The corridor didn't have a name.
Not all corridors had names, the older parts of the building had accumulated function faster than designation, and the east annex was old enough that the stone had taken on the specific quality of places that had absorbed centuries of concentrated thought without anyone writing it down. The doors were plain. The numbers were hand-painted in a style that had been updated three times across three different administrative regimes and showed it.
Room seven was at the end of it. The number was painted in a style that didn't match the door, or the wall, or anything else in the corridor really. Someone had repainted it at some point and hadn't bothered making it fit.
I stood outside it for a second.
Rado had said the room would be empty unless someone used it. Which was not quite an invitation. More like he'd left a door open and was pretending he hadn't noticed the wind.
I opened it.
He was sitting on the table. Not in a chair, on the table, with a book open across his knee that he wasn't reading. He looked up when I came in and didn't look surprised, which meant he'd either expected me or was good at not showing when he hadn't.
"You came," he said.
"You left the room," I said.
"I said it would be empty." He shrugged. "Technically."
"Technically," I said.
I took the chair by the window. Outside two second years were crossing the courtyard fast, the way you walk when you're late but don't want to look like you're late.
Rado closed his book without marking the page and put it on the table between us.
"So," he said.
"So," I said.
He looked at me for a moment. "You made an enemy yesterday."
"I know."
"First day."
"I know."
"Daveth's been here a year," he said. "He knows people. He's..." He stopped, seemed to decide something. "He's not going to forget about it is what I'm saying."
"I know that too."
Rado was quiet for a second. "I was going to handle it."
"I know. I didn't give you the chance."
"No," he said. "You didn't." He didn't say it like he was angry. More like he was still working out how he felt about it. "My way would have been better."
"Probably," I said. "What would you have done."
He looked at the ceiling. "Waited, mostly. Daveth only makes those comments because the room goes quiet after. That's what makes it land. If I'd just kept talking, kept being fine about it, eventually the room stops waiting for me to react and starts wondering why he needed to say it." He paused. "People figure it out. Takes longer but it sticks."
I thought about that.
"That would have been better," I said.
"Yes." A beat. "And you'd have had nothing to do."
We sat with that for a moment. The light through the window moved a little as something shifted outside.
"The mark," I said. "His comment was about the mark."
"Yeah." Rado turned his hand over on the table, looked at it. Nothing visible there, no traces, just an ordinary hand. "Support mark. That's the classification. Perception, environmental reading, some interference stuff if I'm close enough." He said it flatly, no performance either way. "Daveth thinks support marks don't belong in a combat cohort. He's said it before, not to me, to other people, about me. Yesterday was just the first time he said it in front of me."
"Does that happen a lot," I said.
"More than it used to." He shrugged, but it wasn't quite as easy as he made it look. "The music mark isn't flashy. It doesn't blow things up. People see it in action and they're not always sure what they saw, which means they're not sure it did anything." He glanced at me. "Seran admitted me anyway. That's enough."
"What does it actually do," I said. "When it's working."
He looked at me for a second like he was deciding how to answer.
"Right now," he said, "you're trying to figure out whether to trust me."
I didn't say anything.
"Not the words," he said. "I can't hear what you're thinking. It's more like the shape of it. The rhythm. There's a sound everything makes, not literally, but adjacent to sound. And yours just went from open to careful." He stopped. "That's probably a weird thing to tell someone."
"It's fine," I said. And then, because it was true: "Seline does something similar. Different mechanism."
"The psychic mark," he said. "First year, House Ashen."
"Yes."
"She's been reading the room since she got here," he said. "I've been watching her watch people." He almost smiled. "She's good."
"She is," I said.
He was quiet for a moment. Then: "The girl at the back of the arena yesterday."
I looked at him.
"You noticed her," he said.
"Her mark felt like it was there," I said. "But I couldn't find it. Not suppressed. Something else."
"Yeah." He turned his book over on the table, put it back. "I've been trying to work out what she sounds like since she walked in. Most people have something, not a real sound, just a resonance, a shape I can pick up. Hers is almost nothing. Like she's learned to be very still." He frowned slightly. "Not hiding. More like she doesn't want to disturb anything so she just doesn't."
"Do you know her name," I said.
"Lira Voss. I asked the administrator."
I filed it. Lira Voss. First year. Mark type unknown, and from the look of it she'd like to keep it that way.
"She was watching us," I said. "Not the upper years. Us."
"You specifically," Rado said. "For a while before Daveth opened his mouth. After that it was you and me and Sable." He paused. "Whatever she's doing with what she sees, I can't hear it. And I can usually hear something."
We sat with that. Two people who paid attention to things arriving at the same hole in their information.
"The third year," I said. "Tall. Spatial mark."
"Kael Doran." Rado leaned back on the table a little. "Third year. No house affiliation, old family but the line's thinned out. Been here since first year. By most accounts just does what he wants and nothing else." He looked at me. "He looked at you when you came in yesterday."
"Before anything happened," I said.
"Before anything happened," he said. "Not the way people look at someone new. More like he was checking something. Like he already had a question and you walking in answered it."
I thought about the mark running in its passive layer. The territorial quality, the way it bled into the ambient at depth, the way other practitioners at high levels felt it before they saw it.
"Something about me," I said. "He could feel something. I don't know what he made of it."
