“Reading about training is not training. Planning to train is not training. Only training is training. Everything else is preparation for training you haven’t done.”— Midorikawa Corp, Combat Readiness Manual
The corridor between the south elevator bank and Doctor Pell’s office was longer than I remembered it.
The cubes in my pouch shifted against my hip with every step, the harness creaked under their weight, and my back ached where I hit the wall. I had been walking slowly. I noticed it on the second turn and picked up the pace. I owed Pell nothing less than punctuality, and possibly several other things I had not yet been informed of.
Her door was open before I reached it.
She stood at the threshold the way she’d stood in Mai’s office; the smile arriving a half-second before the gesture. “Mr. Kallum. Please, come in.”
I came in. She closed the door behind me with a soft click and walked back around her desk. The visitor’s chair was upholstered. The cubes settled against my thigh, and I did not put the pouch down.
Pell folded her hands on her desk. “Before anything else, Mr. Kallum, I want to apologize. The assessment you were administered today was not the assessment I had in mind when I made the offer. I want to be clear about that.”
I waited.
“Mr. Kavish requested the supervising role personally. His stated reason was that he believed the assessment would, in his words, help you grow.” She kept her voice even. “Teachers retain discretion over the design of practical evaluations within the parameters of their assigned grade level, and I do not, as a matter of school policy, overrule that discretion at the moment of administration. I would not have selected sublevel thirty-five. The classification system exists for reasons that, I think, were demonstrated to you today rather more vividly than I would have preferred.”
She nodded to herself.
“Each color tier represents a substantial multiple of capability over the preceding tier, Mr. Kallum. The progression from Level Nine to Level Ten is not one level. It is the same distance as the progression from Level Zero to Level Nine, compressed into a single threshold. The jump from gray to green is the worst of these jumps in absolute terms, because students at the gray ceiling assume they have prepared for what waits at the green floor, and the green floor is,” she said as her fingers shifted on the desk, “as I’m sure you observed, not the same monster.”
I had not observed this; I had been thrown into a wall, but I nodded anyway.
Pell continued.
“The school maintains a review process for instructor-administered assessments. A committee of three senior faculty can be convened on the petition of the student, the parent, the school administration, or my office directly, and they may rule that an assessment was unreasonable in scope. In such cases, the failure does not enter the student’s record. The student is permitted to retake the examination under revised parameters.” Her hands had not moved. “I would be prepared to petition the committee on your behalf this afternoon, Mr. Kallum. The outcome, given the parameters of today’s assessment, would not be in serious doubt.”
The cubes against my thigh felt heavier than they had a minute ago.
The committee would not be convened for any of the other students who had failed assessments this semester. The committee was going to be convened for me because my surname did not fit on the standard placard.
I fought not to let it show on my face long enough that Pell tilted her head, just slightly.
“Thank you.” My voice came out flatter than I had meant. “I’d appreciate the petition.”
Pell looked relieved. “Of course. I’ll convene the committee this afternoon. You should expect notification of the outcome by tomorrow morning.”
“Will I need to come in tomorrow? For the retake, or for the other assessments.”
“No, Mr. Kallum. The custom track that I outlined this morning will proceed as planned. The registrar will reach out within the week to coordinate the Creston preparation, and the school will provide the scheduling for the promotional recording at a time convenient to your other obligations.” Her hands unfolded. “If anything in the arrangement no longer suits you, please reach out directly. My office, not Mai’s.”
She paused.
“And do exchange the cubes on your way out, Mr. Kallum. They’re processed individually under the combat assessment terms.”
I stood and offered her a smile, which I hoped didn’t look fake. “Thank you, Doctor Pell.”
“Mr. Kallum.” She rose as I did. “Truly. I’m sorry about today. The assessment will be reviewed. The record will be clean.”
I left.
—
The Thursday ghost-mode held all the way through the empty corridor at the top, past the unattended security desk, to the bank of Fitro Inc. machines bolted to the concrete by the south stairwell.
I had been using the same machine for months. The paint was still the sickly green-white, still flaking to bare steel at the corners where students leaned on it. The faded logo had not gained any letters since my first week.
I dumped the cubes into the intake.
The hatch wheezed shut around them. The screen flickered yellow and cheerful.
[Currency Exchange Machine][Individual grading: ENABLED][Quota: Not applicable]
Total deposit: ¢146 Note: Processed automatically via Rosenfeld Premium Account
The screen held the total for three seconds and reset to its default cheerful greeting. The machine clunked. The hatch wheezed once and stayed shut.
I turned away from the machine and walked toward the main entrance.
—
The maglev was sparse too. I took a window seat that no one was going to fight me for and watched the central district slide past.
Kavish had said that I had not earned the System. Pell had just confirmed that I would not be allowed to earn the consequences of using it badly either. The two of them had, between them, arranged a complete picture of what my surname meant in practice. I did not particularly want to look at the picture, but I was holding it now, and there was nowhere convenient to put it down.
