Lead the Way, Kou

The light across the benches had gone long and yellow, and the shut-up heat of the morning had left the room. Someone had propped the casement open.

It was voices that had woken me. Kou, upside down on the lintel, was talking to Kit, who was bent over a chart.

“You could just go and look,” Kou was saying. “It’s half an hour.”

“I can’t interrupt Father’s important work.” He answered without looking up. Then, much more quietly, “Kit would like Kou back.”

I hadn’t moved. Kit turned, and saw that my eyes were open.

He crossed the room and stopped at the foot of the curtains, at about the distance I would have picked. “You’re awake! You can stay and help me with Father’s work. It’ll be fun!”

“Didn’t you listen to me?” I stayed flat on my back. “There is a warlock on the loose about to destroy all timelines.”

“I’m sure Father will deal with it.” He was nodding as he said it. A moment later, quieter, “Kit hopes so.”

With Ryu rolling off her and her hair squashed on one side, Kathi-1 sat up in the curtains. Kit pointed at her. “And you, Kathi-1. Kou-0, Mori, Ryu. All of you. It’ll be great.”

He had a plan. He fetched a chart from the bench and turned it over, and on the back, in a small, square draftsman’s hand, was a floor plan of the workroom. The curtain corner was labeled ‘Kathi-0’ and ‘Kathi-1,’ with a door penciled into the wall beside it and a lock drawn on the door. “I read that girls like doors that lock,” he said. Along the casement frame, next to the brass perch, three more perches had been drawn, each labeled ‘Kou-0,’ ‘Mori,’ or ‘Ryu.’

“The blackboard stays,” Kit said, tapping the paper. “The benches go along the wall. There’s room for a rug, and you’d both get the afternoon light.”

“It’s not to scale,” he added. “I only had until you woke.”

Kathi-1 looked at the plan for a long time. I looked at the perches.

He had also cleared the end of the front bench while we slept, and on a clean sheet of paper was dinner. The summer kitchen packed one meal for him every morning, a covered dish, a roll, an apple, a wedge of cheese, and he had cut it, carefully, into three, and taken the smallest piece for himself. Ryu went out through the casement while the dinner was being divided, and came back some time later with a small rabbit already cooked, which he dropped twice on the way across the room.

“He cooks?” said Kit, and set the rabbit beside the cheese with great ceremony.

We stayed until the light on the benches went from yellow to orange to nothing, which in high summer takes most of an evening. He told us about the calibrations, and where the corridor drafts came from, and which of the benches was lucky. Kathi-1 and I traded looks across the paper. They were all the same look.

At last he gathered his charts and stopped at the door. “I’ll be back early, with breakfast,” he said. He looked back twice.

The corridor went quiet.

“We can’t be here when he arrives,” I said. “We slide at first light, before he’s up.”

“He’ll find an empty room,” Kathi-1 said. “And a floor plan.”

“We can’t leave him like this,” Kou said. “Even I can’t.” He had come down off the lintel. “Let’s go and fetch his Kou before we leave.”

Kathi-1 turned to him. “Do you even know how to get there?”

“He told me during my watch, turn by turn. It’s half an hour away with flying magic. I should be able to locate him with a searching pulse once we’re close enough.”

“You know I’m not that good with flying magic!” I said.

“I know you can manage it for half an hour.”

“I can do half an hour too,” Kathi-1 said. “I’d feel bad for him when he comes back tomorrow morning and finds he’s all alone again.”

“The fate of all timelines is on the line,” I said, “and you want to go on a sidequest?”

Kou looked at me without blinking. Mori, Ryu and Kathi-1 looked at me too.

“Flying opens no windows,” Mori said, at the sill. “Whatever is listening for them shouldn’t hear this. And it costs balance, mostly. Hardly any mana.”

“Fine, I’ll do it for Kou.”

My face went hot, all the way to my ears. Nobody said anything. Ryu, on Kathi-1’s shoulder, put his head beneath his wing.

“Since that is decided,” I said, “let us go and get Kou-3. Lead the way, Kou.”

Kou lifted off the floor and went to the casement, ears forward. Mori and Ryu followed. Three small shapes against what was left of the sky, they flew out in a line. They came back in the same order. “Clear,” said Kou. “No one on the paths. No one in the block.”

Kathi-1 and I took our staffs off the wall. She rose off the sill on the first try, in a clean arc, with her hair streaming. My staff went one way and I stayed where I was. It went another way and I followed it as far as the ceiling. On the fourth try I cleared the sill. Not one of us had worked out how we meant to get a bat out of Kit’s father’s laboratory.

Beneath us the campus lay dark, the quads and the paths laid out like a map nobody was using. In the whole of the boys’ dormitory, one window was lit.

I did not look at it long enough to see whether anyone was standing in it. I was busy staying up.