The instructor read the week's allocations out of the back of the theory block at morning roll, clipboard flat against her thigh, voice doing the thing it did when a piece of news did not require her opinion.
"Live-target practice, Week Three. Group Seven slots as follows."
Ren kept his hands on his knees. Group Seven had been waiting on this for four days. A real target, not canvas. A low-rank materialized core, the thing the cohort had been whispering about in the canteen, and slots were limited, and the instructor was reading names in the flat voice she used when a thing was settled.
She read four names. None of them were his.
Then she read two supplementary names off the second column. Group Six. The mill-town kid with the ink stain. The short-haired girl who did not miss. Both of them were the slots a Group Seven student would normally have gotten, and one of them was the slot he would have had if the pen had moved at Ring Two.
"Foundation Track Six standard allocation," the instructor said, for nobody in particular. "Priority to students with a measurable baseline output. Next item."
She moved on.
Ren kept his hands on his knees and his face doing nothing. The face had been doing nothing for three days and it did not need a reason now. The null reading from intake had been a null reading, and null readings did not warrant live-target slots, and the paperwork was exactly the shape his plan wanted. The plan was working.
The plan was working.
Okay, he thought. Fine.
It was not fine.
He waited for the instructor to dismiss the block and then walked out of the hall with the rest of Group Seven at an even pace and peeled off at the first side corridor on a made-up errand about his card balance. The card office was two turns away. He walked it with his hands in his pockets because his hands in his pockets was a Group Seven thing and he was still a Group Seven thing.
The corridor was empty. The card office door was shut.
He stopped in front of it and put his forehead against the cold wall for half a second and swore at it, once, under his breath, in Harken.
"Skott dei."
He was not cold about it, just angry. Seventeen years old and told no in public by a system that did not owe him the reason. The wall did not answer. He did not need it to.
He straightened.
The card office door opened.
A clerk looked out at him. Middle-aged, ink on his cuff, face of a man who had been interrupted. "You waiting?"
"Balance update," Ren said. "Thought it'd be posted by now."
The clerk glanced at the ledger board behind him. "Tomorrow morning."
"Right. Thanks."
The clerk nodded and closed the door.
Ren stood there for another second with the taste of the Harken word still behind his teeth and then turned and walked back to theory.
Stance correction ran its full session. The instructor gave three notes on posture and then read from the manual in a voice that went over him without catching. His left heel did its smaller hot-point thing against the bandage. The kid to his right was chewing something throughout the entire lecture (not a grain bar, hard candy from the sound of it, methodical, patient, click click click) and it was the most distracting thing in the room, which said something about how interesting the manual was. Toma Vess was three seats down and did not look at him once. Ren sat through it. He did not hear a word.
The session ended. The cohort stood up and flowed out into the corridor in the direction of the dormitories and Ren flowed with it.
He was halfway down the corridor when a girl his age stepped out of a side alcove and fell in beside him.
She did it without hurry. Plain gray coat. Dark hair cut plain, pulled back. A notebook under her left arm, black cover, no markings. Her shoulder was already level with his when he registered she was there, her pace matching his exactly.
Ren kept walking. Stopping was a tell. He had learned that at Ring Two.
She did not introduce herself. She did not look up at him. She asked one question, flat and unhurried, no more weight in her voice than a routine check.
"Is your creature name real?"
Ren's next step landed wrong.
He corrected it inside a half-beat and kept walking and did not let anything show in his face, but the correction had happened, and if she watched for corrections she had seen it.
His card said F-provisional, unclassified creature. He knew what his card said. He had watched the appraiser write it. Unclassified could mean two things. It could mean the appraiser had looked at the residue and not known what it was. It could mean Ren had looked at the residue and not told the appraiser what it was. These were different lies. He had only ever told the first one out loud.
She had asked the second one.
How, he thought. How does she know there are two.
"It was a small thing," he said. His voice came out level. "I did not know what it was."
She did not slow down. She shifted the notebook under her arm, pulled a short pencil out of her coat pocket without looking, and made a single mark inside the cover. One line, quick. The pencil was already going back into the pocket before the mark was finished. She did not break stride. She did not look at him.
"Thank you," she said.
The next corridor branched left toward the reading rooms. She turned into it without slowing, and her coat did not flare, and her steps did not change, and she was gone behind the corner and the corridor was empty again.
Ren kept going the other way.
His mouth was dry. Great.
He did not know her name. She had not offered it.
The dormitory steps were the same steps as the ones he had sat on three days ago, stone worn smooth in the middle by a hundred years of cohorts sitting exactly where he was sitting now. He came around the corner of the dorm block and sat down on them without thinking about it, because his legs had made the decision before his head had.
He looked at the bandage on his foot.
The denial was a policy. The policy had a stated reason and the reason was technically correct on the paper he had fabricated, and there was no person behind the policy to be angry at. The notebook girl was a person. The notebook girl had asked a question she already knew the shape of. One of these was the bigger problem, and he tried to decide which, and the trying kept slipping off both of them because they were not the same kind of thing.
The girl, he thought. She's a person. Persons are worse than policies.
Then: No. The denial is the one that's costing me training.
Then he stopped.
His legs were tired. His heel was tired. His head had been running for three days without a break and it was tired too, and the deciding was not getting anywhere, and at some point a person was allowed to just sit on a step.
He sat.
The courtyard in front of the dorm block was empty. Somebody was sweeping somewhere off to the left, slow strokes, not in a hurry. A bird on the roofline was making the same two-note sound it had been making when he sat down. The light was coming in low over the west wall, late-afternoon yellow, and it was falling on the steps.
The steps were warm.
He noticed it. A thing that had been true for a while and had just now crossed into his attention. The stone under his hands was warm. Sun-warm. Stone that had been sitting in the sun all afternoon while a seventeen-year-old was inside a theory block not being on a list.
He had not been warm in three days.
He put his palms flat on the step beside him and left them there.
Huh, he thought.
The sun was on the back of his neck. It was on his knees. It was on the bandage. It was not solving anything. The list was still the list. The notebook girl was somewhere in a gray coat going into a reading room he had not seen. Tomorrow morning his balance would update and it would say the same thing it had said yesterday. Nothing on the step was fixing any of that.
But the step was warm.
He meant to get up after a few seconds. He sat for a minute longer than that, with his hands flat on the stone and the bird doing its two-note thing and the sun on the back of his neck, and he did not think about any of the four things he was supposed to be thinking about.
Then he got up.
She had not offered her name. But she had come back.