Chapter 116: Recovery Is Not the Same as Rest

There are approximately four hundred things I would rather do at the eleventh bell than walk across a residential courtyard in the dark.

Sleeping is thirty-nine of them.

I want that understood before I explain any of what follows, because everything that happened that night happened to a person who had already decided, twice, to go to bed instead, and who got up anyway both times, and who has spent a considerable amount of the time since wondering what would have happened if he had managed to be lazier for one more hour.

***

Vanguard’s door was unlocked.

That is not unusual.

Residence rules permit any student to enter another residence’s common areas until midnight, and James Vellaroux had reportedly written approximately one rule for his entire building, which concerned fighting indoors and which he enforced with the enthusiasm of a man who had been waiting his whole life for something to enforce.

Tristan Rhael was in the common room.

He was sitting in a chair facing the stairs, not reading anything, not doing anything, at the eleventh bell.

He looked up when I came in and did not seem remotely surprised.

"Lower training hall," he said.

"I hadn’t asked yet."

"You were going to."

"How long has he been down there?"

Tristan looked at the clock.

"Five hours."

***

The lower training hall at night is worse than the lower training hall during the day, which I would not have believed possible.

No windows.

No natural light.

Just the long reinforced room with its marked circles and its weapon racks and the faint hum of the containment wards, which nobody notices when seventy-five people are shouting and which is extremely noticeable when one person is not.

James was at the far end.

He was doing spatial shifts.

Not practising them.

Repeating them.

Point to point across the same forty feet, over and over, in a rhythm that had clearly been going on long enough to stop being a rhythm and start being a habit.

I watched eleven of them before he noticed me.

That was the first thing that was wrong.

James Vellaroux had detected me across a crowded hall from behind, twice, in a class where seventy-four other people were making noise.

He should have known I was there before the door finished closing.

"Vortex."

He was breathing hard.

Sweat through the shirt, hair stuck to his forehead, the particular grey undertone that people get when they have been past a limit for long enough to forget where it was.

"It’s the eleventh bell."

"I’m aware."

"That wasn’t a statement of fact. That was a question with better manners."

James wiped his face with his sleeve.

"I’m training."

"You’re repeating."

"Same thing."

"It has never been the same thing and you know that better than I do."

He shifted.

Not toward me.

Just across the circle, forty feet, a blink of displaced air, and he was on the other side of the room with his blade already moving into the follow-through of a strike at nothing at all.

"Thirty-one tonight," he said. "My record was nineteen."

"When?"

"Last month."

"And you got to thirty-one."

"Thirty-one," James said, and there was something underneath his voice that I did not like at all, "and I’m not tired."

***

Here is what I know about bodies.

I know it better than I know anything else, better than barriers, better than politics, better than sleep, which is saying a great deal.

I spent five years at a border where the difference between a soldier who could be saved and one who could not was frequently four minutes and an accurate assessment, and Valerian Alzette made me perform those assessments out loud, in front of the patient, until I stopped being wrong.

So.

Grey undertone.

Breathing that had not slowed between repetitions.

A tremor in the left hand that he was managing by keeping it closed.

Pupils slightly wrong.

And underneath all of it, the thing that had been bothering me since the eleventh shift and that I had not let myself name yet:

He was moving beautifully.

That was the problem.

A body at the end of five hours of spatial work should be sloppy.

The shifts should be shortening.

The landings should be heavy.

Every physical system in James Vellaroux should have been filing complaints an hour ago, loudly, in the only language a body has.

And instead he was clean.

"James."

"What."

"When did you last feel tired?"

He stopped.

Actually stopped, for the first time since I had entered the room, and looked at me.

"What?"

"Not sore. Not sleepy. Tired. The thing where your arms get heavy and your body tells you that you’re finished."

James said nothing.

"You can’t remember," I said.

"I don’t need to be..."

"When."

A long pause.

"Six days," James said.

’System.’

[I am here.]

’Say it.’

[You already know.]

’Say it anyway. I want to have heard it from something other than myself.’

A pause.

[Healing Bond accelerates natural recovery. His body is repairing faster than he can damage it. Fatigue is the mechanism that would normally stop him.]

’I removed the brake.’

[You did not remove it. You outran it. The distinction will not comfort you.]

"Your channels," I said.

"What about them?"

"Sit down."

"I’m not..."

"James. Sit down, or I will fetch Professor Darius, who sleeps four corridors from here and who I am told is unpleasant when woken, and then we will both be having this conversation in front of a man with explosives."

James sat down on the edge of the circle, which told me more about his condition than anything else that night had.