Comma was on the couch when I got home, scribing something on her holo, and she glanced up when I walked in.
“You look terrible.”
“Thanks. I feel that way too,” I said.
She paused and held my gaze for a few seconds. “Wanna talk about it? I have homework, but it can wait.”
“Maybe later,” I said. “Enjoy homework.” She accepted that and went back to her holo. After I left my gear downstairs, I returned to my room to read more about how to build a coilgun to get my mind off the school fiasco.
—
Thursday afternoon dissolved into diagrams, and by the time I looked up, the clock had moved three hours.
The plan was simple in outline. The book had a strong opinion about the second coil arrangement, and the tenth chapter assumed familiarity with electromagnetic principles I would need to pretend to acquire. TinkererDB was, for once, useful for exactly this. #ask-pro was open to me. #design-philosophy was read-only, but the archives went back for years.
I lurked. I read. I did not ask, because the probationary tag was clear enough about what a wrong question would cost me, and I had no rep to spend.
The twins called me before dinner.
“I failed my practical assessment at Creston.” That was the version of Thursday I could give without explaining the parts I did not feel like explaining. Like, for instance, me stretching the truth about where I was going to school. Alice’s face went through three expressions before settling on outrage.
“Green? For real? What is Creston thinking!”
“They’re not.”
“Ceci, are you hearing this?”
“We’ll practice forms every week. I’ll send the schedule tonight.”
That was all. She did not ask which monster I was fighting. She did not ask what the parameters had been. She did not ask why I had failed.
Friday took the same shape. Book, TinkererDB, three hours on a polarity problem in the second coil, an hour on a single page of theory Eddy would have explained in six sentences. By Friday afternoon, I had a rough sketch on the Orbital and a rough parts list, mostly to source through Eddy or, if Eddy didn’t carry them, through the scrap channel.
Erika messaged twice.
The first time I sent her a selfie of myself bent over the Orbital and she sent back a single laughing emoji. The second time I did not answer because I was three layers into a coil diagram and forgot the band had pinged at all.
Omar messaged me he needed me to come to the movie night on Palistra day, when was the premiere. I just gave him maybe, because I was feeling lost.
The ceiling of my bedroom had not changed in any meaningful way since I had started looking at it three hours ago.
I had told myself that I had built a small mountain of productive-shaped activity over the last two days and had earned the right to lie down for a while. All I did was lie down for the rest of the night.
Comma had knocked at one point. I had said that I was fine.
The coilgun book was a few chapters more familiar than it had been on Wednesday. The TinkererDB archive had given up most of its better #design-philosophy threads. I had a parts list and a sketch on the Orbital and a vague conviction that the second coil’s polarity problem was solvable, given another four hours and possibly an act of Aurelia. None of it had been training. None of it had been the work that would have made Kavish wrong.
The holoband chimed.
The contact card was blank.
[Incoming call — caller blocked]
I sat up because I didn’t want to take calls horizontally, and even my Friday-evening self had standards. I flicked it to the holo-tv on the far wall, and the wall opened into a window into someone else’s room.
Two faces resolved.
Alice was on a bed with her chin on her hand, hair a mess, in an Aurelia-branded sleep shirt. Cecilia was at a desk behind her, a textbook open to her left and a stylus across the page.
There was no third face.
“Ahoj, Dashi.” A woman’s voice came through the channel, with no video on her side. “I have you and the twins. We will go over the operation now.”
“Miss Natalya.” The voice was the same she had been using on Wednesday.
Alice, who had not yet contributed a word, contributed her first. “Dashi? You called him Dashi.”
“I did.”
“That’s—” Alice’s grin began before the sentence ended, “—that’s the best.”
“It is what I call him.”
“Ceci! Ceci, did you hear that, Ceci? She calls him Dashi—”
“I heard, Alice.”
“I am keeping it.”
I closed my eyes for two seconds. When I opened them, the holo-tv was still there, the twins were still there, and Natalya’s audio was still there, all three of them entirely real. “Alice. Please.”
“Dashi, focus.”
“Oh no.”
“Dashi.”
“Stop.”
“Dashi.”
Natalya cut in without raising her voice. “We are doing the brief, zlatíčko. You can say Dashi the entire time. We are still doing the brief.”
Alice straightened up. “Yes, Miss Natalya.”
“Good,” Natalya said. “Operation. Saturday. Bishop’s ball. Two parts. Records in the east wing admin building, third floor, on the air-gapped cluster. Cache reconstruction nodes in the west wing basement, three of them, in series. The window is ninety minutes from when I push the file edit. If we miss the window, the cache repaints from synchronized fragments and flags the edit, and the entire operation goes from clean to embarrassing in roughly four seconds. We do not miss the window.”
“Got it.”
“Dashi has it,” Alice said.
“Alice!”
“I am supporting the operation.”
