The Understudy

Chapter 3: Ten Days

The warmth came first.

It moved up through his chest and into his skull, thin and even, like the first swallow of something hot on a cold morning, and then it was inside his head and settling, and Warren sat very still with his hands flat on the desk and let it happen. His eyes were open. The room was exactly where it had been — the fan ticking, the blackboard, the page taped beside it with the rankings on it and his own name sitting down at the bottom of the column where it had been sitting since one o'clock yesterday afternoon.

The tiredness went.

Not the way sleep takes it off. This was thinner than that and faster. It came off him the way a wet coat comes off your shoulders, and what was left underneath was clean and awake and quiet, and the light in the room looked a little sharper along the edges of things. The fan blades. The corner of Frankie's notebook. The grain of the desk under his fingers, which he had never once noticed in three years of sitting at it.

*Spirit, plus ten.* The thought was as level as anything else he had ever thought, and underneath it something turned over slowly, once, the way a lock opens.

Ten points. He'd sat through the whole orientation on the four bars. The Guild rep with his will-reading voice, the slide, the sentence about items and auctions and parents' income. Every point of it bought or found. Every point of it out of reach.

Ten, then, and it had landed the moment he opened his mouth, and he could feel it sitting in his skull now. Which meant the thing behind his eyes was not a hallucination, and it was not his own voice talking back at him in the dark, and it was not going to go away if he shut his eyes and counted to ten.

If it was real, the rest of it was real too.

Warren looked up.

Frankie was still half out of his seat beside him, one hand braced on the desk, face still blotched from the hallway — from standing out there with the Guild rep and getting nowhere, then coming back in and taking the hit twice over. When Warren stood, the whole class came up with him without meaning to. Not standing. Turning. Heads, shoulders, twenty-odd people on tile who had all decided five minutes ago exactly how this was going to go.

Frankie opened his mouth.

"Frankie," Warren said. "Sit down. He's not worth the trouble."

Frankie sat. He did it slowly, watching Warren the whole way, like a man lowering himself onto a step he wasn't sure was there.

Levi's face had already started to go wrong.

"You laughing?" Levi said. "You got something to laugh about, write-off?"

Warren looked at him — actually looked, the way you look at a form you have to fill in and hand back — and Levi's jaw moved and his weight shifted back a half-inch onto his heels. A small thing. Nobody with their eyes half on the board would have caught it. Warren caught it, turned it over, put it down, and said nothing at all.

That landed worse than anything he could have said. He watched Levi figure that out.

"You laughing?" Levi said again, higher this time. "I'm late to the Awakening by a month and I still got a combat class out of it. Blade-dancer. You know what that is? That's a *combat* class. You couldn't hold a skill book backward. You're unclassed. You're a—"

"Three."

Levi stopped.

"Three," Warren said. "In the Showcase. You placed third."

"So did—"

"And you sleep through first period."

Something moved in the room. Not much. Twenty-four people, all of them looking at Levi now, and one of them off to the left shifted a foot on the tile, and another one further back turned her head a few degrees toward the person beside her, and that person looked back, and both of them looked away again. Nobody said anything. They didn't have to.

Warren kept his voice where it was. Level. Bored, even.

"I'm asking a real question," he said. "How do you place third in the Showcase and sleep through first period? Because I don't have a theory about that. I've had all night and I don't have one."

"I studied—"

"Did you?"

"*I studied!*"

"You know what I think," Warren said. "I think somebody found out what the prompt was going to be. I think somebody took it home over the weekend and paid a tutor to build the whole performance for him, line by line, so he could stand up on stage and move his arms in the right direction and get a number put next to his name. And I think the number was three."

Levi's face drained — forehead first, then the rest — and his hands closed and closed again, and his mouth worked twice with nothing coming out of it, and he took a step back into the desk behind him without seeming to know he had done it. The whole class saw it happen in real time, even the ones who'd been looking at their own shoes.

"That's a lie," Levi said. "That's — you can't prove — you don't *have* anything—"

"No," Warren said. "I don't. I've got a question. You've got an answer. It's going the way it's going."

He watched Levi hear the shape of it. The wrong door closing. The wrong name on the wrong paper. Somebody in the back row breathed out, audibly, and that was the whole thing — a class of people who had half-known something for two years, hearing it stop being half. Nobody had to say anything, and nobody did.

Levi's hands came unclenched. His voice dropped, which was going to be worse for him than yelling would have been.

"Say it again," he said. Quietly. "Say it in front of everyone again and I'll—"

"You'll what."

"*I'll —*" Levi stopped, and breathed, and Warren watched him work out that anything he did with his hands right now would settle the question permanently. The room was settled. The room had settled about ten seconds ago and Levi was the last one to notice.

That was when he grabbed the last thing on the table.

"You and me," Levi said. "Here. Now." He had his jaw set and his color coming back wrong, red instead of white, and he pointed at Warren without quite touching him. "You've been running your mouth off in front of all of them. Fine. Back it up. Ten days from now. This room. You write the questions, I answer them out loud in front of everyone. Off the senior curriculum — everything from it, nothing outside it. You think I cheated, then *prove* you're the one who's been paying attention." His voice climbed back up as he went. "And if I'm giving up ten days, so are you. You hit level ten by then. Ten days, level ten, and I take the whole thing back and put my name on it. Don't hit it, and you go up on the auditorium stage in front of the whole school and apologize to me by name, and the school feed gets all of it."

Levi stopped to breathe. He'd said it all in one run, like a man who had to get it out before he thought better of it.

