That's Yours

“That settles it,” Kathi-1 said, once she’d caught her breath. “You can’t keep doing this with three.”

“We’ve been doing it with three since before you existed to have an opinion on it.”

“You’ve done it once. Today makes twice, and the second time needed five.”

She had a point, and I filed it as a separate problem from the one currently being argued.

“I’m not teaching you to slide. I don’t know what it costs to carry a fourth, and I’m not finding out with you as the experiment.”

“Then don’t carry me. Teach me the anchor, and I’ll find my own door.”

“You don’t have an anchor. Nobody on the other side has ever met you.”

“Mori had never met Kou either, when he slid in. He made it anyway.”

Mori’s ears went flat. He didn’t argue it.

“Force doesn’t steer a seam,” I said. “It tears it. That’s not a guess. That’s what happened to me the first time I forced one instead of trusting it.”

“Then I won’t force it.”

“You don’t know what that means yet. Not really. Not with your own weight behind it.”

“I’ll learn it the same place you did.”

I opened my mouth to tell her exactly how that had gone for me, the astronomy tower, Sikorska’s hands closing over mine before I made the whole thing worse instead of better, and stopped there, because I heard, with unhelpful clarity, how little standing I had to give that particular warning.

“For the record,” Kou said, from my shoulder, “I still like our odds with three. Nobody asked my opinion about four.”

“Nobody’s going to,” Kathi-1 said. “I’m not asking permission. I’m telling you what I’m doing whether or not you help me do it better.”

***

Two hours later, out beyond the tree line and in among the halls, in the narrow gap between the back of one Kathi-1 didn’t live in and the high stone wall behind it, we found the next point. Leaving the trees behind felt like leaving something of hers behind too, which was a ridiculous thing to feel about a forest. She came the whole way, silent except twice, both times to correct our direction before either Mori or I caught the mistake ourselves.

Mori confirmed the signature before any of us did, out of habit more than necessity.

My own control sharper for not being run through exhaustion first, the window came up steadier than any of last night’s had, and resolved into a room instead of a clearing: one narrow bed, unmade, a desk buried under papers, a hat hung on the bedpost, a staff in the corner, a window that looked straight out onto a stone wall, letting in the flat gray light of a very committed overcast.

Back to us, Kathi-2 was at the desk, and didn’t turn.

“That’s not my room,” Kathi-1 said, quiet, checking the fact against herself as much as telling us. “Mine looks out over the grounds. That one’s looking at a wall.” She glanced over her shoulder at the stone wall a pace behind us, and then back at the one filling Kathi-2’s window.

Crouched in the dead weeds at the foot of the wall, the ground frozen hard under my knees, we waited, longer than felt reasonable, while I held the window open in short bursts, never for long, checking rather than watching. I rationed what mana I had the way last night’s search had taught me to, and watched for anyone else: a knock, a friend dropping by, anyone at all. Nobody knocked. Nobody came. In every burst, Kathi-2 was exactly where she’d been in the last one.

A door.

Kathi-1 stood at the edge of the window’s light, not touching it. She’d already decided she wanted it; her knuckles had gone pale on the staff. Nobody told her to stay back this time, and nobody offered to help her forward.

The astronomy tower. Permission I wasn’t going to get, and didn’t wait for either.

Mori looked at me. I didn’t tell him not to.

“Physical anchor. Someone real, on the other side, who’d actually feel you land. Emotional anchor. Not performed. Actually meant, whatever it is. Force it, and it breaks before it opens. Lean into it, and it holds.”

“That’s the whole theory?”

“That’s the theory,” Mori said. “The rest is practice, and I can’t hand you that in an afternoon. Nobody handed it to Katherina, either.”

“If you make it through,” I said, before I could decide whether I wanted to say it, “that’s yours. Not permission. Not us. You.”

“I already wrote Sikorska everything,” she said. “Sealed it before we left my room this morning. It doesn’t need me standing there to matter.”

The envelope on the lamp. Not coursework, then.

“She’ll do what mine did.”

“She’s not yours.” Kathi-1 said it flatly, and that closed the subject. “I liked her, before I stopped showing up to class. She noticed when I stopped, which is more than either of my parents managed. If anyone in this world is going to actually listen instead of discussing it to death, it’s her.”

I didn’t have a counterargument ready. This was new.

***

It had worked out with Kathi-1. I didn’t let myself count how much of that was luck rather than plan, or what we’d do the first time luck didn’t show up.

“Ready,” Mori said, at my shoulder.

I looked back once. Already somewhere I couldn’t follow her into, Kathi-1 had her eyes shut and one hand flat against Ryu’s neck.

I didn’t answer Mori honestly.

“Ready,” I said instead, and reached for the shape of a girl who didn’t know yet that she was about to have visitors.

Kathi-1 wasn’t beside me when the window closed behind us. I checked for her anyway, the same reflex I’ve never quite broken with Kou, and then made myself stop checking before I had to decide what the answer meant.