Chapter 117: Everyone Is Being Very Reasonable

I have been shouted at by a Duke.

By a war captain.

By two beastkin clan elders, one of whom was holding an axe at the time.

And by Penelope Declair, who is worse than all of them combined and does it at a volume nobody else can hear.

None of that prepares you for a room where everyone is being reasonable.

The summons came just after sunrise.

I had fallen asleep roughly an hour before that.

I want it recorded that I had been awake for twenty-six hours, which is a personal record I had no interest in setting and intend never to approach again.

"Alash."

"No."

"They’ve called an inquiry."

"Still no."

Penelope pulled the blanket off me.

Under any other circumstance this would have constituted an act of war.

"It’s about James."

I sat up.

They did not use the Headmaster’s office.

That was the first thing that told me how serious it was.

The office is where Theoran Vale speaks to people.

The room they used instead was on the second floor of the Administrative Wing.

Long.

Bright.

A table down the middle and chairs on both sides of it.

It exists for occasions when the academy wishes to have said something in front of witnesses.

Theoran at the head.

Selene and Darius on one side.

Lena Arkwright standing at the far end with a folder, looking like she had not slept either.

I learned later that she hadn’t.

James was seated.

That was good.

Seated meant well enough to sit.

Elizabeth was beside him.

And along the wall, not at the table, because they had no formal standing and everyone in the room knew it:

Sophie Trohan.

Hands folded.

Not smiling, for the first time since I had met her.

And Daphne Spinster.

Watching.

Saying nothing, which is her entire method.

’This is a lot of people.’

[Yes.]

’Is that bad.’

[It is thorough. You may decide whether that is the same thing.]

"Sit, Vortex."

I sat.

"This is not a disciplinary hearing. I want that established before anyone becomes creative."

Theoran’s hands rested on his cane.

"No student has broken a rule.

There is no rule against what happened.

That is one of several reasons we are all here this early."

Darius made a low sound that could have been agreement or indigestion.

"Arkwright. You examined him first."

Lena stepped forward.

I have seen Lena excited.

Curious. I

nsulted.

Quietly furious.

I had not seen her like this.

Her folder was open and her hands were completely steady, and she addressed the Headmaster of Zenith Academy in exactly the tone she uses when telling me my questionnaire is badly worded.

"James Vellaroux presented near midnight with channel strain consistent with sustained overuse. Academy instruments confirmed it before dawn. The strain is measurable. The pattern matches what we were shown in Professor Selene’s first lecture."

"Permanent?" Elizabeth asked.

"Probably."

"Probably."

"I’m not going to say certainly."

Lena did not look away from her.

"Certainly is a word for people with twenty years of readings. I have six days of them. The honest answer is that channel damage is measured in decades. He will find out properly when he’s thirty. Everybody finds out properly when they’re thirty."

James said nothing.

He had not said anything since I entered the room.

"How much?" Theoran asked.

"Less than it should be."

The room stopped.

"Say that again," Selene said.

Lena turned a page.

"Six days. Six-hour sessions. Spatial repetition past the point of fatigue, in a fifteen-year-old. By the standard tables he should be looking at a significant reduction."

She looked up.

"He isn’t. The strain is real. It’s a fraction of what the hours predict."

"Why?"

Lena looked at me for the first time.

"Because the skill that let him do it was repairing him while he did it."

There is a particular silence a room makes when several intelligent people arrive at the same unpleasant idea from different directions at the same moment.

Darius broke it.

Of course he did.

"So the thing that hurt him is the reason he isn’t worse."

"Yes."

"That’s disgusting."

"I agree." Lena did not blink. "It’s also what the numbers say."

Theoran turned his cane once against the floor.

"Is the effect still present?"

"Yes."

Elizabeth’s head came up.

"It has been seven days," Lena said. "His recovery rate this morning was still elevated."

A pause.

"So is mine. So, by their own accounts, are Mercer’s, Ellowen’s and Trohan’s."

"All five."

"All five."

"For how long?"

"Unknown."

"Can it be stopped?"

And there it was.

Lena looked at me again, and this time it was not a handover.

It was a question.

"Vortex," Theoran said. "Can you end it?"

"No."

"Have you tried?"

"Twice."

"When."

"Last night. And again at first light, on myself first, because I was not going to experiment on somebody else’s body twice in one week."

I kept my voice level.

That took more effort than the answer deserved.

"Nothing happened. The skill does not have an off."

"Did you know that when you used it?"

"No."

"Would it have changed your decision?"

"Yes."

"On all five?"

And I opened my mouth.

And nothing came out.

Here is the thing nobody tells you about being asked a simple question in a bright room by a patient old man.

You do not get to think first.

You find out what the answer is at the same moment everyone else does.

Because the truth was that Mira Ellowen had slept eight hours in a single night, for the first time in five years, and had told me about it on a dark stairwell in a voice with nothing quiet left in it.

And I was sitting in a room being asked whether I would take that back.

With full information.

Knowing what it cost James.

"I don’t know," I said.

It came out wrong.

Thin, and slower than my voice normally arrives.

Elizabeth looked at me then.

Not with anger.

That was worse.

Theoran wrote something down.

