Chapter 137: Apparently I Am Interesting Now

Somebody in my class has worked out that minus ninety is the lowest score in the recorded history of Zenith Academy.

I do not know who. Roland says it was Marren, Marren says it was Delia, and Delia says she merely confirmed it, which is the sort of answer that tells you everything.

The important thing is that Sanctuary has decided this is an achievement.

***

"Nobody’s ever done it," Cedric said at breakfast, with his mouth full. "Not in two hundred years. You’d have to actually try."

"We didn’t try."

"That’s what makes it good."

"There are classes that have finished with three points."

"Three points is nothing. Three points is a bad day." He pointed a piece of bread at me. "Minus ninety is a statement."

Somebody further down the table said we should have it painted over the door and about nine people agreed with them, and the argument that followed lasted the rest of breakfast and covered, at various points, whether it should be in silver, whether the Headmaster could stop us, and whether the number should be written out in words for dignity.

I want it on the door. I am aware that this is not leadership. I want it on the door and I intend to keep wanting it.

***

Penelope did not join in.

She sat at the end of the table with her hands round a cup and let the whole thing happen around her, and when Cedric appealed to her directly about the silver, she said, "Mm," and drank something.

She knows what the ninety is made of.

She is the only person in that room who received all three of those cards, one at a time, in her own hand, and read them, and did what they said. She knows which thirty stopped Cedric burning a hundred people, and which thirty put Lena’s hands on a boy under a stone, and she knows exactly what the last thirty was.

So she is not going to find it funny, and I am not going to make her.

I did not say anything about it.

I let them do the door argument and I laughed at Cedric, and I sat at the other end of the table from a girl who has not mentioned it since and is not going to.

***

Here is what I wanted from today.

Nothing.

I wanted a corridor and two lessons and a chair by a window, and I wanted no part of any conversation about the northern rim.

I have been alive a long time by any measure you like, and I have made a great many plans, and I would put that one comfortably in the bottom third.

***

The staring started before I reached the east hall.

It is a specific kind. People do not stare at you, that would be rude. What they do is stop talking as you come past and then start again a moment later at slightly the wrong volume, so that every group you pass sounds like a door closing and opening.

Six of those between Sanctuary and the east hall. I counted, because counting was more interesting than not counting.

Then a second-year I have never met in my life stopped in front of me and asked if I was all right.

"Yes."

"Only I heard..."

"I’m fine."

"Right." He did not move. "Good. That’s good."

Then he stood there for a moment longer, apparently out of material, and went away.

***

Somebody held a door for me.

Somebody else offered me a chair, in a corridor, where there was no reason for a chair to be involved in anything, and I am still not certain where he got it.

A girl from Class One asked Roland, in front of me, whether I should be walking about.

Roland, to his considerable credit, said, "He walks about constantly. It’s most of his personality."

***

Roland has been tracking it.

I use that word deliberately. He is not gossiping. Gossip is when you enjoy the story. Roland has been treating the entire thing the way his father treats the price of wool.

"Four versions," he said, falling into step beside me. "Three of them are already dead, don’t bother with those. The Force one lasted about an hour this morning and then somebody pointed out there was nobody up there who has Force."

"What’s the surviving one?"

"There are two. One’s boring, which is why it’ll win in the end. It says you fainted."

"That is boring."

"It’s also nearly true, which is unusual and I don’t like it." He shifted the bag on his shoulder. "The other one says the glass exploded."

"The glass did not explode."

"I know the glass didn’t explode. That’s the one that’s moving fastest, though. It went from Vanguard to Brightvale to Concord before second lesson. It’s got legs."

"Why that one?"

"Because it’s got a picture in it," Roland said, as though explaining a tariff. "People can see glass exploding. They can’t see whatever actually happened, because nobody’s told them what actually happened, so they’ll take the one with the picture."

He thought about it.

"Give it two days and the exploding one is the truth. I’d bet on it."

Then he said, without changing tone, that the gallery is closed for inspection and nobody is allowed up the northern path, and that two separate people have seen Professor Darius go in there since yesterday morning.

And then he asked whether I thought the number should go on the door in silver.

***

Penelope was asked three times.

The first was in the corridor outside the east hall, by somebody from Class Two, who wanted to know why she had walked away from a hundred points with her hand already out.

She said, "It was a busy day," and kept walking.

