By the second bell on Friday the school had decided that Han Yeju had spent a week studying the rig.
Yeju heard the first version in the wash-line queue, from a third-year she had never met, who was telling it to a friend with the confidence of a woman reading from a document. She heard the second version at breakfast, and it had grown a detail: the first-year had been seen at the rig at six in the morning with her hand on the bracket. That one was true, which was the horror of it, because the true detail arrived inside the false story and welded it shut. By the fourth bell the version going around the annex was that she had reported the weld to the registrar three weeks ago and been ignored, and a boy in the corridor asked her, kindly, whether she was going to sue.
Three weeks ago I was on a floor with my head between my knees counting other people's casts. I have never spoken to the registrar. I don't know where the registrar is.
"It's a better story," Bori said, at the table, not looking up. "Yours has no one in it. A rope broke and your mouth went off. Nobody can do anything with that. This one's got a girl who checks the welds and a school that doesn't listen, and everyone in this building has been ignored by somebody, so now they've all got a part." She turned a page. "You're a coat. They're putting it on."
The two Stewardship girls at the next table were arguing about whether the sandbag was forty kilos or sixty. It was forty. Yeju knew, because it said so on the bag, in paint, in a hand from before the war.
Ha Somyeong found her in the corridor outside the theory wing at the sixth bell, and she did it the same as she did everything, which was without any warning and without wasting a word on the approach.
"I'm not going to thank you," she said.
She had a strip of gauze along her jaw and her collar was buttoned wrong. Yeju had heard, from Jang, from three separate versions of Jang, that Nurse Im Dallae had taken eleven pieces of glass out of her scalp and had made her sit for an hour while she counted them into a dish.
"Good," Yeju said.
"I've been at it since Thursday. What I owe you." Somyeong had her hands behind her back and was looking at a point above Yeju's head, and she was clearly finishing a speech she had written somewhere else. "I worked out that it's nothing. You weren't looking at the rig for me. You were bored and your mouth went off, that's what the captain says, and the captain doesn't lie about work. So it's nothing. You don't get to be owed for an accident. If I thanked you I'd be thanking a rope."
She's right. She's completely right, and she's the only person in a building of four hundred who's got it right, and she's telling me to my face at six in the evening with glass holes in her head.
"That's fair," Yeju said.
"It's not fair, it's true. Fair would be the other thing." Somyeong's eyes came down. "So here's what I came to say, and then I'm going to go and eat, because I haven't. Jang and Jung and I have been drilling it."
What?
"Since Friday. In the shed behind the wash-line, we've got a bell and we take turns calling and the other two drop." She said it flatly, a girl reporting a decision that had already been made by a committee Yeju had not been invited to. "Nine of us. All nine. Because the captain said your voice moves us before our heads vote, and she said it in front of everybody, and Jang has been sick about it for two days because he can't stand it being true, and it is true, so we're making it better." She rolled her shoulders. "You should know. You'll be in a permit-zone in seventy-two days and there'll be nine people four paces behind you with their bodies wired to your mouth, and I thought you'd want that in writing before somebody hands you a shovel."
She went to eat.
Yeju stood in the corridor for a while.
They're practicing. Nine of the best first-years in this school are standing in a shed after dinner teaching themselves to obey a joke, and none of them asked me, and I couldn't have stopped it, and if I'm wrong once in the spring I will kill all nine of them with one syllable.
Cheon Miyu came for her at the eighth bell in the library, which was not an ambush, because Miyu had made sure Yeju saw her cross the whole length of the reading floor first.
If you encounter this story on Amazon, note that it's taken without permission from the author. Report it.
She had a folded sheet in one hand and the paper fan in the other, and she came around the end of the table and sat on it, on the edge, in Yeju's light, which she had also done in the third week and had presumably enjoyed.
"Incident report," she said, and dropped the sheet on the book. "Sa Bik filed it, he does the hazard ones. It's four lines long. Do you want to hear the fourth line, or shall I skip to the part where I tell you what's wrong with it?"
"Skip."
"I never skip." Miyu unfolded it with one hand. "'The counterweight bracket failed at a repair weld of undetermined age. Student HA SOMYEONG sustained superficial lacerations. Student HAN YEJU issued a verbal warning prior to the failure. The rig is condemned.'" The fan tapped her lower lip. "Prior to. Not during. Prior to."
