28. Raven
Raven
The red flare goes up.
I'm already moving.
The flare is Azalea's — the one signal I gave her for the single circumstance in which I drop everything, regardless of where I am or what I'm holding or how badly I need what I'm holding.
I am forty feet from the pinch where the first two fire drakes are waiting.
I have spent an hour building toward this exact minute.
The first is set. The second is set. If I walk that corridor in the next sixty seconds I have them precisely where I've been working all morning to have them.
The flare burns out against the sky.
I'm already moving south.
Not fast. Fast is predictable. Fast by the shortest road is what the third one is counting on — he made this happen, which means he worked out what it would produce, and what it produces is me arriving committed and reacting along a route anyone could name.
If he's put anything in the main corridors, fast and direct walks me straight into it.
So I go up.
The west face of the south dormitory has a drainage pipe I used twice in Year Two for training and tested my weight against both times.
It's bolted to the stone every eight feet with anchors far heavier than drainage requires, a decision by the facilities office that I thought was excessive at the time and have been grateful for ever since.
The pipe puts me on the second-floor ledge in twenty-two seconds.
The stone is cold enough through my palms to feel like it's taking something.
The window latch is the standard kind Balor covered in the Year Two session on getting into buildings — the session everybody thought was absurdly specific and that I have now used three times.
It opens from outside if you press the lower left corner of the frame at the right angle while lifting the handle. Four seconds.
Twenty-six seconds total from the base of the pipe.
No announcement. No warning. The third fire drake is somewhere in this building and he has had the time between Azalea's flare and my arrival to set himself. If he set up at the stairwell door, which is the obvious place, he is facing the door.
He isn't facing the window.
I go through the window.
? ? ?
The stairwell drops away below me.
I land on the second-floor landing and I read the whole of it in the time it takes to find my feet.
This is the thing Balor drills until it stops being a decision: look before you commit, because what a place is when you land in it is never quite what it looked like from outside.
It takes one second. One second is enough.
Bella at the foot of the stairs. One arm out, bleeding through a tourniquet she's made from her own jacket sleeve.
She's standing the way someone stands who has been in a fight a long time and is managing it rather than winning it — feet wide, weight low, the shape that spends as little as possible while still covering the way in.
She has been doing this twenty minutes and she is doing it correctly.
The cut isn't slowing her. She's working around it.
A fourth-year green dragon between her and the corridor door. His back is to me. He was watching Bella, not the window. Blade out. He moved it to his left hand when she dropped into that stance, which is either a choice or a sign he's been fighting left-handed the whole time. Either way I keep it.
The third fire drake on the upper landing, above me, mid-shift. The air around him wrong — shimmering, dry, too warm, and the smell of him filling the stairwell like something scorched.
Bella's eyes find me the instant I land.
Her face changes, though not in any way visible from where the green dragon is standing.
I know her face. What crosses it is recognition and the discipline of not letting it show, the composure of a woman who has just been handed the most useful thing in her fight and has no intention of giving it away.
I move.
The fire drake first. Not a preference — an order of danger. He's mid-shift, which makes him unpredictable and immediately lethal in a way the green dragon, still human and committed to a blade, is not. The half-shifted one is the thing I can't predict. He goes first.
He's six feet above me and the heat is already coming off him in a way I can feel as pressure, as dryness at the back of my throat. Fire drakes run hot in human form. Mid-change they run like an open forge.
I don't give him time to finish.
The acid is directed. The narrow, concentrated stream I can produce when the dragoness is fully forward and the intent is exact.
Not the indiscriminate kind. This is a tool with a purpose — break the change, collapse it, take the threat away without taking the person.
Balor was very particular about that distinction.
The Purge permits killing. That doesn't mean every fight requires it.
It hits him center mass.
The change collapses. He goes down on the upper landing, everything his body had been building for the shift suddenly going sideways in him, and the sound he makes is not one I will forget quickly.
He will be in a great deal of pain. He will not be able to shift for a week. He will be found. He will live.
The green dragon turns around.
? ? ?
He's bigger than me in human form.
Not by much — he's a fourth-year, built for it, four years of Shadowcarve visible in how he moves as he turns.
He reads the landing in about a second. The fire drake down.
Me above him, scales up along my forearms. And he does the arithmetic fast. I'm smaller.
I've just spent a great deal of acid. I have a second problem on the upper landing.
He has a blade, he has four years, and he has the momentum of a fight he was winning until forty seconds ago.
He is wrong about all of it except the blade and the four years.
He starts moving and I let him. The thing Balor teaches about a committed opponent — someone who has chosen the fight and is already inside the choosing — is that trying to turn him before he arrives works far worse than using what he brings with him.
You wait for the commitment. You don't argue with it. You put it somewhere else.
He closes.
He has four years of training.
He has been fighting my sister in a stairwell for twenty minutes.
