4. Chapter 4
Chapter four
J essica
The good seats in the assembly hall are the ones in the middle of a row, halfway back, where you can still hear and the heating actually reaches.
I know that now. Last year I sat at the end of the front row like an idiot.
"Left," Sophia says, steering me by the elbow. "Left, left — Declan, sit, you're blocking an entire nation."
We take up half a row. Torres on one side of me, Freya on the other, Declan folded into a seat clearly designed for someone with different legs, Renzo already slumped with his arms crossed and his eyes half shut in the exact posture of a man who is not paying attention and will be able to recite the entire assembly verbatim.
Somebody two rows up is looking at me.
I look back until she stops.
"Your public awaits," Sophia murmurs.
"Shut up."
Falken comes out onto the platform and the hall settles, and he doesn't even have to ask for it.
"Second year," he says.
That's the whole opening.
"Last year we taught you what it is to belong to wolf society. History. Law. Custom. Control." A pause. "This year we ask where you fit inside it."
Then he lists the five rotations, and I find myself sitting forward.
Protection and Security. Search and Rescue. Investigation and Intelligence. Leadership and Governance. Diplomacy and Community.
Real work, with faculty and with people who do it outside these walls. How we do in them shapes what comes after.
"You are not being sorted," Falken says. "You are not being ranked. Nobody in this hall is choosing a life today. You will try the work. You will discover what you're good at, which is frequently not what you expected, and what you cannot stand, which is equally useful."
Okay.
Okay, that actually sounds good.
Last year was survival. Get the Marks. Don't fail. Don't be the latent program experiment that proved everyone right.
Nobody ever asked me what I wanted. I still have no idea. I'd quite like to find out.
The schedules are in envelopes at the doors, and the corridor outside turns into a market.
"Search and rescue," Declan says, shining.
"You didn't even think about it," Renzo says.
"Why would I think about it? They've turned my actual job into a class."
"Investigation," Freya says, when I look at her. "And rescue. I'd like to try the first one before I decide."
Sophia opens hers and her whole face falls about a foot.
"Diplomacy and Community," she reads, in the voice of a woman reading her own death notice. " Community emphasis. "
"That's good!"
"That's the other half, Jessica. Community emphasis is where they let you organize a bake sale."
"You'll be in a room."
"I'll be in a hall . With trestle tables ."
Renzo shrugs when I get to him. "All of them. He said the point is to try things. I intend to be extremely bad at four and find out which one I'm not bad at."
Which is, annoyingly, the correct approach.
Torres reads his without any expression. "Protection." Then, before I can react: "Not because of you."
"I didn't say anything."
"You were about to say something."
"I was about to say something, I wasn't about to say that ."
"It's the only one of the five I've already done. I just did it badly and for the wrong people." He folds the page into his pocket. "I'd like to see what it looks like done properly."
Mine has a third page the others don't seem to be reading as hard.
Preliminary Recommendations. Advisory only. Based on first-year performance and faculty evaluation.
Leadership & Governance — Priority Recommendation.
And underneath, in normal type, Diplomacy & Community.
Sophia has it out of my hand before I finish reading it twice, because Sophia has never respected a boundary in her life.
"Oh my God," she says. "They're training you to be a princess."
"They are absolutely not."
"Jessica, it says priority ."
Declan takes the page off her without comment and hands it back to me.
Torres bumps his shoulder against mine as we start walking. He doesn't tell me it's fine, or that plenty of people would want it.
"You didn't ask for it," he says.
"No."
"Yeah." He looks straight ahead. "I'm sorry."
The training arena smells like rubber matting and old sweat and it is the first place all morning where nobody looks up when I come in.
Professor Voss is standing in the middle of it with his arms folded, wearing the same shirt he wore every day last year, watching second-years file through the doors with the expression of a man counting livestock.
His eyes land on me for about a second and a half.
"Miller."
"Professor."
"Your hands are down."
I haven't done anything yet. I've walked eleven feet.
"You came through the door with them down," he says, and moves on.
I could kiss him.
Not literally. I have enough problems.
But every single person I have spoken to since April has looked at me like a question they're not sure they're allowed to ask, and this man has looked at me for one and a half seconds and told me my guard is bad.
It's the best thing that's happened to me in four months.
