Ash and Ember

CHAPTER TEN Ranked at the Bottom

What am I going back for. I know the answer. I just don't say it out loud because saying it out loud makes it a plan, and plans can fail, and I've watched enough things I needed fall apart to have strong feelings about naming them before they're ready.

The instructor from last night didn't tell me his name.

He said: I know what you are. Three months. And then a junior staff member appeared at the corridor junction and he looked at me for one more second , the look of someone deferring a conversation, not ending it , and he walked away. I closed the door. Sophie said nothing, which meant she had a great deal to say and was choosing to wait. I lay on the cot and stared at the ceiling and thought about what it means for someone to wait three months for you, and whether it's supposed to feel threatening or like something else.

I'm still thinking about it when they line us up for intake assessments at dawn.

The assessment hall is exactly what the building outside promised , functional, stripped of anything decorative, designed for the production of clear information. Five stations along the far wall: strength test, speed circuit, combat instinct drill, wolf-shift quality evaluation, and a final marker I can't identify from the entrance because a cluster of students is blocking the sign. The process is straightforward. They watch you. They write things down. They sort you.

I move through each station and I make decisions.

Not about whether to perform , I've never performed, performing is too uncertain, too dependent on what the audience wants. About how much to show. The question I've been answering my whole life in different rooms, with different stakes: how much of yourself is safe to let out right now, in this place, with these people watching.

I land in the middle of each category. Deliberately. Not so far back that I fail , I need to pass, I need to be here, I have nowhere else to be , but far enough from the top that the numbers don't draw attention. I could run the speed circuit in sixty percent of the time I actually run it. I run it in eighty. I could end the combat instinct drill in the first exchange. I let it go to three.

I notice the assessor at the strength station log my result without looking at my face. I notice the combat drill evaluator look at my hair before she looks at her ledger. I file both of these things with the part of my brain that keeps records, the part that has been keeping records since I was thirteen, the part that does not forget.

Third cohort. Middle rankings, manageable expectations, the category that says competent but not remarkable. The intake officer reads it off his board and ticks something and moves to the next name.

Beside me, Sophie is placed in the second cohort, which is better than she expected and which she does not celebrate out loud because she's watching my face. I look at her and shake my head slightly, which means I'm fine. She reads it correctly and moves on.

She always reads me correctly. I don't tell her often enough how much that costs her and how much it means to me.

The mess hall at lunch is a map.

I've always read rooms as maps , entry points, load-bearing structures, where the power sits and where it flows. The Academy's social geography is already establishing itself on day one, which tells me this is a place with a strong existing culture and new arrivals are expected to find their position within it rather than contribute to reshaping it. Senior cohorts at the back, farthest from the cold draught that comes in every time the main door opens. Mid-ranks in the middle. New arrivals at the front, nearest the kitchen noise and the smell of the serving vats.

Sophie and I take a table at the edge of the new arrivals section , not the front, not quite. The edge, where you can see the room without being the most visible thing in it. She eats. I watch.

I note who moves through the space like they own it and who recalibrates as they walk, adjusting their path around the people who do. I note the girl at the senior table who hasn't looked at her food once , she's been reading the new arrivals since they sat down, cataloguing with the same efficiency I'm using on the room. I note the boy beside her who leans in to say something and she doesn't react, eyes still moving. Both of them are going to matter at some point. I don't know for whom yet.

And then I note him.

He's at a table near the west wall with two other instructors , older than him, both carrying the particular ease of people who have been here long enough that the institution is comfortable around them. He's reading something, a folded document, eating without looking at his plate the way people eat when food is fuel and attention is currency. He hasn't looked up since I clocked him, which means he's either fully absorbed or performing absorption.

He's the only person in the room not performing for anyone.

That fact is more noticeable than any performance would have been. In a room full of people establishing themselves , where to sit, who to sit near, what expression to wear while they do it , his complete indifference to the audience around him reads like a kind of authority. Not arrogance. Just the absence of the thing the rest of us are still doing.

I look back at my food.

The third-cohort training session is in the afternoon. Their assigned instructor is young , mid-twenties at most , with the energy of someone who has been given authority recently and is still calibrating how much to use it. He looks at the assembled group with assessing eyes, and when they reach me they pause in the specific way that means he's processing several things at once: the hair, the pack designation on my intake form that says independent, the girl who arrived with nothing and no one.

He pairs me with the largest student in the group for the sparring demonstration.

I recognise this. It's the same logic as the training ground back home , you put the anomaly against something imposing and see what happens. If she loses, you've established the order. If she wins, you've learned something.

