Page 119 of Raven’s Fight

This is the conversation we haven't had. We've talked about the Purge in debrief, in the practical terms of what happened and what it produced and what comes next. We haven't talked about it the way she's asking now. Not the tactics. The thing underneath the tactics.

I take a moment to answer it accurately.

"The first hour looked like what I expected," I say. "She stood in the middle of the courtyard and the student body moved around her, and I could read that. I'd planned for it. I knew she was going to do it. The fourth-year at thirty-seven minutes, I could read that too. That was the message, and I knew what the message was."

"But?"

"But watching from outside is different from knowing." I find the words the way I always find them, by not hurrying them. "I know what she's capable of. I've known it for twenty-three years. Knowing it and watching it happen with a gate between us are two different experiences, and the second one has something in it the first doesn't."

She's quiet a moment. We're flying side by side, the cold up here carrying the mineral edge of the high route, the sky above us the blue of late morning at altitude.

"When did Hemlocke signal you about Anipe?"

"Just before the first hour. The mirror flash. I was already on the south roof by the time it landed where she was going, and I saw her change direction."

"You were on the roof."

"I needed a view that wasn't the gate corridor."

She takes that in. I can see it in the quality of her attention, the shift of Raven absorbing something she didn't have. "You were covering the south approach."

"I had three positions I moved between for the first twenty hours. After Hemlocke's signal I held the south."

"Corvus."

"I know," I say. "I know the rules. I wasn't stepping in. I was watching. There's a difference."

She's quiet again. Then, not quite an accusation, in the tone of someone who knows the difference and is filing it rather than arguing it: "I didn't know you were on the roof."

"No."

"Would you have told me?"

I consider it honestly. "Afterward, yes. During, no. It would have changed what you were doing, and what you were doing was correct."

She makes the sound she makes when something is accurate and she doesn't want to give me the satisfaction of saying so. I take it as agreement.

We fly. The high route carries us above the tree line into air clear enough to see much further than you can from below the passes. I can see three peaks to the east whose names I know. She can probably see five.

"The shoulder," she says after a while.

"I knew when Keir knew. The bond read it right — pain you were handling, not something that had gone through. I held the south building for four hours after that."

"Four hours."

"Yes."

"Doing what, exactly."

"Watching the south approach. Making sure nothing came at that angle while you were in the armory corridor."

A pause. "You were covering me."

"I was observing," I say. "While covering you. The distinction holds. Technically."

She makes a sound that isn't quite a laugh but lives on the same street. "Twenty-three years and you're still going to hold on to the distinction."

"The distinction is real and it means something."