"Second year," Voss says, when the doors close. "Last year I taught you how not to die."
He lets that sit for exactly as long as it needs to.
"This year we're going to find out whether you can keep the person next to you alive."
Somebody near the back makes a noise.
"You'll be fighting with a partner. You'll be fighting for a partner.
You'll be getting people out of places they can't get out of themselves, some of whom will be panicking, most of whom will be heavier than you, and none of whom will be helpful.
" He unfolds his arms. "Before any of that, I need to know what you've each retained over the summer.
Pair up as I call it. Two minutes each. Try not to embarrass me. "
He goes down the room.
"Soren. Miller."
Of course.
Evren Soren comes across the mat, taking his jacket off as he walks, and stops in front of me with an expression of total neutrality.
"Did you piss him off?" I say.
"Frequently."
"Recently?"
"Continuously."
He's a head and a half taller than me and roughly the shape of a door. Last year that would have finished the conversation before it started.
"Two minutes," Voss says. "Go."
Soren comes in slowly.
And I clock it immediately, because Luke spent months teaching me to watch shoulders and hips instead of hands, and Soren's shoulders aren't committing to anything.
He's being careful with me.
He remembers last year. He remembers the girl who couldn't hold a stance and flinched at everything, and he has decided, kindly, in the interests of not humiliating a scholarship student in front of the class, to go easy.
Oh, I don’t fucking think so big guy.
I let him take my wrist, because he's expecting me to pull away from it, and instead I go toward him.
Inside his reach, where all that height stops being an advantage and starts being a lever.
My shoulder into his ribs. My foot behind his ankle, which is exactly where he left it, because he wasn't taking this seriously enough to move it.
Then I use every pound of him against himself, the way I got shown over and over in an empty gym every afternoon, and Soren goes down flat on his back with a sound like a dropped bookcase.
The room stops.
I stand over him with my heart going and my hands, for once in my life, up.
Soren lies there and looks at the ceiling for a second.
Then he looks at me, and it happens again — the smile, small, about a quarter of a second, gone before anyone else in the room could swear to it.
"Again," he says.
The second round is a completely different experience.
He doesn't leave his ankle anywhere. He doesn't let me inside. He puts me on the mat twice in ninety seconds, both times without any apparent effort, and the second time I stay down for a beat longer than my pride would like.
But he's working for it now. I can hear him breathing.
That's the part I wanted.
"Better," Voss says, from somewhere behind me. It is not clear which of us he's talking to and I suspect that's deliberate.
I'm hauling myself up off the mat when a voice cuts across from the benches, pitched to carry.
"Amazing what a year of private lessons with Lucian Draeven can do for a girl."
Natasha is sitting on the low wall with her wraps half done.
Everybody hears it. That's the point of it.
And she's not wrong, which is the irritating part. I don’t think everyone at the academy knew that before, but now they certainly do.
"It is," I say. "You should ask him for some."
Somebody laughs and tries to take it back.
Natasha's chin comes up.
"You—"
"Enough."
Voss hasn't moved. He hasn't raised his voice either.
"If the two of you have enough breath to argue," he says, "you've got enough breath to work. Mat. Now."
Oh, fuck.
Natasha is good.
Annoyingly, genuinely good. She's been trained properly and expensively since she could walk, and it shows in the first ten seconds. Her stance is textbook. Her hands are where mine are supposed to be. She doesn't waste anything.
She hits me twice in the first thirty seconds, and the second one catches my mouth, and I taste blood and get genuinely, thoroughly angry.
And I feel it.
That heat coming up out of my chest and down my arms, the whole body going loud, the thing that lives underneath now.
This is it, some part of my brain says, absolutely delighted. This is exactly the kind of moment. Come on.
I reach for it the way I've reached for it a hundred times in a field all summer.
Nothing.
Not a flicker. Not a pull. Just a girl on a mat with a split lip and a mouthful of blood, exactly as human as she was yesterday.
Natasha comes in again while I'm still somewhere else and puts me on the floor.
Right.
Fine.
I get up.
She's better than me. She's cleaner than me, she's faster than me, and she has been doing this since she was six. What she has never once had to do is fight someone who doesn't care about looking stupid.
So I stop trying to trade with her.