Chapter 42 — The Missing Slate

Chapter 42: Chapter 42 — The Missing Slate

~ Raven ~

"What the hell does that mean?" Raven said. "What Wing headache?"

Tessa opened her mouth, then closed it and looked at Thalia, delegating.

"Okay, so." Thalia flopped onto her own bed and propped herself on her elbows. "Apparently students in Nikolai’s Wing wake up with headaches sometimes. Lingering ones. Mostly after the first day — which makes sense, honestly, this school is stressful and exhausting, my feet have died twice since morning. Not everyone gets it. But most people do, at least once."

"According to who?"

"The older students. I heard two of them whispering about it in the wash line." Thalia shrugged. "It fades. You stop noticing it, they said."

What a load of bull crap, Raven thought.

She’d been tired before. She’d been tired her whole life — tired down to the bone, tired in ways this academy couldn’t invent — and being tired had never once put a slow drum behind her eyes like this one.

"So what causes it?"

Thalia and Tessa exchanged a look that contained no information whatsoever.

"Wing pressure," Thalia offered. "That’s one theory. Living stacked on top of a hundred wolves does something, allegedly."

"The wards," Tessa said. "The residence wards are old. Unfamiliar wards press on people who didn’t grow up under them. Allegedly."

"Or it’s just the strain of living under a Cardinal heir’s aura." Thalia waved a hand vaguely at the ceiling, in the general direction of wherever Nikolai slept. "His presence sits over the whole tower, and our heads are, I don’t know. Adjusting. Allegedly."

"That’s three explanations."

"We have more if you want them. None of us actually knows."

Raven rubbed her temple. The drum kept its rhythm, patient, unbothered by theories.

"So every student in this academy just walks around with a headache," she said. "Four Wings full of wolves, all clutching their skulls, and the finest institution on the continent hands out tonics and calls it settling in. Truly the pinnacle of civilization. I see why the entrance exam is so difficult."

"When you say it like that, it sounds stupid," Thalia said.

"It sounded stupid before I said it."

Thalia opened her mouth to argue, found nothing in there, and closed it.

Raven let it go. She’d only ever lived in this Wing — for all she knew, the whole academy woke up pounding. One more strange thing in a building full of them. She filed it on the list, which was becoming less of a list and more of a ledger.

Which reminded her.

"Those flat devices," she said. "The ones everyone kept angling at me in the corridors. I tried to ask Nikolai and he talked over me. What are they?"

"Linkslates," Thalia said, brightening the way she did whenever she got to explain something. "They do everything. Messages to anyone in the academy, recordings, the announcement feed, rankings, your points balance. Half the school watched the classification through someone’s slate. There’s a whole channel just for the Cardinal Court standings."

"Recordings."

"Mm-hm."

"So the cafeteria today—"

"Oh, that’s everywhere by now," Thalia said cheerfully. "Both fights. Probably from six angles."

Wonderful. Somewhere in this academy, students were rewatching Kieran’s aura bending her spine. Rewatching Dante breaking him on the floor for it. Passing her worst afternoon around like a party trick.

Raven moved on before that thought could dig in.

"Then why don’t we have any?" She looked around the room. "Four of us. Not one slate. I saw other first-years carrying them today — a girl in the corridor had hers out before I’d finished walking past."

Tessa shrugged.

"Beats me. I’ve been wondering the same thing."

"Maybe you buy them somewhere," Thalia said, without conviction. "Or collect them from an office. Or they hand them out later in the term and nobody told us."

"You don’t know."

"We don’t know," Thalia agreed. "There’s a lot of that going around tonight."

Raven glanced at the fourth bed.

Brielle lay stretched across it fully dressed, one arm over her eyes, radiating the specific exhaustion of a person who had spent her day shielding strangers and regretting it. She hadn’t contributed a word to the conversation and appeared to have no plans to start.

Raven looked at her for a moment.

That aura shield in the cafeteria. The blocked arm against Kieran. Threatening my housemate in front of me? You’ve got nerve — said to a Court-ranked noble with two Alpha heirs bearing down behind her. Brielle had known exactly how dangerous the twins were. She’d stepped in front of them anyway, on day two, for a girl who had headbutted her into a nosebleed situation not twelve hours earlier.

Maybe she wasn’t entirely unbearable. Maybe — and Raven examined this thought carefully, the way she’d examine a coin found on the ground — she was even a good person, somewhere under the attitude.

Raven crossed the room and stopped by her bed. She even managed a small, genuine smile.

"Brielle."

No response.

"I wanted to say thank you. For today. You stood between me and Celeste, and then between me and the twins, and you didn’t have to do either." Raven meant every word, and let it sound that way. "I won’t forget it."

