Chapter 135: Nobody Moves

( James Vellaroux’s POV )

Here is the arithmetic, because somebody should write it down.

There was an open Major in that clearing.

The last one. Fifth of five. There were still small Wellsprings sitting unclaimed around that basin and not one of them mattered any more, because Concord had a hundred and seventy and the only thing left on the whole board that could put a class past them was standing in a wood in front of four classes who had walked a mile in the dark to reach it.

And when the last white one goes, sealed or not, the day goes with it. That is in the conditions. Selene wrote it. I expect she thought it was tidy.

A hundred points.

Four classes standing round it.

Vanguard had seventy. A hundred would have put us at a hundred and seventy, level with Concord, and Concord was not in that wood and could not get back into it before the day ended.

Brightvale had a hundred and ten. A hundred would have put them at two hundred and ten and won them the entire examination outright, by forty, with nothing anybody could do about it.

Greywall had thirty. They have spent the whole day walking to places where they gain nothing. A hundred points would have been the difference between last but one and a respectable afternoon.

And Sanctuary, whose Wellspring it was, whose turn it was, who had kept every single part of an agreement that nobody could enforce, was standing in that clearing without its acting leader, because she had looked at a card and run into the dark.

A hundred points.

Sitting there.

Lit.

***

Four classes and nobody moved.

I have been over this about forty times since and I still cannot tell you what was stopping them, because there was nothing stopping them. There was no rule. There was no referee. There was no clause on that sheet about agreements, and there never had been, and every person in that clearing had known it since the middle of the morning.

Tristan was six paces from it.

He did not move.

Marta was closer. Four paces, maybe. She had been closer to every white Wellspring all day, because that is where she stands.

She did not move.

Nadia was at the edge of the light with thirty-five people behind her who had walked a mile in the dark for nothing and would get nothing.

She did not move.

***

The light started going down.

It does that. It comes up, it stands for a while, and if nobody touches it, it folds back into the ground on its own and the points go with it. Selene designed that. I imagine she thought it was elegant.

It took about twenty seconds.

I stood in a glass box and watched a hundred points come down out of a wood one hand’s width at a time, in front of a hundred and forty-four people who could all have had it, and not one of them so much as shifted their weight.

***

Two weeks ago I would not have understood a single part of that.

I would have called it stupid. I would have called it stupid out loud, to Tristan, at length, and I would have been unbearable about it for a week.

I sat down on the floor of my box with my back to the desk, and I stayed there until the light was gone.

***

( Sophie Trohan’s POV )

I wasn’t watching the Wellspring.

I mean I was, at first, and then I wasn’t, because after about four seconds I realised the Wellspring was not where anything was happening, and I have spent the whole day up here learning to look at the right part of the picture.

So I watched faces.

***

Roth.

Roth, who has been carrying too much since dawn and who had an absolutely enormous row with Marta on the fourth day and still hasn’t properly forgiven her, was standing about ten paces from the light with his arms full of somebody else’s water skins. And he looked at it, and he looked at Nadia, and then he turned round and looked at the trees, and he stayed looking at the trees.

That’s all. He just decided to look somewhere else.

***

Wynne.

Wynne was sitting down. On the ground. She’d sat down the moment they stopped walking because she has been on her feet for fourteen hours and she is not strong, she has never been strong, she got into this academy by examination and everybody knows it.

She did not get up.

And she was on the left. She is always on the left. She was on the left of the light and there was nobody between her and it.

***

Hollis.

Hollis, who hums, who freezes in crowds, who stood alone in a square this morning while an entire class flowed away past him.

Hollis was standing with his shoulder touching a Greywall boy’s shoulder. I have no idea which one. They had been walking together on the way in, I think, the way exhausted people do, and when everybody stopped they just stayed like that.

He was humming. I’d bet my whole life on it.

***

Not one of them moved.

And nobody told them not to. That’s the bit. Nobody said anything. There was no speech and no vote and no agreement and no Marta standing up saying the hard true thing, because there was nothing left to say that anybody didn’t already know.

The last hundred points in that basin went back into the ground in front of a hundred and forty-four people, and every single one of them let it, individually, separately, at the same time, without discussing it.

***

I have spent today being told, over and over, in about nine different ways, that promises are worth nothing out there because there is no clause to hold them up.

There is no clause.

They did it anyway.

***

( Daphne Spinster’s POV )

The doors unsealed when the light went out.

That is how the day ends. The last white one resolves and the Crucible is over, and the room lets you go.

I did not hear them. I felt it. The air changed, the way it changes when a window opens in another room, and the gold that had been in the partitions all evening went out of them the way a lamp goes out, all at once, everywhere.

The pale line is still there. It has not gone.

***

Trohan was nearest to the doors.

She was on the floor of her box with her hands over her face and she did not look up.

Aurelius was standing. She saw it happen. She did not move either.

Vellaroux was sitting with his back to his desk at the far end and would not have got there in time even if he had been on his feet.

So it was me.

***

I want to set down that I did not decide anything.

People are going to say I did. Nadia will say it. She will make it into a thing and I will have to sit through it.

I did not decide. The doors opened and I was already moving and I have no memory whatsoever of the part between those two facts, and I have been trying to find it for some hours and it is simply not there.

There is one piece of it I do have, and only because it made a noise.

I took the chair with me going through the door. Not deliberately. My hip caught it on the way past and it went over and came apart on the floor of the gallery, because it had already been used on a partition once that evening and had nothing left in it.

Nobody picked it up. It is presumably still there.

