Chapter 15: Complaint Number Six
The fifth complaint arrived on a Tuesday. It said, in its entirety, that Han Yeju had been observed casting past the point of physical distress in the east hall, that this constituted a hazard to herself and others, and that the recommended action was a formal warning.
Under the ruled section, in the engraved hand:
[ Additional note: the subject's ears were ringing. The subject continued. The subject stopped at ten because she was instructed to stop at ten, which indicates the subject is capable of stopping when instructed, which raises the question of who has been instructing her for the previous three weeks. This is not part of the complaint. ]
Yeju read it three times in the corridor outside the east hall.
She counted my casts. From where? I checked the gallery twice.
And she knows what the ringing means, which means she's been close enough to a mage burning past their floor to learn it. Which means...
Which means nothing. Everyone in Group One knows what the ringing means. She's Ring three. Stop it.
She spent the next four hours in the library not reading. The history of the Loen succession sat open at page two hundred and eleven, where it had been sitting since Thursday. Yeju looked through it and thought about eleven weeks, a Rift line, and a watcher she had not been able to spot.
Twice she caught herself reaching for the store. It would be so easy. Four hundred points for [Ember Coil], second circle, a real form out of a real mage's hand; she had ten thousand five hundred and sixty-six points sitting in a panel only she could see. Nine second-circle forms. More casting power than anyone in Group One could put on a field. For about ninety seconds it seemed obvious: buy the forms, walk into the spring with a fistful of borrowed fire, stop being the water somebody notices too late.
And then it runs out. In a Rift. With nine people behind me, and I'm what I was, minus the points.
She closed the book without reading a word of it.
She was still in the corridor outside the east hall when the sixth arrived, hand-delivered.
Baek Seorin came down the corridor at her usual pace, the pace of a person who has never once been late and considers hurrying a form of confession. Yeju had learned to recognise her by sound. Not footsteps. A drop in the ambient temperature, about six paces out.
She stopped. She held out a folded paper.
"Another one," Yeju said.
"Yes."
"That's two in a day."
"Yes." Seorin did not take the paper back. Her uniform was immaculate. The winter-grey eyes were doing the motionless thing, and Yeju had begun to suspect it was not calm. It was the opposite of calm, held very hard. "Read it."
Yeju read it.
[ DISCIPLINARY COMPLAINT. Filed by: Baek Seorin. Regarding: Han Yeju. Offense: none. ]
What.
[ Additional note: there is no offense. The form requires an offense. I have written 'none' because the alternative was to invent one, and I have invented five, and I have run out. ]
[ The subject is in Group One. The subject cannot cast twelve times without sitting down. Group One trains at the Rift line in the spring. The subject will be taken to the Rift line in the spring because she is in Group One, and the subject will die there, and there is no form for that. I have looked. ]
This novel's true home is a different platform. Support the author by finding it there.
[ I do not know why I am writing this. ]
Yeju stood in the corridor and could not, for a full four seconds, get her breath to do the ordinary thing.
Don't look up. If you look up she'll see your face, then she'll leave, then she'll never file another one, and that will be...
That will be what? Say it. That will be WHAT, Yeju?
She looked up.
Seorin was looking back. Her jaw had gone tight in a way Yeju had never seen on her, not in the courtyard, not over the frozen gloamstag, not once. Up close, at three feet, the Frost Calamity of the first year was a girl of seventeen with a white-knuckled grip on a pen she had not put away.
"You have a drawer," Seorin said.
Oh no.
"Your roommate mentioned it. Not maliciously. She mentions things." The grip on the pen did not loosen. "You keep them. The complaints. All five, in a drawer, by your bed."
"They're official documents."
"They are not official documents. Nothing after the ruled section is official. Everything after the ruled section is." She stopped.
Say it. Say it, say it, say it.
"Is a matter of record," Seorin finished.
The corridor was very quiet. Somewhere below them a bell rang the hour, and neither of them moved for the whole duration of it.
"Baek Seorin," Yeju said.
"Don't."
"I wasn't going to say anything."
"You were." The cold came off her in a sheet, sudden as it had been in the courtyard, and the corridor's windows went white at the corners. Seorin looked at the frost like it had betrayed her personally. "I file complaints," she said, to the window. "That's what I do. Since I was eleven. When a thing is wrong, I write it down, I hand it to the person, then it is written down, I have done my part, and it is finished." Her voice did not rise. "It is not finishing."
"Then stop filing them," Yeju said.
It came out before she could stop it. It landed like a slap.
Seorin's head came around. "What?"
"Stop filing them. If it's not finishing, stop." Yeju's heart was doing something ruinous. "You've written six. You could write six hundred. It won't finish, because that's not what they're for, and I think you know that. I think that's why you're standing in a corridor at ninth bell with a pen in your hand instead of in your room, where a person goes when a thing is finished."
The frost on the windows crackled outward two full inches.
"You don't," Seorin said, and stopped. Her voice had gone somewhere Yeju had not heard it go. "You don't get to. I file complaints. That's the arrangement."
"With who?"
"With me," said Baek Seorin, and the words came out with about ten years of pressure behind them and no place to go.
She left.
She left the way she did everything, at her own pace, spine straight, and Yeju stood in a corridor with six pieces of paper and watched the frost melt off the windows in slow drops.
[ +4,500. ]
Not now.
[ Not a request. Reward's automatic. ] The panel sat there a moment. [ Do you want to know what the ledger called that one? ]
No.
[ It called it 'Complaint #6.' ] A pause. [ It didn't have a category. It made one. ]
That night Yeju sat on the end of her bed with the drawer open and all six laid out on the blanket in order, and she read them first to last. The fire. The curfew. The roofs. The east hall. The ringing. There is no offense.
She's right about the spring. Eleven weeks. A woman with a pipe walks nine prodigies and one decorative F-core out to a place where the world is thin, and I'll have one candle I can throw twenty-three times before I fall over.
Twenty-two days in this world, and I have a plan for none of it.
The Rift line was on the map in the library, which Yeju had looked at once and not properly. She got up in the dark, lit the stub of a candle, and dug the school's regional survey out of her trunk from under three weeks of ignored coursework.
The line ran north-east of Haean City, forty miles out, a chain of permit-zones drawn in red where the world went thin on a seasonal pulse. The survey gave the pulse in a table at the bottom, month by month. The spring column held a number larger than every other number on the page, and somebody had annotated the margin in a hand from before Yeju was born: worst in the fourth year of any cycle.
She counted back. Then she counted forward, twice, because the first answer was one she didn't like and she assumed she'd made an error.
This is the fourth year of the cycle.
And the school knows. That's WHY they go, that's where you learn. Nine of them can throw forty forms. I can throw four.
Bori's voice came out of the dark from the other bed, flat and unhurried.
"You're humming."
"Sorry."
"It's the ugly one." A pause. The mattress creaked as she rolled over. "It's the losing one."
Yeju looked at the six pieces of paper on the blanket. Then she folded them, all six, in order, put them back in the drawer, and shut it.
"Bori," she said. "Where's the Rift line?"