Chapter 22
Fen
She found him in the garden on the seventh night.
He heard her coming â€" she was quiet but not as quiet as she thought she
was, and he'd been developing an involuntary awareness of people's mana
signatures that made approaching him undetected increasingly difficult.
Her signature was unusual: faint on the surface, the dim Bronze of her
official rank, but with something underneath it that was different.
Denser. Like an ember covered in ash.
She sat down on the low wall beside where he was sitting on the ground
and looked at the faint scorch marks from two nights ago that the
groundskeeping construct hadn't quite fully erased.
'That was you,' she said.
'Yes.'
'Discharge?'
He looked at her. 'You know what that is.'
'Involuntary mana release. Happens when you're holding too much.' She
was quiet for a moment. 'I had a similar problem my first week. Mine was
smaller. Different quality.'
He waited.
'I've been coming out here at night since the third day,' she said. 'I
noticed you'd started coming out too. I gave you a few nights to see if
you'd bring it up yourself.' A pause. 'You didn't.'
'No.'
'So I'm bringing it up.' She turned to look at him directly. 'I told you
my result was complicated. This is part of the complication. I don't
generate mana the way a normal Bronze-rank should. I absorb ambient mana
and convert it. Slowly, inefficiently, in a way that keeps my reserves
technically full but isn't the same as actual mana generation.' She said
it flatly, like reciting a diagnosis. 'My family thought I was broken.
They may have been right about that. But I've been managing it for four
years and I can tell you that the discharge problem gets better if you
practice releasing in small amounts deliberately rather than waiting
until you overflow.'
Cyan looked at her for a moment.
'You could have led with that,' he said.
'I didn't know if I could trust you yet.'
'And now?'
'You've been keeping my secret for a week without being asked to, which
means you identified what I was doing and decided not to use it.' She
shrugged. 'That's good enough for provisional trust.'
He thought about that. 'What do you want?' he said. Not suspiciously â€"
practically. She'd come with a reason.
'What I said before. To survive the semester.' She looked at the garden.
'I've been watching the other provisionals. Most of them aren't going to
make it â€" not because they're not trying, because they don't understand
what they're actually being evaluated on. It's not rank. It's potential.
They're looking for students who can develop, not students who already
have.' A pause. 'You have potential. Whatever you are, you have a lot of
it. I have potential but no one to corroborate it. If we're seen as
allied, my standing improves and your unusual behavior has a partial
explanation.'
'I act strange around mana,' he said. 'Your explanation is?'
'My absorption-type ability interferes with standard mana output
readings. It's documented in the Umbros school literature, which nobody
reads.' She said it matter-of-factly. 'If we're asked, that's the
explanation for both of us. Absorption-type anomalies present similarly
on standard instruments.'
He looked at her. She'd clearly thought about this considerably more
than a week warranted.
'You had this planned before you came to my room the first night,' he
said.
'I had the outline. The details needed to wait until I knew what you
were.'
'And what am I?'
She studied him for a moment. 'Something I don't have a category for
yet. But something that's on the same side of the line I'm on.' She
stood. 'Do we have an arrangement?'
He thought about it for about four seconds.
'Yes,' he said.
She nodded once and went back inside.
He sat in the garden for another hour and practiced releasing small
amounts of what he was holding, carefully and deliberately, into the
ground beneath him.
It was harder than the burst had been. Control always was.
But by the end of the hour he could feel the difference. Just slightly.
Just enough to be worth continuing.