Chapter 120: Everyone Else Had a Productive Weekend

( Elizabeth Aurelius’s POV )

She designed the drill in fifty-one minutes.

That was the first error, and she identified it on the walk back, which was too late to be useful.

Fifty-one minutes was not enough time to design an exercise.

It was enough time to design an exercise that confirmed what she already believed.

There is a difference, and she has known about it since she was twelve, and she had walked directly into it on a Saturday morning in her own training yard.

The arrangement itself was adequate.

Thirty-seven students.

Movement, positioning, a mana relay along a line.

One gap, left uncovered on purpose, forty feet from the end.

She explained it once.

Then she stood at the edge of the yard and did not speak for eleven minutes.

The first ninety seconds were excellent.

She permitted herself to enjoy them, briefly, which she has since reclassified as the second error.

Class One moved the way Class One moves.

Fast.

Quiet.

Very clean.

Adrian made a small satisfied noise beside her and she did not correct him, because she had made the same noise internally.

Then the relay reached the gap.

And Class One stopped.

Not chaotically.

She wants to be precise, because the precision is the whole problem.

There was no panic.

Nobody scattered.

Nobody argued.

They arrived at the gap, slowed, and turned.

One after another.

Toward the edge of the yard.

Toward her.

Eleven seconds.

She counted them, because counting is what she does with things she does not want to feel yet.

Eleven seconds of thirty-seven extremely capable people standing in an obstacle course, waiting for a woman who had privately promised herself she would not speak.

She did not speak.

Someone eventually improvised.

The improvisation was poor.

Two others followed it because it was the only thing occurring.

The relay collapsed.

The exercise ended four minutes later in a manner that would have embarrassed Class Five, and she is aware that she used Class Five as her comparison point, and she is aware of what that indicates about where her attention currently lives.

She walked back to the residence without speaking.

Adrian followed.

"They’re not stupid."

"I know they’re not stupid."

"Then..."

"They are extremely intelligent, and they have spent eleven days learning that the fastest route to a correct answer is to wait four seconds for me to provide one."

She sat.

"I produced that. Not them. I rewarded it every single time and I did not once notice I was doing it."

Adrian sat across from her.

He had been preparing something since Friday.

She knew that, because she had watched him prepare it, because he holds his hands differently when he is carrying a sentence.

He did not use it.

"You’re not choosing me," he said.

"No."

"Right."

"Do you want the reason?"

"I already have it." He leaned back. "I think like you. If you hand this to me, Class One gets the same brain with a worse version of it."

She did not contradict him.

She noted, distantly, that not contradicting him was a form of cruelty, and that there was no version of the sentence that would have been kinder and also true, and that she has never been good at choosing between those.

"Petra," she said.

He blinked.

"Petra Halvern?"

"Yes."

"She’s argued with you twice."

"Three times. You were not present for the third."

"And you overruled her."

"All three times."

She put her hands flat on the table, because they had begun to want to do something else.

"I was correct twice. The third time I was not. I did not go back and tell her so, and she has not raised her hand in eight days."

Adrian was quiet.

"That’s why?"

"That is why."

She stood.

"I require someone who will continue when I am not present to be waited for. There is exactly one person in this residence who has demonstrated that she will disagree with me in a room."

She reached the door.

"And I spent eight days teaching her not to."

"Elizabeth."

She stopped.

"If it helps," Adrian said, "she’s going to be insufferable about it."

"I am counting on it."

She was already calculating how many hours remained before Monday.

Thirty-nine.

Thirty-nine hours to undo eight days.

She has performed worse arithmetic in her life and she cannot immediately recall when.

***

( James Vellaroux’s POV )

Eleven hours.

He had told them two.

He could not train.

That was the situation.

The situation did not change by being looked at, so he stopped looking at it and walked the hall instead.

Stance.

Wrong.

He said so.

Next one.

Timing.

Wrong.

Said so.

Next.

Follow-through, recovery, footwork, angle, grip.

Wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong.

His left hand stayed closed the entire time.

