Page 102 of Legacy Ascended

"So recorded," Wren says from the screen.

I get one question, because Falken looks at me and gives me the nod.

I've had about ninety seconds to think about what it should be, and everything I want to say is the wrong size for this room, so I ask the only thing that's actually useful.

"Instructor. Does your finding establish that the block is unsafe, or that it can't be made safe for me specifically?"

Voss looks at me properly for the first time.

"The second."

"So the finding isn't about the Preserve. It's about me being in it."

"Yes."

"And the difference between me and everyone else in that column is that people are trying to take me."

"Yes."

"Then can I ask what the finding says about how long that's true for?"

"It doesn't say," Voss says. "Because I don't know, and I'd be inventing it."

That's the honest answer and it's the one I least want, and I write it down in my notebook word for word so that later, when I'm angry at somebody, it won't be him.

Faris speaks then, from the middle of the table, without looking up from her own page.

"The finding is correct and the decision is correct, and both of them will be used against her," she says. "Within the week somebody will say that Miss Miller has been withdrawn from field training. They will not say why. I'd suggest this Council write the reason somewhere a person can find it without asking her."

"Noted," Wren says.

"I'm not being kind," Faris says. "I'm being accurate. There's a difference and I'd hate to be misread."

"Nobody has ever made that mistake, Professor," Falken says.

Luke catches my sleeve on the way out and doesn't say anything, because there isn't anything to say.

Ander is already looking at the corridor.

Soren stands by the window with his hands behind his back, and down the bond there's a long flat note from him that I recognize from the hearing room. He's angry. He's just better at it than I am.

I go after Falken.

His office has three chairs in front of the desk and he doesn't offer me one, because he knows I'm not sitting down.

"You've got about four minutes," he says. "Use them."

"I'm going to make four arguments."

"I'd expect nothing else."

"One. I'm better trained than I was in September and Voss just said so on the record. Two. I've been assessed under fire three times now, which is more than anyone in that column, and I didn't fold in any of them. Three. The purpose of an assessment is to find out how somebody performs in conditions you can't control, so removing me from the only part of my training where conditions aren't controlled means I will never be assessed on the thing that actually matters." I stop for a second. "Four. Somebody got into my room in the middle of the academic core, past staff on the door, with a key. You've just reopened the Preserve for two hundred students on the grounds that it's manageable, and the one place that's been proven unsafe for me this month is the building you're keeping me in."

Falken puts his pen down.

"Those are good," he says.

"Which one's wrong?"