Chapter 24 CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR: The Letter and the Plan
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR: The Letter and the Plan
I gave Sable his hour.
I used mine to find Sera.
She was not in the east stairwell or the kitchen courtyard. I found her on the second-floor landing of the maintenance stairs, sitting with her back against the wall and her knees up, already awake in a way that told me she had not slept.
I sat beside her.
"You saw the list," I said.
"I know there is a list," she said. "I have always known. I just did not know how many."
"Seven," I said.
She nodded once.
"Did you recognize any of the other names?" I said.
"Two," she said. "Students from before I arrived. I heard about them secondhand. Both were described as exceptional. Both died in accidents during their second year." She looked at her hands. "I thought they were accidents."
I said nothing.
She pulled her collar back slightly. The brand on her neck. Two lines crossing inside a circle.
"She put this on me during the preparation process," she said. "I did not know what it was then. I was five. I thought it was a mark of selection. Something to be proud of." She let the collar go. "It is a tracking mark. She can find anyone she has prepared this way from within the academy grounds. If I leave, the mark goes with me."
I looked at her.
"Can it be removed?" I said.
"Davan has been working on that for two years," she said. "He thinks yes, but it requires someone with a core that can interact with the Aether structure of the brand without triggering it." She paused. "Someone like you."
I had not thought about that.
My core, the thing that passed through the archive seal because it registered as nothing, might be the same thing that could interact with an Aether brand without setting off whatever signal it was designed to send.
"After we get out," I said.
"Yes," she said. "After."
"Sable is writing a letter to his father," I said. "Then we move. Tonight."
She looked at me. "All five of us."
"Yes," I said.
"Davan cannot leave," she said. "He does not have a tracking mark. But he has something else. He has been doing something in the sub-level for the last two years without Thane knowing. If he leaves, she will check the sub-level when she notices he is gone. She will find what he has been doing."
"What has he been doing?" I said.
Sera looked at the wall across from her.
"Copying," she said. "Every time she does a round, every time she accesses the sub-level for her work, he gets into the space she uses afterward and copies what he can find. He has two full years of her working records. The actual process documentation."
I held that.
Two full years of documentation of the extraction process. Names, methods, timelines, everything she did step by step and the reasoning behind each part of it.
"If she finds that," I said.
"She will destroy it and him," Sera said flatly.
"Then Davan stays," I said. "He protects the documentation. We get out, we reach the regional authority, we send someone back for him."
"He will agree to that," she said. "He has been ready to make that choice for a long time."
I thought about this for a full moment. About what it meant to leave someone behind on purpose. About every time in my first life I had made that same calculation and what it had cost the people who ended up on the wrong side of it.
"He has to agree himself," I said. "Tonight. Before we move."
"He will," she said.
She stood up.
"There is something else," she said. "The third name on the list. The one without a note beside it."
I looked at her.
"I think I know who it is," she said.
"Who?" I said.
She said a name quietly, like she had been holding it for a while and was finally setting it down.
I did not recognize it.
"A student in the upper wing," she said. "Third rank. She arrived the same year Sable did. Her core reading at entry was silver with a white edge. I have been watching her for three weeks. Her core is accelerating the same way Sable's is."
"She does not know," I said.
"She does not know," Sera confirmed. "And we cannot take her tonight. She does not know us. Walking up to a third-ranked noble student and telling her she is marked for death in the next hour would not end well."
"Then we send someone back for her too," I said. "The same way we send someone back for Davan."
"Yes," she said. "That has to be the plan."
I thought about the third student walking around this building right now. Sleeping, maybe. Unaware of what was in the archive with her name on it.
"What is her name?" I said.
"Lysa," Sera said. "Lysa Crane."
I put the name in my memory the way I used to carry critical information before a battle. Fixed. Impossible to forget.
Lysa Crane. Third rank. Silver core with a white edge. Marked.
"All right," I said. "We go in two hours. Sable, you, me, Ren."
"Ren," she said.
"He earned it," I said.
She did not argue.
I went back to my room.
I sat on the cot and looked at the narrow window and the stone wall outside it. The sky was still dark. The mountain was still enormous and cold and above everything.
I was about to walk out of this academy in the middle of the night without permission, with a stolen folder under my jacket, moving on a plan that depended on reaching the regional authority before Lyra Thane realized what was gone.
I pressed my hand to my chest.
The core was warm. The heat of something ready.
I reached under the training manual and took out my mother's letter.
I read it one more time. The same words. Her careful handwriting. My father sitting at the kitchen table in the evenings waiting for something.
Then I folded it very carefully and cleanly and put it in my jacket pocket.
I was not leaving it behind. Whatever happened, that much I was keeping.