I had exactly ninety seconds, and I had no plan.
The heavy footsteps came down the corridor at the pace of a man who’d never needed to hurry.
They echoed off the steel walls.
Lira stood frozen in front of Window Four with her fist closed around the glowing coin.
Sol was hugging her notebook.
Kalasag had his back arched and his fur standing up like a brush.
I looked at the three of them and thought, This is exactly what I was afraid of.
“Aris,” Lira whispered.
“What does ‘unlisted’ mean?”
“It means the Board has no record of what you are.”
“Is that bad?”
“It’s the worst thing it could be.”
I should have explained more, but there wasn’t time.
I could still hear her question in my head, and it made my stomach twist.
She had asked it in the same small voice she used when she was afraid, but she was trying to hide the fear behind curiosity.
I recognized that voice.
I’d used it myself, long ago, in a different corridor.
I pushed her gently toward the green door at the far end of the hall.
“Go with Sol,” I said.
“Walk. Don’t run. Don’t look back. Wait outside the Main Building.”
“What about you?”
“I’ll handle the examiner.”
“How?”
“I don’t know yet.”
She gave me a look that was half worried and half amused, and I felt something in my chest tighten for no reason I could explain.
* * *
I decided to wait for the examiner at the junction of the corridor, where the lamp light was dimmest.
He came around the corner with a ledger under one arm and a brass lantern in his hand.
He was tall and narrow, with a gray vest and a high collar, and a pair of round spectacles that magnified his eyes so much that they looked like two small moons.
A brass nameplate on his breast read EXAMINER PASCUAL.
His shoes squeaked with every step.
I’d known him for nine years.
He was the Registrar’s most punctual deputy, and he had never once smiled at me.
“Mr. Valeriano,” he said.
His voice was reedy and precise, like a pencil being sharpened.
“Adviser of record. I was told there was an irregularity at Window Four.”
“A small one.”
“The window disagrees.” He consulted the ledger.
“It reports that an Applicant offered a payment that was recognized as unlisted. I would like to see the Applicant.”
“She’s not here.”
“Not here?”
“She stepped out. A call of nature.”
Pascual’s magnified eyes narrowed.
He turned the page.
“I do not see any restroom entries in the Applicant’s file.”
“The Applicant has a weak bladder.”
“That is not recorded either.”
“It’s a recent development.”
I could feel the seconds ticking.
Behind him, far down the hall, I caught a glimpse of a gray tail disappearing around the corner.
They’d reached the door.
I needed about forty more seconds.
The examiner lifted his lantern and began to walk past me toward the window.
I said the first thing that came into my head.
“Examiner Pascual. Do you eat tapa?”
* * *
He stopped.
It was a very small stop.
His shoe squeaked once and went silent.
He turned his head slowly, as though I had spoken in a foreign language.
“I beg your pardon?”
“Tapa,” I said.
“Cured beef. Garlic rice, fried egg. The usual breakfast.”
“I know what tapa is, Mr. Valeriano.”
“Do you have an opinion on the marinade?”
The Examiner opened his mouth, then closed it.
A faint pink flush crept up from his high collar.
For a moment he looked at me with real suspicion, and I thought I’d made a terrible mistake.
Then he cleared his throat.
“Calamansi,” he said stiffly.
“And a measure of soy sauce. Vinegar is for people who lack imagination.”
“Vinegar,” I said, “is the only correct answer.”
He drew himself up to his full height.
“Mr. Valeriano. I must protest. My mother, the late Mrs. Pascual of Pampanga, prepared tapa by a method that was handed down through five generations. She used calamansi. She used no sugar at all. She said sugar was a vulgar compromise.”
“Your mother’s tapa must have been tough.”
“Tapa should have a sweet edge,” I said.
“A little brown sugar. A pinch of black pepper. It should be thin enough that it curls when it hits the pan. You marinate it overnight, minimum, with garlic crushed with the flat of a knife, and you fry it in its own juices until the edges go dark. Then you add a spoonful of vinegar at the very end, to cut the sweetness.”
I stopped.
The words had come out of my mouth smoothly, without any effort.
I hadn’t thought about them.
I hadn’t searched for them.
They had simply been there, like a drawer that opened by itself, and in the pause that followed I felt a strange hollow in my chest.
Where did I learn that?
I had no idea.
I’d never cooked tapa in my life.
I couldn’t remember anyone teaching me.
Yet my mouth knew exactly how it was supposed to taste, down to the last pinch of pepper, and the knowledge sat inside me like a coin in a pocket I didn’t know I owned.
“That’s,” said Examiner Pascual slowly, “quite a specific recipe.”
“I eat it every morning.”
“Do you?”
“For nine years.”
“Hm.” He tilted his head.
For an instant, the magnified eyes held something almost like sympathy.
“Pampanga style, or Batangas?”
“I couldn’t say.”
“A pity. Then you’ve been missing the best part.”
He launched into a lecture.
* * *
I’ll spare the full account.
The debate lasted eleven minutes.
Examiner Pascual defended calamansi, soy sauce, and the superiority of Pampanga beef, while I argued for sugar, vinegar, and the structural integrity of garlic.
He brought up regional rivalries.
I brought up my breakfast.
At one point he produced a pocket notebook and drew a diagram of the ideal slice, and I nodded and said “Fascinating” three times, and I meant it.
A surprising amount of it was fascinating.
Somewhere in the middle, I looked past his shoulder.
At the far end of the corridor, a small figure in a gray sweater stood in the doorway of the green door.
Lira.
