18. Chapter 18
Chapter eighteen
Jessica
The meeting's at ten, in the long room in administration with the bad radiator.
I know the radiator. I sat under it while Voss told us a net had been built for something my size. Freya sat beside me. Corvin was two days out of surgery.
The radiator knocks twice and goes quiet.
Falken's at the head. Voss is three seats down with a folder in front of him. Two of the academy's security people I know by face and not by name. Faris, because she sits on everything. Jon at the far end, where he puts himself now, with a notebook he won't open.
Luke and Soren and Ander along one side, because their Houses are involved and nobody was going to keep them out.
Torres beside me, which took an argument at the door that Falken lost again.
On the screen at the end, Councillor Wren and two other faces, joined from somewhere with better weather.
"Rurik," Falken says.
Voss doesn't stand up, and he doesn't open the folder. He puts one hand flat on the cover.
"Three items. I'll take them in the order they were asked for."
"Go on."
"First. The intrusion into Miss Miller's room.
Somebody entered the residence, opened one drawer, left an object, and left.
No forced entry, nothing else disturbed, no useful marks.
Twelve people hold a key to that residence and every one of them accounts for their afternoon.
I can't establish whether one of those accounts is false or whether access was obtained another way. "
Somebody on the screen writes that down.
"Second. The object. It's a wristwatch, cut from the arm of an officer on the road, logged as property recovered at the scene, and held in a Council storage with two signatures on the sheet.
The officer identified it herself." A pause.
"The property tag has been removed. The store's own log shows no entry that shouldn't be there. Nobody signed it out."
"Then how did it get here?" one of the security men asks.
"I don't know," Voss says. "A log that shows nothing isn't the same as nothing happening. It means whoever moved it didn't need to write anything down, which narrows the question and doesn't answer it."
"Can you establish a route?"
"No."
"Can you establish intent?"
"I can establish that somebody wanted her to recognize it," Voss says. "Which is the only thing about this I'd put in front of a court, and it's the part that worries me most."
I keep my hands on the arms of the chair and I don't look at the screen.
"Third," Voss says. "The records access. Miss Miller's superseded archive approval was opened twice under an authorization that resolves to her student record. She wasn't at either terminal. The academy has retired that number. A new one will be issued this week and the old one goes dead."
My student number. Six figures I've written in the top right corner of everything I've handed in since the first hour of my first year, in the box, in the order they want it.
It's on the essay Faris marked me down for.
It's on the sheet I filled in the morning I was told I'd qualified with a hundred and eight.
"Understood," I say, because somebody has to say something.
Then they give everything back.
That's the part I wasn't expecting.
Practical placements resume across all four cohorts.
The Preserve reopens with two changes to the reporting procedure and one to the kit list. Search and Rescue goes out in the morning with an added faculty presence.
The whole thing takes ten minutes and one of the security men reads it off a sheet and nobody asks a single question, because it's good news and good news doesn't get interrogated.
I've got my pen on the notebook and my heart going and I'm doing the thing where you don't smile in a room like this.
"One exception," Falken says.
The radiator knocks twice.
"Miss Miller's participation in the rescue block is not approved. She'll continue with her assigned rotations. The panel's decision is recorded and the reasons are attached to it."
I hear Torres breathe out beside me. I don't hear anything from the three along the wall, which is worse.
"Rurik," Falken says. "The reasons."
And Voss reads out the finding.
He wrote it. He put me forward for that block weeks ago, in writing, on a form, and then he sat down and wrote the thing that takes me out of it, and now he reads it to a room with me in it, and he doesn't hurry and he doesn't soften it and he doesn't look away from the page to see how I'm taking it, which I understand is the respectful version.
The block operates off the developed campus.
Personnel are dispersed by design. Locations are published in advance.
Participants are separated from their partners on purpose, at night, in terrain chosen because it's difficult.
Two of the three incidents involving Miss Miller happened outside the academic core, and one of them happened because somebody knew where she would be and when.
"On the material I have," Voss says, "I can't write a line saying the block can be made safe for her. I can write one saying it can be made safe for everyone else in it. I'm not prepared to write the first one because it isn't true."
"Thank you," Falken says.
"I'd like something else in the record," Voss says.
"Go on."
"That she's ready for it. That I put her forward in the autumn and I'd put her forward again this morning. Whatever this finding is, it isn't about her capability, and I don't want a panel reading it in two years and drawing that inference."
"So recorded," Wren says from the screen.
I get one question, because Falken looks at me and gives me the nod.
I've had about ninety seconds to think about what it should be, and everything I want to say is the wrong size for this room, so I ask the only thing that's actually useful.
"Instructor. Does your finding establish that the block is unsafe, or that it can't be made safe for me specifically?"
Voss looks at me properly for the first time.
"The second."
"So the finding isn't about the Preserve. It's about me being in it."
"Yes."
"And the difference between me and everyone else in that column is that people are trying to take me."
"Yes."
"Then can I ask what the finding says about how long that's true for?"
"It doesn't say," Voss says. "Because I don't know, and I'd be inventing it."
That's the honest answer and it's the one I least want, and I write it down in my notebook word for word so that later, when I'm angry at somebody, it won't be him.
Faris speaks then, from the middle of the table, without looking up from her own page.
"The finding is correct and the decision is correct, and both of them will be used against her," she says.
"Within the week somebody will say that Miss Miller has been withdrawn from field training.
