Chapter 30: No Front
On the fiftieth night Yeju wrote four hundred words about a woman standing in a doorway, and every one of them was bad, and she kept them.
The ledger-notebook had gone soft at the corner from being carried. Page one was casts, ruled and tallied, eleven a day since the sixteenth. After that came THE HOUSE THAT STAYED, which was still a terrible title, and which now had eleven pages in it, seven of them written since the shed.
Jung is going to be six weeks in a strap. Um Dae-sik is going to a permit-zone for eleven sen a day because I put a hole in a roster with my own mouth on purpose. Chae-rin scraped two words off a page with a knife. And I'm sitting up at one in the morning writing about a woman who won't leave a house.
What is wrong with me.
She wrote another paragraph.
It was the baker again, which she had not planned. He had come back on page nine without being asked, still counting his loaves wrong at four in the morning. Yeju had let him. Bori had fixed him once, he had stayed fixed, and now he was the only person in the book who worked.
[ Nothing. ]
I know.
[ Four hundred and six words. No deviation, no flag, no heart moved, nothing touched, nothing owed. I've checked twice. ] The panel sat in the corner of her eye, plain grey, plain black. [ Balance: 21,281. That's fifty-three second-circle forms, in case the arithmetic has escaped you, which it hasn't, because you did it in the library on the fifteenth day. ]
Why do you keep telling me what it can't price?
[ Because you keep doing it. ]
The candle had two inches left. Bori was asleep with a book on her face, which was how she slept, which Yeju had stopped finding strange around the twentieth day.
[ Host. ]
What.
[ Somebody's on the stair. ]
Professor Doksu was standing in the corridor outside the Hall of Early Snow at one in the morning.
He had a coat on over the theory-wing greys. He had walked the length of the school in the dark, past the wash-line, past the shed, past the second bake room where forty shapes were resting under cloths, and he was standing on the flags in a corridor of a girls' dormitory at an hour that would cost him a conversation with the headmistress if anybody saw him.
He was holding a bundle wrapped in oilcloth, tied with string.
Fifty-seven days.
"You're on the stair," Yeju said.
"I am aware of where I am." He held it out. "Take it, please, I have no intention of standing here."
She took it. It was heavier than it looked, the weight of a lot of paper that had been handled.
"I can't pay for it."
"No." Doksu put his hands behind his back. "I have spent nine days on that and I would like to say it once, in order, without being interrupted, and then I am going to bed."
The corridor was cold. Somewhere below, a door went.
"You told me the hook arrived with the spell. You told me you have carried a stranger's hand inside your only form since the day you enrolled. I have considered four explanations and discarded three. The fourth is not an explanation, it is a sentence: something in this school gave a first-year a technique she did not learn, and nobody noticed, including her." He said it without any weight at all, a man reading a column of figures. "That is a question I intend to answer. It will take me some years. I have some."
Unauthorized duplication: this narrative has been taken without consent. Report sightings.
"So this is."
"This is not kindness." Doksu's voice did not move. "Do not do me the discourtesy. In fifty-seven days you will walk into Permit-Zone Nine in the fourth year of a cycle with a decorative core and one form. By every reasonable projection you will not come back. If you do not come back, my question does not get answered, ever, by anyone, because nobody else in this building has noticed there is a question." He straightened his cuff. "I am not saving a student. I am protecting a source. It is bookkeeping."
He walked across the whole school at one in the morning to protect a source.
He's going to say that sentence to himself for years.
"Professor."
"Do not." He was already turning. "Two things. The reports are the only copy in an order a human can read, and if you lose them I will end you. And when you find out whose hand it is, you will tell me, because you will want to tell somebody, and there is nobody else in this building who will believe you." He went four steps down the corridor. "Go to bed, Han Yeju. You look like a fortnight of bad weather."
She did not go to bed.
The east hall was warm and lit at half past one, because it always was, because there was one girl in this school who did a thing every night whether or not anyone came. Yeju sat on the floor under a lamp with her back against the rack and undid the string.
The oilcloth held about sixty sheets, and a cover page in that engraved hand, and it said:
PERMIT-ZONE NINE. FOURTH-YEAR CYCLE. FIELD REPORTS, VANGUARD DEPLOYMENTS, COLLATED. ELEVEN ENTRIES.
She read it the way she used to read a manuscript, which was fast, from the top, without stopping for the good bits.
The entries had a shape. Each one had a name, then a date, then a description in a soldier's hand, then two ruled lines at the bottom that Doksu had drawn himself: WHAT IT DID. and WHAT KILLED IT.
Entry one: gloamstag, four of them, a herd. She knew that one; she had been ten feet from one on the second day of her life here. What killed it: Vanguard Third, blade, no losses.
Entry two: something called a lampreymouth that came up out of standing water. Two dead. What killed it: fire, sustained, eleven casters.
Entry three: a thing that made a noise like a person you knew. Nobody died. Four went home. What killed it: it left at the crest.
She read all of them. It took an hour. By entry seven she had stopped being frightened in the ordinary way. She had gone into the flat state she used to get into at three in the morning at a desk in another world, where information was information and you dealt with it. Entry seven was about a cold. Entry eight was about something that ate the sound in a room. She read nine. She read ten.
Entry eleven had no name.
That was the first thing. Every other entry had a name at the top, because soldiers name things, because you cannot report on a thing you cannot call anything. Entry eleven had the date, then a space where the name went. The space was empty. It had been left empty on purpose, because the ruled line for it was there.
Under it, in a hand that pressed much harder than the others:
It has no front.
That was the entry. Three words. Yeju turned the sheet over, because there had to be more, and there was not, and she turned it back.
Doksu's two ruled lines were at the bottom, the same as on all the others, in his own precise hand.
WHAT IT DID. Under it, in the soldier's hand: Four of us tried to work out where its weight was. It opened Hyeonu from hip to collarbone while we were doing it. Nobody saw it commit. I do not think it commits. I think it is already going and we only notice the part that is near us.
WHAT KILLED IT.
That line was blank.
Yeju sat on the floor of a warm hall at half past two in the morning and looked at a blank line.
Wolha said it. On the seventeenth day. She said some of it doesn't have a front, and she said she'd watched a Ring-five try to read a commitment off a thing with no face and get opened from hip to collarbone in the time it took him to work out where its weight was.
She wasn't giving me an example. She was quoting. She's read this. She read this report and then she stood in this hall and taught me to watch a hip.
Which means she already knows the drill is useless. She knew on the seventeenth day. She's been telegraphing on purpose for a girl with no core for thirty-three days and she knows.
At the bottom of the sheet, under the blank line, somebody had added one more sentence in the soldier's hand, smaller, as if it had been put in later, after the report was finished, by a man who had gone away and come back.
It did not die. It went home at the crest. It will be there in the fourth year.
The lamp guttered. The oil was low.
Yeju did not ask the Engine anything. She sat on the boards with sixty sheets in her lap in a hall that a girl unlocked for her every night, fifty-seven days from a place with an unnamed thing in it that nobody had ever killed, and she did not ask, because there was nothing to ask, and because she could not think of a single clever thing, which had not happened to her since the courtyard.
The panel opened anyway.
[ Host. ]
[ Buy a form. ]
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