It wasn't prior to. It was the same half-second. He wrote it down in the order that made sense to him, which is the order in which a sensible person does things.
"So he's got the order wrong," Yeju said.
"He's got the order wrong, and the order is the only thing in this school I care about." Miyu folded it away. "Here's what interests me, and I want you to understand that I've had a very boring week and you're the only thing in it. There were ten people in that hall. Nine of them were throwing fire at a board, because that was the assessment, and that is what people do at an assessment: they look at the board they are being marked on." She leaned in. "You were looking at the rope."
"I was bored."
"You were bored." Miyu said it warmly, the same as she said everything. "You were sitting a mark that decides your training group for four years, in a hall you are not supposed to be in, in the fourth year of the cycle, ten weeks from a Rift line that everyone in this school has quietly decided will kill you, and you were bored."
The library did its noise. Somebody two tables over turned a page.
"That's four times," Miyu said.
"Four what?"
"Four times I've watched you be handed a reason to care about something and put it down. The board doesn't move you. The duel didn't move you. Chae-rin's ledger doesn't move you, and that girl has spent a hundred and forty sen and nineteen days on you, and you look at her like she's weather." She had gone very still, and the fan had stopped. "Everyone in this year wants something. Jang wants the rotation. Somyeong wants the top of the board. Yuna wants to not go home. I want, and I'm not going to tell you what, because you'd write it down." Closer. "You don't want anything from this school. In thirty-five days you have not asked one person in this building for one thing."
I asked Wolha to strike my name.
That's not asking for something. That's asking for less.
"You've got a fifth string," Yeju said.
"I've got a fifth string." Miyu smiled. "It's not a theory. I'm out of theories, that's the trouble with you, I had four and they were beautiful and you broke them all in a fortnight. This one's a sentence and I've had it since Wednesday and I can't get rid of it." She slid off the table, and stood, and she was close enough now that Yeju had to look up to keep her face, and looking up put the line of Miyu's throat against the window light and the small dark curve at the corner of her mouth about eleven inches away, and the smell of apples and ink came with her.
The line of her jaw was.
The book. Look at the book. There is a book here.
"You're not hiding a talent," Miyu said. "Everyone thinks you're hiding a talent. It's the only thing this school knows how to imagine, because it's a school, and a school is a machine for finding talent, and when it meets something it can't find it assumes it's been hidden." She reached down and, with one finger, closed Yeju's book. "You're hiding a reason."
The library was cold and the lamps had not been lit yet. Yeju's ears had gone, which was not the casting.
"That's not a fifth theory," she said. "That's the same blank scrap with more words on it."
"Yes." Miyu was delighted. She let it show, which she almost never did, and it took ten years off her. "That's why I like it. Do you know what a reason is? A reason is a thing that happened. Talents are born and reasons happen, at a time, to a person, and a thing that happened has a date on it, and I am extremely good at dates." She straightened up and put the fan away and became, over about a second and a half, a girl on the student council in a corridor. "So I've stopped asking what you are. I'm going to find out what happened to you."
[ +1,750. ]
Not now.
[ It's a short one, and you'll want it, because the ledger has done something interesting with her. It logged this as a second contact and it charged the reroute against a scene that hasn't happened yet. ]
What does that mean?
[ It means Cheon Miyu was written to work this hard on somebody in the spring, and it wasn't going to be you. ]
Miyu got four steps and turned around, walking backward between the stacks, and she did it with her hands behind her back and her head tilted the single degree that Yeju had learned to be afraid of on a different girl.
"Seventy-two days," she said.
Yeju's stomach went.
"I don't know what the number is for. Yet." Miyu's smile came back on. "But you've been counting something since the day the roster went up. You do it at the board. Your eyes go along the top of the sheet where the dates are and your mouth moves, and then you stop and you look at the door. You've done it eleven times. So I went and counted the same things you were looking at, and I got seventy-two, and I've written it on the board with the fifth string, and I'm going to sit under it until it means something."
She went. The stacks took her.
Yeju sat in the cold library with a closed book and did the arithmetic she had been doing since the thirtieth day, and got seventy-two, and put her face in her hands.
She counted my mouth.