Please Fall for the Male Lead (Not Me)

Nobody went to Gang Wolha's rooms, which was not a rule anybody had written down, and Yeju walked up three flights and knocked on the door at the end of the instructors' corridor at the fifth bell on the fifty-third day with sixty sheets of oilcloth under her coat.

The door opened on a room with almost nothing in it. One bed, made the way a soldier makes a bed. One chair, one table, one lamp, one stove with a kettle that had been rebottomed twice. There was a shelf with four books on it and the books were about drainage. Against the far wall, under the window, sat a long wooden case with brass corners and a strap. The strap had gone stiff and pale where a buckle had not moved through it in a very long time.

"You're not on my list for today," Wolha said.

"No."

"Then you want something, and you've come up three flights to want it, which means you've been arguing with yourself about it since about noon." She stood aside. "Wipe your feet, don't touch the stove, it isn't lit and I'm not lighting it."

Yeju put the bundle on the table and undid the string. She had a whole opening prepared, four sentences she had built on the stairs. She used none of them, because Wolha had already stopped moving.

She read the cover sheet without picking it up. Then she pulled the chair out, sat down, went through the pages the way Yeju had gone through them: top to bottom, fast. She did not stop at any of the ones a person would stop at. She stopped at entry eleven. She looked at it for about as long as it takes to read three words a hundred times. Then she put the sheet down and squared it to the edge of the table with two fingers, which was a thing Doksu did. Yeju noticed the borrowing without knowing which of them had done the borrowing.

"Where," Wolha said.

"I'm not going to say."

"Han Yeju. There is one man in this school who can find anything in that archive. He is a thin unpleasant creature who grades in four colors. If the registrar learns that vanguard field reports walked out of a Spire duplicate archive in a student's coat, he loses his post inside a fortnight, and I'll be asked to sign the paper." She had not raised her voice. She had gone very quiet, which Yeju had learned in fifty-three days was worse. "So I am not asking you who. I am telling you that you are carrying a man's whole career around in an oilcloth, and you did not know that until eleven seconds ago, and you have gone the color of a fish."

He knew. He walked across the school at one in the morning knowing. He handed it to me, told me not to do him the discourtesy of calling it kindness, and he'd have said the same thing to a wall.

"He knew," Yeju said.

"Of course he knew. That's not the interesting part." Wolha turned the sheet over, found nothing on the back, turned it again. "The interesting part is that he thinks you're worth his post, and he does not like you, and I have never known him to be wrong about a number in nineteen years."

She got up and went to the window and looked out at nothing.

"Ask it," she said.

"You've read this before."

"That's not a question, that's a fact you'd like me to confirm so you don't have to say the real one. Say the real one."

Fine.

"You taught me the drill," Yeju said. "Thirty-eight failures out of forty-two. Watch the hip. And on the seventeenth day you told me a Ring five got opened from hip to collarbone in the time it took him to work out where its weight was, and I thought you were giving me an example. You were quoting this. Word for word. You've had entry eleven in your head since before you put me on a line, and you taught me to read a commitment anyway, and the thing in there does not commit."

"Correct."

"So why."

Wolha turned around, and the scarred side came with her, and she did not arrange her face for it.

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"Because there are eleven entries," she said, "and ten of them telegraph."

Oh.

Oh, that's obvious. That's so obvious. I've been carrying this three days and I never once turned the page to do the arithmetic. I'm an editor. I read for the interesting bit, and the interesting bit is always the one with no name on it.

"Gloamstags telegraph. Lampreymouths telegraph, badly, from the water, but they do it. The cold one telegraphs, the noise one telegraphs, the sound-eater telegraphs so hard that a child could read it and children have." Wolha counted them off on the frame of the window with a knuckle, one tap each, unhurried. "In six days you will meet three things, maybe four. That's the average across nineteen deployments in a fourth-cycle year, I've done the sum, it's in a drawer. The odds that one of the three is the eleventh are about one in nine. I taught you the drill for the eight."

