Chapter 314: Opening

[Pinnacle Academy, Main Library - Central]

[Thursday, 3:20 PM]

Nothing about the library had changed since the last time Jae dragged me here.

Same corner table. Same afternoon light coming in sideways through the tall windows. Same two girls already seated when I arrived, one of them looking perfectly composed and the other one very deliberately not looking at the door.

"You’re on time," Jae said.

"You said three twenty."

"I did. I just didn’t expect it."

I sat down in the seat that was, of course, the one next to Alice, because Jae Yoona has exactly one joke and she has never once gotten tired of it.

"Hello," Alice said.

"Hey."

That was the whole conversation for about four minutes.

I’d assumed this session would go the way the last one did, which is to say Alice would sit there getting quietly frustrated until she physically tugged on my sleeve to ask for help.

But something had changed since the Montclair trip, and it took me a while to work out what it was.

She wasn’t nervous.

She was tired.

There were shadows under her eyes that make-up hadn’t quite covered, and she was working through a dungeon classification set at maybe half the speed she normally would, going back to reread things she’d already read.

"Association law," Jae said, without looking up.

"Question fourteen. You’re both wrong."

"I haven’t answered it yet," I said.

"You will be."

I looked at the question. Cross-border subjugation authority, jurisdiction transfer between associations when a threat crosses a national line.

Ah.

I’d written this module badly, if I’m honest.

It was one of those things I put in to make the world feel like it had a bureaucracy, and then never thought about again, which meant the actual legislation had been filled in by the A.T. and I was learning it at the same rate as everybody else.

"Transfer is automatic if the threat’s rated B or above," Alice said.

"It isn’t," I said.

"It’s automatic if the threat is rated B or above *and* the receiving association has standing capacity. Otherwise it goes to the nearest guild with a subjugation licence."

Alice looked up.

"That’s not in the module."

"It’s in the amendment. Bottom of the third page, in the footnotes."

"...Nobody reads the footnotes."

"That’s why it’s in the footnotes."

Jae made a small sound that might have been a laugh.

Alice pulled the page up on her screen, found it, and stared at it for a second with the expression of someone who has been personally wronged by a document.

"How do you do that," she muttered.

"Do what?"

"Know things you shouldn’t." She said it lightly.

Then she seemed to hear herself and added, quickly, "About the syllabus, I mean."

"I read a lot."

"You read fantasy novels in the library."

"...You’ve been watching what I read?"

Thunk.

Jae’s pen hit the table.

Alice went a colour I’d previously only seen on emergency signage.

"I-...that’s not- you’re always in the fantasy section, it’s not watching, it’s an observation—"

"She’s been watching what you read," Jae said.

"Jae."

"For months."

"Jae."

"..."

I decided, in the interest of everyone’s dignity, to look back down at question fourteen.

We worked through the rest of the set.

It went faster than last time, mostly because Alice had stopped being embarrassed and started being competitive, which is a much more efficient version of her.

Then, somewhere around the fourth question in the subjugation authority section, she said something that shut me up completely.

"This part’s wrong, you know."

"Which part?"

"The jurisdiction clause." She tapped the screen.

"It assumes the local association wants to hand over authority. But if the association’s compromised, or if the family that’s supposed to hold the licence isn’t there anymore, then the whole thing just... stalls. For years. And nobody comes."

She wasn’t reading off the screen anymore.

"...Is that from a case study?" I asked.

"No."

She caught herself. I watched it happen, the exact moment she realised she’d let a door swing open, and the way she closed it again was practised in a manner that told me she’d had to do it before.

"It’s just an example," Alice said.

"Hypothetically."

"Right."

England.

Her father.

The licence that stalled because the man who held it was killed by a man with no name, and nobody came, and a sixteen-year-old came here instead to make herself into the person who would.

She has never told me any of that. She’s never told anyone in this room.

I know it anyway because I know exactly who did it, and I know he is going to come back for her specifically because of me.

And I sat there and said nothing, and looked at question seventeen.

"Rel?"

"Hm?"

"You went quiet."

"Just thinking about the footnotes."

Alice studied me for a second, unconvinced, and went back to her screen.

Jae looked at me over the top of hers, and said nothing at all, which from Jae Yoona is practically an interrogation.

***

I lasted the full hour and left at twenty past four, which is the longest I’ve voluntarily stayed in that library all year.

The corridor outside the east reading rooms was empty at that hour, which is presumably why he chose it.

"Mr. Laurence!"

...!

Of course.

Damon Bennett was coming down the corridor with a stack of marked papers under one arm, walking at that unhurried pace people use when they have absolutely been waiting for you and want it to look like they haven’t.

