When the ranking board went up in the main hall on the second morning, Yeju was almost relieved to find her name where it belonged: near the bottom, unranked.
She stood in front of it with a piece of dry toast and read the whole thing while the hall filled around her.
The board was a slab of black slate the height of two people, ranking the entire first year by core rating and refined it by the monthly practicals. Her eye went along it the way it went along a contents page: top first, then down.
BAEK SEORIN. Ring 3.
A first-year at Ring 3 is not supposed to be possible. He put it in the character sheet, I queried it, he argued saying egacy cultivation. I let it through because it was three in the morning and I wanted to go home.
I wrote that number. It's rude in person.
Below her the names ran down through the Rings. DO YUNA, fire track, third from the bottom of it, one failed exam from being sent home. CHEON MIYU, already flagged for the student council. YEON CHAE-RIN in gold chalk because her house had paid for the chalk. Down and down through the middle to the bottom third where the F-cores and the late bloomers sat.
HAN YEJU. Core: F. Rank: unranked.
There's the whole cast.
Yuna washes out or she doesn't, depending on nobody in particular. Miyu smiles at everyone and trusts no one. Chae-rin spends hundreds of chapters throwing her gorgeous furious life at people who were never going to love her back, and ruins herself while everybody claps.
But I'm at the bottom. Unranked. Which is where I want to be, it is the only thing that has gone right in two days.
A hall monitor came past with chalk and wrote complaint filed (1) in the offense column beside her name, right there, in front of her. The students nearest read it, looked at Yeju, then up at the number one name, then back.
"That's you," said a voice at her elbow, chewing. "You're the fire one."
Yeju turned. A girl her own height stood there in a uniform worn like pyjamas, half-lidded eyes, a braid she had clearly slept in, holding an entire loaf of bread against her chest with both arms, in the grip another person might use on a cat.
"I'm the fire one," Yeju agreed. she would like to that it in another context.
"Kang Bori. We share a room." Bori tore a piece off the loaf and held it out. "You didn't come back last night. I ate your half of the window ledge. There's more ledge." She considered this. "There's not more bread."
Yeju took the piece. It was, against all odds, very good bread.
"You lit a fire in the courtyard," Bori went on, around her own mouthful, watching the board with her usual flatness. "Everybody's talking about it. Half of them think you're stupid. The other half think you did it on purpose to look clever, which is worse, because now they're afraid of you. Let them keep being afraid. It's cheaper than being liked."
"That's good advice. Real advice even."
"I know. I only give the one kind." Bori tore off another piece. "The frost girl filed a complaint on you and then wrote a compliment. That's going around too. Nobody knows what to do with it. Neither does she, I'd guess." She chewed. "I keep a book of things like that. You're in it now. Page one."
Page one.
I've had enough of page one.
Before Yeju could ask what that meant, a form hand landed on the top of her head and ruffled once, unbothered, as if petting a dog you will keep.
"So YOU'RE the one who nearly got trampled on page one, then set the crowd on fire to fix it," said a new voice amused, about two years older. "Oh, I like you. You're going to be so much work."
Yeju looked up. A tall fourth-year stood over her, sun-brown with a student council sash gone soft with age, a clipboard tucked under one arm like a weapon she had retired but kept.
"Kwon Hae-su. Fourth year, Stewardship track, retired council." She stuck out her free hand. "I run the disaster list. It's a list I keep of first-years who are going to cost this school money, and congratulations, you went straight to the top, which usually takes a whole semester." She grinned. "F-core, one complaint, one dead monster, one impossible frost-rank looking at you funny, and it's day two. You're adopted. Don't argue, people who argue get more attention, not less."
"I wasn't going to argue."
"See. Smart and cute" Hae-su ruffled her hair again and let go. "Rules of survival, since nobody's told you. One: eat when there's food. You've got Bori for that, she shares, it's her one flaw." Bori nodded gravely. "Two: the board is not your friend, it's a scoreboard the school uses to make you compete so you don't unionise. Three."
She leaned in, and the easy warmth thinned into something else for one sentence.
"When Baek Seorin looks at you like that, which she is going to keep doing it, you don't run and you don't flinch. She's had a whole life of people doing both. Just look back. That's it. That's the whole trick with her, yet nobody's ever done it, so you'd be first."
File that. File that in the good drawer.
She's a fourth-year on the Stewardship track. She's got one line in the whole book, in chapter sixty, holding a door.
He cut her for pacing too. Obviously he did.
"Why are you being nice to me?" Yeju asked, she had to ask.
"Because in about a week nobody else is going to be, and I've got a soft spot for lost causes. Ask anyone." Hae-su tapped the clipboard. "Now go to your first class, disaster junior. Casting Theory, room nine, and try very hard not to be memorable, which for you is apparently a full-time job."
She got four steps and turned back, walking backward, easy as anything.
"One more thing. Your dorm's the Hall of Early Snow, west wing, and it's got a rule the housing office won't tell you because it's embarrassing. The night-kitchen runs after the bells. It's not sanctioned. Nobody's stopped it in forty years, because every attempt to stop it has been run by somebody who got hungry at midnight during the investigation." She grinned wider. "Free bread, disaster junior. First real perk of your terrible new life. Try to enjoy one thing before something else catches fire."
She sauntered off into the crowd, ruffling two more heads on her way out of pure habit.
"She talks a lot," Bori observed, watching the space where she had been. "But she's never wrong about who's going to need help. She clocked you across a full hall. That's not nothing." She tore the loaf again. "The night-kitchen's real. I'll take you. Don't tell the frost girl, she'd file something."
[ I like her, ] the panel offered, unprompted. [ The bread one. She's the only person in this building who has looked directly at me and not paid me the slightest attention. It's restful. ]
Yeju stopped with the bread halfway to her mouth.
"Wait," she said, under her breath. "You can see her?"
[ I can see everyone, host. ]
No. That's not what you said. You said she looked at you. You mean at the space where you are.
Except you didn't say that.
She stopped hearing the room.
"You price everything," she said. "Seorin. The crowd. The instructor with the clipboard. The boy telling his monster story two benches over, you had a number for him and I didn't even ask. So what have you charged off her?"
[ ...]
"Off Bori. Just now. This whole conversation."
The panel was quiet.
It was quiet long enough that Yeju looked away from the board and up at the empty air where the grey text usually sat, feeling a sense of fear which was different. raw.
[ ...We're going to be late for Casting Theory, ] it said at last, and would say nothing else.
Yeju looked at her roommate, who had finished a third of the loaf and was watching a board rank children by a power she apparently did not have, since her own line read, where a rating should be, N/A.
"Bori," Yeju said. "What's your core rating?"
"Don't have one." Bori tore off another piece. "They tested me four times. The instruments say I'm not there. One of them cracked." She held out the bread. "It's fine. I keep my own records. More reliable."