Group Seven was doing stance work on the training ground and Ren was cataloguing things he had not bothered to catalogue yesterday.
The instructor held her clipboard with her left thumb hooked along the underside of the board, taking the weight. He had watched her hand for twenty minutes and she had not shifted the grip once. Left-thumb dominant. He filed it, because filing things was what his brain was doing today, and there was not much else to do while standing with his feet at forty-five degrees and his weight forward.
Toma Vess was two rows over. Toma was fifteen. Ren had figured this out five minutes ago by looking at him, because there was a version of fifteen you could only find on kids who had been sent somewhere important before they were ready for it. Two of the other Group Seven students were older than Ren by a year at least. The mill-town kid at the far end had to be nineteen. That felt wrong in some low way Ren could not find the shape of.
The corridor window above the theory block was empty.
He had clocked this on the walk in, without meaning to, and it had stuck in his chest when the other things had not. The dark-notebook figure had been in that window yesterday at this hour and the day before that at this hour, and today the window had no figure in it, and his body had registered the absence before his head had. His body was doing a lot of things ahead of his head lately.
'That's information,' he thought. 'I don't know what it means, but that's information.'
His left boot was rubbing the blister at the heel. He had been ignoring the blister since the wagon. He could not ignore it today. Every step on the packed dirt was a small hot point against the back of his foot, and the small hot point was taking up more and more of his attention as the drill went on. Of course. Of course that was the thing his brain was going to fixate on. Stance work, cohort surveillance, an unnamed figure missing from a window, and what his brain wanted to think about was his boot.
"Morning," Toma said, when the instructor dismissed them.
Ren looked at him.
"Morning."
Toma meant it. There was no angle on it. He was standing there with his hands in his coat pockets and his shoulders at the angle of a kid who had decided to say good morning to someone and was now executing that decision. Then he nodded and went to walk with the other Group Seven kids toward the canteen.
Ren stood on the packed dirt for a second.
The sparring rumor had not stopped moving. He could feel it still working through Group Seven: the other kids not quite making eye contact, and Toma making eye contact. Curious, not hostile. Curious was worse. Hostile was a thing you could plan around.
The route from the training ground to the card office cut past the east side of the supply row. Ren had mapped the alternate route on the first day, the longer way around behind the theory block, and had decided not to take it. Taking it meant Brekken had already won a small thing he did not deserve to win. Ren was going to walk past the doorway.
The plan was simple. Eyes forward. Normal pace. Do not look in.
It worked for two steps.
Brekken was standing in his own doorway with a broom.
He was sweeping the step. He was not looking at the street. He was looking at the bristles and the small pile of grit they were pushing toward the edge of the stone, and his red hair was bent down the same way it had been bent over the ledger yesterday morning, and he was just a large older man sweeping his step at the hour a shopkeeper sweeps his step.
Ren's feet kept moving because his feet were not the problem.
The problem was the Harken rule.
In Harken you did not walk past a man sweeping without acknowledging him. It was not a courtesy. It was something the mine wives had taught the kids before they were old enough to argue with it, a thing you did because the old men who had been digging coal for forty years had earned a nod from a boy in clean clothes, and a boy who walked past without the nod was a boy whose mother was going to hear about it by sundown. Ren's mother had been dead for six years. The rule had not died with her.
"Morning," he said.
"Morning," Brekken said, to the bristles.
Flat. Drawling. The same voice as yesterday. He did not look up. The broom kept moving.
Ren kept walking.
Three paces later he was past the doorway and the rule had been served and the thing he had been trying to protect had just spent itself on a Harken instinct six years older than his academy card. There was nothing to do with it. You could not un-greet a man.
'That was the cheapest thing I could have done,' he thought, 'and it still cost me.'
The blister was worse by midday. He sat on the edge of his cot and looked at the boot for a full minute and then accepted what the boot was telling him.
He needed a bandage roll. The academy intake kit did not include one. The canteen did not sell them. The equipment shed locked them behind a theft ledger that made you explain what you wanted them for. The supply shop sold them at fourteen coppers a roll, going rate, pinned to the board on the wall behind the counter in Brekken's handwriting.
'Fine,' he thought. 'Fine. Perfect. Fine.'
He walked back across the training grounds with his left foot doing its small hot point against the back of his heel and went in the door of the supply shop.
Brekken was behind the counter writing in his ledger.
"Bandage roll," Ren said. "Small."
Brekken put the pen down, took a roll off the shelf behind him without looking, and set it on the counter.
"Fourteen," he said.
Ren counted out fourteen coppers and set them on the wood. Brekken scooped them into the till. The transaction was finished. Ren picked up the roll and turned for the door.
"The new ones rub at the heel," Brekken said, behind him.
Ren stopped.
"Doesn't matter how you lace them." Brekken was already writing in the ledger again. He had not looked up for the pay, had not looked up for the roll, was not looking up now. "Takes about two weeks."
Ren stood there with the bandage roll in his hand.
He had not mentioned his boots. He had not limped. He had been consciously not limping since the wagon, because a limp was a tell and tells were the one thing the plan did not allow for. His trousers covered the boot entirely. The blister was two layers of fabric and a strip of leather below any sightline a man behind a counter could have on a customer walking in the door.
"Thanks," Ren said.
"Mm."
Brekken wrote a number in his ledger. The pen moved in small careful lines and did not stop.
Ren walked out.
He was halfway across the training ground before Per thirty-five did the thing.
It was the same quiet angle of attention he had felt in the intake hall and the corridor and the back row of the target post demonstration, the small pressure of being looked at from behind that did not have a sound or a visual and was just there. He did not turn around.
He filed the angle. Brekken was still in the doorway, watching him go.
Five seconds, maybe six. Then the angle withdrew and Ren could not feel it anymore, and he kept walking in a straight line toward his dormitory with his face doing nothing and the bandage roll in his hand.
He went inside and sat on the cot and pulled the left boot off.
The blister was ugly. Raw along the back of the heel, a little wet at the edge, going to hurt to put a sock over and hurt worse to walk on tomorrow. He had been right to buy the bandage. Brekken had been right about the boots.
That was not the part.
The part was that Brekken had been right before Ren had bought the bandage. The part was that Brekken had the observation ready on his tongue and had chosen to let it out today, unprompted, as Ren was walking for the door, with the coins already in the till and the transaction already finished.
Two weeks sat on top of the rest of it. Two weeks was a figure of speech. Two weeks was also the exact length of the lie Ren had told the wagon girl about when he had last been in Harken. Ren had not told the lie to Brekken. Ren had not told the lie to anyone inside the walls of Cauldron. The lie had lived on a wagon bench three days ago with a girl whose name he had forgotten and it had not left that bench.
He looked at the bandage roll on the cot next to him.
'How long,' he thought, 'has he been watching me walk.'
He wrapped the heel. The gauze was clean and the tension was right and his hands did the wrap without needing him. Outside the window the maintenance-courtyard crate was still eight inches from where it had been. He looked at it for a moment and did not find it soothing today.
He put the boot back on. He laced it the same as always. It still rubbed.
But the question underneath kept crouching there, and it was worse than the blister: had Brekken been watching him since the day Ren walked into Cauldron, or since before that?