I have been fighting since the bell, and the dragoness has been fully forward for an hour, and my shoulder is burning, and the anger I have been banking since the beginning of all of this is, at this precise moment, exactly where it needs to be.
The movement is from the third session of Year Two Advanced Shadowcarve.
The one Balor showed us once and then made us run until it lived in the body instead of the head.
It needs full talons, a particular entry angle that borrows his momentum rather than meeting it, and total commitment.
There is no careful version. You do it or you don't.
I do it.
It works because it doesn't oppose force. It takes force and finishes the sentence. His own forward motion becomes part of the movement, and the talons meet the commitment rather than the man arriving.
It takes four seconds.
He doesn't get up.
I stand in the stairwell and let the dragoness settle and look at what I have done.
The Purge permits lethal engagement. Those are the institution's words, and they cover this the way a sheet covers furniture.
I think about Finlay's rite — the acknowledgment that has to be in my own words, the accounting of what was there before and what is gone.
I think: fourth-year. Shadowcarve. Blade. Chose to corner my sister. Chose to stay while she was bleeding. Made his arithmetic about me and was wrong about what I am.
The formal record will carry his name and the circumstance and the date.
My words will have to carry what I saw in his face in the second before he came — the look of someone who has decided and is past the place where deciding can be undone.
He was past it before he turned around. I didn't make this outcome. I finished it.
I will write it honestly.
After.
? ? ?
Bella is staring at me.
Her face is doing several things at once, and I know every one of them, because I have known this face since we were children in the same nest. What she saw.
What she is choosing not to show about what she saw.
What she is choosing not to say because we are standing inside an active Purge and this is not the moment.
Bella's particular intelligence has always been for reading rooms. She knows this isn't the moment.
"Are you hurt?" I say.
She opens her mouth. "You just—"
"Are you hurt?"
A beat. Something in her face settles into the thing she's choosing. "My arm."
I cross to her. Blood has gone down her sleeve and dried tacky at the cuff.
The cut is longer than I'd like but clean, a straight edge with no tearing, which means it will close properly once it's bound right.
The sleeve tourniquet is doing its immediate job.
She tied it correctly, which means she had the presence of mind to bind her own arm in the middle of a fight.
I'm not surprised. I have always known her composure was better than her theatrics suggested.
I get the kit out and work fast. Three-layer compression, from Balor's first session on this — the one meant for a forearm that has to keep moving without losing circulation. Firm. Even. I check it after.
"Close your hand."
She does. The grip is strong. The arm works.
"Twenty minutes?"
"About. The fire drake found me first, when I came back from the north grounds.
Azalea saw it from the north walk and put the flare up before I lost sight of her — I told her to run and she ran.
" She says it evenly, the voice she uses when she's reporting to herself as much as to me.
"The green dragon came in around ten minutes.
Saw I was already busy and decided that was an opportunity.
He was faster than the fire drake and less experienced.
I kept the fire drake between us as long as I could. "
"You did well."
She looks at me steadily. That's the look she uses when she's received something she intends to keep rather than answer. "I used the vial."
"On which one?"
"The fire drake. Fifteen minutes in, when he got close enough. It didn't stop him — different body — but it wrecked his heat for long enough that I could move and keep the door open." A pause. "I was very responsible with it."
"I know you were." I tie the last knot. "That will hold. Don't ask the arm for anything at full extension."
"Understood."
We don't discuss the landing. We don't discuss what she saw, or what I did, or what four seconds cost. We step over the fire drake on the upper landing with the deliberate efficiency of two people who have a next thing and are going to do it.
In the corridor outside, Bella says, "You need to go back."
"Yes."
"Two of them at the pinch."
"Yes."
"They've had—" she works it out, quick, her father's arithmetic sitting under it "—eight minutes since the flare. They know it worked. They know you came south. They'll be moving."
"They'll assume I came through the main corridors and I'm coming back the same way. They'll have set up for a straight approach."
"So you go crooked."
"So I go crooked."
She nods once. "I'll find Azalea. We'll stay together and stay out of the eastern grounds until you send the all-clear through the bond." She looks at me sideways. "Your shoulder."
"Sealed. Working."
"Good." She looks at me a moment — not the long look, the short one that does the same work. "Go. We're fine."
I look at her one more time. The bound arm.
The steady face. Her father's discipline sitting in her eyes over the top of everything she's carrying out of that stairwell.
She is fine. She has been fine for twenty minutes in a situation most people would not have been fine in for five.
The composure she wears for performance is the same composure she reaches for in a crisis, and I have never been more grateful for that in her than I am right now.
I squeeze her good hand.
I go.
The shoulder burns. There are two fire drakes at the pinch who have had eight minutes to think. The Purge has nearly three days left to run, and Samara is still somewhere on these grounds.
I go back to work.