The Understudy

The classroom smelled like sweat and chalk dust, and the sun through the east windows had turned the air over the desks into something you could almost chew. June in Havenport did that — nine in the morning and already the boys at the back were fanning themselves with loose pages, and the ceiling fans went around and around and moved nothing at all. Warren Voss sat with his eyes on the blackboard and his mind somewhere else. The board still held yesterday's homeroom announcements, half-erased: a fundraiser for the band, a reminder about summer registration, a printed sheet taped crooked near the corner listing names. He had read those names more times than he could count. The Awakening Showcase had wrapped yesterday afternoon. Two hundred seniors in the auditorium, parents in the back rows with phone cameras up, the dean reading results off a tablet while a projector threw each student's evaluation up on the wall in letters six inches tall. Warren had stood through all of it and clapped when other people's names came up. He was first in the class in every academic subject this school offered. That part was not in dispute — not even among the people who didn't like him. And he wasn't in the top three. The sheet near the corner of the board said: Showcase — Final Placement, Havenport High School, Class of 2027. First. Second. Third. Three names, none of them his, and next to each name a line describing the award. Any of those awards would have changed things at home. Third place came with a combat-skill license — the Guild-channel paperwork that let you buy a licensed combat skill book, the kind of book that ran about a hundred and twenty thousand on the open market. First place got the same license plus a maxed combat skill out of the school's own reserve, and nobody in this half of Havenport said that number out loud. A licensed combat skill book was roughly what both of his parents earned put together in a year. Two parents, twelve months, and this thing the school gave away to three kids on a Tuesday. He was looking at the sheet, not really looking at it, when the chair next to him scraped. "That's garbage," Frankie Doyle said. He'd read the names on the way in, apparently, or read them again standing up, because now he was on his feet next to his desk with his hands already up in the air. "That's — no. No. First in the class. First. Every exam since freshman year, every paper, every — and they put three guys up there who didn't outscore you on the floor? Did they even watch the same showcase?" "They watched it," Warren said. "Then how — " "I don't know how." Frankie wasn't listening to the answer. He never did when he got going. "Your evaluation was higher. I was there. I saw the number go up on the screen before they moved to the next section, and it was higher than all three of them. That's not — you don't get to just — " He turned to the rest of the room, both arms out, appealing to a jury that hadn't been seated yet. "Tell me I'm wrong. Somebody tell me I'm wrong." Nobody told him he was wrong. "Come on," a girl two rows back said. She had her pen down and her arms folded. "Even the walk-ons scored better than Breck. This school's gotten shameless." "My cousin got third place two years ago," somebody near the door said. "His family sold the license and put the money toward a house. That paperwork alone is worth more than my dad makes in three months." "So we go to the dean," Frankie said, and now he was pulling his bag up off the floor, like the plan had already been approved in a meeting Warren hadn't been invited to. "Right now. Before homeroom. We go to Hollis and we put the score sheet in front of him and we stand there until he explains it." The room made the sound a room makes when it agrees with something. Chairs shifted. Two boys by the window got up. Someone said yeah, someone else said finally, someone said they should have done this last semester about the other thing. Faces turned toward Warren with the particular expression people wear when they are being brave on someone else's behalf — eyebrows up, mouths set, chins lifted slightly. Warren stayed in his seat. He knew how this went. He had known before Frankie opened his mouth. If fifteen of them walked down to the administration office and knocked on Dean Hollis's door, Frankie would be there. Frankie might even be the one who knocked. And by the time the elevator opened on the third floor, the hallway would be down to three or four, and by the time Hollis looked up from his desk, it would be Frankie and one other kid who had nothing to lose because he was failing anyway, and the rest would have remembered somewhere they needed to be. He didn't hold it against them, particularly. It was arithmetic, and the math had changed for him a month ago. Last month, every senior in the district had gone through the Awakening. The testing centers had been full for two weeks — school buses lined up outside the regional facility, parents waiting in the parking lot with thermoses, kids coming out the doors afterward either lit up or hollowed out, depending on what the evaluators had pulled out of the system for them. The whole city talked about it the way people talk about the weather at the start of a storm. The Awakening pulled a class out of you. Nobody had ever explained exactly how, not even the national program that ran it, and most people had stopped asking. What mattered was the list you got assigned, and more importantly, the class name printed at the top of your record. Warren had come out of the center with a class designation that made the technician at the desk look twice, then type it in again, then call a supervisor over to confirm. Unclassed. Average attributes below the floor. Skill acquisition costs nearly double that of any structured class. And the number that everybody in the room already knew, the number that had been repeated to him by three different adults in three different tones of voice over the past month: raising an unclassed to level fifty costs about what it costs to raise four or five of anybody else to the same level. Nobody organized study groups around