The Rift-line roster went up on the thirtieth day, and Baek Seorin's name was on it.
Yeju found out at the board, in the crowd, the same as everyone else. One sheet, headed SPRING FIELD ASSESSMENT: PERMIT-ZONE NINE. It listed Group One's nine. Then, under a separate heading that said ATTACHED, four more names from the wider year. The second of them was Baek Seorin.
She's ranked one in the year! She's in the duelling track! She has no business anywhere near a Rift roster!
She requested it. She could request a transfer to the moon and they'd sign it.
Eleven weeks ago she wrote 'the subject will die there' on an official form, and now her name is under a heading called ATTACHED, which did not exist last week, which means somebody made it exist this week.
Yeju stood at the brass rail with her ears roaring and read the sheet four times.
"That's not a heading," said the boy next to her at the board. He had a roster sheet from last year in his hand, because some people bring evidence to a noticeboard. "Look. Last spring. Group One's nine, that's it. There's no ATTACHED. There's never been an ATTACHED."
"Maybe they needed a medic," somebody said.
"Baek Seorin's not a medic. She's the first of the year. She froze a gloamstag in the entrance yard in about four seconds." The boy was working himself up, the way people do at a noticeboard. "You don't attach the top-ranked duellist to a first-year field assessment. That's sending a cavalry captain to watch a bake sale."
He's right, and he's going to arrive at the wrong answer in about six seconds, because everyone always does.
"Unless the pulse is bad," the boy said. "It's a fourth-cycle year. Maybe the school's worried."
There it was.
Yeju stood at the brass rail and let the crowd invent a school that worried about them, and did not say the true thing, which was that no school in the history of schools had ever put its best duellist on a roster because of a survey table.
She found Seorin in the east cloister at eighth bell. It took an hour, because Baek Seorin did not have a place she went to be alone; she had six, and she rotated them. Yeju had worked that out over three weeks and never told anybody.
"You're on the Rift roster," Yeju said.
Seorin did not turn around. She stood at the arch looking out at the practice yards, and the frost had made a small pale ring on the stone around her feet, which meant she had been standing there a while and not paying attention to herself.
"Yes."
"You're in the duelling track."
"I requested a transfer of attachment. It was approved." The filing voice, the one she used when she had a document to hide behind. "The permit-zone assessment takes attached students at the discretion of the field officer. Captain Gang signed it on Tuesday."
Wolha signed it. Wolha, who objected to me in writing. And Wolha does nothing by accident.
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"Why," Yeju said.
The frost ring spread half an inch.
"Because the roster required a fourth-year attachment for medical safety and there were none available," Seorin said. "Because Permit-Zone Nine is a fourth-cycle year. Because the survey table says the spring pulse is the worst in a decade and Group One is going anyway. And because." She stopped.
Say it.
"Because there's an F-core on the list," Seorin said, to the practice yards, "and everyone in this school has decided she's a tactician, and she is not a tactician. She is a girl who cannot cast twelve times without sitting down, and in eleven weeks she is going to walk into a thin place with nine people who can throw forty forms, and every single one of them will assume somebody else is watching her."
The cloister was very cold now. Somewhere below, a bell rang, and neither of them moved.
"So I'll watch her," Seorin said. "That's all. It's an arrangement. It's not."
She stopped again.
Don't push. She's standing in a ring of her own frost telling you she rearranged her entire academic year to stand next to you in a Rift. Push, and she'll file something, walk away, and you'll lose this.
Push.
"It's not what," Yeju said.
Baek Seorin turned around.
She had been crying, or she had been about to, or she had been doing whatever a person does when they have trained seventeen years to do neither. Her eyes were dry. Her face was immaculate. Something behind it had come loose from its housing.
"I don't know," she said.
That was all. She did not elaborate. She stood in the cloister with her hands at her sides and told the truth in three words, and it was the most Yeju had ever heard her say.
[ +6,000. ]
Not now.
[ I'll be brief. That is the largest single payout you have ever received. It came from three words. And the ledger has stopped attempting to categorise her. It now files everything Baek Seorin does under a heading it created eleven weeks ago and has never used for anyone else. ]
What heading?
The panel did not answer.
Yeju stood in the cloister for a long moment. Then she did the stupidest thing she had done since the courtyard, which was take one step forward and say: "I'm going to make it eleven weeks. I've got a plan."
"You don't have a plan."
"I have the beginning of a plan."
"You have a candle," Seorin said, "and a woman teaching you to say the word 'now,' and thirty-eight failures out of forty-two attempts. I know that because I asked Captain Gang, and she told me, because she wanted me to know precisely how bad it is." The frost cracked out another two inches. She looked down at it, and her mouth did something unhappy. "I file complaints because they're the only thing I have that does anything. And there's no form for this. I have looked. I have looked twice."
She walked past Yeju toward the stair and stopped level with her, not looking at her, close enough that the cold came off her in a wave.
"Eleven weeks," Seorin said. "Don't make me watch it."
Then she was gone down the stair. Yeju stood in the cloister in the melting ring of somebody else's frost. She got out the ledger-notebook and turned past the casting tallies, past three bad pages about a house that stayed, to a clean sheet.
At the top she wrote: THINGS THAT WILL KILL ME IN ELEVEN WEEKS.
Whatever's in Permit-Zone Nine. Unknown, the survey gives a pulse number and no fauna, because the fauna changes every cycle. My floor. Eleven casts. Wolha's floor is four hundred. The reading problem. Things in a Rift don't telegraph, nobody knows how to teach it, and there are nine hundred and six names on a wall about it.
She stopped. She looked at the three lines. Then she wrote a fourth, and it came out before she had decided to write it.
Nine people who can throw forty forms and will all assume somebody else is watching me.
And then a fifth.
One person who won't.
Yeju sat down on the cold cloister step with the ledger on her knees.
She read the survey table. She did the arithmetic, got the same answer I got, then went to a captain who had objected to my existence in writing and asked to be attached. And Wolha signed it, which means Wolha ran the same numbers and decided the fix was Baek Seorin.
Everybody in this school has independently concluded I'm going to die in the spring. The only person who hasn't done anything about it is me.
She turned the page.
At the top of the clean one she wrote, in her too-hard borrowed hand: THINGS I ACTUALLY HAVE.
The list was much shorter. She was still writing it when the bell went for curfew, and she did not go in. Somewhere below, a door opened and shut. The frost on the step had melted to nothing, and Yeju sat in the dark with a pen and wrote down the only four things she had.