"Sir."

"I thought that was you." He stopped a comfortable, non-threatening distance away.

Everything about him was calibrated to be a comfortable, non-threatening distance away.

"Studying? On a Thursday? Kolek will faint."

"Group thing."

"Ah, the Yoona girl. And Elizabeth." He nodded like this delighted him.

"Good pairing. Second and what are you now, in theory?"

"First."

"First." He smiled.

"Right. Which is the reason I wanted to catch you, actually."

Here it comes.

His free hand drifted toward his back pocket. Not all the way.

Just far enough that I knew he was thinking about the mirror, and that he was aware he was thinking about it, and that being aware of it annoyed him.

"You didn’t sign the sheet," Bennett said.

"No, sir."

"Can I ask why not?"

"I don’t need the sessions."

"You don’t," he agreed easily.

"That’s not really what they’re for, though, is it? Half the students in that room want reassurance. You want" he tilted his head slightly, "—well. I’m honestly not sure what you want. Which is why I’d like an hour of your time."

"Sir?"

"One-to-one. Not group. You’ve got the highest theory average in your class and one of the lowest practical ratings in the year, and that combination doesn’t happen by accident."

He shifted the papers under his arm.

"I’ve been teaching a long time, Mr. Laurence. When those two numbers sit that far apart, it usually means the student is either hiding something or protecting something."

_..._

He’s good.

He really is good.

That was the thing about Damon Bennett that never came across in my own notes.

On the page he was a coward with an exit strategy and a pocket mirror. In person he says a sentence like that in a corridor with a friendly smile on his face, and you feel your own pulse change.

"Which one am I?" I asked.

"That’s what the hour’s for."

And there it is.

Isolate. One student, one room, one hour, no witnesses. It’s what he did to eleven people in my novel and every one of them walked in thinking they’d been noticed by a teacher who cared.

I could refuse. It would be the sensible thing. Refusing would make me one of the students he can’t get to, and he’d move on, and he’d take that failure back to Morwen along with everything else, and Morwen would find a way to come at me that I couldn’t see coming.

Or.

Strategy above all.

He wants a room with me alone in it. Fine. That means he’ll be alone in a room with me.

You can’t gather proof on a man you’re avoiding.

"Okay," I said.

Bennett blinked.

Just once. Barely anything. But it was there, and I filed it away with great satisfaction, because it meant he’d expected me to say no.

"Okay?"

"An hour. When?"

"...Monday," he said, recovering smoothly.

"After sixth period. My office is on the second floor of the east wing, past the staff kitchen."

"I know where it is."

"Do you?"

Careless.

"It’s on the campus map," I said.

"So it is." Bennett smiled again, and it was exactly as warm as the last one and exactly as far from his eyes.

"Monday, then. I’ll look forward to it, Mr. Laurence. Genuinely."

He walked off down the corridor toward the staff wing, and about six steps in his hand went to his back pocket, and I heard the small click of a mirror being flipped open.

I let out a breath.

Monday.

One hour.

Let’s see which one of us walks out of that room knowing more than he did going in.

_*******_

[Pinnacle Academy, East Wing - Staff Offices]

[Friday, 7:14 PM]

The campus was dark by the time the courier reached the staff wing.

He wasn’t a courier from any service that had a name. He wore the grey coveralls of the academy’s own maintenance contractors, carried a clipboard nobody checked, and had been on the approved vendor list for eight months for exactly this purpose.

He knocked twice on the office door and didn’t wait for an answer.

Bennett was at his desk with the lamp on, marking papers he had no intention of reading properly.

"Delivery."

The package was small. Padded envelope, no markings, the weight of something suspended in insulation.

Bennett signed the clipboard with a name that wasn’t his, and the door closed, and he was alone again.

click.

He set the papers aside.

He took out the pocket mirror first, because he always took out the pocket mirror first, and he checked his hairline and the set of his collar and the exact symmetry of his own smile until his hands stopped shaking.

Then he opened the envelope.

Inside, packed in grey foam, was a single glass vial no longer than his thumb. The liquid in it was dark and moved wrong, sliding against the sides a half-second later than it should have.

A folded note sat beneath it.

[One dose. Central chamber only. Administer no earlier than the morning of.]

[Do not be seen. Do not be clever.]

[— M]

Bennett read it twice. Then he held the vial up to the lamp and turned it slowly, watching the liquid crawl.

Eleven days until the practical.

"Well," he murmured to the empty office, and his reflection in the dark window murmured it back at him.

"Let’s make it a memorable one."