Chapter 9 CHAPTER NINE: The Roof Chapter
CHAPTER NINE: The Roof
I went.
I will not pretend I had a good reason for it other than: I needed to know.
My general's mind said it was a trap. My general's mind also said I had survived worse than traps and that the best way to understand what you are walking into is to walk into it with your eyes open and your core ready.
I left my room at quarter to midnight and took the east stairs. Four more levels above my floor brought me to a door marked MAINTENANCE. It was unlocked. Above it, a short stair led to a flat section of roof edged with stone.
The sky over the mountain was very clear. Stars in every direction, hard and bright, the kind you only see at altitude where the air is thin and cold. The black peaks of the surrounding range stood against the night sky like they had always been there and planned to stay.
I came out onto the roof and looked around.
No one.
I waited.
At exactly midnight, a voice came from my left.
"You came alone."
I turned.
A girl stepped out from behind the stone edge of a higher section of the roof. She looked about twelve. Dark skin, narrow eyes, hair pulled back tightly. She was wearing the grey academy uniform but with no rank pin on the collar. Every student wore a rank pin.
She looked at me the way you look at something you have been studying for a long time and finally see up close.
"Who are you?" I said.
"My name is Sera," she said. "I am not going to tell you my last name yet because you will react to it and I need you calm for what I have to say."
"I am calm," I said.
"You are calm on the outside," she said. "Inside is different." She tilted her head. "Can you feel it right now? Your core has been reading this situation since you came through the door."
I felt it. She was right. A thin warmth along my arms, the way my core behaved when it picked up something Aether-charged nearby.
"What do you want?" I said.
"I want you to know that you are being watched," she said. "Not by students. By someone inside the teaching staff who has been building something for a long time and who needs you specifically to finish it."
"Lyra Thane," I said.
Something in her expression shifted. Slightly. Like a door moving on a hinge without opening all the way.
"How do you know that name?" she said.
"She came to my house three years ago," I said.
"She stood in my doorway and looked at me. My father forgot her by the next morning."
Sera was quiet for a moment. "She has done that to many people." She looked out at the mountain range. "There are four students in this academy right now that she brought here on purpose. She has been doing this for twenty years. You are not the first. You will not be the last unless someone stops her."
"Four," I said. "Who are the others?"
"I can only tell you one safely right now. Telling you more means moving faster than I can protect."
"Then tell me one."
She looked at me.
"Sable Voss," she said.
I held very still.
Sable Voss. Rank one. Born into a noble family that had produced academy champions for five generations. The boy who had looked at me twice during the ranking ceremony as if I did not fit the pattern he expected.
"He does not know," Sera said. "He has no idea what she did. His core, his rank, his bloodline. All of it was shaped by her across three generations of his family."
"Why are you telling me this?" I said.
"Because you are different from the others," she said. "They came in as themselves. You came in as something much older. She does not fully know what you are yet. That window is the only advantage any of us have."
"What happens when she decides she knows enough?" I said.
Sera looked at me steadily.
"The last student she finished with died in a training accident," she said. "The academy ruled it a core collapse. No investigation. No questions from anyone."
I thought about that for longer than I should have. A training accident. A core collapse. Something that leaves no obvious evidence and nothing a standard examination would flag as wrong. The kind of death that looks like the academy systems failing, not a person making a choice.
"How do you know all of this?" I said.
She reached up and pulled back the collar of her uniform. There was a small mark on the side of her neck. Not a scar. More like a brand done very precisely. Two lines crossing inside a circle.
"Because I was one of them," she said. "Seven years ago. She did not finish what she started on me. I escaped before she could." She pulled the collar back. "I came back to Ironspire because the others are still here. Because someone has to be paying attention."
She turned toward the door.
"Wait," I said.
She stopped.
"The feather," I said. "The first note. How did you get into my room?"
She glanced back.
"You were not the only one with a dead core assessment," she said. "Mine looked dead too. It is not. It just does not work the way they test for."
She went through the door.
I stood on the roof for a long time.
The stars were still sharp. The mountains were still dark. Below me, the academy was quiet, four hundred and ninety-nine students asleep in ranked rooms, completely unaware.
I pressed my hand to my chest.
The core answered. Steady and awake and warming slowly.
I thought about Lyra Thane standing at my door three years ago in the dark, smiling like everything was already exactly as she planned and had been for a very long time.
I thought about Sable Voss, rank one, the perfectly shaped product of a system built around him by someone else, not knowing any of it.
I thought: she had twenty years of practice doing this.
I had one life to stop it. Maybe two, if you counted the first one.
I went back down to my room and did not sleep at all.
Tomorrow, every single thing would start looking normal again.
That was the part I needed to be most careful and deliberate about.