"And if it's the ninth."

"Then nothing I have ever taught anyone matters, and I will be busy, and you will be a name." She said it without any change in her at all. "That is not cruelty, Han Yeju, it's arithmetic, and you have been sitting in my hall for six weeks pretending you're the only person in the building who can do it."

The room had no clock in it. Yeju noticed that, and filed it with the four books about drainage and the kettle that had been rebottomed twice.

"There's a second reason," Wolha said. "You haven't asked for it, so you haven't earned it, but you'll get it wrong on your own and I'd rather it was right."

"Go on."

"The drill isn't for the fauna." She came back to the table and put one finger on entry eleven. "You keep reading it as a technique for surviving a thing. It is not. It's a technique for surviving a unit. There are nine of them, one of you, one of me. Somebody has to be the clock. It was never going to be me, because in the second hour I will be the only Ring seven in that valley, and every single one of them will be looking at me instead of at what's killing them." Her hand came off the sheet. "So the clock had to be somebody who is never going to be the strongest thing in the room. There's one of those in my hall. She's got a decorative core and she counts other people's casts when she's bored."

She picked me on the first day. In the hall, with the pipe, before the rig, before the shed. She wrote an objection to my placement and then built me into her unit in the same week, and I've spent six weeks thinking she was teaching me not to die.

"You've been building a caller since the eleventh day," Yeju said.

"Since the first. The eleventh was when I found out you'd do it." Wolha went to the window again. "Now ask the one you came up three flights for, and then get out. I have marking."

Yeju looked at the sheet on the table. The soldier's hand, pressed hard. The blank line under WHAT KILLED IT, and under that, smaller, added later, the sentence about the crest.

"Who wrote the last line?"

Wolha did not answer.

She stood at the window with her back to the room, her hands at her sides. Out in the yard somebody was running a drill, counting it in fours. The counting went on for a while. The woman at the window did not say anything at all.

Then she crossed the room, crouched at the long wooden case under the window, put her thumb under the buckle of the strap. The strap did not want to move. It had been through that buckle for nineteen years. She worked it out with her thumb, patiently, the way she did everything, and the leather made a sound like something tearing that was not quite tearing, and the buckle came free.

She opened the case.

Inside, in a rack, standing on their ends like bottles in a crate, were maybe forty rolled maps in oiled paper, each one tied with a tape, each tape labelled in a hand Yeju had never seen: small, careful, absurdly neat, the handwriting of a person who had not yet had anything happen to them.

Wolha went down the rack with two fingers, the way Doksu went down a stack. She stopped near the back. She drew one out, stood, put it on the table. It was heavier than paper, because somebody had backed it with linen, intending it to last.

"Move the reports," she said.

Yeju moved the reports.

The map came open across the whole table and hung off both ends. It was a valley, drawn in four inks. It was beautiful. The contour lines ran at intervals so tight they went grey where the ground went steep, with notes in the margins in the same neat hand. At the bottom right, in a box: PERMIT-ZONE NINE. SURVEYED IN THE SECOND MONTH. G. WOLHA.

She was twenty. She was maybe twenty years old. She went into that valley with a chain and a level and drew it. Then she put it in a case, shut the strap, and the strap has been shut for nineteen years. There are forty of them in there.

"Nobody's mapped it since," Wolha said. "The Spire has a survey. It's a pulse table and a boundary, which is a lie of omission, because a boundary is not ground. The vanguard has never once needed a map. The vanguard goes in, comes out, doesn't care what's between." She put a knuckle on the northeast quarter, where the contours went almost black. "You do. You're going to be a girl with eleven casts standing in a place, and the only thing you have ever been good at in either of your two lives, whatever the second one is, is knowing where the water is."

The lamp needed trimming. Neither of them trimmed it.

"Sit down, Han Yeju," said Gang Wolha. "I'm going to draw you the ground."

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