Page 77

It came back fast, and the speed of it was the thing, not the answer. It came back a quarter-second faster than a real answer came. I didn’t push because I’d learned that much.

But a boy two rows over hadn’t. A Force kid, broad, restless, the kind with more nerve than sense, who’d spent the whole lecture bouncing his knee and clearly thought the diagrams were the most interesting thing he’d seen all term. He caught something in the air the way a class caught the scent of a teacher who didn’t want to be asked. And he leaned in instead of away.

“What about four?” He didn’t even put his hand up, just said it into the quiet, grinning like it was a clever thing to have thought of. “I was told there used to be bonds with more than just three when I was a boy.”

The hall went a particular kind of quiet and Sallow’s composure thinned. “Four does not bond,” he said. “Four tears itself apart.” Sallow didn’t draw it, and we all knew why.

“But a square is stable,” the boy said, saying what we were all thinking.

“Add a fourth point to a stable three,” he said, “and you double the current with nothing to route it through. It doesn’t form as a square. Every member feels the power through the bond at once. It is not a failure that fades, children, like a sprain that heals wrong. It is a structure pulling itself to pieces with the people still inside it.”

A beat, and then quieter, almost to himself, the part I would write down and underline twice. “Unless a bond had at its center some sufficient anchor. A single still point that could carry the overload. Could take the current of all of them through itself, and give it somewhere to go that was not them.” He stopped, and something moved behind his face, but I was too far away and too unfamiliar with the man to understand what. He gathered his notes as he continued louder this time, “But there is no such thing. There never has been. A fourth is death. The records are unanimous. We will move on.”

And he moved on briskly, to bond-sickness and severance and the proper forms of grief, the way a man moved on from a thing he had decided not to have said. I sat there with my pencil not moving and a cold going down the back of my neck that had nothing to do with the stone.

A single still point that could take the current of all of them through itself.

He’d said it like it was impossible, the exact way the footnote had said resonant pairs, a thing ruled through and superseded, a door with the handle filed off. He had described, in one sentence, for one unguarded breath, precisely the kind of impossible thing a missing book got pulled off a shelf to bury. And then he’d told us, firmly, that it didn’t exist.

I just copied his sentence into my notes, word for word, to take out and look at when I was alone.

And then I looked at Linden. I’d been looking at Linden and Kit out of the corner of my eye on and off for the whole hour, if I was honest.

Linden had gone still, not paying-attention still but the other one, pen stopped dead against the page and eyes down. The exact stillness that had come over him at the resonant-pairs footnote in the stacks, and again at the gap on the high shelf where a volume should have been. The stillness of someone who already knew the thing being said, who had known it a long time, and had decided at some cost never to be the one to say it.

I knew that stillness now because I’d been collecting it for weeks like a girl pressing leaves. It meant a Fenwick was sitting on the answer.

He didn’t look up but felt me looking, I was sure of it, the way I was always sure of it, and he kept his eyes on the page and his hand still and gave me nothing. That was its own kind of answer too.

Before I could think about Linden any more Professor Sallow cleared his throat in a way that anyone would be able to tell meant that he was uncomfortable with what he was about to say, which made me look away from Linden and back to the professor.

“Sex is a way of reaffirming the bond once a triad has coalesced. It’s common for emotions and desires to run rampant as you adapt to the feedback you receive through the bond. It’s not just power that gets transferred between one point and another, but emotions as well. When one point feels desire, the others do as well, which is why it can be so, uh, hard to regulate when the bond is first formed. Please keep in mind the codes of conduct once you are bonded and restrict any…encounters to the designated areas.”

He made it sound like everyone was just going to be fucking every chance they got and that they had special little rooms just for that. My mind flicked back to the nook that Kit and I had practiced in and suddenly I wondered what exactly it was there for. Maybe it wasn’t a study area like I’d thought?

My gaze strayed from the flustered Professor Sallow to Kit and he turned toward me ever so slightly, but didn’t look at me, which was probably just as well. If he had I might have blushed with the images that were going through my head at that moment.

Then as though my mind couldn’t get enough of me embarrassing myself I looked at Linden and found him looking at me before he jerked his gaze back to his paper. A blush did spread up my cheeks them, I was sure of it from the sudden heat blazing in my body.

I caught Linden after class, or I tried to, Kit was already long gone. The lecture broke and the hall emptied in its little knots and clusters. Linden was up and moving with that economy of his, no wasted step, already most of the way to the door by the time I had my bag over my shoulder.

“Linden.”

He stopped, because he always stopped for me. The thing about him, the thing I was only beginning to understand, was that a man who gave the rest of the world nothing would stop dead in a doorway because I’d said his name.

“You went quiet,” I said. Low, because there were still people in the room. “In there.”

“I’m always quiet.” There was a faint thing at the corner of his mouth that wasn’t quite a smile, deflection done gently, which was how Linden deflected. Kit threw a joke like a flash of light to make me look away, while Linden just went smooth and still and offered me a door out of the question politely, so I’d feel rude taking the other one.

I took the other one. “Not like that,” I said. “You went quiet like the footnote. Like the shelf.”

For a second there was a flicker behind his eyes, there and gone. I thought he might actually give me a true sentence.

He didn’t.

“It’s a hard lecture,” he said. “People die in it, at the end. The severance part.” He shifted his bag on his shoulder. “I’ll see you at the stacks.”

TWENTY-SIX