Chapter 41: Broadcast
Leon was quiet for a moment too long.
"There's someone," Emma said. It wasn't a question.
"I didn't say that."
"You went silent."
"I was thinking."
"About what."
"About whether I was hungry."
Fred propped himself up on one elbow. "That was not a hungry face."
"You've known me for four hours."
"It was still not a hungry face."
Leon looked at the canopy. Neither of them was going to let it go, which he'd understood about thirty seconds in. Emma had the particular energy of someone who had just been thoroughly embarrassed about her own situation and was now extremely motivated to redirect attention elsewhere.
"There's someone," he said finally. "Or there was. It doesn't matter anymore."
"Why doesn't it matter," Emma said.
"Because it was never going to go anywhere."
"Why."
"Because the difference between us is too much." He said it plainly, without drama. "There's no version of it that works. I figured that out a while ago."
Fred was quiet for a moment. "How much of a difference are we talking."
"Enough."
"Like rank difference?" Emma said. "Is she here? At Valorian?"
"I don't know. Maybe."
"D2? D1? Higher?"
Leon didn't answer, which was its own kind of answer. Emma and Fred exchanged a brief look over his general direction.
"When did you last actually talk to her," Fred asked.
The phone call came back immediately. Forty-three seconds. About the overdue phone bill & his expired card. She told him to not let it happen again.
It was the only time she'd called him directly. His every other attempt at contact had gone through Emilia Sterling first — her secretary, professional, courteous, thorough about filtering. He'd called four times total in the months after the marriage, all of them about legal documents that required his input or signature. Each time he'd explained the reason to Emilia, waited while she determined whether it qualified, and only then been put through to Iris. Brief conversations, all of them. Functional.
So when an unknown number had appeared on his screen that Monday morning on the bus and it had turned out to be Iris — not Emilia first, not a scheduled callback, just Iris, directly, without preamble — his first thought had been that something was seriously wrong.
It had been about a phone bill.
She'd already paid it before she called to tell him. Which meant the call itself hadn't been necessary at all. She could have sent a message through Ms. Sterling, or simply let it sit, or not involved herself at all. Instead she'd called personally, said four sentences about an expired card, and hung up in under a minute. Which all was an abnormal experience for him.
He'd spent the rest of that bus ride trying to work out what the point of it had been. He still didn't have a satisfying answer.
"Recently," he said. "Kind of. It was a weird interaction."
"Weird how," Emma said.
"Just weird. Doesn't matter."
"Leon."
"Emma."
She made a short frustrated sound. Fred seemed to recognise the ceiling had been reached and settled back against the timber wall.
"So there's someone," he said. "Unreachable, possibly here, last interaction was recently and weird. That's all we're getting."
"That's all you're getting."
"Fine."
Emma didn't say fine. But she also stopped pushing, which amounted to the same thing. She pulled her jacket up and turned onto her side.
A few minutes passed.
"It's genuinely nothing," Leon said, to no one in particular.
Nobody responded to that.
They settled into the watch rotation, one person keeps watch while the other two rests, & later they switch. Fred said he'd slept a few hours the previous night before finding them, so he took the first shift. Leon and Emma lay down on the makeshift sleeping surfaces and within a few minutes the hollow had gone quiet enough that Leon could hear the wind moving through the canopy above.
He closed his eyes.
The scene in his head had no clear edges.
He was young — eight, maybe nine, the details wouldn't hold still. A garden somewhere, the kind with old stone paths and a fountain that made more noise than it looked like it should. Afternoon light, warm.
He was talking to a girl.
Dark hair. Long, tied back loosely. She was saying something he couldn't quite hear, gesturing at something beyond the garden wall with an expression that suggested she found whatever it was moderately irritating and also slightly funny at the same time.
Then she turned and he could see her eyes — a colour he'd never quite found the right word for, somewhere between blue and something older than blue, like the centre of a very deep body of water.
" Iris "
He pointed at her hair.
Something had appeared in it — a single streak of silver-white running through the dark, catching the afternoon light. It hadn't been there before. It looked like someone had painted it there deliberately, which they hadn't.
She reached up and touched it.
Then she looked at him and said something he couldn't—
The buzzing pulled him back.
Sharp, insistent, all three bands at once. Leon opened his eyes to the underside of the timber wall and a thin strip of sky that had gone a deeper blue — late afternoon. He'd slept longer than he'd expected.
Emma was already sitting up, blinking, hair pushed to one side.
"What's happening," Leon said.
"Look at your band," Fred said. He was crouched at the edge of the hollow, watching the screen on his wrist. His expression was hard to read.
Leon sat up and raised his wrist.
The band screen had changed. The usual interface was gone, replaced by a single notification bar pulsing steadily.
IMPORTANT BROADCAST — MANDATORY RECEPTION
A global announcement is being transmitted to all registered participants and academy personnel. Reception is automatic. Broadcast begins in 90 seconds.
"All participants," Emma said quietly, reading her own screen.
"And academy personnel," Fred added. "This isn't a game update."
In the Group 7 zone, on the other side of the mountain range, Noah was sitting against a pine tree eating the last of his morning ration when his band started buzzing. He looked at it, then at Krai, who was already reading his screen with the focused expression he used when something required processing.
"What is it," Noah said.
Krai didn't answer immediately.
In Zone 6, Jay was midway through a contract task — a timed navigation problem that had taken him forty minutes to get to the relevant position for — when the buzzing started. He stopped walking, looked at the band, read the notification twice.
Around him, two other students he'd been loosely aware of in the vicinity also stopped. One of them looked up from their band and caught his eye briefly. Neither said anything.
Back at the academy, in the main administrative building, the senior officers' meeting had been running for two hours.
Proctor James sat at the head of the long table, twelve officers arranged along both sides. The subject had been the Federal Government announcement — something significant enough that Valorian had received a formal directive from Washington requiring all registered institutions to broadcast it to their populations. The nature of the announcement had not been disclosed in advance to the administrative office. They had only the directive and the time.
James was midway through outlining the broadcast logistics when his personal phone lit up on the table in front of him with a call from ‘Simon Clark’.
The room went quiet.
He looked at the screen. Picked it up.
"Yes."
He listened. The call was under a minute. His expression during it was the kind of neutral that requires effort to maintain.
When it ended he set the phone down carefully.
"The Board has instructed us to broadcast directly to all students," he said. "Including current tournament participants." He looked at the officer responsible for the band communication system. "All zones, all groups, simultaneous. Standard emergency channel."
"The announcement content—"
"We don't screen it. It goes out as received." He looked at the table for a moment. "This is going out worldwide."
Leon watched the counter on his band tick down toward zero.
Emma had her knees pulled up, watching hers. Fred was still crouched at the hollow's edge, one hand resting on the timber wall.
The forest around them had gone oddly still, which was probably coincidence.
The counter reached zero.
The band screens shifted again.