Page 100 of The Truths We Hold

“I know.”

“Your hands are shaking.”

“I know that too.” I get my palms up. “Behind me. All of you, behind the fire. The fire is between you and them and the fire does not move.”

I build it again.

It comes slower than it should. That’s the honest accounting, and I’m too tired to lie to myself about it: forty-eight hours ago I burned everything I had in a granite chamber under this building, and a mortal body does not refill in forty-eight hours, and what I am drawing on now is not a reserve. It’s a floor. It’s the last thirty percent, and I can feel exactly where the bottom of it is, the way you can feel the bottom of a well by the sound.

The fire comes anyway. It always comes. That is either the great mercy of my life or the mechanism by which I will eventually die, and I have never been able to decide which.

It goes up across the corridor in a sheet from floor to ceiling, five feet deep, hot enough that the paint blisters on the lockers to either side. Not a weapon. A wall — and a wall is a much harder thing to build than a spear, which is something the Hunter command never taught me and which I learned in four months of standing in front of people I love.

The stack comes around the corner. Six of them, then a seventh with the shoulder emitter, and the point man sees the sheet and stops, and the whole formation concertinas behind him.

“Vale.” Amplified, through the helmet. “Stand down. You are obstructing a lawful extraction.”

“There are fourteen students behind me.”

“They are not the objective.”

“They’re in the corridor you’re coming down.” My voice sounds like someone else’s, flat and patient, my lecturing voice, the one I use for the module on thermal control. “So they are the objective, whether or not anyone wrote them into the operation. That’s what a corridor is.”

The emitter comes up.

I have been on the correct end of one of those, and I know what the next four seconds contain, and I put everything I have left in my right hand into the sheet at the moment the pulse hits it.

The corridor goes white.

Then it goes over.

—

I come back on my knees with my forehead against the tile and Dr. Adler’s hand fisted in the back of my collar, holding me more or less upright while she stands over me with her academic shadow spread across the corridor mouth like a woman holding a door shut in a gale.

I have known Ilsa Adler for four years. In that time I have seen her raise her voice exactly once, at a faculty meeting, about a scheduling matter.

“Twenty years I’ve taught shadow theory in these corridors,” she is saying, to the men in gray, in a tone I would not have believed her capable of. “Twenty years. I have graded in this hallway. I have walked a child to the infirmary from that door with her arm broken and I have sat with her mother in that room. I will not let the institution’s own weapons destroy my students in my corridors.”

Her shadow is not a combat shadow. She is a scholar; it’s thin, and it’s precise, and it’s got about ninety seconds in it. But it is articulated — forty years of study, every joint of it understood — and she is using it to do the only clever thing available, which is to wrap the emitters. Not block them. Wrap them, close, so the density signature they read is hers and not the children’s.

“Ilsa—”

“Get up, Constantine.”

“Working on it.”

“Work faster. There’s a second team in the stair.”

I get up.

The fourteen are still behind me. That’s what matters and that’s the only thing I let myself check. Fourteen second-years pressed into the alcove by the water fountain, and one of them — Devin Achebe, fifteen, a boy who has been failing my practical for two terms because he cannot make himself take the exercises seriously — is on the floor with his back against the wall and his shadow half gone.

Bound. The pulse caught the edge of him.

I have seen it before. In adults. I have never once seen it in a child, and I have to look at the ceiling for a second before I can go over there.

“Professor.” He’s very calm, which is the worst part. “I can’t feel the left side.”