Please Fall for the Male Lead (Not Me)

The academy had been running a book on how many times Do Yuna touched Han Yeju's head, and Yeju found out about it on Thursday, in the refectory, at the worst possible moment.

"Eleven," said Um Dae-sik, sliding onto the bench opposite with a bowl in each hand. "Tuesday. Eleven in one day. The book's been open since the twentieth and the previous ceiling was four, so eleven broke it, and I've had to pay out to nine people at odds I wrote in a state of enormous confidence." He put one bowl in front of her. "That's yours. It's an apology. I have never apologized to anyone in this school and it's costing me a bowl, so eat it."

"There's a book."

"There's a book on everything. There's a book on whether Jang cries this term." Dae-sik started on his own. "The headpat book's the clean one, because you can count it. You can't count crying, people argue."

Bori turned a page. "I hold it."

What.

"The book. I hold the book." She did not look up. "Nobody trusts him with the stakes, he's thirty-one half-loaves in the hole. So the money sits with me. It's a ledger. I keep ledgers."

My roommate is the bank of a betting market on how often a girl touches my hair.

"Bori."

"You're going to ask me to shut it down." Bori licked her thumb, turned another page. "I won't. It's eighty-one sen on deposit, from thirty-four people. If I close it they'll open a worse one in the annex where nobody counts properly. Then there'll be arguments, and arguments turn into duels. It's not about you." She ate a piece of bread. "It's never about you. That's the part you keep getting wrong."

Do Yuna arrived at a run, missed the bench, hit the table, and gripped Yeju's shoulder with both hands.

"He's summoned me."

"I know."

"Doksu has summoned me, it's on a card, it's in red." She had the card. She had clearly been carrying it around since the ninth bell like a lit fuse. "Everyone says red's the worst one. Is red the worst one? Somebody said red's for failures. I passed. I passed with a green mark, I've never had a green mark, my aunt doesn't even know yet, the letter's still in the post, and if he takes it back before the letter gets there."

"He can't take it back."

"He can't take it back," Yuna repeated, at the ceiling, in the voice of a woman in a boat.

Dae-sik ate. Yeju stood up.

Professor Doksu's office on the second floor of the theory wing had not changed since the eighteenth day. It was the same room made of paper. Stacks by year, journals in dull green, a slate board with a hand on it so precise it looked engraved, one window, closed.

Yeju waited in the corridor. She had been there about ninety seconds when the door opened.

"Han Yeju," Doksu said, without coming out. "You as well. I assumed you'd be in the corridor, so I have set out a second chair, which I would like noted as an act of hospitality that will not be repeated."

There were two chairs. Yuna sat in one with her hands between her knees. Yeju sat in the other.

"Do Yuna." Doksu drew a clean sheet toward himself. "On Tuesday you produced a second-circle fire form of sufficient integrity to pass through two regulation boards at twenty paces. Draw it for me."

Yuna took the pen. She looked at the paper for a while.

"I can't," she said.

"You cast it."

"Yeah. I can't draw it." She put the pen down. "I've never drawn it. I know where it goes in the air. If I try to put it flat I lose the fold, my hand goes stupid." She was going red. "Sorry. I know that's not, I know people can draw it, I've seen people draw it, I just."

"Don't apologize," Doksu said. "That's the second most interesting thing anyone has said in this room this year." He made a mark. "Who taught you to push the sixth before it closes?"

Stolen from its rightful place, this narrative is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

"She did."

"How."

"She yelled it at me from the gallery."

The pen stopped.

"Before that," Doksu said, "for nine days, what did she teach you?"

"The right way." Yuna shrugged. She had no idea she was giving evidence. She never did; it was the best thing about her. "She taught me clean. Slow at the fifth, set the fold, let it close. It was really good, Professor. I drilled it for nine days, I could do it in my sleep, and I sprayed it twice in front of sixty people." She scratched her ear. "Then she yelled the other thing, and it worked, and I still don't know why."

"I know why," said Doksu. "You may go."

Yuna went, mouthing is that it over her shoulder at Yeju. Then she was gone. The office was very quiet, and the window stayed closed.

Doksu capped the pen.