Rado nodded slowly. Didn't push it, which I was starting to understand was just how he was. He'd take what you gave and wait for the rest.
The bell went for third period.
We'd been in the room an hour.
He picked up his book and stood. "Tomorrow," he said. Not quite a question.
"Yeah," I said.
He left. I stayed for another minute. The dust turned slowly in the light from the window.
I got up and went to find the library.
Seline was on the third floor.
I'd known she would be. She'd said on the tour the ceilings were higher, which meant she'd already decided. She was in the restricted access section, which had a sign old enough that the letters had faded at the edges. She'd clearly looked at it and kept walking.
Three books open on the reading table, held at different pages with whatever was available. A pen. A folded piece of paper. The corner of her notebook.
She looked up when I sat down.
"Third floor," I said.
"Obviously," she said, and went back to reading.
I looked at the open page in front of her. Old script, pre-standardisation, the letterforms slightly wrong in the way of things written before the conventions settled. A list of something with margin annotations in a different hand.
"What is it," I said.
"Classification record," she said. "Mark types observed in the last decade of the War. Someone tried to cross-reference it with the post-Accord taxonomy afterward." She turned the book so I could see the margin. "Look."
The annotation said: No subsequent record. Query: extinction or reclassification?
"Three types," she said. "Same three that stop appearing after the Accord in every text I've found. The person who wrote this knew the record was incomplete." She sat back. "They just didn't know why. Or if they did they didn't write it in the margin."
I looked at the page. At the list. Three entries, each with the same annotation underneath. Except the last one had something else beneath it, older ink, a different pen.
Ask the Wall.
I looked at it for a while.
"I saw it," Seline said. "I've been sitting here an hour trying to figure out what to do with it."
"The Thornwall," I said.
"Has to be." She was very still in the way she went still when something had her completely. "Someone came to this library fifty years after the Accord and opened this book and wrote that. And then nobody answered it. For three hundred and fifty years."
The library was quiet around us. Somewhere below a class was starting, voices in the corridor, footsteps.
"Ashby," I said.
Seline looked at me.
"Her class," I said. "What the official account is protecting. She might know what the question means."
"Maybe," Seline said carefully. "Or she knows part of it and is waiting for someone to bring her the right piece." She closed the book slowly. "Not yet. We need more first."
I nodded. She was right. Arriving with half a question was worse than waiting for the fuller one.
We stayed on the third floor for another hour without talking much. Seline reading, me looking at the other two annotated entries and finding nothing that helped with the first. Both of us just in the same space, which had stopped requiring management somewhere around the road to Carenfall.
At some point she said without looking up: "How was the study room."
"Useful," I said. "He notices things differently from how I notice them. The overlap is interesting."
She looked up. "Good different or complicated different."
"Both probably. Ask me in a week."
She went back to her book. Which was the right response. She'd learned which questions needed time and which needed answers, and she'd stopped pressing the ones that needed time.
That wasn't a small thing. I didn't say so. I didn't need to.
I found the maintenance yard by accident on the first day and had been using it since. Nobody came here. The academy's actual training grounds were in the east wing, supervised and scheduled, and this was just a forgotten square of uneven stone behind the dormitory block that smelled faintly of old rain.
I was halfway through the sequence when the door opened.
Haruka Akira stopped in the doorway. She had a book under one arm and the expression of someone who had expected an empty yard and was not pleased about being wrong.
We looked at each other.
"This is a maintenance yard," she said.
"I know," I said.
"You're not supposed to be in here."
"Neither are you probably," I said.
Her expression did something. Not quite a frown, more like she'd filed that and didn't appreciate it. She looked at the katana at my hip, at the mark traces visible on my arm where the sleeve had pushed up, and then back at my face.
"You're the first year," she said. "From the arena."
"Yes," I said.
"The one who decided to make Daveth Soden's problem their problem on the first day."
"Yes," I said.
She made a short sound that wasn't quite a laugh and wasn't quite not. "Brilliant," she said, flatly. "Really excellent decision making."
I didn't say anything.
"Do you know how much work it is when first years start feuds with established second years in the first week?" She set her book down on the low wall by the door with more force than necessary. "I have to manage that now. That's my job. That's what you've given me."
"I didn't ask you to manage it," I said.
"No, you just did the thing and left the consequences for someone else." She crossed her arms. "Very heroic."
I looked at her for a moment. "He was making the comments in front of a room full of people. On purpose. Because he thought nobody would say anything."
"I know what he was doing."
"Then you know why someone said something."
"I know why someone said something," she said. "I'm questioning why it was you, three hours into your first day, when you don't know this building or the people in it or what Daveth is actually capable of when he decides someone's worth his attention."
She said it like she was angry. But there was something underneath it that wasn't quite anger. More like she was frustrated that she couldn't argue with the part that mattered.
She picked her book back up. "The student council session is the third day. Second hour. West corridor meeting room. Be there." She looked at me one more time, something moving behind her eyes that she didn't let land anywhere. "And find somewhere else to train. This yard is mine."
She left.
I stood in the empty yard for a second.
Then I went back to the sequence from the beginning, because she hadn't actually told me to leave.
The forms took another thirty minutes. When I finished I put my jacket back on and went inside and ate dinner and went to bed.