Sol was holding the door open behind her.
Kalasag sat at her feet.
She wasn’t leaving yet.
She was watching me with an odd expression, not worried anymore, but soft and baffled, and the faintest smile pulling at the corner of her mouth.
She mouthed something.
Vinegar?
I closed my eyes briefly.
When I opened them, she was gone, and the door had clicked shut.
“As I was saying,” Examiner Pascual declared, thumping his ledger for emphasis, “no true Pampangueño would put sugar on a tapa.”
“Then I suppose we’ll never agree.”
“Evidently not.”
He glared at me.
Then, to my astonishment, the corner of his mouth twitched.
“You are an interesting man, Mr. Valeriano,” he said.
“I’ve always thought you were rather dull.”
“I’ve been called worse.”
“I’d like to hear your opinion on longganisa some other time.”
“I’ll consider it.”
“Do.” He straightened his vest and adjusted his lantern, and the professional blankness slid back over his face like a lid on a pot.
“Now. About that Applicant.”
“She’s gone to class,” I said.
“Social Dimensions of Teaching. She has a quiz.”
“The Applicant had an irregular payment, and she is required to…”
“The window will still be here tomorrow. So will she.”
Examiner Pascual hesitated.
His eyes drifted toward the brass grille, then back to me.
For a moment I could see him weighing two instincts, procedure and something else I couldn’t name.
“I will file a report,” he said at last.
“I’d expect nothing less.”
“The Registrar will want to review it.”
“I’m certain he will.”
“The Registrar is currently away until further notice.”
“Since 1987,” I said.
The Examiner almost smiled.
He snapped his ledger shut, tucked it under his arm, and walked away down the corridor with his lantern swinging, shoes squeaking at every step.
I listened until the sound faded.
Then I leaned against the cold steel wall and slid down until I sat on the floor.
* * *
My hands were shaking.
I looked at them with detached interest.
A man who had killed a Class 4 Hound last week, bare-handed, was trembling because he’d had to argue about beef.
The coin did this, I thought.
The beef was only the excuse.
Unlisted currency.
Every Footnote I’d ever paid had been logged by the Board.
Every Archivist paid in a currency that the Board had designed, from memories that fit into its ledger.
The power we borrowed was copied from something older, and the copying left marks.
Those marks made the payment readable.
The Board could accept our memories because they came from Degrees that the Board itself had made.
Lira’s memory had been refused.
It had been handed over freely, with no resentment, and the window had still sent it back.
The only way that could happen was if her memory didn’t belong to the Board’s system at all.
It was older than the system.
It was what the system had been copied from.
The source.
I closed my eyes.
In my mind I saw the gold light spilling from her palms in the library, bright and clean and absolutely wrong for any Archivist I’d ever met.
I saw the oldest page of the oldest book, and the line I’d memorized when I was seventeen, in a hand that no longer existed.
The first gift was not made.
It was given.
If the Board knew what she was, they would not wipe her.
They would not train her.
They would put her in a drawer.
I opened my eyes.
The pencil column on the receipt came back to me, with its neat blank heading.
RETURNS.
I had no idea what it meant, but I knew who wrote in pencil.
Ma’am Teddy.
The pencil on the note in the infirmary.
The librarian’s chalk-dusted hands.
I had never seen another person in the building willing to defy the Registrar’s rules for something so small.
What are you doing, I asked the empty corridor, and why are you doing it through her?
* * *
A small white paper crane fluttered down the hallway.
It came from the direction of Room 404.
I recognized the fold, crisp and perfect, the paper the same cream stock as the Dean’s stationery.
It landed in my lap and unfolded itself with a faint rustle.
Mr. Valeriano.
Your adviser’s penance remains in effect.
The review is postponed, as before.
Seventy-two hours.
— A.
Underneath, in the same cold typed font, was a single additional line.
A report from Examiner Pascual will be filed by noon.
I trust you will have an explanation.
I read it three times.
The Dean knew.
Maybe not what she was, not yet, but he knew that something had happened at Window Four, and he’d sent his note before the Examiner reached the end of the corridor.
He hadn’t asked a single question.
He’d only given me another three days, as a man hands a leash to a dog he intends to follow.
I crumpled the paper in my fist.
Something rose in my chest then.
I didn’t want to look at it directly.
It was hot and tight and uncomfortable, and it made my jaw clench.
I examined it with the cold part of my mind and filed it under the heading I used for most feelings that arrived without being asked.
Annoyance.
The label was wrong, and I knew it.
I’d been annoyed at people before.
Annoyance felt like a headache.
This felt like a hand closing around something small and breakable that I had decided, without consulting myself, to carry.
I stood up.
I brushed off my hoodie.
I walked down the corridor with my face composed and the crumpled note in my pocket, and I told myself the whole way that the thing in my chest was a minor administrative irritation.
The green door opened onto the second floor of the Main Building, sunlight and noise and a cleaner mopping the tile.
Lira was waiting by the window with Sol and Kalasag.
She turned when she heard me.
The coin glowed faintly between her fingers, and her eyes were wide and bright and wet at the corners.
“You did it,” she said.
“You actually did it.”
“I lost the argument.”
“Did you?”
“Pampanga beef is superior.”
“You said vinegar.”
“I said it was the only correct answer. I didn’t say I believed it.”
She laughed.
It was the same clear, startled laugh I’d heard in the canteen, and something in my head went very quiet and very still, like a room after a bell has stopped ringing.
“Thank you,” she said.
“Don’t thank me,” I said.
“Just keep that coin hidden.”