Chapter 131: Nine Words for Somebody Else’s Class

( James Vellaroux’s POV )

The second white one in the ruin sits at the foot of the tower.

Not in the square. Round the back, in what used to be a yard, with the tower on one side of it and two courses of old wall on the other and about forty paces of broken ground in between.

Bad place to put anything.

Four classes came up from the river in one column, which I still can’t quite believe. Greywall at the front because they’d gone ahead, then Brightvale, then us, then Sanctuary strung out at the back.

Nobody talked much. It was hot by then and everyone had been up since before dawn and a fair number of people had been in a river.

Tristan walked the yard twice before he let anyone near the light.

Twice. He looked at the tower, and then he looked at the wall, and then he went and put his hand flat on the wall and left it there for a bit like a man checking a horse.

Then he moved everybody back four paces further than they needed to be.

I want that on the page because of what happened next, and because he did it without being told, and because I have never once in my life looked at a wall before a fight.

***

Brightvale had the ruin. That was the order, settled somewhere on the riverbank while I wasn’t able to hear it. Greywall the island, Brightvale the ruin, us the ridge, Sanctuary last.

Ten from each class went in to open it. Same as the island.

The light came up.

It came up fast, faster than the island one, and it did not stop at head height. It went up the inside of the tower shaft like water going down a drain backwards, all the way to where the top used to be, and the whole ruin lit the colour of five in the morning.

Beautiful, probably, if you were somewhere else.

The stone did not like it.

***

You could hear it. I couldn’t, but you could see people hear it, which is the same thing from up here. Forty heads turned at once toward the tower and then toward the wall.

Tristan was already moving.

Not away. Along. Sideways down the line, hands out, pushing people back, and I knew what he was doing because it is the only thing there is to do, which is get everyone four paces further from a thing that is about to arrive.

The wall came down in one piece and then in a hundred.

***

It took about two seconds.

Two courses of old stone, a section maybe ten paces wide, out and down into the yard, and the dust went up so fast that for a moment I could not see anything at all.

When it cleared, most people were on their feet.

Most.

There was somebody under it near the western end.

Navy jacket.

Mine.

***

( Alash Vortex’s POV )

I was watching the wall before it came down.

Not because I’m clever. Because Tristan walked the yard twice, and when a man like that walks a piece of ground twice, the second walk is him looking at the thing that worries him, and you can simply follow his eyes.

So when it went, I already had my hands on the glass and I was looking in the right place.

Dust for about four seconds.

Then people getting up.

Then not everybody getting up.

***

Here is what I could see from half a mile away, and I want to set it down properly, because people have odd ideas about what a healer actually does.

I could not see a face. I could not see blood. I could not see anything you would call a wound.

What I could see was a boy in a navy jacket lying half under a stone with his chest not moving the way a chest moves when somebody is winded, and four people crouched around him, and two of them with their hands under his shoulders.

Lifting.

They were going to pull him out.

Of course they were. That is the first thing everybody does and it is the first thing everybody is told not to do and it takes about a year at a border to stop wanting to. You see somebody under a stone and every part of you says get them out from under the stone.

His chest was not moving right.

If the stone is sitting on a chest and you take it off wrong, or you drag the body out from under it sideways, you can finish what the stone started in about four seconds. I have watched that happen. Once. I was twelve, and it was not my patient, and I have thought about it more than almost anything else in my life.

Lena was thirty paces away at the back of the yard with Sanctuary.

***

I did not think about the note.

I want that recorded, because I have spent the whole day with my hand in my jacket and I did not think about it once. I picked up the pen while I was still standing up.

Lena to the tower. Don’t move him. Crushed chest.

Nine.

Slot.

Sanctuary went from minus thirty to minus sixty.

***

I watched it land in Penelope’s hand.

She read it, and she did not look up, and she did not hesitate, and she turned round and shouted one word at her own class, and Lena Arkwright came through forty paces of broken ground with her satchel already open.

I could not hear what Lena said when she got there.

The four people around him took their hands off him.

That is all. That is the whole thing. Four people took their hands off a boy and sat back on their heels and waited for somebody who knew what she was doing, and it cost thirty points, and I would spend it again this evening and tomorrow and for the rest of my life.

***

One card left.

I did not notice that for some time. I noticed it while I was watching Lena get her hands under the edge of the stone and start talking to the people around her about where to hold, which is exactly what I would have done and about four minutes faster than I would have done it at her age.

