Page 67 of Raven’s Fight

"I believe you. I also know you. Not being scared and not showing scared are two different things, and you've been doing one of them for six weeks and I couldn't tell which." She looks at me steadily. "Now I know. It's good."

Azalea reaches over and puts her hand over mine — the gesture she's had since she was five, which has always meant exactly what it means without needing anything said around it.

✦ ✦ ✦

I give them each something.

Orpheus gets the list first. Four names. The three fire drake students with their schedules and their tells, and the transfer marked separately, his purpose still unknown, with a note that he should be treated as a fourth until proven otherwise. Orpheus reads it in under a minute. He reads everything in under a minute. He folds it in quarters and puts it in his inner pocket and his face doesn't change, which means he's already fitting it into whatever he's been building in his own head all term.

"The transfer gives away his left hand," I say. "You'll see it in the grip. He reaches a little slower with it and holds harder than he needs to. In low light, go by sound."

He nods. One hand opens and closes, briefly — a fighter's body taking hold of something new. "The second one. The one with the proximity elective."

"She catalogs scent. She's been building a map of the whole student body in her head. She'll know who's near her without looking. Come at her downwind and don't let her nose do its work."

Another nod. No further questions. Orpheus has the list, Orpheus will prepare, Orpheus will be exactly where he needs to be tomorrow.

Bella gets a vial. Small, dark glass, sealed with the red wax that means the contents are dangerous. She holds it up and tilts it, watching how the lamplight moves through it.

"Is that⁠—"

"Carefully bottled. Carefully measured. The Purge permits you to use what your own body can produce." I look at her. "Which means for the length of the Purge it's legal. Outside it, you never saw this. You don't know I can make it."

Bella turns the vial over in her fingers, taking an accurate measure of exactly what she's been handed and what it means. Her expression moves through several things and settles somewhere that isn't quite pleased and isn't quite awed — the face of someone who has just been trusted with something and understands completely what the trust is.

"I'll be very responsible," she says.

"I know. Don't use it unless you're genuinely out of options. It's for out of options."

"Understood."

She tucks it into the inner pocket of her jacket, the one that sits against the ribs and takes a deliberate reach to find. The right place for a last resort.

Azalea gets a signal. I describe it exactly: a red flare, filed under the standard Purge distress rules but meaning, to me specifically, I need you regardless of what you are doing. Not a general call — I'll get those and weigh them against where I am. The red flare skips the weighing. It means Azalea, now, nothing waits.

"You won't need it," I say.

"I know." She looks at me steadily. "But I'll have it."

"Yes."

"And you'll come."

"Yes."

She holds my eyes another moment, the particular look Azalea gets when she has decided to believe something and wants you to know the deciding is done. "Thank you," she says.

✦ ✦ ✦

We eat.

I ordered food from the kitchen earlier — not the cafeteria, the actual kitchen, where Corvus has a standing arrangement with the evening shift. There's bread, and the braised thing I've learned to name by smell before the lid comes off, and cheese from the good batch Hemlocke arranged with a southern supplier last month. Orpheus produces a bottle of something from inside his jacket with the composure of a man who finds this unremarkable.

"The east dormitory cellar," he says, when Bella looks at it.

"That cellar doesn't exist," Azalea says.

"Correct."