Brielle’s hand rose off her eyes just far enough to wave Raven away like smoke.

"I heard you. I’m trying to sleep."

The hand dropped back.

Across the room, Thalia pressed her lips together so hard they went white. Her shoulders had begun to shake.

A vein twitched in Raven’s forehead. She breathed through it. She had thanked worse people for less. She could be gracious. She was choosing to be gracious.

"Thank you again, Brielle."

"Still heard you."

Raven turned and walked back to her own bed with stiff, dignified steps while Thalia collapsed sideways into her pillow, laughing as quietly as she could manage, which was not very.

"She does like you," Thalia wheezed. "This is her liking someone."

"I’d hate to see the alternative."

"You broke her nose. You’ve seen it."

Thalia dug a bread roll out of her bag and lobbed it across the room. "Here. You said you were hungry, and nobody’s going anywhere near that cafeteria today. It doesn’t have furniture anymore."

Raven caught it. It was squashed flat on one side and slightly stale.

It was also, somehow, one of the better things anyone had handed her all day.

Outside the window, the afternoon light had started leaning, stretching the shadows of the training courts long across the grounds. Somewhere below, a formation was still drilling — the same shouted count, over and over, like the academy hadn’t just watched two Blackthorn heirs get folded into the floor before lunch.

Raven worked through the bread roll and thought of something.

"When do classes actually start?"

"Tomorrow," Tessa said.

Thalia’s head came up off the pillow. "Tomorrow tomorrow?"

"Tomorrow tomorrow. First bell."

"But we just—" Thalia gestured at the room, at the day, at the general condition of the world. "There was a classification. There were two fights. Half the school is traumatized. Surely they give us a day."

"It’s a school," Tessa said. "The schedule doesn’t care about your feelings."

Raven chewed slower. Classes. She’d fought so hard to get through these gates that she’d barely thought past them — and now tomorrow had lectures in it, and she didn’t know what a Valerius class even looked like. Combat? Theory? Sigilwork?

"How do we even know where to go?" she asked. "Is there a schedule?"

"They send it out," Thalia said. "The night before, an older girl told me. It just arrives."

"Arrives how?"

Pause.

"...On your slate," Thalia said.

The room went quiet.

Raven looked at her. Thalia looked at Tessa. Tessa looked at the ceiling.

"The slates we don’t have," Raven said.

"The slates we don’t have," Thalia agreed.

"So four of us are starting classes tomorrow with no schedule and no way to receive one."

"It sounds worse when you say it out loud like that."

"Everything today sounds worse out loud." Raven finished the roll. "We’ll ask the prefect at the morning announcements. If the academy wanted us lost, it could’ve just left me in the woods. It would’ve been cheaper."

From the fourth bed, without moving her arm off her eyes, Brielle spoke for the first time in an hour.

"If any of you wakes me before the bell, I’ll finish what the headbutt started."

"Noted," Thalia said.

The afternoon wore down into evening around them. The light went from gold to grey, the drilling below finally stopped, and the corridor outside filled and emptied twice with the sounds of girls coming back from wherever the rest of the academy had spent its scandalous day.

Thalia talked. That seemed to be her natural state — theories about the classes, gossip about the other Wings, a running list of everyone who’d stared at Raven in the corridor ranked by how badly they’d hidden it. Tessa contributed corrections. Raven mostly listened, and found she didn’t mind it, which was its own strange thing to notice.

They took turns at the washroom. Lamps lowered. Fabric rustled. Thalia mumbled something about the morning bell being a war crime, and Tessa answered with a sound that wasn’t words, and the ordinary noise of four people surrendering to sleep settled over everything.

Raven lay on her back and stared at the dark ceiling.

Her body was finished. Her mind had one more room to walk.

The white place. The chains. The wolf the size of a house, wearing her silence for eighteen years. The dream had felt less like a dream than a location — somewhere she’d been taken, somewhere with rules — and she still didn’t know what any of it meant, or why the weight cinched down the moment the wolf stirred, or who had chosen the silence for it.

What are you? everyone kept asking her.

She’d give a great deal to stop asking herself the same thing.

The drum behind her eyes softened. The bed was warm. Somewhere across the room, Brielle had started to snore, faintly, in a way Raven decided she would mention at the worst possible future moment.

Exhaustion took her under before she’d finished planning it.

_____^______

Raven opened her eyes.

The room was dark. The deep dark of the middle of the night, hours from any bell

Someone was standing beside her bed.

She stared up at the shape. Tall. Motionless. A held stillness, watching her, close enough to touch—

No.

Wait.

Figures.

"What the fuck?"