"In the spring," he said, "she failed a first-circle practical for two months. Her form was correct in week one. I have her sheets. Every instructor in the fire track wrote the same note on them: rushes the third stroke. Every one of them tried to fix her third stroke. I have nineteen years of records of that failure, it is always the same failure, and it is never the stroke."

Careful. Careful, careful, careful.

"You watched her for eleven nights on a roof," Doksu said. "Then you told her the thing about her head. You did not teach her a glyph. You have never, so far as I can determine, taught anyone a glyph in your life. You couldn't. You don't know any."

"I know one."

"You know one. You cast it with a hook nobody in this hemisphere puts on it. We have discussed that; you told me no, and I have thought about your no for twenty-three days." He got up. He went to the slate board, where the ignition glyph still sat from some other class. "I was wrong on the eighteenth day. I said the seam was how you know. It isn't. Anyone can know a thing. The seam is that you know what is wrong with a person in eleven days, and then you say one sentence, and the person changes."

He picked up the cloth and wiped the board clean, which took a while, and he did it thoroughly.

"That is not a talent this school teaches," he said. "It is also not a talent this school has. I have watched four hundred students a year for nineteen years and I could not have told you what was wrong with Do Yuna. I would have said: rushes the third stroke."

He's not wrong. He's not even slightly wrong. He's done what I do, on me, and he's better at it than everyone in this building put together. He's a horrible little man who grades in four colors. He's the only one who got there.

"Sit down," Doksu said. "I'm going to offer you something."

She sat down. He did not.

"The regional survey gives you a pulse number for Permit-Zone Nine and no fauna, because the fauna changes each cycle and the surveyors will not put their names to a list that will be wrong." He went to a stack against the wall, third from the window, and put two fingers on it without pulling anything out. "The surveyors will not. The vanguard did. Every permit-zone deployment files a field report. The reports go to the Spire; the Spire returns duplicates to the originating academy for the archive. The archive is four hundred years old, and nobody in it has ever been able to find anything."

"But you collate."

"I collate." Two fingers, on the stack. "I have the field reports from the last fourth-year cycle in Permit-Zone Nine. Eleven entries. What came out, what it did, what killed it, in the hand of the people who were standing there. It is the only copy in this school that is in an order a human being can read, and it took me a winter, and I did it because the archive offended me."

The room had gone very small.

Fifty-seven days. Nine prodigies, a captain, one girl four paces ahead of me making herself into a telegraph, and NOBODY KNOWS WHAT'S IN THERE. Wolha won't say. The survey won't say. And this man has it in a stack, third from the window, and he's touching it with two fingers so I know which one it is.

"What do you want," Yeju said.

"The hook."

Of course.

"Draw the glyph your hand casts," Doksu said. "On paper. Once. In front of me. Then take the reports and go to your Rift line and come back or don't, it's not my business, I'll have the hook either way."

Yeju sat in the chair in the room made of paper.

She thought about it. That was the part she would take out later and look at: she thought about it for a real length of time, several seconds, with fifty-seven days in her chest, and she was not deciding whether to pay. She was working out whether she could.

"I can't," she said.

"You can. You've refused. There's a difference, and I've been on the wrong side of it once already."

"No. Listen." Her hands had gone stupid, so she put them on her knees. "I'm not refusing. I refused you on the eighteenth day. This isn't that. I can put the glyph on paper, I'll do it now, I'll do it eleven times, but the hook won't come, because I don't put it there."

Doksu's face did nothing.

"When I cast, my hand does it," Yeju said. "It's always done it. I've never chosen it, I've never learned it, I couldn't take it out if you paid me. It arrived with the spell. It's not my handwriting, Professor. It's somebody's."

The office was quiet for four seconds.

Then Doksu sat down behind his desk, slowly, the way a man sits when he has been standing for a reason that has left the room.

"You don't know," he said.

"No."

"You have a stranger's hand inside your only form, you have had it since the day you enrolled, and you don't know whose it is." He was looking at her with an attention she had not been given in either of her lives. "Every version of this I have entertained for twenty-three days requires you to know. The plant knows. The prodigy knows. The liar knows. That is what the hook has always been: the thing you were hiding."

"I know."

"It's not that." Doksu picked up the pen, uncapped it, put it down again, which was the only unstructured movement Yeju had ever seen him make. "Han Yeju. That is the first thing you have told me that frightens me."