The placement duels were posted on Thursday, giving Yeju four days to engineer her own defeat.
It was the sensible move. Placement decided your training group for the year. The bottom group did remedial drills in a shed by the wall. The top group got the good instructors, the good hall, and the attention, which was the part that mattered.
She wanted four years of shed.
"You're humming," Bori said, from her bunk.
"I'm planning."
"You hum when you plan. It's an ugly hum." A page turned. "What's the plan."
"I lose."
Bori considered the ceiling. "That's not a plan. That's Tuesday."
"It's a managed loss." Yeju had the bracket sheet flat on the floor and was drawing on it. "If I just fall over, they'll put me in remedial, which is what I want, but they'll also flag me for the tutor program, which means an instructor watching me twice a week. So I need to lose in a way that looks like effort. Competent, honest effort, defeated by an obviously better opponent. Nobody looks twice at a girl who tried her best and got beaten by someone stronger. That's the most boring story there is."
"You've thought about this a lot."
"I've thought about this exclusively."
[ Your opponent is Jin Taewoong. ]
Yeju's pen stopped.
[ Second year, ducal cousin, blade track. Rank fourteen. He asked for you specifically, which the bracket officer allowed, because the bracket officer is nineteen and afraid of dukes. ]
"Why would a rank fourteen ask for an F-core?"
[ Because you're famous now and he isn't. ] The panel let that sit. [ He watched a first-year get a personal complaint from Baek Seorin, maybe due to some humiliation kink, he has decided that beating you publicly will be worth more to him than beating someone good. I respect it. ]
"That's the opposite of what I need."
[ Yes. ]
"That's a spotlight with a sword in it."
[ Yes. I said the same thing. To myself. In here. Where you couldn't hear me, because you were humming. ]
Yeju put her face on the bracket sheet.
She tried the bracket officer first, because the cheapest way out of a duel is paperwork. He was nineteen, he had a table in the drafty end of the admin hall, and he had the hunted look of a man who had been shouted at by four separate houses this week.
"I'd like to withdraw," Yeju said.
"You can't."
"There's a form. I want to submit it"
"There's a form," he agreed. He did not reach for it. "It goes to the discipline office. The discipline office logs it as a refusal of assessment. A refusal of assessment gets reviewed by a first-year council rep, and this year's first-year council rep is." He checked a sheet he didn't need to check. "Cheon Miyu."
"Is that bad."
"She reviews every refusal personally. She writes notes." He looked up with the flat despair of a man passing on a curse. "Last month a boy withdrew from a duel because his knee hurt. She approved it. Then she asked him about his knee. Every day. For two weeks. In front of people. Warmly." He pushed the form six inches toward her. "It was a real knee injury. He transferred."
A case of content theft: this narrative is not rightfully on Amazon; if you spot it, report the violation.
Yeju looked at the form. She thought about a girl she had never met making warm inquiries about her health in a corridor for a fortnight.
"Never mind," she said.
"That's what everyone says," said the bracket officer, already putting the form away.
She found Jin Taewoong in the practice yard the next morning, because the only thing worse than a bad situation was a bad situation she hadn't read yet. He was tall and expensively bored, he ran his forms with a precision that would have been beautiful if he'd looked like he enjoyed any of it. He noticed her watching yet kept running forms for another full minute so she'd know he'd noticed and didn't care.
"The fire girl," he said finally, not sheathing. "You came to ask me to go easy."
"No."
"They all do." He wiped his blade with a cloth from his belt. "You want to know why I picked you?"
"I know why you picked me."
That got his eyes up.
"You're rank fourteen," Yeju said. "But that just means you're good enough that being good isn't news. You can't climb by beating rank thirteen, that's mundane. So you need a story. And there's a first-year with no core who's somehow attached to Baek Seorin's name, if you take me apart in front of the yard, you're not rank fourteen anymore. You're the one who handled the anomaly."
The practice yard had gone quiet.
Taewoong's lips twitched "You talk a great deal."
"I've been told."
"Here's what you have wrong." He stepped closer, his tall frame was like a wall Infront of Yeju. "I don't need a story. My house has stories. I picked you because people think your some hot shot just because you set a fire in a crowd. But let me tell you what it really is, a coward's trick from someone with nothing." He put the cloth away. "You'll be in the shed group by Friday. That's not a threat. It's a sure event"
He walked off. Yeju stood there with her heart going.
[ He's not entirely wrong about the fire. ]
"I know."
[ I mention it because you're about to decide he's a villain, but he isn't. He's a man who was raised to be excellent and turned out to be only very good, and that's a worse life than being useless. ] A pause. [ Also his footwork is arrogant. He drops his back heel on the fourth beat of every form. Free of charge. ]
"I don't need his footwork. I need to lose."
[ Right. Yes. The plan. ]
She got two steps toward the hall before somebody bumped her shoulder hard enough to spin her. A flash of red hair, a shouted apology already three yards away.
"Sorry! Sorry, I'm late, I'm so late." The girl was running backward now, grinning with both her arms full of scrolls she was dropping. "You're not hurt, right? You're fine. You look fine."
Do Yuna. Fire track, rank sixty-something and falling, one exam from being sent home, currently late to the class she could not afford to be late to. She had freckles, singed sleeve-ends, and a person destined to be eternally late.
"You dropped four," Yeju said.
"I know! I'm counting them in my head!" She was still going backward. "Hey, you're the fire one, right? The courtyard? That was so cool, everyone says you're insane, I want to know how you did the split thing, the crowd-split thing, can I ask you later, I have to. I have to go, he locks the door at the bell."
"He locks the door?"
"Doksu locks the door," Yuna wailed, and vanished around the corner. She left a scroll behind her on the flagstones.
Yeju picked it up. It was a fire-form primer, first circle, read to death, annotated in a big desperate hand. On the inside cover somebody had written YOU CAN DO THIS and then crossed it out.
[ Do Yuna. ] The panel's text had changed weight, just slightly. [ Fire track. In the original book, Kim Do-hyun tutors her through this exact exam in eleven days and she never forgets it. That's the first thread. It's how she starts looking at him. ]
Yeju looked at the crossed-out line on the inside cover.
[ Host. Put the scroll down. ]
"I'm putting it down."
[ You're not putting it down. ]
"I'm going to give it back to her. That's not the same as. That's just....." Yeju heard herself. She stopped. She looked at the scroll. She looked at the corner Yuna had disappeared around. The simple thing was right there: leave it on the wall for the lost-property monitor, walk to lunch, let Kim Do-hyun find her in eleven days like he was supposed to.
She put the scroll under her arm and went to find the fire track.
The fire track was in the annex three flights up, Yeju was winded by the second because this body had never done anything.
She found Yuna outside Doksu's door. Locked out. Sitting against the wall with her knees up and her face carefully arranged into an expression that said this was fine.
"He locked it," Yuna said.
"You said he locks it."
"I know I said. I say it every week." She thunked her head back against the stone. "It's a whole thing. He locks it, I miss the lesson, I fail the quiz on the lesson, my average goes down, I'm sixty-third. It's very tidy. He's built a machine to fail me
Yeju held out the scroll.
Yuna looked at it with suprise. Something went across her face too fast to read, and she took the scroll and put it against her chest with both arms.
"You came all the way here..." she said.
"It's your scroll."
"It's my scroll, yet you climbed three flights to give it to me. You're wheezing. Sit down before you die." Yuna patted the floor beside her, which is how Yeju ended up sitting outside a locked classroom for forty minutes with a girl she was supposed to be handing to somebody else.
[ There it is. ] The panel sounded almost fond, which was worse than anything it had said all week. [ I'll get the ledger. ]