There's Your Surprise

“Kou! Mori! Ryu!” I didn’t turn my head to see which of them had already moved. “Hold them. I’m getting Kathi-1 away from that window.”

Low and fast, skating over the wood without touching it, the first of the black things was across the benches before I’d finished the sentence. Kou and Mori sang two notes a half-step apart, one from above and one from the floor, and three of the things stopped as if the room had tilted beneath them. Ryu’s fire went down the aisle in one flat line.

Kathi-1 hadn’t moved. She stood with her staff held up and both hands white on it, in front of a window that was no longer a window. It was a hole, and the edge of it hung dark and heavy, as if something on the far side were leaning on it.

“It won’t fold,” she said. Her voice had gone high. “It should fold, I opened it, why won’t it fold?”

“Because it isn’t only yours anymore.” I set the crystal of my staff against hers and closed my free hand over her fist. “Don’t push at it. It’s pushing back. With me. Not around me.”

With her hands over mine, Sikorska had said it to me twice, once in an exam hall and once behind the astronomy tower.

She breathed in. She leaned.

It fought us. It wanted to be held shut with something heavier than leaning, and for a moment the two of us were two staffs and a lot of hope, and then she found where my lean was and put hers on top of it. The hum went down through the floor. The edge gave.

It shut all at once, like a lid.

***

The ones that had come through before it sealed were still moving. Several were left in the room, and one of them was already through the line of fire, coming at me low.

I slowed it. The lean came easier than it had in Kathi-1’s forest, and I felt it in my teeth anyway, a thin cold wire drawn tight behind my eyes. One of them dragged through the air, and then two, and then three, caught mid-lunge with their limbs stretched out, and I breathed in short bursts that tasted of ash. Kathi-1 didn’t wait to be told. Three small seams, one after another, and the three weren’t there.

Something raked the air where my head had been. Cold against my cheek. I hadn’t seen it come. Kou’s note hit it from behind and turned it, and Ryu’s fire met it from the front, and it went past me near enough to smell, a cellar smell, before the wall beside the door went black.

“Behind you,” Mori said, quietly, and I was already turning, my heart going so hard it blurred the edges of the room.

The next slow came out half the length of the one before. The thing lunged through the gap anyway and hit the shaft of my staff, and my whole arm rang with it. Numb to the second knuckle. I held on. Kathi-1’s seam took it from the side, and the last one came apart under both of Kou’s and Mori’s notes at once, unraveling in the air.

Then it was quiet. My ears rang. Ryu was breathing hard somewhere, and something small ticked as it cooled.

I looked at what we’d done to the room. A bench split down the middle. Three more scorched along their fronts, a black smear on the plaster, a long dark streak across the floorboards where something had finished coming apart. Anyone who walked in here would know someone had fought for their life in it.

“That’s going to be noticed,” Kathi-1 said.

Somewhere down the corridor, a long way off, a door banged. Then another. A voice called out, and was answered.

“Someone will lock this block,” I said, “and put a watch on every path. If we walk out of here now, we start the search again behind a lock on every door.”

“So we don’t walk out,” Kathi-1 said. “We go through.”

“Mori.” I didn’t look at him. “You said they wouldn’t care about us this far away.”

“I was wrong about the distance.” He had landed on the nearest bench, and he spoke carefully, setting the words down one at a time. “It isn’t an easy thing for them. Catching a window is like catching something drifting in water with your fingers. Almost always it slips away. This time they closed their hand.”

“So it can happen again.”

“It can. But whatever they caught, it’s shut. I’d say now is the best chance we’ll get.” He lifted his head toward the door. “Open a small one and try again. If it holds, open it fully.”

Footsteps, more than one pair, and closer.

“We go now,” I said. “We open a window close enough to Kathi-3 for her to notice. Both of us, at once, right beside her. Aim for the shared surprise.”

“That’s how it worked in the forest,” Kathi-1 said. “You and me and a dragon.”

“That was an accident. We can’t fake it, it has to be real. So we make sure there’s something to be startled by.”

“I can startle someone,” Kathi-1 said. “Easy.”

Kou was on my shoulder before I’d finished the sentence. He didn’t look at me. Mori took my other shoulder, small and cold. “Kathi-0,” he said, too quietly for anyone else. “If you don’t have it—”

“I have it.” My hands were shaking so badly that the crystal rattled against my staff.

We went up the room between the benches, to the place that matched the figure’s bench. I stood to the left of it and Kathi-1 to the right, and we raised our staffs together.

The crystals warmed. Two windows opened side by side, an arm’s width apart.

Summer light again. Close enough that I could have put a hand on their shoulder, someone sat at the bench beyond them. The hair was cropped short and purple, the sleeves of a white shirt were rolled to the elbow, and a stylus had stopped mid-line above a sheet covered in diagrams. The rows behind them were bare. The front bench had swallowed its neighbors, six pushed together under paper, with charts pinned edge to edge across the blackboard, a wire tray of red-sealed envelopes stacked past its rim. A medal sat in an open velvet case shoved to a corner where it wouldn’t be in the way. A brass perch bolted to the casement frame had nothing on it. Their lips were moving. There was no one else in the room. They looked up. The shoulders were squarer than mine, and the jaw was mine anyway, and there were amber flecks near the left pupil.

Last night I had refused to set foot in the boys’ dormitory, on principle.

I opened my mouth. Nothing sensible came out of it.

“Kathi-3 is a boy?”

Kathi-1, beside me, had stopped with her own mouth open. She closed it. “There’s your surprise,” she said, a beat late. “Let’s go.”

The second came and went, and the window didn’t close. Nothing leaned on the far edge of this one. Kou’s claws tightened in my collar, and that was all the comment he made. I didn’t ask why. The window widened, and Kathi-1’s widened beside it with Ryu already a spark on her shoulder, and the stylus fell out of a hand that had my knuckles. Everything in me went out at once. I stepped through with Kou and Mori hanging on. For once, I didn’t stop to think about what would happen if it failed.