Page 58 of Raven’s Fight

I write it at the top of the page I keep behind the desk panel where nobody will look. Two weeks. Then I cross it out. Not because it's wrong — because crossing it out and writing it again is something I've done since the Purge date went on the calendar, a private ritual with no reason behind it that I keep performing anyway. The number sits differently once you've written it and struck it through. More real. The way saying a thing out loud changes its weight, the way repeating a problem moves it out of the part of your mind that avoids things and into the part that solves them.

I've been carrying this number for weeks. Six when it was six. Four when it was four. A steady count that has come along to every class and every patrol report and every council. It's been with me the way weather is with you — not always at the front of your attention, always there at the edges.

Two weeks.

I have the names.

✦ ✦ ✦

The records come through Callan's adjunct route — the same one Balor used to arrange Keir's visitor mark, which is kept in a different book than the one Anipe watches. Callan pulls them without raising anything, logs the access as part of his ordinary review of his own students, and leaves the files on the east tower desk at the end of a Tactics session when the room is empty.

I read them standing at the desk before I go.

Four students. Four histories. Four paths into Dragonis Academy that all run through the same office — Anipe's — and that all share the same quiet resemblance if you know what to look for. The paperwork is complete, consistent, and slightly too smooth. Real records have texture. They carry the marks of institutions that don't talk to each other cleanly, transfer credits that don't quite line up, personal statements that read like somebody was nervous and rewrote them three times. These are clean in a way real ones almost never are.

They were built. Assembled by someone who understood what a real record looks like and copied the shape of it instead of the thing.

The first. Enrolled eighteen months ago, second year now. Home listed as a small settlement in the western territories, which Keir's border survey marked as holding a fire drake population. Courses all practical, nothing theoretical — combat heavy, movement heavy, the schedule of someone who came here to build one skill rather than an education. His marks show steady competence and nothing more. Good enough to clear every threshold, never good enough to draw an instructor's eye. That's its own discipline. Being good enough to look ordinary is harder than being obviously good.

I follow his movements through the course records. Which classes, which hours, which instructors. He's in Balor's practical sessions twice a week, which puts him in the main courtyard when the courtyard is crowded. Good cover. But last term he chose an elective in outdoor terrain navigation, and that course runs along the western boundary of the academy grounds. The same western boundary the fire drake rotation sits outside of.

Not a coincidence.

The second. Enrolled fourteen months ago, and her papers put her in the northern territory, which is the odd one out. Either a different route in, or the appearance of one. The same smoothness underneath. Her record carries one strange entry: a distinction in a Shadowcarve elective that requires six weeks of sustained close work with the other students in it. The kind of closeness that gives you regular, unremarkable access to the scent of everyone around you. The kind that lets you build a catalog without anyone noticing you're building one.

She was chosen for that. Her work here isn't combat.

The third. Enrolled sixteen months ago, second year, and on paper the least interesting of the four — competent, unremarkable, a schedule with no shape to it at all. That's what makes him worth looking at. Every course he's taken puts him somewhere central at a busy hour. He isn't training for anything. He's learning the building.

The fourth. Callan's confirmed match, the transfer with the invented school. Twelve months enrolled, third year. His record is the most carefully built of them — too carefully. It has what looks like a flaw in it, two transferred credits that don't quite fit the rest of the transcript, which would ordinarily be a mark of authenticity. Except the flaw sits in a subject where the real records for that institution, which I pulled from the continental archive, show they never taught those units at all. Someone added the inconsistency to make the thing look real. They just didn't have accurate material to build it from.

There's one more thing, and it holds across all four.

They have never sat in a class with Orpheus. Never been enrolled in any session that also lists Bella or Azalea. In an institution this size, with three of them here over a year, no overlap at all with those specific people doesn't happen by chance. Somebody has been steering them away.

That's discipline. They aren't here for sport, aren't collecting grievances, aren't doing any of the casual violence a badly briefed plant falls into. They're here for one target on one day, and everything else — every class, every meal, every day they've spent inside these walls — has been arranged to keep that day intact.

I close the files. I take them to Balor.

✦ ✦ ✦

Balor's office has the quality of rooms that belong entirely to the person using them. It smells of old leather and the mineral dust of the training grounds, and the books on the shelves aren't decoration. They're used, the spines broken at the pages he goes back to. He's behind his desk when I knock, which he always is at this hour, and when I come in his face does the thing it does when he's about to receive something he expected and hoped not to need.

I put the files down.

He reads them in silence. It takes seven minutes, which is thorough — he isn't skimming, he's reading what I read and looking for what I looked for and finding it. When he's done he closes the top file, sets both hands flat on the desk, and looks at me.

"Anipe's office," he says.

"All four. The paperwork is built the same way across every file. Same smoothness. Same lack of any honest mess."

He nods once. His face goes very flat, the way it goes when something confirms a suspicion he didn't want confirmed. "I had questions about the second one when she enrolled. That distinction was unusual for the background on her papers." A pause. "I raised it with Anipe."

"And?"

"She produced supporting documentation that answered the question." He looks at me. "The supporting documentation was also too smooth."

"But you accepted it."