Something's Off

Ryu had breakfast ready by the time I woke. It was a small, accusing row of grilled mice on a flat rock, and he sat behind it with his chest out, as if daring someone to find a flaw.

The rain had stopped. At some point before dawn Kou and Mori had let the barrier go, and nobody had told me, and I’d slept straight through it. The beds, evidently, were that good.

Kathi-1 took the first mouse and handed me the second. It tasted of smoke and not much else, which was more than I could say for most of what the dormitory dining hall served.

“About last night,” Mori said. He said it to the mouse in his claws. “I wasn’t asleep.”

“Obviously,” Kou said.

“I didn’t want to interrupt.” He turned the mouse over and examined the other side. “I doubt the warlock would care about our windows this far away. And even if they did, a window’s open and gone before anything could get a grip on it. If they caught one, it would be luck.”

“You could have said that last night,” Kou said.

“It wasn’t mine to join.”

I went back through everything I’d said at the fire. I got as far as “methodological” and stopped.

Mori’s answer was the first thing anyone had offered that sounded like one, so I took it.

***

While we were stamping out the fire, a bell rang somewhere across the campus, and by the time we reached the halls the paths had emptied. “Everyone’s in a room with a door,” Kathi-1 said. “Best time there is.”

By daylight the corridor outside Kathi-2’s room was a different place. The same stones, but the lamps were out and the sun lay across the floor in long stripes, and there was nobody in it. Kathi-1 stood in front of the door for long enough that Ryu shifted his grip on her shoulder.

Then she knocked, twice, quietly.

I counted. I got to eleven, and I was about to say something clever and wrong when the lock turned.

Kathi-2 opened the door a crack. She had the writing board held flat against her chest, and her hair had been brushed since yesterday. Across her cheekbone there was a gray ghost where ink had been scrubbed at and not quite gotten out.

“I’m sorry about last night,” Kathi-1 said. “I shouldn’t have gone at you like that. You’re allowed to read a book.” She shifted her weight. “We’re going on to the next one. Do you want to come?”

That was all. I waited for the rest of it, the argument, the demand. It didn’t come.

Kathi-2 listened with her eyes on Kathi-1’s chin. When it was over she shook her head, once.

Then she tilted the board and drew a finger across the paper, and there was no pause in it this time, not one. She turned it around. The board read, ‘Good luck. I’ll be in my room.’

I’d had a speech prepared. It left my head entirely. “Thank you for the bed. It was extremely narrow.”

Something happened at the corner of her mouth. It was gone before I could classify it.

The door closed softly, and the lock turned.

“Right,” Kathi-1 said, to the door, and then to the rest of us, brighter than it needed to be. “Kathi-3.”

***

Keeping buildings between us and any window that might have someone in it, we went around by the tree line, behind the halls. Kou rode on my shoulder. We took turns on the windows, Kathi-1 and I, a pulse from the edge of the trees, the gap between two halls, the end of a garden path, and Kou sent his pulse through each and brought it home before the window closed.

The lines crossed far from where I’d expected. I’d have bet on the boys’ dormitory.

“She’s in the old block,” Kou said. “Past the lecture halls.”

I knew which one. Stone, narrow windows, a roof that had been patched in mismatched slate. At home I’d never had a class in it.

“So she does go to classes,” Kathi-1 said. “Kathi-3 is built differently.”

“Differently from the two of you, you mean,” Kou said.

Kathi-1 grinned.

A side door of the old block stood unlatched, as side doors tend to at lesson time, and the corridor behind it smelled of chalk. The point turned out to be a lecture room on the ground floor. The door was ajar, and the room behind it was empty, benches in rows and dust hanging within a slant of light. I checked it twice, once with my eyes and once with Kou’s.

“Quick one,” Kathi-1 said, and raised her staff. “Just to see what we’re walking into.”

The crystal at the head of her staff warmed, and the air in front of her opened.

Light came through it, hot and yellow and nothing like our morning. A summer sun, laid across the same benches, with a casement on the far wall standing open to it. The rows of benches were empty. Beyond them, at the far end, small and soft at the edges, a figure was bent over a front bench heaped with something pale, hands busy at something I couldn’t make out.

“Something’s off,” Kou said. His ears went flat against his skull. “Close it.”

Kathi-1’s hand went for the edge of it, half a beat late.

One second. That was the rule. However carefully you held it, a window anchored to a place gave you one second.

The edge wouldn’t fold. It was holding.

“It shouldn’t still be open,” Kou said, to me. “Kathi. Close it.”

I had a perfectly good reason, and I’ll set it out in order. A window that held past its second was an opportunity and not a fault, and a lone figure at the far end of an otherwise empty room was exactly what we’d come for, and what I’d said at the fire about windows having two ends was a point made in the dark, to a bat, and this was daylight, and no one who had ever really studied the problem would have wasted it.

“She’s alone in there,” I said. “This is our chance.”

I put the crystal of my staff to the edge of it and leaned toward the figure, reaching for the signature we’d followed across the campus. A window anchored to a person this time, not a place. If it took, I’d have a stable view of whoever that was.

Kou looked at me without blinking. Then he folded his wings and turned toward the light, and he didn’t say it again.

The sunlight went out of the window from the edges inward. Ryu’s wings snapped open on Kathi-1’s shoulder.

What came through first was a limb, low and black. Then the rest of it, with nothing on it that was a face. Then more of them than I could count.

“It’s he—” Mori’s voice cracked on it, high and fast. “The warlock! They’ve noticed us opening windows!”