Warren said nothing. He was running the numbers.

Ten days, and he'd read the same Guild booklet everybody else had. Level ten took an average Awakened six weeks to four months of steady runs. Faster with a team, a pass, and money. Slower if you were unclassed, because you couldn't hold a slot in anything above the intro floor and there were four people ahead of you in every queue at the Guild office every morning of the week.

Ten days was a joke. If you were anybody else, ten days was a joke.

He was not anybody else, and he had known that for about eleven minutes.

Level ten wasn't only a level. It was the line — the line on the Guild chart where a student could apply for the accelerated university track, and the line below which the placement offices wouldn't open your file at all. Hit it, and he could sit for a fall slot at Haverford or State. Get into Haverford, and there was real money on the back end, the kind of money that let his mother come off the night shift at the linen service for a quarter of the year.

And the books were real too. Combat-skill books ran around six figures. He'd checked once, downtown, out of a kind of cold curiosity, and then he'd walked home and never said the number to anybody.

Two books, in ten days, for the price of asking Levi Hale three questions off the curriculum.

Warren let him stand there in it.

"Frankie said something to me yesterday," he said. "After the scores got read out."

Levi was breathing through his nose.

"He said the whole thing is rigged and there's nothing to be done about it. He was right the first half."

"Just take the bet or don't."

"Make it two books," Warren said.

The room made a small noise.

"One from you and one you buy. By last period of the tenth day, both of them on the desk." He looked at Levi, and his eyes came down from the collar to the shoes, unhurried, the way you price something on a shelf. "And I'll take the auditorium," he said. "I'll take the feed. You can have both of those. That's the shape of it." He let a beat go by. "You answer in here. In the meantime I'd go home and start studying, if I were you. Three years is a lot to fit into ten days."

Levi Hale walked out.

He did it the way a person walks out when he wanted to have walked out the whole time and only just now found the door: grabbed his bag off the hook by the desk, caught his hip on the chair behind him and left it sitting crooked, hit the door and pulled it harder than the hinges wanted, and it gave the whole room a flat crack against the jamb, and the noise sat there.

Nobody moved for four seconds.

Then people started collecting their things, in ones and twos, tile-scraping, zipper-pulling, the ordinary sounds of a class standing up to leave. Nobody looked at Warren. Everybody looked at Warren. There was a specific way the whole room didn't look at him, and Warren caught it, and turned his phone over on the desk, and put his notebook in his bag one page at a time, and did not look up at any of them.

Frankie hadn't moved.

"Warren," he said.

"Yeah."

"What did you just do."

"Bought a book," Warren said.

"That's — you realize you just —" Frankie's hands were in the air and didn't know where to go. "You just bet a *whole school apology* on *ten levels in ten days*. Ten. Levels. In ten days, Warren. That's four months of runs with a good team, minimum. That's—" He stopped and looked at Warren's face and whatever he'd been about to say didn't come. "How are you not—"

"Because I'm going to do it," Warren said.

He said it without emphasis. That was the part Frankie kept coming back to, later, telling it — not the sentence, the way Warren had put it out there like a due date, level and indifferent, and then gone back to packing his bag.

"We're going to talk about this," Frankie said.

"Tomorrow."

"Tonight."

"Tomorrow." Warren closed his bag and stood up. "I've got a run."

His phone had started buzzing while he was talking, low and steady against the desktop. He picked it up and looked at the screen.

*Rudy*.

"Hey," he said.

"You're at school, right?" Rudy's voice was loud the way it always was, the way a person talks when he's decided the phone is going to carry half the conversation for him. "I'm out front. Not the parking lot — the front, the loop where the buses come. You're not answering texts."

"I'm answering now."

"So listen." Wind behind him, downtown somewhere — Warren could hear wind, and a car going by, and under all of it the low hum of his bike not quite at idle. "I've got a group. Four of us, that's the whole thing, except I'm on point, and point gets to pick one extra. So *one* extra, and I've been sitting on it for two days because I wanted you before I offered it to anybody else. Intro dungeon up past the bypass, level one to four, three hours if nothing goes bad, all four of us at the door by four-fifteen. Are you in."

Warren didn't answer right away.

He was standing in the aisle with his bag on his shoulder, and the room was emptying out around him, and down on the street three floors below Rudy was sitting on a bike the color of rust, and none of it — none of the classroom, none of what had just happened up against Levi Hale, none of the number he'd been carrying around in his head since last fall — had a single line of print on it that Rudy could read.

*Level one to four.* Three hours. One slot.

He turned his face toward the window.

The window was open a hand's width and the fan was moving the air in the room around and the air coming in from outside was hot and flat and smelled like the parking lot and somebody's grass. Down at the loop a bus pulled off from the curb, and the diesel grumble of it came up through the open window and into the room.

Behind his eyes, something moved.

[Options available:]

[Option A: Decline. Rudy runs his four without you.]

[Boon: +10% solo leveling efficiency, 24 hours.]

[Option B: Say nothing. Walk out the back door and run it alone.]

[+5 Spirit.]

[Option C: Say yes. Take the slot.]

[Boon: One random skill granted on dungeon entry.]

Warren looked at the three lines. The fan came around again.

"Warren?" Rudy said. "You there?"

Warren shifted the bag higher on his shoulder. He did not, yet, put a finger on any of them. Down on the loop the bus was already gone, and the sound of it was going with it, and the room was empty except for Frankie, still standing by the desk, watching him.