"Second circle," Do Yuna said, upside down off the end of Yeju's bed, "is on Tuesday, and I have three attempts, and last year four people out of sixty-one got it on the first one, and I'm fifty-eighth, and I've been not telling you for nine days."
Bori turned a page.
"Nine days," Yeju said.
"Nine days! I was going to tell you, I had a whole plan where I told you at the night-kitchen, and then you were doing your face, the eyebrow face, so I didn't, and then the rig thing happened and you were being famous, and then it was nine days." Yuna's hair was all over the floor. She had come in through the window, which was on the second storey, and had not explained it and never would. "It's [Ember Lance]. It's a lance. You make a lance out of fire and you put it through a board at twenty paces. It's the whole difference between being a person who can light a candle and a person who can be sent somewhere."
"How many strokes."
"Nine." She said the number to the ceiling. "Nine strokes and there's a fold at the sixth where the shape has to close on itself before you push it, and if it doesn't close it comes out as a spray, and a spray's a fail, and it's not a fail like the first circle where you can be structurally offensive and get a barely. It closes or it doesn't. Doksu grades it. He gave four people a pass last year and he's had the same board since."
Nine strokes with a fold at the sixth. Her third stroke was the problem in the spring and she beat it by driving through it. A fold is not a thing you drive through. A fold is a thing you close.
She can't drive through this one. Her whole method is a hammer and this is a knot.
Yeju got up and got her boots.
The kilns were cold on Sunday, which meant the fire-track roof was cold too, so they used the east hall, which had been unlocked and lit and warm at tenth bell every night since the twelfth day and which Yeju had stopped asking about.
She gave Yuna bad advice for two hours.
She did not know it was bad advice. That was what she would take out and look at afterward, in the dark, with her ears going. It was good advice. It was the advice she would have given any competent student in her first life, and she gave it in the voice she had used on nine years of authors, calm and certain and kind: the fold at the sixth is a technical problem, so we solve it technically. Slow down at the fifth. Set the fold deliberately. Let the shape close before you commit any force to it. Be clean, Yuna. Doksu grades clean. Doksu has graded clean for nineteen years and he is going to be standing eleven feet away from you with a pen in four colors, and the man cannot help you and will not like you, so give him nothing to dislike.
Yuna went away and drilled it clean for nine days.
On Tuesday, at the ninth bell, in the casting pit, in front of sixty students on the gallery rail and one man with a pen, she got the fold at the sixth to close perfectly and put a spray of orange across the board's left edge and failed her first attempt.
Doksu made a mark.
"Second," he said.
Yuna went back to the line. From the gallery Yeju could see her hands. She had them down at her sides and she was opening and closing them, and her shoulders had that specific set, and the whole thing went off in Yeju's head like a struck match: the corridor before the spring practical, the girl who had thrown up twice, if I fail, say the mean version.
She was slowing down at the fifth. She was thinking about the fold. She was thinking about the fold the same as she had once thought about the exam, and about the cart with the wheel, and about her aunt, four hundred miles away, and about a house she would have to go back to; and the thing that had broken her third stroke for a whole spring was not in her hands, it had never once been in her hands, and Yeju had spent nine days teaching her hands.
I did this. I gave her a technical fix for a fear. I gave her the note the author always wants, the clean one, the one that sounds like craft.
She's going to fail, and it's going to be mine, and I'm going to have to stand up here and watch her be brave at forty people.
The second attempt sprayed at the sixth.
"Third," said Doksu, and capped his pen, which he did when he had stopped expecting anything.
The gallery had gone into the noise a gallery makes when it has decided the ending, a low warm sympathetic hum, and somebody near Yeju said "aw" and meant it kindly, and Yeju put both hands on the rail and shouted into a room where nobody shouted.
"YUNA."
Sixty heads came round. Doksu's did not.
"Do it wrong."
Yuna's face came up.
"You're closing it clean and it's killing you. Stop closing it." Yeju's voice had gone somewhere she had not authorized it to go. "You passed the first circle by driving a bad stroke through and blowing the frame off the wall, and you did that because your hands know the form and the rest of you keeps voting. So don't let it close. Push it at the sixth before it's shut and let the shape argue with you and make it fold on the way through. It'll be ugly. Do it wrong. Do it wrong again."
"That is not the form," said Professor Doksu, to nobody, without looking up.
"It's her form," Yeju said.
Yuna laughed. It came out of her wrecked and loud in a silent hall, and then she raised her hand and drew nine strokes faster than she had drawn anything in her life, and she hit the sixth like a girl kicking a door, and the shape did not close, and she pushed it anyway.
It folded on the way through.
The lance came off her hand as one long orange line, and it did not look like the diagram, and it went through the board at twenty paces and through the board behind that one and buried itself in the sand butt at the end of the pit with a sound like a shovel going into gravel.
Nothing happened for about a second and a half.
