Page 63 of Raven’s Fight

I lie in the room that smells of her and of cold mountain air, and I think: she's right. She will.

And I think: twelve days.

I get up. I get dressed. I go to work.

Chapter 22

Raven

The day before the night before, I wake up and I go to Tactics.

This is a choice. There are things I could be doing instead. A last look at everything we have. A check-in with Keir on the border rotation. Another pass over the four fire drake records to see whether I've missed anything. The pre-Purge walk of the grounds that Balor has offered twice and I've declined twice. I've declined because I already know those grounds — three years of training on them, every path and corridor walkable in the dark with my eyes shut — and walking them today with intent would tip me out of the present and into the anticipating. I need to stay present.

The Purge starts tomorrow night. Everything I need to know, I know. Everything that needed doing before it starts is done. The work now is not to keep working. The work is to still be the person who does what needs doing when the bell rings, rather than the person who spent the last day running every scenario until the scenarios crowded out the clarity.

So I go to Tactics. I sit in my usual seat. I watch Callan pin the scenario to the board.

I've seen it before — not this exact one, this kind. A contested resource, several claimants, and incomplete knowledge of what each of them can actually do as against what they've let everyone believe they can do. The classroom version of a problem I've been living inside for months, which means I could run the standard answer in about seven minutes, hand it in, and score well.

Instead I solve it three ways.

The first is the textbook answer, clean and elegant, spending as little as possible. The second takes a deliberately worse road to the same place, to see whether the longer route changes anything about where you arrive. It does, slightly — the long way turns up a consequence further down the line that the clean answer never surfaces. I note that. The third treats the missing information as the actual problem rather than a condition to work around, and builds toward finding out what I don't know before committing anything. It's slower. It's far more certain.

I hand in all three.

Callan gives all three the same mark, which I only learn at the end of class when he tells me. He reads them through in order, then looks up with the expression he wears when something has landed exactly where he built it to land. "Same mark because all three do the job," he says. "Different marks would say one method is better than the others. It isn't. What's right depends on where you're standing."

"I know," I say. "I wanted to see whether you'd say it."

"I know you did." He picks up the papers. "Get some sleep tonight."

I go.

✦ ✦ ✦

Lunch is loud.

Bella has found something objectionable in the hot food and is making that known with the theatrical energy she brings to all food complaints — not actually upset, performing upset well enough to satisfy an audience, because the performance is where the fun is. Azalea is defending the cafeteria with equal energy from the opposite direction, just as theatrical, just as uninvested in the actual question of the food, feeding off the friction the way she's fed off Bella's friction since they were hatchlings in the same nest.

Orpheus eats without objection and watches them both with the dry satisfaction of a man who enjoys other people's performances and has the self-control not to join in.

I eat my food. It's bad. That's fine. The food has been consistently bad for three years and the consistency is its own comfort, the known thing in the known place.

"The potato thing," Bella says, pointing at my plate. "That's not a potato thing."

"It's what they said when I asked."

"They're wrong."

"I think it's a root of some kind," Azalea says. "Not a potato. In the potato family."

"The potato family should be ashamed," Bella says.

Orpheus makes the sound that passes for his laugh. I eat the root thing, which is fine, because it doesn't taste of much, which means it doesn't taste of anything bad.

No strategy. No hand signs. No planning sessions dressed as meals, no briefings dressed as conversation. Bella and Azalea argue about the cafeteria for eleven minutes and then swerve with no warning into a story about Allister, who is apparently in the middle of an elaborate situation with someone in his year that started with a borrowed book and has escalated far past anything a borrowed book should be able to cause. The story is not tactical. It is funny. I laugh in the right places and in a few wrong ones, because it's funnier than they're telling it and Orpheus's commentary underneath is making it worse.

My siblings are exactly themselves today. That's the most useful thing they could possibly be, and they have no idea it's useful, which makes it more so. Nothing in it is performed — not the food, not Allister, not Orpheus running under the noise like a warm current. They're just themselves, the way they always are, and I'm with them, the way I always am, and for an hour none of us is anything else.