I win. I make it take longer than it should. Not by struggling , by being selective, covering my fastest combinations, letting him set the rhythm and then redirecting it rather than overriding it. I take one hit to the left shoulder that I could have avoided, and I let it land, because landing a hit on me makes my opponent look functional and makes my victory look like a close thing rather than an inevitability.

The instructor marks something in his ledger. I know the sound of that particular pen movement , the quick, finalising stroke of a box being checked. I have been sorted.

Walking back to quarters, Sophie falls into step beside me and says, with the precision of someone who has been waiting all afternoon to say exactly this: "You could have won that in the first thirty seconds."

"I know."

"Half that. You could have ended it in fifteen."

"Probably."

"Why didn't you?"

I'm quiet for long enough that it becomes its own answer, but she waits, so I give her the actual one. "Because I'm new here. Because Blackrock follows me as a story even if it can't follow me in person. Because if I go up too fast, too visible, before anyone in this place knows who I am rather than what they've decided I am,"

"Someone will try to take it from you," Sophie says.

"Someone will find a way to make it not count. Yes."

She nods. She thinks about it with the honest consideration she gives everything. Then: "That's very smart." A pause. "It's also exhausting. Doesn't it get,"

"Yes," I say.

Flat. Honest. I'm too tired to construct anything more than that, and Sophie doesn't need construction, she needs what's true. "Yes, it's exhausting. Managing how much of myself is visible at any given moment has been exhausting since I was eight years old and I don't know how to stop because stopping has always cost something I couldn't afford to pay."

Sophie is quiet. The kind of quiet that means she's holding something and deciding whether to say it.

"What would it feel like," she says eventually, "to just , not? Not manage it?"

"I don't know."

"You must have imagined,"

"If I'd imagined it seriously, I would have done it. And if I'd done it at home, I'd be," I stop. "It doesn't matter what I'd be. It didn't happen there. Maybe it happens here. Eventually."

"It matters," Sophie says, with the soft, steady certainty she uses when she's decided something is true and is not going to be argued out of it. "The fact that you've never been allowed to just be at your full capacity , that's not a quirk of your personality, Mona, that's something that was done to you, and it matters, and I think you're doing it again here and I think,"

"I think," I say, very carefully, "that you should trust me to know this particular battlefield better than you do."

Her mouth closes. She thinks about it. She opens her mouth.

"Fine," she says. "But one day."

"One day. Not today."

"One day," she says, "someone is going to make it safe enough that you just,"

"Ashveil."

We both stop.

He's behind us. I don't know how long he's been behind us or how he walks that quietly on packed gravel, and the fact that I didn't hear him is information about him that I'm going to think about later. He's in a different coat than last night , something grey and plain, instructor's uniform, the Academy crest at the shoulder , and he's looking at me with the same expression he has apparently decided to wear whenever I'm in his eyeline. The unsettled-room look. The I-was-expecting-this-but-not-quite-this look.

"Third cohort," he says. Not a question. A statement with a particular quality , not disapproval, something more like disagreement.

"Intake assessments confirmed it," I say.

"Intake assessments confirmed what you showed them." His voice is even. Careful in the way of someone who chooses words with an awareness of their load-bearing capacity. "Which wasn't everything."

Sophie makes a small, quickly suppressed sound beside me.

I look at him. He looks back. The evening light is doing something to his eyes , that colour I couldn't name last night, warmer at the edge , and I make a conscious decision not to spend time on it.

"If you have concerns about the assessment process," I say, "I'm sure the intake office would be interested to hear them."

Something shifts at the corner of his mouth. Not quite a smile. The ghost of something that might have been a smile in a different circumstance, in a person who smiled more often. "I have concerns about the assessment process," he says. "I have more concerns about a student who placed third cohort on purpose and thinks I didn't notice."

The warmth in my chest stirs.

"What's your name?" I ask.

A pause. Brief. Like the question surprised him, which interests me, because I don't think this man surprises easily.

"Derek," he says.

"Derek." I let the word sit for a second, finding its shape. "You said last night that you've been waiting three months. What exactly have you been waiting for?"

He looks at me for a long moment. Then: "For you to arrive somewhere I could say this without your pack's walls around you." A beat. "I need to show you something. Tonight, after the evening session. Come to the north tower."

"Why would I do that?"

"Because," he says, and there is something in his voice that is not performance and not calculation but something that sits below both of those, something that costs him something to say, "I knew your grandmother before you did. And she sent me to find you."