That was deliberate.

A closed hand does not shake where thirty-seven people can see it.

Somewhere in the ninth hour the hall went quiet and he registered it as progress.

Concentration.

Good.

It was not concentration.

He did not work that out until Tristan stood in front of him and refused to move, which is a thing Tristan does approximately once a year and which has never once been about something small.

"Move."

"No."

"Rhael."

"You’ve said the word wrong forty times."

James stopped.

"What?"

"Wrong. Forty times since morning. I started counting at the fourth hour, so it’s more."

Tristan did not move.

"You haven’t said one thing anyone should do. Only what they shouldn’t."

"That’s the same information."

"It is absolutely not the same information and you know it isn’t."

The hall went very quiet again.

Different quiet.

James looked at him.

Then he sat down on a bench, which he had not done all day, and put his head back against the wall, and discovered that his legs had opinions he had not been consulting.

"I don’t know how to tell them," he said.

"Tell them what?"

"How I do it."

The words came out badly. He tried again.

"I see what’s wrong. I’ve always seen what’s wrong. Somebody moves and I know, and I can’t take it apart, because I have never had to take anything apart in my life."

He opened his left hand and looked at it.

Steady.

Mostly.

"It just works. You can’t hand somebody a thing that just works."

Tristan sat down next to him.

"So don’t."

"That’s helpful."

"You can’t teach them to be you in two days. Nobody can be you, which is mostly a good thing."

He bumped James’s shoulder, which on any other day would have been a genuine risk.

"But you know what happens when it goes wrong."

James did not answer.

"You know what breaks first. You know what an exhausted line looks like before it fails. You worked out your own channels were finished about four days after someone else had to tell you, which is bad, but you did work it out."

"That’s not a qualification."

"Teach them what a mistake looks like from the inside. You’re the world’s leading expert."

James sat with that.

It was a horrible way to put it and it was accurate, and those two things were apparently allowed to be true simultaneously, which was new, and which he did not like.

"I’m naming you."

"I know."

"You know."

"I’ve known since Friday." Tristan stretched his legs out. "I was going to argue. Then I watched you do this for eleven hours and decided the class needs somebody who’ll say sit down."

James looked out at the hall. Thirty-seven people, most of them pretending not to be listening, all of them listening.

Four days served. Twenty-six to go.

A competition next week.

"Fine," he said.

***

( Sophie Trohan’s POV )

The vote was her idea.

She wants that on record, because by the end of it she was having considerable trouble remembering why she had thought it was a good one.

Round one: eleven nominations.

Eleven! Out of thirty-seven people! Almost a third of the class had been put forward by somebody, which Sophie found genuinely lovely for about ninety seconds and then found structurally catastrophic.

Round two: nine, because two withdrew and one person nominated the entire dessert committee as a body, which was ruled inadmissible by a show of hands that took six minutes.

Six minutes.

On admissibility.

Round three: a tie.

Round four: the same tie.

Round five: a different tie.

Somewhere around the fiftieth minute Sophie stopped counting rounds and started watching faces instead, which is what she does when a thing has stopped working, and she noticed two things.

One: thirty-six people were having an absolutely wonderful evening.

Two: not a single one of them was ever going to concede anything, ever, because conceding would end the argument and the argument was the point.

She loves them.

She really, genuinely does, and she wants that in the record too, before the next part.

She stood on a chair.

"We’re stopping."

The room quieted.

Mostly.

One hand at the back.

"Is this the part where..."

"Yes."

"Okay."

And there it was.

The Hermit’s voice, weeks old, arriving on schedule the way it had been arriving on schedule since the illusion.

Sometimes everyone will disagree and you will still need to choose.

Fine.

Fine.

"Marta."

The room turned.

Marta Vess had not been nominated once.

Not in any round.

She was by the window with her arms folded, where she had been all evening, and she had voted in exactly one round and abstained in the other four.

"Me."

"You."

"I didn’t put my name in."

"I know. That’s part of it."

Marta’s expression did not improve, which honestly was reassuring.