One card.

And a piece of paper in my jacket telling me to keep it.

For the first time all day, those two facts were the same fact, and I sat down and did not feel clever about it at all.

***

( Sophie Trohan’s POV )

Brightvale sealed the ruin while a boy from Vanguard was lying under a stone forty paces away.

That’s not a criticism. I want to say that before anything else, because I know how it reads and it isn’t that at all.

The light was up. It was open. It stays open for a bit and then it closes on its own whether anybody touches it or not, and if it closes untouched then a hundred points go back into the ground and nobody gets anything and the whole afternoon was for nothing.

So Marta put her hand on it.

And she did it looking the other way. At the tower. The entire time.

I’ve never seen anybody claim a hundred points while facing the wrong direction.

***

Our figure went to a hundred and ten.

First place on that board since dawn had been Concord, and Concord is still Concord and still a hundred and fifty, and I did the sum before I could stop myself, because of course I did, because for about four seconds I was a person doing sums about a scoreboard while somebody’s chest was wrong.

I am not going to pretend I didn’t.

Then I looked at the western end of the yard, where a girl from my class was kneeling with her hands flat on the ground next to a boy she’d never met, holding the dust down with a little bit of Water so he wasn’t breathing it, which I don’t think anybody asked her to do.

That’s Wynne. Always on the left. Always doing some small thing on the left that nobody notices.

I put my forehead on the glass and stayed like that for a while.

***

( Daphne Spinster’s POV )

Greywall had nothing to do.

We were paid this morning. We came north because we said we would. We opened the ruin because a Major needs three classes and three classes needed us, and then we stood at the back of a yard and watched Brightvale take a hundred points, exactly as agreed, and got nothing, exactly as agreed.

I have no cards.

Nadia has no instructions. She has not had any since twenty seconds after midday.

So I watched.

***

The glass is hot.

Not warm. It was warm this morning and it has been getting worse all day and there is now a point about a hand’s width from the partition where I do not want to put my hand.

I have been telling myself it is the sun.

It is not the sun. The sun has been on this glass since about ten and the heat is not coming from outside. I have tested it. The front glass, the one with a mile of basin behind it and the whole afternoon on it, is cooler than the partition between me and Trohan.

The partitions are hot and the window is not.

There are five boxes in this room and all five of us are inside them.

***

I looked along the row.

Vellaroux with both hands on the front glass. Trohan with her head against it. Aurelius standing very straight and not looking at anybody.

And Vortex, who had just sat down.

He sits when it is finished. I have noticed that. He stands when something is happening and he sits down the moment there is nothing left to do about it, and he had just sat down, and a girl from his class was running across a yard with a satchel.

I put my palm flat on the partition beside me.

I took it off again quickly.

***

( Elizabeth Aurelius’s POV )

Concord went back into the wood and took two more small Wellsprings, and our figure went to one hundred and seventy, and I watched the number change and felt nothing whatsoever.

That is not a complaint. I mention it as an observation about myself, because I have had a great deal of time up here to make them and very little else to do with the time.

We are winning.

We have been winning since ten this morning and we will be winning at the end of the day, and the margin is not close and cannot be closed, and every single person in this basin now knows it.

Which is presumably why none of them have looked at us since noon.

***

Petra has not sent anything back.

There is no mechanism for it. A card goes one way, down. Nothing comes up. I knew that at dawn and it did not concern me at dawn because I had decided I would never use one.

She read it twice. Then she folded it and put it inside her jacket, and she has not taken it out again, and she has led Concord through that wood for two hours since without once looking toward the rim.

I do not know whether she is angry.

I do not know whether she is ashamed, or relieved, or whether she has simply put it away with the other things she intends to raise with me tomorrow in a quiet room.

I have rehearsed four versions of that conversation and discarded all of them, and it is not yet five o’clock.

***

I did look at the yard.

I watched a wall come down on a boy who is not mine, and I watched a card go from the box at the far end of this room down into a girl’s hand, and I watched a healer run.

Thirty points. For a Vanguard student. Spent by a class on minus thirty, in the fourth hour of a day it cannot win, by a boy who has not once today sent a card that had anything to do with the scoreboard.

I am the only person in this room who has spent one on the scoreboard.

I am also, by a considerable margin, the person winning.

I would like somebody to explain to me why those two sentences fit together so badly, and there is nobody in this room I can ask, because the glass is between us and because I would not know how to begin.