? Yes. Also correct, because it’s been six days."

***

Attempt two was delegation.

"No," Roland said.

"You haven’t heard the offer."

"You want me to find out how four people are feeling and report back, so you don’t have to walk to two residences."

"...That’s the offer."

"No."

"You know everything about everyone. You do this recreationally."

"I do this recreationally." He pointed at me with a piece of bread. "This isn’t recreation. This is you handing me a job you’re avoiding and calling it a delegation. I’ve watched my father do that to apprentices for eleven years and I’m not the apprentice in this building, Leader, I’m the one who knows what it’s called."

There is very little to say to that.

"How’s the shoulder," I said.

Roland paused mid-bite.

"Fine."

"Fine as in better."

"Fine as in gone." He rotated it, which he clearly did not need to do and clearly had been doing a lot. "It’s been six days. I’d had that ache since the exam, three weeks, and it’s just not there. I keep checking for it like a tooth."

"That’s good."

"Is it?"

I did not answer immediately, which Roland noticed, because Roland notices the shape of a silence the way most people notice weather.

"Right," he said quietly.

***

I found Mira on the stairwell.

Of course I did. She had not moved her preferred location because the building had not become quieter, and she does not waste effort, which is a quality I recognize and admire in others and defend vigorously in myself.

"Leader."

"Don’t."

"Sorry, Leader."

I sat down two steps below her, which put my head level with her knees and made the conversation less like an interrogation, and which I would like to claim I did deliberately.

"I’m doing a thing," I said.

"You’re checking on everyone you used the skill on."

"How did you..."

"Aurelius told you to start with me."

I stared at her.

"That was in a courtyard. On the other side of the residences."

"Yes."

"Four hundred paces away."

"Three hundred and sixty, from the top window." Mira opened one eye. "The wind was right."

I revised several assumptions about my own privacy, filed the revision somewhere I could panic about it later, and moved on.

"She said you wouldn’t tell me if something was wrong."

"She’s right."

"Is something wrong?"

Mira did not answer for a while.

Then she said, "How much do you know about what it does?"

"Very little."

"Would you stop using it? If it was doing something you didn’t expect."

"Yes."

She closed her eye again.

"Then that’s why I wasn’t going to tell you."

***

Six nights.

That is how long it had been since I took her hand on that stairwell, and in six nights Mira Ellowen had slept, by her own count, an average of seven hours.

Not four.

Seven.

"Every night," she said. "Not the same. Some nights six. One night eight, which I didn’t know was possible. The sound is exactly as loud as it has always been. I can hear four conversations right now and one of them is about me. But I go to sleep and it doesn’t keep me out anymore."

"That was supposed to last an hour."

"I know."

"It’s been six days."

"I know that too." She said it flatly, without any of the wonder the sentence deserved. "I did the arithmetic on the second morning."

"And you didn’t say anything."

"No."

"Mira."

"You would have stopped." She turned her head toward me, and her eyes were open now, and there was nothing quiet about her face at all. "You are exactly the kind of person who stops. You spent an entire examination refusing to risk anyone, and the first time something happens that you can’t explain, you’ll stop, and then I’ll go back to four hours for the rest of my life and I’ll know exactly what it felt like not to."

The stairwell was cold and dark and the building made its noise around us.

"That’s not fair," I said.

"No."

"You’re not supposed to want a thing more than you want to know if it’s safe."

"You’re fifteen and you carry a pillow into a war." Mira shrugged. "Everybody wants something more than they want to know."

***

I will summarize the remaining two, because I have limited patience for describing walking.

Sophie Trohan was in the Brightvale common room, arguing about whether a dessert schedule could be legally binding, and when I asked how she had been feeling she said "Great! Why?" with such total unclouded sincerity that I briefly considered leaving before finding out anything else.

Then she said, "Oh, my hands don’t get cold anymore."

"Your hands."

"They used to, after Ice work. Always. Since I was ten." She flexed them, entirely unbothered. "They stopped. Sixth day now. I assumed that was just getting stronger."

She hugged me before I left.

I did not consent to this and have registered a formal complaint with nobody.

James Vellaroux I did not reach, because Tristan Rhael intercepted me at the Vanguard door with an expression of genuine apology and said that James was training, that James had been training for six hours, that James had been training for six hours most days this week, and that if I wanted to wait I was welcome to, but that Tristan personally would not recommend it.

"Is he sleeping?" I asked.

Tristan’s apologetic expression did something complicated.

"He says he is."

***

I sat on the low wall outside Sanctuary for some time after that, holding Dream Haven, in the specific posture of a man who has walked four hundred and ten paces and received information he would rather not have.

Roland’s shoulder. Gone.

Lena’s recovery rate. Elevated. Measured, six mornings running.

Mira. Seven hours.

Sophie’s hands. Warm.

James. Training six hours a day and telling people he is sleeping.

Five people, none of them harmed, all of them better, every single one of them still changed six days after an effect that was supposed to last sixty minutes.

’System.’

[Yes.]

’You told Aurelius’ question honestly. You said the effect stops.’

[I said that to you. She cannot hear me.]

’Don’t.’

[Very well. Yes. The effect stops.]

’Then why is Mira sleeping.’

A pause.

[Because the effect stopping and the bond ending are not the same event.]

I sat with that.

The courtyard was doing its late afternoon thing, students moving between residences, somebody laughing near Concord, the light going long across the stones.

’Read me the objective.’

[You know the objective.]

’Read it anyway.’

『 Sub Quest 3 : Healing bond Path 1

➤ Objective: Successfully bond with 7 individuals through Healing Bond (5 / 7) 』

Bond.

Not heal.

Not treat.

Not assist.

Bond with seven individuals, and I had read that word forty times across six days and understood it as a verb describing a thing I did on a Tuesday, rather than a noun describing a thing that continued to exist afterward.

’How long do they last.’

[Unknown.]

’Guess.’

[No.]

’Can I end one.’

There was a longer pause than any of the others.

[I don’t know.]

Which was the second time in three days it had said that, and the first time I had been sitting outside in the sun when it happened, and somehow that made it worse.

Mira had slept eight hours one night.

She had done the arithmetic on the second morning and decided not to tell me, because she had correctly predicted that I would want to stop, and because she wanted it more than she wanted to know whether it was safe.

I looked down at Dream Haven.

"This is your fault somehow," I told it.

It did not respond, which is one of its best qualities, and which is the entire reason we get along.