Boys Are Dirty

“We go tonight,” I said.

I kept it low. The strip between the foot of the bed and the window was the only floor in the room with space for an argument, and that put Kathi-2 close enough to touch.

Kathi-1 sat under the window with her knees drawn up, and took her time replying.

“It’s dark.”

“It was dark the night I found you.”

She let that one go.

“We only need to look for Kathi-3 tonight. The slide can wait for morning. I have enough left for a handful of windows, not for a crossing, and I’m not planning on one.”

“Kathi-3,” Kathi-1 said, to nobody in particular. She didn’t ask what number that made her. “She’ll have moved by morning.”

“Everyone sleeps somewhere. At this hour, she’s wherever she sleeps, and that’s where she’ll be at dawn.” I nodded at the bed, where Ryu was still asleep on the blanket and Kou and Mori had stopped pretending not to listen. “And we’ve already taken her bed for an afternoon. I’d rather not take it for a night as well.”

She nodded, but not at me. She was looking past my shoulder, at the desk.

Kathi-2 had a book open in front of her, held flat under an ink-stained hand, the writing board propped against the wall beside it. She wasn’t turning the pages.

Kathi-1 got up. Ryu, who had slept through everything else, lifted his head the moment she moved and dropped off the bed to follow her.

She took the one step towards the desk and tapped Kathi-2 on the shoulder.

Kathi-2 turned in her chair, slowly. Her eyes went to Kathi-1’s face and then slid off it, down and to the edge of her desk.

“Aren’t you bothered by this?” Kathi-1 said. “The fate of all the timelines is on the line. Two versions of you came here from other worlds chasing a warlock, and you’re just sitting there reading a book?”

“Stop it,” I yelled. “You’re scaring her.”

“Scaring her?” Kathi-1 didn’t look away from her. “She’s the same as us. She should be coming with us, not pretending this has nothing to do with her.”

Kathi-2 pulled the board onto her knee, angled away from us, and started writing.

Then her hand started to shake. Her finger kept hovering, over and over the same short stretch of paper, her head bent low over it.

She turned the board to face us.

It was a smear. One dark, wet streak, soft and spreading at one end, with something at the start of it that might have been a letter before she lost control.

She swung it back and looked at it herself, and her face went all at once. Her shoulders came up. The board slid off her knee to the floor, and she pressed her knuckles against one eye and left a streak of ink across her cheekbone.

Ryu got there before any of us. He went up onto her knee in one hop, where the board had been, and pushed his head in under her other hand.

She shoved him away. Not hard. Hard enough. He tumbled off her knee and caught himself on the floorboards, wings half open, and looked at Kathi-1.

Kathi-1 had gone still, reaching toward him.

I took her hand and pulled, and she came with me to the door without a word of argument. Both our staffs were leaning beside it, where someone had put them, and I grabbed them on the way past. Ryu scrambled after her along the floor, and Kou and Mori came over our heads.

There I glanced over my shoulder. Kathi-2 had turned to face the desk again, sobbing silently.

I shut the door to her room with the end of a staff.

***

The corridor was empty, and so was the stair, and the side door at the bottom of it opened onto a night that had no bite in it at all.

It had still been winter that morning, in Kathi-1’s forest. Eighty-seven days past hers, by the date on the board, and somewhere inside them, it had become spring.

I took us to the open ground behind the dormitories, where the tree line started. Whoever had built this campus had built it on the same bones, and at home it was the one place on campus where Kou, Mori, and I had been able to argue without anyone noticing. The same low wall was there. I’d have been almost offended if it hadn’t been.

Kathi-1 sat on the wall and stared at the grass. She had her hands in her lap, one closed around the other, and she didn’t look at any of us, and she didn’t look up when Ryu landed beside her.

He pushed his head in under her chin.

For a moment she didn’t move at all. Then she put both arms around him and held on, and he let her.

Kou and Mori settled on the wall a little way down from her. I stood on the grass with both staffs and no use for either of them.

After a while Ryu huffed, a small, put-upon breath with a thread of smoke on it, and Kathi-1 made a noise that was almost a laugh. She wiped her face on her sleeve. She kept one hand on him.

Kou flew off the wall.

He didn’t land on my shoulder, which was where he generally went. He hung in the air in front of me instead, wings working, closer than he usually came from the front, and tipped his head toward my jaw.

Don’t.

I stepped away.

His head met air.

“Get ready,” I balked at him. “We’re searching.”

I opened the window before I’d finished the sentence, right under his nose, near enough that he jerked away from the edge of it. It held for its second, showed me nothing I could use, and folded shut with nothing sent through it.

“I said ready.”

“You said it while you were doing it.”

“Then be quicker.”

He didn’t answer. He landed on the wall beside Mori and folded his wings, and looked at the tree line instead of at me.

Kathi-1 was watching us.

“Fine,” she said. Her voice had gone rough. “Let’s go find Kathi-3. But we check on Kathi-2 one more time before we slide.”

I handed her staff over. “Fine.”

“Ready,” Kou said, before I asked.

The next window took the pulse cleanly, out and home again before it closed. Pointing away from the trees. The way we’d come, past the halls we’d just left, and on across the campus.

***

Walking straight down a single bearing only ever tells you that you’re still on it, which is the kind of mistake I’d have marked down in anyone else’s homework, so I opened each window somewhere new: the far edge of the lawn, the corner of a lecture hall, the foot of a stair. Each pulse drew its own line. The lines started to cross.

By the fourth, they crossed in one place only, and I knew exactly which building stood there, because at home I always went to the far side of the path rather than walk under its windows.

Kathi-1 knew it too. I watched her work it out a half-second behind me.

“Every one of them lands there,” Kou reported, from overhead. “She’s inside.”

“What is Kathi-3 doing there?” I asked. “And at this hour?!”

Kathi-1 looked at the boys’ dormitory, and then at me, and the corner of her mouth went up.

“After Kathi-2, I didn’t think we had it in us to be this daring,” she said. “Come on, let’s hurry up and find her so we can spy— I mean, make sure of her location.”

“I’m not sneaking into the boys’ dormitory. Boys are dirty!”

“You’re no fun.”

Gravel crunched somewhere behind us.

Someone was coming along the path from the main hall, unhurried, a lamp swinging at their side. It was the walk of someone with every right to be out this late, in contrast to us.

“Sikorska,” Kathi-1 breathed.

I’d been about to say it myself. She was the only teacher anyone had mentioned to us in this world, and she’d already summoned Kathi-2 once this evening.

Neither of us stayed to find out. We went around the far side of the building at something just short of a run, Ryu low to the ground, Kou and Mori overhead, and didn’t stop until the building was between us and the lamp, and then two more after that.

Kathi-1 leaned on her knees and caught her breath, grinning at the gravel.

“I know where we can hide out,” she said. “If this forest is anything like mine, I know all the best spots for sleeping in it. It’s spring here, and Ryu does fires.”

I made a face. I didn’t try very hard not to.

“Will you be all right out there?” Mori asked, quietly.

“It’s one night on the ground, Kathi,” Kou said, before I could answer Mori. “You’ll live.”

The alternative was going to Kathi-2’s door and knocking, and asking her for the floor.

“You mean I’ll improve the forest with my presence,” I grumbled at Kou.

We cut toward the tree line the long way, well clear of the path. Somewhere among the halls we skirted on the way was a window that looked out at nothing but a stone wall, so there was no light of hers to look for from out here.

I looked for it anyway.

Tomorrow we’d go back and knock on her door before we left. I hadn’t worked out yet what I’d do if she didn’t open it.