“Good.” Natalya did not wait for further confirmation. “I will cover my work first, since my work is the only part already finished. Side entrance off the maintenance courtyard. I unlock it when I see Dashi on the perimeter cam. Sub-band channel opens the moment he crosses the threshold. Dashi. Do not say anything on the channel that you do not want me to hear. I will probably hear it anyway. The operational fiction is that we are professionals.”
“Understood.”
“Server room is biometric. I bypass it. You will hear three chimes when it is ready. After the third chime, you have eleven minutes inside. Eleven, Dashi. Not twelve, not thirteen. Patrol passes the corridor at fifteen, and I do not want to learn what the building does to a guest who is somewhere a guest cannot be.”
“Eleven. Got it.”
“Cache nodes. Three of them, in series, west wing basement. Stairs, not the lift. The lift logs the travel. I will give you a tool. Small. Looks like a stylus. You place the contact end against the port on the node. You hold it there for thirty seconds. You do not move. You do not adjust. You do not check your band. You hold. I push the scrub. The tool lights up green. You move to the next node.”
“Three nodes, thirty seconds each.”
“Plus walking. The map I will send shows the routing. Memorize it before tomorrow. Do not follow the map on a band, Dashi. Bands are how operatives end up in cells.”
“How do I get the tool?”
“Limo. Six o’clock tomorrow. From your house, straight to the academy. The driver knows the route, but he does not know me. You will not see me before the operation.”
“You don’t want a meet?”
“I do not meet operatives in person before a job anymore.”
The Wednesday version of being curious about Natalya’s reasons had taken me through three transit zones and into a man’s apartment. The Friday version let the reasons go unasked.
Cecilia adjusted her stylus and contributed the social half. The Bishop’s Ball had a published schedule. Dash needed to be visible during the first reception, the opening processional, and the second-hour reception. The intervening windows were his to use.
The bishop gave a brief opening; nobody listened, nobody was expected to listen, but everyone was expected to be in the room. The space afterward, during the dancing, was the largest single window he had, roughly forty minutes, and the academy did not monitor where guests went during dancing.
“I’ll make sure Dash’s suit works,” Cecilia said. “She sent me a photograph.”
Natalya made a small sound that might have been approval and might have been acknowledgment.
“What about my gear?” I said, because I needed to ask something before they realized I was totally green.
“You do not have any.”
“I—”
“Aurelia is a no-weapons campus, Dashi. Ball doubles the controls. The detectors are calibrated for ceremonial blades and decorative sidearms, which means they will catch yours regardless of how cleverly Sarisol cut the fabric. You arrive in the mono, in shoes, with a holoband and the tool I am giving you. That is your kit.”
“The tool,” Natalya added, “looks like a stylus. It will pass. Nobody will look at it twice. If somebody does look at it twice, you say it is a fountain pen, and you smile, and you keep walking.”
“A fountain pen? Why the would I—”
“Rich people carry fountain pens, Dashi. Aurelia’s records architecture is what happens when nice people design systems,” she said somewhere in the middle of it. “Everything trusts everything. Nodes do not authenticate to each other; they assume each other. Half the cache verification is on a single hash that has not been rotated since the building opened. It is sweet. I find it sweet.”
“Aurelia is one of the kinder corps,” Cecilia said.
Natalya snorted.
“The goddess,” Natalya added a moment later, because the goddess was apparently still on her list, “answers prayers in the order Aurelia Inc. invoices them. Premium tier first. Then Advanced. Then the rest of you, eventually, perhaps.”
Alice bit her lips. “That’s not how it works.”
“Of course it is not, miláčku. I am being colorful.”
Alice did not look entirely sold on colorful. Cecilia’s stylus had moved a quarter-turn against the open textbook, which was, I had learned in the limousine; her tell for something she would address with her sister later.
I watched them in the holo for a fraction of a bit longer than I needed to. Alice on the bed, hand under her chin. Cecilia at the desk behind her, stylus, textbook, the careful set of her shoulders. Both of them were in frame.
I batted the thought away. The brief was the thing.
“Channel check tomorrow morning,” Natalya said. “Eleven o’clock. I call. You answer. We say a sentence each, the channel says clean, we are done. If the channel does not say clean, I will tell you what to do. Do not, Dashi, fix it yourself.”
“I have learned not to fix earpieces I did not build.”
“You have learned. Twins. Meeting at the ball?”
“We will be at the entrance at seven,” Cecilia said. “We will walk in together. You are arriving as our guest; the registration is on my invitation. After the second reception, when the dancing starts, we will signal the window.”
“Good. Six o’clock tomorrow. No weapons. No questions to the driver.” She paused as if deciding on something. “Dashi.”
“Yes.”
“You did well on Wednesday.”
The line cut.
The holo stayed for a moment, the twins still framed, Alice’s grin returning as she said, “She gave you a compliment.”
“Goodnight, Alice.”
“Goodnight, Dashi. Sleep. You look terrible.”
“He does,” Cecilia agreed.
“Goodnight, Ceci.”
The call closed.