Please Fall for the Male Lead (Not Me)

The grind was eleven casts a day, and Yeju did eleven casts a day for nine days before she understood what Wolha had given her. Not a training schedule. A leash.

Eleven was the floor. Eleven was where the ringing started, and Wolha had picked it deliberately, because eleven meant Yeju spent every day at the exact edge of her own body and could not do one thing more. No sneaking in a twelfth. No training ahead. The grind took forty minutes, cost eleven points, and left her sitting on the east hall floor with her ears singing. After that there was nothing to do for the rest of the day except go be a person, which turned out to be the harder assignment.

Nine months of this. Two hundred and seventy days. Three thousand casts to make one candle free, and I've done three percent of it, and I want to lie down forever.

She started writing again on the tenth night. She had not planned it and did not decide it.

It happened as it had always happened, back when she was alive: she sat down to do something sensible, and forty minutes later there were words on a page that had nothing to do with the sensible thing. The ledger-notebook was school issue, ruled for figures, bought for two pennies to track her casts. She tracked her casts on the first page. On the second page, some time past midnight, she wrote a paragraph about a woman standing at a window in a house that did not exist.

Then she wrote another one.

Stop. Stop it. Eleven weeks. A Rift line, no core, a machine in your eye. And you're writing a NOVEL?

Yes.

Why?

She did not have an answer. She had never had an answer. In her first life she had spent nine years fixing other people's books, and there was a document on her home drive with forty-one pages in it, and every time she opened that document some large stupid thing in her chest sat up like a dog hearing a key in a door. She had died with it unfinished. She had died sixteen feet from a desk where the last thing she touched was someone else's chapter.

The title on the school-issue ledger, in her borrowed girl's too-hard hand, was THE HOUSE THAT STAYED.

That's a terrible title.

She wrote for an hour and eleven minutes. It was bad. She knew it was bad while she was doing it, the same way a person knows a bruise is coming, and she kept going anyway. When she stopped there were three pages, and she felt better than she had in twenty-two days of surviving.

[ Query. ]

Not now.

[ It's a short one. ] The panel hung in the corner of her vision while she blotted the page. [ You've spent nine days at the floor of your body to make one candle free. You've refused to buy a form that would make you dangerous tomorrow. You have an eleven-week clock and no plan. And you're writing fiction. ]

It's not fiction. It's a hobby.

[ You've written the word 'stayed' four times and crossed it out three. That's not a hobby. That's a person with a problem. ] A pause. [ I'm not being cruel. I'm attempting to log it and I don't have a column. ]

Yeju stopped blotting.

What column do you normally use?

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[ For an activity that costs you nothing, gains you nothing, deviates from no plot, and moves no heart? None. There isn't one. It doesn't touch the story at all. ] Another pause, longer. [ Do you understand how rare that is, host? Almost everything you do is worth something to me. This is worth nothing. It's the only thing you've done in three weeks that I can't price. ]

Like Bori.

The panel did not answer.

Like Bori, Yeju thought again, deliberately, into the silence. The silence went on being a silence. She sat in the dark with a bad title and three bad pages, and filed the whole exchange on the list she was not supposed to be keeping.

The trouble with eleven casts a day was that it left twelve hours.

Yeju had not accounted for this. In her first life the days had been full whether she wanted them or not: a commute, a queue, a manager, four hundred pages of somebody else's plot. Here she woke at fifth bell, ate bread, sat through Doksu, cast eleven times, and then the afternoon opened in front of her like a hole in the floor.

She tried filling it with reading. The library's practical section turned out to be forty books that all said the same thing in a different order, mana capacity determined outcomes, a sentence written by and for people with mana capacity. She tried the histories instead and got two weeks in before noticing she was doing it for pleasure, which she filed under symptoms.

She tried watching Group One drill. That lasted one afternoon. Jang threw forty-one forms and complained about his wrist. The Ha girl threw thirty-eight and said nothing. Yeju sat on the wall doing arithmetic she could not stop doing.

Four hundred forms a week each. Twenty thousand by spring. That's what stands between them and whatever's in Permit-Zone Nine. It might not be enough, and I have a candle.

She did not go back to watch the drill.

Bori found the ledger on the fourteenth night, because Bori found everything, and because Yeju had made the elementary error of falling asleep on it.

"You're writing a book," Bori said, at breakfast.

Yeju's tea went down the wrong way. Across the refectory, forty people did not look up, because nothing had happened yet, which was the only mercy of the entire morning.

"You went in my drawer."

"It was on your face. You slept on it. There's ink on your cheek, it's been there since second bell, nobody's told you." Bori tore the loaf. "It's called The House That Stayed."

"Don't say it out loud."

"It's a bad title."

"I know it's a bad title."

"The bread character is unrealistic," Bori said.

Yeju stopped. "The what."

"Page two. There's a baker. He gives away bread at the end of the day because he's kind." Bori ate a piece of the loaf, flat and calm, a reviewer on her second pass. "Nobody gives away bread because they're kind. They give it away because it's stale, or because they want something, or because throwing it out feels worse than handing it over. Your baker's a person from a story. Fix him or take him out."

A NOTE. She gave me a NOTE.

And it's good. That's the worst part. The baker IS from a story. I wrote him in nine minutes because I needed someone to open a door.

"How much did you read," Yeju said.

"All of it. It's three pages." Bori pushed the half-loaf across the table. "Keep going."

"It's bad."

"Yes." She turned a page of her own book, done with the conversation. Then, without looking up: "So's everything, at three pages. That's what three pages is." A pause. "The window bit was good. The woman looking out. That bit's not from a story."

Yeju looked at the half-loaf on the table.

She fixed the baker that night.

It took two hours, which was absurd for a character who appeared on one page and opened one door, and she did it anyway. The new version gave the bread away because he had counted the loaves wrong at four in the morning and could not stand to have counted wrong twice in one day. A worse reason, and a truer one. When she read it back, the whole page had gone from dead to alive on the strength of one man's arithmetic.

She found that seam in nine seconds. She doesn't read. She's never read anything but the one book she carries, and she found it in nine seconds.

What is she?

The candle had burned down two inches. Yeju sat with the pen in her hand and the question sitting in her chest, and then she got out the other list, the mental one, the one the Engine had asked her to stop keeping.

One: the flourish in my glyph. Not my hand. Two: the flame that doesn't gutter on an F-core. Three: Bori, whom the Engine cannot price, and who found the seam in a page in nine seconds. Four: hosts. Plural.

Four things, twenty-nine days. She looked at them for a while. None of them touched each other, and every single one was a door.

[ Nothing. ] The panel again, unprompted, in the corner. [ For the record. That whole exchange with your roommate. Not one point. ]

I know.

[ I want you to notice that I told you. ]