"May I say something."

Every head in the room turned, because the voice came from the wall.

Because nobody there had ever heard it above conversational.

Mira Ellowen was standing just inside the door.

I had not seen her come in.

Nobody had.

She has been in that building eleven days and I am reasonably certain no one has ever heard her enter a room.

"You have no standing here," Darius said. Not unkindly.

"I know."

"Then..."

"Let her speak," Theoran said.

Mira came forward three steps.

Stopped.

She did not look at me. I understood afterward that this was deliberate.

"I have a Sound attribute and exceptional hearing."

Her voice was completely flat.

"That isn’t a gift. I hear everything in a building with a hundred and eighty-seven people in it. I have never once been able to turn it off."

A pause.

"For five years I have slept about four hours a night. Every person who has ever examined me has told me that this is simply what my attribute costs."

She stopped.

The room waited.

"Since the fifth evening I have slept seven."

Nobody said anything.

Somewhere outside, students were crossing the courtyard, and one of them laughed, and the sound came in through the window and did not belong to this room at all.

"I understand what you’re deciding," Mira said. "I understand that he hurt someone. That he did it without knowing. That not knowing isn’t the same as being blameless."

Her hands were at her sides.

Not fists.

Just still.

"I understand all of that and I am not arguing with any of it."

She finally looked up.

"I’m telling you that whatever you decide, it is also a decision about me."

A breath.

"That’s all. I’d like that to be in the room while you make it."

Then she stepped back against the wall and went silent again, which is her natural state, and which she had broken for the first time in eleven days to do that.

I did not trust myself to look at her.

’System.’

[I have nothing to add.]

’That’s twice this week.’

[Yes.]

Theoran let the room sit for a long while.

He is the only person I have met who can do that without it becoming a performance.

"Vellaroux. You have not spoken."

James looked up.

"What do you want me to say?"

"Whatever you would say if this room were empty."

James thought about it.

Properly. For long enough that the silence became uncomfortable for everybody except him.

"I did it to myself."

"The skill..."

"The skill made me capable of it."

His jaw tightened.

"I chose thirty-one shifts. I chose six hours. Nobody was in that hall with me. Nobody handed me a schedule. I have had a training limit explained to me by better instructors than I deserved since I was six years old."

He looked at the table.

"I stopped feeling tired and I decided that meant I had finally become good enough."

A pause.

"That’s not a skill’s fault. That’s mine."

"That is a generous reading," Selene said.

"It’s an accurate one."

"It can be both."

And then James looked across the table at me.

First time since I walked in.

"He also walked into Vanguard near midnight because I hadn’t answered a question."

He said it to the room, not to me.

"Made me sit down. Told me he wouldn’t guess at a number."

A pause.

"Nobody else noticed. I’d been doing it in front of my entire class for six days."

Something went wrong in my chest.

I have taken a Force detonation to the ribs and found it less objectionable.

It would have been easier if he had shouted.

I had a version of myself prepared for shouting.

I had nothing at all prepared for a boy I had injured telling a room full of adults that I was the only person who had looked at him properly in a week.

I did not say anything.

I could not have.

Theoran’s ruling took nine sentences.

"No new bonds. Not one. Not for any reason. Not on anyone, until we understand what this is."

He did not raise his voice.

"That restriction is mine personally. I will treat a breach as a breach of my authority rather than of a rule, which should indicate how seriously I intend it."

I nodded.

"The five existing bonds remain. They cannot be removed."

His eyes moved, briefly, toward the wall where Mira stood.

"And removing them would not obviously be desirable even if it were possible."

He turned back.

"All five bonded students will be examined weekly by academy healers, beginning today. Arkwright will assist, as she has more data than my staff and I see no reason to pretend otherwise."

Lena’s expression did not change.

Her ears went slightly red.

"Vellaroux is suspended from all spatial work for one month. Not as punishment. As medicine."

James did not argue.

That was, in its own way, the most alarming thing that happened all morning.

"And Vortex."

"Yes."

"You will report to me weekly."

"About the bond?"

"About whatever you decide to tell me."

He held my eyes.

"I am aware that will not be everything. I would like it to become more than nothing."

People left in the order people always leave rooms like that.

Authority first.

Feelings last.

Elizabeth walked past me without stopping.

That was fair.

Sophie squeezed my arm on the way out and said, "You look terrible," which was also fair, and considerably kinder.

Lena stayed behind to argue with an academy healer about measurement intervals and appeared to be winning.

I was the last one standing.

Mostly because standing had become a project.

Which is when I realised Daphne Spinster had not left either.

She was at the window.

She had not said a single word in ninety minutes.

She did not turn around now.

"Spinster."

"You skipped me too."

Flat.

Not accusing.

The tone of someone reading a number off a page.

"I did."

"Aurelius asked you why."

"She did."

"You didn’t answer her."

"No."

Daphne turned.

Red eyes.

Entirely unreadable.

A face that gives away precisely as much as it decides to.

"Good," she said.

Then she walked out.

And left me alone in a bright room with a long table, holding a pillow I had once again carried into a formal proceeding without noticing, trying to work out whether I had just been threatened, thanked, or something considerably worse than both.