Four paces.

I had been looking at those four paces since the glass went hot.

***

He was on the floor against the front window with one hand still up on it.

Breathing. Badly, and not evenly, but breathing.

His eyes were open and they were not tracking. That is the part I did not like. I said his name twice and the second time he moved his head about a finger’s width, which is not an answer, but it is not nothing either.

I got down on the floor next to him.

I did not know what to do. I want that written down as well.

I have no healing. I have Blood and Gravity, and Blood is not what people think it is, and neither of them is any use at all to a person who cannot hold his own head up. Arkwright would have known nine things to do. Vortex himself would have known twenty.

I knew none.

***

So I put my hand flat on his back, between the shoulders, where you can feel whether somebody is still working.

And I stayed there.

That is all I did. For however long it was, in a room with the doors open and the gold gone out of the walls and a basin full of people below us who had just let a hundred points fall into the ground.

I have spent this entire term being the person who writes things down so that she does not have to be present for them.

I sat on a floor with my hand on somebody’s back and did nothing at all, for a length of time I did not measure and could not have told you afterwards, and it is the only thing I have done today that I would not change.

***

He is the only one of the five I do not have whatever it is the others have.

He skipped me. On purpose. He would not tell Aurelius why and he would not tell me why, and when I found out I said it was good, and I meant it, and I have not changed my mind.

I was still the one four paces away.

***

( Elizabeth Aurelius’s POV )

I did not go.

That is the whole of my part in this and I have decided to set it down plainly rather than dress it.

The doors opened. Spinster went. Trohan did not look up. Vellaroux could not have reached him. I could have. I was standing, I was two boxes away, and I am not slow.

I stayed where I was.

***

I have spent the day being correct.

I was correct about the arithmetic. I was correct that four classes could not beat us. I was correct that Concord should take small Wellsprings quietly and avoid every Major, and correct that no agreement out there could be enforced, and I have been correct about every single thing since dawn except the one that mattered, which I got wrong early that afternoon by seven words.

And standing there watching Daphne Spinster cross four paces of floor, I understood something that I do not think I could have understood this morning.

I would have been useful.

I would have been extremely useful. I would have known to check his breathing and I would have known to send somebody for Arkwright and I would have done it faster than she did and better than she did, and it would have been the correct thing.

And it would have been me arriving.

He has been arrived at all day. By me, at the inquiry. By half the faculty. By a hundred and forty-five people turning round on a riverbank to look up at his window.

***

So I put my hands behind my back, which is where they have been since dawn, and I let somebody else go.

It is the second useful thing I have done today and the first one I am not certain about.

***

The board still says one hundred and seventy.

It will say one hundred and seventy when they read it out, and Concord will have won this examination by sixty points, and I will stand up in front of one hundred and eighty-seven people tomorrow and accept it.

Nobody will stand next to me while I do.

I did that. Not Petra. Me, in ninety seconds, with a pen.

***

( Sophie Trohan’s POV )

She came up the last of the slope at a run.

I want to say she was running. She wasn’t, not properly, not by then. It was a mile and it was uphill at the end and she had been on her feet since before dawn like everybody else, and what she was doing was the thing your legs do when you have decided something and your body has stopped being consulted.

She came round the end of the gallery and through the doors and she did not stop at any point.

Daphne was on the floor with him. She looked up.

And she did not move out of the way, and I think that was right, and I am glad it was her and not me because I would have got up and fussed.

***

Penelope got down on his other side.

She did not touch him first. She looked at him. Properly, for about two seconds, the way you look at something when you need to know one specific thing before you can afford any other feeling.

Then she said something.

I was four boxes away with the doors open and I still could not hear it, because my ears were doing something stupid, and because I had my hand over my mouth.

***

He answered her.

That is the part. He answered.

Not much. It was short and it took him a moment and I could see that it cost him, and she leaned in to get it.

And then her face did something I have never seen on it in twelve days.

She was furious.

Absolutely, completely furious, at a boy lying on the floor of a glass box who had just about managed four words, and she did not say one single furious thing, and her hand was already going to the side of his head.

***

I know what she’d seen on the way up.

There is a board on the wall in that gallery and you can read it from the path if the light is going and you know where to look, and she had been staring at numbers all day like the rest of us.

Minus ninety.

He spent it. The last one. On her.

She had a hundred points three paces away from her hand in a clearing and she left them there and ran a mile, and by the time she got to the top of that slope she knew exactly what it had cost, and she had not turned round.

***

I got up then. I don’t know why. I got up and went and stood in my own doorway like a person waiting for a bus, because I could not be on the floor for another second and because from there I could hear.

She said one more thing.

"Where’s your pillow?"

That was it. That was the whole of it. A mile uphill in the dark and a hundred points left lying in a clearing and a boy on the floor who had just about managed four words, and what she asked him was where his pillow was, in exactly the voice she uses when he has left something somewhere and she has decided not to make a speech about it.

There was a pause.

Then he said, "Chair."

And she looked over at the chair, which was lying on its side by the desk where he had knocked it over at some point during the evening, and there it was underneath it.

And she made a sound that was not quite a laugh.

And Daphne Spinster stayed exactly where she was on his other side with her hand between his shoulders, saying nothing at all.

***

Somewhere below us, a hundred and forty-four people were walking out of a wood in the dark with nothing.

I sat down on the floor of my box with my back against the open door and cried like an idiot, and I would like it known that it was not sad crying, and that I have absolutely no intention of explaining it to anybody.