Then the gallery came apart. Yeju felt it through the rail, sixty people going up at once, and somebody was screaming, and the boy who had said "aw" was on his feet with both arms in the air yelling a word that was not a word, and down in the pit Doksu walked eleven feet to the board and put two fingers through the hole in it, all the way through, up to the knuckle.
He looked at his fingers for a while.
He took out the pen. He uncapped it. He made a mark in green, which was his color for correct, which he had not used on the fire track's second circle in nineteen months.
"Pass," he said. "Structurally offensive. Do Yuna, come and see me on Thursday, I want to know what your hand thinks it's doing, and bring nothing, and expect to be there some time."
Yuna did not hear him. She was already at the gallery stair, and she came up it three at a time, and she got to Yeju and grabbed two fistfuls of her hair and ruined it, with sixty people watching, screaming into the top of her head.
"I DID IT WRONG."
"You did it wrong."
"I DID IT WRONG, I did it wrong, I did it so wrong, did you see the second board, there was a second board, that board wasn't even mine, I've never." She pulled back. Her eyes were enormous and streaming and about four inches away, and her hands were still in Yeju's hair, and forty people in the gallery were watching a fire-track girl hold a first-year's head like a bowl. "Say it. Say the mean version. Say it now while I can take it."
"You were fifty-eighth in the track this morning," Yeju said.
"Yeah."
"You aren't now."
Yuna made a noise and put her forehead down on the top of Yeju's head and cried for about six seconds, which was as long as Do Yuna cried about anything, and then she was gone down the stairs to find a pen and a piece of paper and the address of a laundry in Haean City.
[ +3,300. ]
[ Balance: 15,903. Ledger's phrasing: 'Do Yuna's second circle is not the male lead's. Neither is the tell.' ]
What tell.
[ You'll notice it in about nine seconds. ]
Kim Do-hyun was standing at the end of the gallery.
He was in blade-track kit with a practice sword still strapped across his back, at a fire-track qualifier, on a Tuesday, at the ninth bell, and the gold light around him had started to hunt. Yeju had seen it stutter twice. She had never seen it do this. The arrows swung across the pit and came back and swung again, hanging in the air where only two people in the building could see them, quartering the room like a dog that has lost a scent in a river.
He was supposed to be down there. In the original he tutors her in the spring, and in the autumn he stands in the pit when she gets her lance, and she looks for him first.
She looked for me. She got to the stairs before he'd worked out why he was in the room.
And Yeju stood on the gallery with her hair destroyed and a number in her eye that was worth more than every point she had earned in the first three weeks, and she was glad. That was the part. She was not sorry, she was not conflicted, she was not going to fix it, she was glad, and she could feel the whole plan she had made on a cold bench on the third day coming off its hinges in her chest, and her hands had started shaking an hour early.
"Hi! I'm Yuri!"
Yeju turned around.
A girl was standing at her elbow. She was about the same height, with a round friendly face and her uniform buttoned to the top and a folded paper in her hand, and she was beaming at Yeju with the uncomplicated pleasure of somebody who has decided to be brave and say hello to a stranger at last.
"Sorry, I've been meaning to say hi for ages, we're in Doksu's group together, you probably haven't noticed me, I sit at the back? I'm Yuri!" She waved the paper cheerfully. "You dropped this on the stair, I think it's a bread tally."
Yuri.
Yuri.
THREE WEEKS. Three weeks in a machine that pays me a fortune to make girls fall in love with me, on the day I stood on a rail and stole a girl's whole life out of the male lead's hands and LIKED it, and this world sends me a perfectly nice child called YURI.
"You," Yeju said.
"Me!" said Yuri.
Yeju went for her.
She got about four inches. Somebody's hand closed on the back of her collar and lifted, and she came up onto her toes with her arms still out, and the hand did not let go.
"Whoa," said Kim Do-hyun. "Whoa. Hey. Okay."
"NOT TODAY," Yeju said.
"Sure," he said, agreeably, holding her off the ground with the flat competence of a boy raised on a farm. "Sure. Not today."
Yuri's face had done nothing at all. She was still smiling. She put the bread tally down on the rail, politely, out of the reach of the situation, and said, "It was really nice to meet you!" and went off down the gallery to be somewhere else, waving over her shoulder, and Yeju watched her go with her feet nine inches off the floor.
Do-hyun set her down.
He did not ask. That was him all the way down, and it was going to keep being him for four hundred chapters: he had just watched a girl try to assault a stranger for saying hello, and he was not going to ask, because his grandmother had raised him to help first.
He rubbed the back of his neck instead and looked out at the pit, where two men were arguing about who was going to pay for the second board.
"Hey," he said. "This is going to sound strange again."
"It usually does."
"I came down here for something." He was frowning at the sand butt with the lance-hole in it, and the gold arrows were still turning slow circles over his head, hunting, patient, wrong. "I was in the yard. I put my kit on, I walked across the whole school, I came up three flights. I've been standing at the end of this gallery for twenty minutes."
He turned around and looked at her, open and puzzled and entirely without suspicion, a boy asking a stranger for directions.
"Do you know what it was?"