Free Web NovelChapter 4: THE RAT
Loud. The kind of loud that wanted an audience. He turned.
Three of them, coming from the direction of the gates. Percival in front. The same coat from the depot yesterday morning. Two companions behind him at the exact distance that made everything their friend said carry further.
The juvenile Griffin walked at his heel.
Here we go.
The Griffin saw Aiden’s pocket before Percival did. It stopped walking. Percival took one step past it before he noticed, then turned back with the small irritated half-step of a young man whose beast had embarrassed him by failing to keep heel.
He looked at the Griffin.
He looked at where the Griffin was looking.
He looked at Aiden.
His face arranged itself.
"It is." He turned to his companions, delighted. "He’s carrying a rat."
They laughed on schedule.
Twelve years ago you scored a nine on the same array that scored me a zero, and here you are at twenty-five years old laughing at a man with a rat in his pocket. There is a version of you that grew up. He didn’t make it.
"Contracted beast," Aiden said. He wasn’t sure why he said it. The information wasn’t going to help anything.
Percival’s face did the thing that wasn’t quite a smile. "A Rotfang Scavenger." He repeated it the way people repeated things when they wanted the repetition to be the joke. "Field Provision 7. I read your registration this morning. They post the new ones on the board."
Aiden didn’t respond.
He read my registration. He read my registration this morning. He stood in his coat that costs four months of my pay and he read my name on a board and he came out here looking for me.
"What does a Rotfang do," Percival said, "in a sanctioned assessment. Against a real beast."
The Griffin looked at Aiden.
Then it looked at his pocket.
Miasma shifted.
Just her weight. Slow. Side to side. The green pulse under her skin caught the morning light through the weave of his coat and threw a thin wash of wrong-colored light across the cobblestones between his boots and Percival’s.
Percival looked down.
The Griffin looked down.
The Griffin took one step back.
There.
Small. Controlled. But back.
There it is.
His mouth did not move. His shoulders did not move. The hand in his coat pocket where Miasma sat did one thing — his thumb pressed against her back through the lining, hard, once. She pressed her weight against the thumb. He pressed harder. She held.
Look at her. Look at her. You showed up out here to put me on the cobblestones in front of your friends. Your beast put your beast on the cobblestones first.
Step back from her, Vane. Step back from her. You’re looking at her. The Griffin’s looking at her. The Griffin understood her before you did.
Three other students had come through the gate behind Percival’s group and stopped on the steps. One of them had stopped mid-stride. A proctor crossing toward the gate had stopped too — the same older proctor with the Hearthcat. The man held a registration ledger and was now standing with the ledger forgotten at his side, watching the cobblestone with the focused stillness of someone who had spent his career watching beasts and had just seen one do something he had no rule for. The street had eight witnesses.
Then nine. A courier slowing his cart.
Zero Affinity. Still the number.
Still the only thing they ever wrote about me. The Griffin didn’t read it. The Griffin used its own eyes.
He stood completely still in his own face. He had been pressing the thing in his chest down with both hands for twelve years and the pressing had become the shape of him, and the thing was moving now and he was not letting it surface and he was not pushing it down either. He was holding it where it had moved to. Half an inch up. Then another half-inch.
Look. At. Me.
Percival looked at him.
The not-smile was thinner now. The half-second of recovery before the next word happened in front of nine pairs of eyes including a proctor’s, and Aiden watched the recovery happen. The pause between the not-smile flickering out and reassembling was a half-beat too long. Aiden had filed three thousand complaint forms with a recovery shorter than that.
Yeah. Saw that.
The proctor was still holding the ledger at his side.
He saw it too.
Percival saw the proctor.
His face did a thing. The not-smile flickered out and then came back, but it came back assembled rather than worn, the difference between an expression you wore and an expression you put on. He looked at the Griffin. He looked at Aiden’s pocket. He looked at the proctor again.
There you go. There he is. There’s the man who’d rather use his father’s money than his own beast. Go on. Use the money.
He walked over to the proctor without saying anything else to Aiden.
Two sentences. Quiet.
The proctor opened the ledger. Wrote something. Closed the ledger. Nodded.
Percival came back. The not-smile was steadier now, which was how Aiden recognized that the recovery was a managed product rather than a natural state.
"The Live Combat Assessment track," Percival said, "is for tamers whose beast classification falls outside the standard battery range. Atypical tier presentations. The proctor agreed your Tier 1 submission qualifies for reassessment under that provision."
Aiden waited.
"Different examiners," Percival said. "Higher-tier scenarios. Live opponents. Whatever the panel decides a beast like yours is worth. Six weeks."
He smiled, properly this time, and it was a worse smile than the not-smile had been.
"Good luck."
He walked past. The companions followed. The Griffin went last, and at the corner of the gate it turned its amber eyes toward Aiden’s pocket for one full step before looking away.
She saw you. Good.
Aiden stood on the cobblestones with his thumb still pressed against Miasma’s back through the lining of his coat, and the heat in his chest moved up another half-inch, and this time he let it go all the way up to his throat, and he closed his mouth around it and did not let it out.
He breathed in once.
He held the breath.
He let it out slow.
All right. All right. We just did that. You and me. We just did that.
His face did not change. The proctor was still watching him from across the cobblestones. The proctor would still be watching him for at least one more beat, because the proctor had spent nineteen years watching beasts and was now watching the person who walked one. Aiden made his face the face of a man receiving administrative correspondence with appropriate stoicism. The face held.
Inside the face he was grinning.
It was not a grin he had had before. It was the grin of a man who had filed four years of complaint forms nobody read, and had just had nine people watch a juvenile Griffin step back from his pocket on a cobblestone in front of an Imperial proctor.
The grin sat below his sternum. The size of his ribcage. He held it there, jaw shut.
Percival had performed. Aiden was going to walk.
He walked.
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The proctor came over while Aiden was crossing the cobblestones.
"Field Provision 7," the proctor said. He looked tired in a way that had nothing to do with the morning. "Your submission’s been moved to the Live Combat track. Six weeks from today. Live opponents, the panel sets each engagement, no withdrawal once you enter. You enter by registering at the east wing office, in person." He paused. "I am required to inform you that the reassessment is at the discretion of the registering office and you may appeal the decision through the appropriate channel."
"How long does the appeal take."
"Eight weeks."
"Right."
The proctor looked at his ledger.
"I have been doing this for nineteen years," he said. "I have seen one juvenile Griffin step back from anything in my career and that was at a sanctioned demonstration against a Tier 3 Stoneback that outweighed it by a thousand kilograms." He looked at Aiden’s pocket. "What is in your coat, lamplighter."
Aiden held his gaze.
"A Rotfang Scavenger," he said.
The proctor nodded slowly.
"A Rotfang Scavenger," he said. "Right."
He closed his ledger.
"Six weeks," he said. "Lamplighter Vell. Live Combat. Don’t be late."
He walked off.
Aiden stood on the cobblestone for one more beat.
The grin in his ribcage moved up another half-inch.
He let it.
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Aiden stood there for a moment.
Six weeks. With a Tier 1 that had made a Griffin step back on cobblestones in front of nine witnesses including a proctor who had been doing his job for nineteen years and had stopped breathing for a beat when the light hit the stone.
Six weeks. All right.
He looked at his pocket.
She was looking across the street.
A drainage pipe ran down the side of the building opposite the Academy gates, and at the base of it, in the joint where the iron met the foundation, the slow water was doing something quiet to the mortar.
She pressed forward.
He didn’t move for a moment.
Then he did.
He crossed the street.
His chest didn’t catch.