a person like that. Nobody sold you their notes for cheap. Nobody brought your name up to a dean who owed their brother-in-law a favor. Some of the kids around him right now were sincere — Frankie was sincere, Frankie had always been sincere, and Frankie was sitting next to him at all because Warren had spent three years dragging him through geometry and chemistry after school, one semester at a time, until his name started showing up in the top ten and his mother started sending thank-you notes at Christmas. Some of the others were not sincere. Some of them would be enjoying this, quietly, from the inside, where it didn't show. He was the class genius who had drawn the worst card in the deck. There were people who had spent three years waiting for something like that to happen to him. The room was still loud. Frankie was still standing. "You're not even mad?" Frankie said, and now he was turned all the way around, looking down at Warren like Warren had personally let him down. "You're going to sit there." "I'm going to sit here." "How." "It's not worth it," Warren said. "And I mean that. Sit down." Frankie opened his mouth. Closed it. Sat down, slowly, like his body was arguing with the order while his brain obeyed. Somebody behind them said, "What does that mean," and somebody else said, "Is he serious," and the room went from loud to awkward in about three seconds. Warren didn't add anything to it. He knew what would happen if he took them up on it. They would get to the third floor, Frankie would knock, and Hollis would look up and start explaining that the showcase score was preliminary and the final ranking was weighted, and that there was a form. Being right did not matter to a man behind a desk. What mattered to a man behind a desk was whether the person standing in front of him could ever be useful to him, now or later. Warren had no value left. He wasn't going to walk up three floors to have that explained to him with a smile. If it hadn't been for the school's own reputation, he suspected, they would have found a way to quietly move him out of the class roster entirely. Nobody wanted a reminder that the system sometimes handed the top student a card that couldn't be played. Someone dropped into the chair on the other side of his desk and turned around to face him. Levi Hale. Warren looked up. Levi had his elbows on the back of the chair and his chin on his hands, and he was wearing the expression of someone who had been waiting all morning for the right moment to sit down here. Levi was third on the sheet. He was also, according to a version of the story that had been circulating since last month, a nephew of Dean Hollis. Nobody knew for sure. Everybody believed it. And his class from the Awakening was a structured combat class — Warren thought it might be blade-type, something with summonable weapons, but he was too bored by Levi to bother confirming it. Academics, Levi had never once cleared the top twenty. Not one semester. Frankie had once read his class rank out loud in the cafeteria to the whole table's amusement. And now he was third on the board with a combat-skill license coming to him at the end of the year. "You know," Levi said, "I kind of respect it. Most people wouldn't take it this quietly." Warren didn't answer. Levi's smile got a little wider. "The poor guy even knows his place. What does an unclassed need a skill book for? Who would you even sell it to? Somebody's got to pay the tuition on four of you just to get one of you to level fifty. You're a write-off, Voss. That's all you are." He said it easily. He said it the way people say things they've rehearsed in the shower, testing the delivered version on a live audience for the first time. A couple of kids behind him overheard and went quiet to listen, and Levi, feeling that, sat up a little straighter. "You can't even get into a dungeon," he said. "No team takes an unclassed as anything but a slot-filler, and the Guild won't clear a party with less than three Awakened on the roster. So you sit here, and you graduate, and you go work at your dad's shop or whatever he does, and every time you walk past a Guild building you get to remember that you could have been somebody." He leaned back, satisfied, and delivered the last line the way he'd been planning to deliver it since the sheet went up. "Right, Voss?" Warren looked at him for a moment. The whole room had gone quiet enough that he could hear the ceiling fan's bearings. "That's it?" Warren said. "That's the whole play?" Levi's smile flickered. "I mean," Warren said, "you worked on this. You've been sitting on it — what, since yesterday afternoon? Since the sheet went up? And this is what you came up with. 'Unclassed, write-off, no dungeon.'" He wasn't raising his voice. He'd pitched it the way you'd ask somebody to pass the salt. "That's the ceiling. That's as high as you go." Somebody near the windows snorted, once, and then tried to turn it into a cough. Levi shoved back from the desk, the chair tipping until it caught itself on the desk behind him with a loud knock. His neck had gone red up to the ears. He stood there looking down at Warren like he wanted something to happen and was trying to remember what. "Say that again." Warren stayed in his seat, and Levi, standing, was looking down at him from two feet away — and somehow that was not the picture at all. Warren had his head tilted back a little, hands loose at his sides, the light from the window behind him throwing a bright edge along his shoulders, and he made no move to get up or get back. "You heard me," he said. "You want to — " Frankie was already on his feet between them, both hands up in the air, body angled toward Levi like a cornerback who had decided which side the ball was going to land on. "Hey. Hey. What are you doing. Sit down." Levi didn't sit down. He didn't move forward either. He stood there breathing through his nose with his fists half-curled at his sides and the whole room watching and the fan ticking overhead, and the moment stretched out and got thinner and thinner — The bell for homeroom never came. What came was a voice that only Warren heard.