The second was at lunch, by a Brightvale girl who had clearly been put up to it by at least four other people, all of whom were watching from a different table with the subtlety of a brass band.

Penelope said, "You’d have to ask somebody who was there," which is a remarkable sentence, because she was there, and because it is not technically a lie, and because it ended the conversation in about two seconds.

The third was in a doorway by a boy I did not recognise who got most of the way through the question before he understood what he was doing and stopped in the middle of it.

She said, "Mm," and went past him.

***

I noticed all three.

I want to set that down plainly because I have spent a day not doing anything about it.

She has not told a single person what that card said. Not one. There are thirty-six people in Sanctuary who would very much like to know why their class finished below zero, and she has given every one of them a version of nothing, and she will go on doing it for as long as it takes, because she has decided it is mine and that settles it.

I could have asked her about it at any point.

I did not ask her about it at any point.

At some stage that is going to become a conversation and it is going to be an extremely uncomfortable one, and I have decided to have it later, which is a decision I have now made twice.

***

Sophie caught me in the west corridor after the second lesson.

"Alash!"

Both hands. Enormous. She has a way of arriving that makes it feel like a scheduled event.

"Sophie."

"You’re up! You’re walking about, everybody said you were walking about, I said that sounded right because you were walking about the day after you got hit by a wall as well, which frankly..."

And then she stopped.

It was not dramatic. She was mid-sentence and then she was not, and her face did something quick that she put away almost immediately, and she looked at a point somewhere past my shoulder and said, "Sorry."

"It’s fine."

"No, I’m..." She started again. "You were on the floor."

"Yes."

"And I couldn’t..."

She did not finish that one either.

***

Here is what I said.

"Lena cleared me this morning. Three examinations, two academy healers, and she went through her own notes twice. There’s nothing wrong with me."

I said it in the voice I use for reading out a chart.

I have handed that exact sentence to about forty people over five years, at a border, in tents, and it is a good sentence for a patient’s family, and Sophie Trohan was standing in a corridor with her hands still half up from a greeting she had not finished.

She nodded.

"Right," she said. "Good. That’s good."

Then she said she had to be somewhere, which was almost certainly untrue, and went.

***

I stood in that corridor for a bit.

I have been told, more than once, by more than one person, that I am excellent in an emergency. It is the only compliment I have ever been given about my character that I think is accurate.

Nobody has ever told me I am any good afterwards.

***

The rest of the day was two lessons and both of them were lessons.

No cultivation. Selene has suspended the practical sessions for two days on the grounds that a body which has spent fourteen hours in a basin should not be asked to circulate anything, and has replaced them with theory in a classroom, which she appears to find no hardship at all, and half the year received this news the way people receive an unexpected holiday, and the other half asked her follow-up questions about channel recovery, and one of them was Delia, who is going to be extremely good at this and extremely tiresome about it.

Nobody attacked anybody. Nothing came out of the ground. Nobody looked at me from somewhere that was not a direction.

It was, by a distance, the best day I have had since the term started.

***

Then Selene stopped me on the way out.

"Vortex."

"Professor."

"You were not at theory yesterday afternoon."

"I was being examined by three people at once."

"I am aware of where you were. I signed the form." She was putting things into a case and did not look up. "Nobody was circulating anything. You missed a classroom, not a mat."

"Yes."

"Then you owe me the written work."

I did not say anything for a second.

"There was written work."

"There is always written work. Channel recovery under sustained load. Four pages." She closed the case. "You will find it interesting."

"Professor..."

"You have until the day after tomorrow, which is longer than anyone else got, and you may tell whoever asks that I was extremely lenient with you." She picked the case up. "I am not going to be lenient with you again, so make use of it."

***

I sat in the Sanctuary common room that evening with four pages to write about channel recovery under sustained load.

Behind me, the door argument was still going. It has moved on from silver and is now about whether the minus sign should be included, which Marren says is dishonest to leave off and Cedric says looks weak.

Penelope was at the next table with her own work, not looking at me, in the specific way she does not look at people.

And I sat there with a blank sheet in front of me.

Two evenings ago something with no measurable presence read me for nine minutes and stopped without finishing, and nobody in this academy can tell me what it was or whether it is over.

And a woman in her middle thirties has just ruined my entire week with four pages on channel recovery.

’This is worse.’

[It is four pages.]

’It is worse and I want that understood.’

[Understood.]

I picked up the pen.