I crouched in front of him and put two fingers against his wrist, and then the base of his throat, and then, because I needed to be certain, flat against his sternum with my palm open.

Healing attribute does not diagnose, exactly.

It is not a window.

It is closer to putting your hand on a wall and knowing, from the way the sound moves through it, roughly where the wall is hollow.

I listened.

And then I sat back on my heels and did not say anything for slightly too long, which is the single worst thing a healer can do in front of a patient and which I have been trained out of four separate times.

"Say it," James said.

"Your channels are strained."

"How strained."

"I don’t know. I’m fifteen and my Healing is at level ten and I am not qualified to give you a number. What I can tell you is that they are not where they were six days ago, and that the change is in the wrong direction, and that you have been putting six hours a day through them while feeling absolutely fine."

James did not move.

"Selene said channel damage is permanent."

"Yes."

"She said you don’t find out until years later."

"Yes."

"Then how do you know now?"

And that was, unfortunately, the correct question, and the answer was that I had spent five years with my hands on people who were lying about how badly they were hurt, and that the wall sounded hollow, and that I had known within four seconds of touching him and had spent the following eleven hoping I was wrong.

"Because I’ve felt it before," I said. "In adults. In people who started too early."

James looked at his own left hand.

The tremor was visible now that he had stopped holding it closed.

"How much have I lost?"

"I don’t know."

"Guess."

"No."

"Vortex..."

"No." My voice came out harder than I intended, and I did not correct it. "I don’t guess about people. Not once, not ever, not for you. Lena can measure it properly in the morning and the academy has instruments and there are people in this building forty years better at this than I am. I am not going to look at you and invent a number that follows you around for the rest of your life."

James was quiet for a long moment.

"That’s the most I’ve ever heard you say at once." ℴ

"I’m aware. I’d like it stricken from the record."

"It was your skill," he said.

Not an accusation. Flat, factual, arriving at the obvious.

"Yes."

"You didn’t know it would do this."

"No."

"Would you have used it if you had?"

"No."

"Then why did you use it at all?" He looked up. "You’d used it four times before me. In six days. You were working through something, and you’ve never once said what, and I have been told by three separate people that you are extremely good at not answering questions."

There it was.

I had, at that point, several options.

I had a version of the truth that was short and false, a version that was long and unusable, and a third thing, which was the only one available to a person sitting in front of somebody whose life he might have just shortened.

"There’s a reason," I said. "It’s real, it’s mine, and it’s not something I can explain to you tonight, or possibly ever, and I am aware that is a contemptible answer to be giving you in this room."

James absorbed that.

"Yes," he said. "It is."

"I know."

"I’m going to keep asking."

"I’d think less of you if you didn’t."

I got him to the infirmary at the twelfth bell.

He walked.

He insisted on walking, and I let him, because the alternative was an argument and because a man who has just been told his ceiling might have moved is entitled to walk out of the room on his own.

Lena arrived in nine minutes.

I know it was nine because I had asked Tristan to run and had started counting, which is a habit I picked up at the border and have never successfully put down.

She took one look at James, one look at me, and did not ask a single unnecessary question, which is the highest compliment I can pay another practitioner.

"Channel strain?"

"Yes."

"How long?"

"Six days of six-hour sessions. Possibly longer. He’s been past fatigue the entire time and hasn’t felt it."

Lena’s pen stopped.

"He hasn’t felt it."

"No."

She looked at me, and I watched her arrive at it, and I watched her decide not to say it out loud in front of the patient, which is a skill most healers take a decade to learn and which she apparently came with.

"Right," she said. "Out."

***

Elizabeth arrived at the thirteenth bell.

Somebody had told her.

It does not matter who.

In a building of one hundred and eighty-seven students there is no version of this night where nobody told her, and she came down the infirmary corridor at a pace that was not quite running and was not anything else either.

She stopped when she saw me sitting outside the door.

For a moment neither of us said anything.

"Is he awake?" she said.

"Yes. Lena’s with him."

"Is it his channels."

"Yes."

Elizabeth closed her eyes briefly.

When she opened them her face had gone back to the composed thing she wears in front of everyone, and somehow that was worse than if it had not.

"I told you," she said. "Four days ago. On a path in the middle of the courtyard, I told you that it had not stopped and that you should be careful with it."

"You did."

"And?"

"And you were right, and I was slow, and I went to Vanguard four days later instead of that afternoon, and I am not going to stand in a corridor and construct an explanation for you."

Elizabeth looked at me for a long, level moment.

"No," she said. "Don’t."

Then she went past me into the infirmary, and the door closed, and I sat in a corridor at the thirteenth bell with a pillow I had carried there without noticing, and did not go to sleep for a very long time.