Chapter 11 CHAPTER ELEVEN: The Boy With No Pin
CHAPTER ELEVEN: The Boy With No Pin
His name was Davan.
He did not tell me his last name. He sat down on the stone ledge beside me with the confidence of someone who had been comfortable in high places for a long time, and he looked out at the mountains the way you look at things you are not impressed by.
"Who told you about me?" I said.
"Sera," he said. "She told me to find you. She said you were the one who came in differently."
I thought about that. "And who are you to Sera?"
"The same thing she is to you," he said. "Someone who knows more than they are supposed to."
He had no rank pin. I had noticed that immediately, the same way I had noticed Sera had none. Sera had explained hers, at least partially. The dead core reading that was not actually dead.
"What is your rank?" I said.
"I do not have one," he said. "I was never formally ranked. I entered the academy through a different process."
"What process?"
He looked at me for the first time since he sat down. His eyes were dark and very direct. "There is a section of the academy that most students do not know exists. Proctor Thane runs it. It is not listed in any official documents."
I felt my core shift slightly. That small warmth.
"How long have you been here?" I said.
"Two years," he said. "I was brought in the same way the others were. I figured it out faster than most because I had someone on the outside who knew what to look for." He paused. "That person is gone now. So I am working with what I have."
"Which is Sera," I said.
"And now you," he said.
He did not say it like a request. He said it like a fact he had decided on before he climbed up here. That was either confidence or desperation and I had not known him long enough to tell which.
"What does Thane actually do?" I said. "Sera said she harvests awakened cores. What does that mean exactly?"
Davan was quiet for a moment.
"You know what happens when a core reaches its peak?" he said. "When it has grown as far as it can grow and it is at full capacity? In most people that takes decades. But the students she selects, she does something to accelerate the growth. She pushes the core forward faster than it should move. When it peaks early, she extracts it."
"Extracts it," I said.
"She pulls the core out of the body," he said. "The body does not survive that. But the core does. She stores them. Uses them for something. We do not know what yet."
I thought about the student Sera had mentioned. The training accident. The core collapse ruling. A death that looked clean on the surface and wrong underneath.
Not a collapse. An extraction.
"How does she accelerate the growth without the students noticing?" I said.
"The food," he said. "There is something in the upper-rank meal service. Not in ours. Only for the students she selects. It is subtle enough that no one connects it to what happens later." He looked at me. "Sable Voss has been eating at the upper table his entire first week. His core is already moving faster than it should be for someone his age."
That landed cold and still in my chest, the way news lands when you already suspected something and hoped you were wrong.
Sable did not know. He was sitting at the top table every meal, eating what was served to him, and every day the thing Thane had built inside him was burning faster toward its end.
"How much time does he have?" I said.
"We do not know exactly," Davan said. "But based on what happened to the last one, not more than one full term."
One term. Roughly three months.
I looked out at the mountains. The cold air was sharp and clean. Below us the academy was lit in small warm points of light from windows and torches.
I thought about Sable Voss looking at me three times in four days. Not knowing. Not having any idea that the life he had built and the rank he had earned and the future his family had shaped for five generations was all constructed by someone who planned to end him when she was done.
"Why have you not gone to someone?" I said. "A senior staff member. The academy board."
"Thane is the board," Davan said flatly. "The Inner Circle that runs Ironspire's administration is hers. She built it the same way she built everything else. Slowly. Over twenty years. Anyone who would listen is already working for her or afraid of her."
"Then what are we supposed to do?" I said.
"Sera thinks you can get close to Sable Voss," he said. "You are already catching his attention. She has been watching the ranking hall. He looked at you three times."
"I noticed," I said.
"She needs someone he might actually trust. He does not trust easily. Noble-born never do. But something about you is pulling at him." Davan looked at me directly. "She thinks it is because his core can feel yours. Even without him knowing what you are, something in his Aether is reading something in yours and it does not match what his eyes are telling him."
That was possible. Cores in very sensitive people could pick up irregularities in nearby Aether. Sable was rank one. His sensitivity would be high.
"And if I get close to him?" I said.
"We tell him the truth," Davan said. "All of it. Before she finishes what she started with him."
I said nothing for a moment.
"He will not believe me," I said. "Not at first."
"No," Davan agreed. "He will not."
He stood up from the ledge.
"But you already know how to play a long game," he said. "Sera said you have been patient your whole life. That you built something in three years with no teacher and no guidance and no proof it was even working."
He went down through the roof door.
I sat there alone in the cold and the dark and thought about patience and what it actually costs.
About how many times in my first life I had waited because waiting was the only move available.
I was nine years old in this body.
Sable Voss had three months.
Patience, on its own, was no longer enough.