They will not say why. I'd suggest this Council write the reason somewhere a person can find it without asking her. "
"Noted," Wren says.
"I'm not being kind," Faris says. "I'm being accurate. There's a difference and I'd hate to be misread."
"Nobody has ever made that mistake, Professor," Falken says.
Luke catches my sleeve on the way out and doesn't say anything, because there isn't anything to say.
Ander is already looking at the corridor.
Soren stands by the window with his hands behind his back, and down the bond there's a long flat note from him that I recognize from the hearing room. He's angry. He's just better at it than I am.
I go after Falken.
His office has three chairs in front of the desk and he doesn't offer me one, because he knows I'm not sitting down.
"You've got about four minutes," he says. "Use them."
"I'm going to make four arguments."
"I'd expect nothing else."
"One. I'm better trained than I was in September and Voss just said so on the record.
Two. I've been assessed under fire three times now, which is more than anyone in that column, and I didn't fold in any of them.
Three. The purpose of an assessment is to find out how somebody performs in conditions you can't control, so removing me from the only part of my training where conditions aren't controlled means I will never be assessed on the thing that actually matters.
" I stop for a second. "Four. Somebody got into my room in the middle of the academic core, past staff on the door, with a key.
You've just reopened the Preserve for two hundred students on the grounds that it's manageable, and the one place that's been proven unsafe for me this month is the building you're keeping me in. "
Falken puts his pen down.
"Those are good," he says.
"Which one's wrong?"
"None of them."
"Then—"
"None of them is wrong, Jessica. I'm not going to stand here and pretend you've lost an argument. You haven't. I agree with all four and I'd agree with them in front of the Council if anybody asked me."
"Then let me go."
"No."
There's a stretch of quiet where the building does its noises.
"You told two hundred of us that a name earns nothing here," I say. "First assembly. Your family name may have opened the gate, it will not earn you a single Merit Mark. I nearly stood up and cheered. It was the first time in my life anyone in authority said the thing I'd always thought was true."
"I remember saying it."
"Did you mean it?"
"That sentence was a promise that your name would never be a credit here. It was never a promise it couldn't be a cost."
"That's a distinction."
"It's the correct distinction, and you'd make it yourself if it were happening to somebody else."
Which is the worst thing he could have said.
"Can I take it?" I ask. "The finding. To the Council. To Wren."
"Yes. Formally, through the panel, and I'll sign the transmittal myself and I won't advise against it.
" He stops in front of me. "And I'll tell you what will happen, because you'll find out anyway.
Wren will refer it to the security review.
The security review will ask Voss whether he stands by his finding.
He'll say yes, because he does, because it's true.
And by the time it comes back to this desk, the block will be over. "
"So it's a no that takes long enough to look like a process."
"It's a no," Falken says. "The process is real and it will change nothing. You can have it if you want it. I'd rather you spent the time on something else, and that's advice, not an instruction, and you can ignore it."
"I want the refusal in writing," I say. "Not the panel's minute.
A document with a reason in it. That I wasn't withdrawn for conduct, or capability, or attendance, or my marks.
That the academy removed a student from field training because a third party demonstrated the ability to reach her, and that no finding was made against her. "
Falken goes back around the desk, opens the second drawer, and takes out a single page.
He'd already written it.
I stand there and look at it on the blotter and don't pick it up, because if I pick it up I've accepted it, and because I am suddenly so angry that my ears have gone hot.
"When did you write that?"
"Last night."
"Why?"
"Because I've had you in this office before," Falken says, "and on every occasion you've asked for something to be put in writing, and I've come to regard it as one of the more reliable features of my working life.
" He turns it toward me. "Read it before you decide whether you're insulted. If it's wrong, I'll change it."
I read it.
It's four sentences and there's nothing in it I'd take out.
I pick it up.
So here's what I have, at the end of it.
I have Leadership and Governance on the second floor of the history building. I have Diplomacy and Community. I have an escort, a legal office, a communications briefing, and a line on a schedule that says TBC — Chancellor's office.
Those are the things somebody put on an advisory page in September and handed to me before anyone in this valley knew what my surname used to be.
Priority Recommendation. Sophia read it over my shoulder in a corridor full of people opening envelopes and said they were training me to be a princess, and I told her they absolutely were not.
I've got all of that. Every bit of it is still mine.
The one line I went and asked for is gone.
The block leaves the following morning from the yard behind the lower hall, which I know because I go down there, because apparently I'm the kind of person who does that.
There's a lot of gear on the ground and Renzo is wearing about six layers and has already lost a glove. Somebody's arguing about who carries the rope. Freya has a list.
Declan comes over with his pack still on one shoulder.
He doesn't tell me it's not fair. He doesn't tell me he'll be thinking of me out there, which would be worse, and he doesn't say anything about next year.
"Two nights," he says. "Then I'll come and tell you everything wrong with how they ran it."
"You'd better."
"There'll be a lot. They've got the casualty scenario in the wrong place. I've seen the map."
"Declan."
"Yeah."
"Don't let Renzo carry the rope."
"I already took it off him."
He bumps his shoulder into my right one, careful about the side without either of us mentioning it, and goes back and gets in the second vehicle.
They pull out of the yard at twenty past eight, and the snow's come back, and I stand there with my hands in my sleeves until the last of them is through the gate and there's nothing to look at but a wet yard and the marks their tires left in it.
Then I go inside, because it's cold, and because I've got a meeting.