"People like you," Marta said. "That’s your whole thing. Nobody likes me. I told Roth his plan was stupid on the fourth day and he still isn’t speaking to me."

"Was it stupid?"

"Obviously it was stupid."

"That’s the other part of it."

Sophie got down off the chair.

"We’re very good at everything except stopping," she said, to the room, because it needed to hear it from her and not from Marta on Monday. "We were the information class. We had every route and every map and we still spent forty minutes tonight failing to pick one person out of nine."

A pause.

"And I can’t fix it. I’m the reason it’s fun."

She looked at Marta.

"You’re the only person in this building who’s ever said no to us and meant it."

Marta looked at thirty-six people looking back at her.

"I’m going to be awful at this."

"Yes."

"They’re going to hate me."

"For about a day."

Marta stood up.

"Fine. But when this is over I want it on record that you did this to me on a Saturday."

The cheer that went up was, Sophie thought, the single most Class Three response possible to a decision that literally nobody had voted for.

She laughed with them.

Of course she did.

Then she went upstairs.

And sat on the edge of her bed in the dark for a while, which is not a thing she does, and thought about a bridge and a line of tired people and eight hours of walking up and down it saying names.

She only worked out three weeks ago that it was a thing.

That it counted.

That it was hers.

And she had just given it to somebody else on a Saturday evening in front of everyone, cheerfully, because it was the right call.

She is very good at being cheerful.

That is not the same as not minding.

***

( Daphne Spinster’s POV )

She started at two.

By four she had thirty-one items and no intention of stopping.

Nadia found her at the table in the common room.

"What is that?"

"Instructions."

"For what?"

"Everything."

Nadia picked up the top sheet.

Thirty-one items. Numbered. The handwriting got smaller toward the bottom because Daphne had refused to begin a second page.

Barrier rotation order.

Who to move first if a line breaks on the left.

Who to move first if it breaks on the right.

The four people in Class Four who will not say when they are hurt. By name.

The two who will exaggerate.

What Lucan does when he is frightened, which Lucan does not know that she has noticed.

"Daphne."

"There are six more pages."

"Daphne."

Nadia put the sheet down.

"You can just talk to us."

"No."

"Why not?"

She did not stop writing.

"Because on the day, I will be behind a line."

The pen kept moving.

"Whatever I have said will be days old. I will not be able to add to it."

She finished the sentence she was on.

"Written down does not need me there."

Nadia sat.

She watched her write, which Daphne permitted.

That is the closest thing to conversation Daphne permits while working, and Nadia knows it, which is one of the reasons she is Nadia.

"Who are you naming?"

"You."

Nadia stopped.

"Lucan’s better at this."

"Lucan is better at thirty-one things on that list. That is why they are on the list."

"Then..."

"You caught me."

"What?"

She did not look up.

"The Citadel. The barrier network. My legs stopped working and I did not say anything, because I do not say anything."

She turned the page over.

"You caught me before I hit the floor. You did not tell anyone. You have not mentioned it since."

The pen stopped.

Briefly.

"Some of them are going to stop being able to stand. I need the one who sees it first."

The lamps had come on. Neither of them had noticed when.

"That was almost a nice thing to say," Nadia said.

"It was a reason."

"It was almost a nice thing."

"Nadia."

"I’m only saying."

"There are six more pages."

Nadia went to bed a little after eleven.

Daphne did not.

She finished page seven at some point she did not track, and then sat with her back against the wall by the window, which is where she sits, and looked out across the courtyard at four lit buildings.

Concord, still burning at the second floor. Elizabeth does not sleep before a problem is solved.

Vanguard, lit at the training hall end. Somebody was still down there.

Brightvale, everything on, because Brightvale is always everything on.

And at the far end, the residence that had taken first place.

Dark.

Every window.

No drill.

No argument.

No list.

Daphne watched it for a while.

She did not know what it meant.

She has noticed that this is becoming a habit with Vortex, and she has noticed that she has stopped finding it irritating, which is considerably worse.